The Worst of Us: JD Vance, the Right, and the Radical Center

Yeah. We have to talk about this.

This weekend I’m going to do a subscriber-only Q&A as announced, but I couldn’t let this thing go without commenting. If you have questions or suggested topics, please reply to this post or email me at jysexton@gmail.com. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. It supports my work, keeps this project rolling, and you get access to exclusive content like the Q&A

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I have…a fraught relationship with JD Vance.

Back in 2016, as I was being thrown in the deep end of the pool with the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA, people were coming to me constantly and asking about Vance. As I’ve talked about many times, our political and media cultures are almost predominantly populated by the wealthy and privileged, creating a dangerous ecosystem wherein coverage of politics and politics themselves are disconnected from the actual experience of living in modern America. I was treated, and continue to be treated, as an outsider and even something of a freak because I come from that America, because I grew up poor and in the ranks of those who have been ensnared in the faux-populism of Trumpism and MAGA.

I got a lot of questions, some of them in good faith. People asked what was happening in those towns and areas. What Trump supporters were thinking. What motivated them. They wanted to know what could be done and they wanted to know how it was that I had been raised in the environment and somehow avoided falling into the same traps. I’m fine with these conversations. I was very, very lucky to have gone to college, gained the skills and resources to learn the history and ideas that helped explain this moment. I was never comfortable in the academic world (which is largely populated by the same people populating the media and political classes) and have been able to work, almost like a translator, in explaining a part of the country that felt walled off.

Then, there were times that it didn’t feel like good faith.

In academia, in the media, and in politics, I have had a lot of conversations with those same people who have, in moments of confidence, relayed to me some of the most classist beliefs I’ve ever heard. Because I had “escaped it,” they felt comfortable talking about people like my family and neighbors and friends as if they were subhuman. Impediments to progress at best, and dispensable at worst. And, when those conversations took place in 2016, one of the keystones of it all was a book called Hillbilly Elegy.

Vance and I have gone rounds. On social media, in culture. And one of the reasons is because I detest him. I work incredibly hard to empathize with everyone - it’s a key to understanding, after all - but I see what he has done and I find it to be as destructive as anything else. Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller in 2016 because it told The Right, as well as The Liberal Center, what they wanted to hear. Poor people were poor because they deserved it. Dysfunction was an expected part of life and the only thing one could hope to do was rise above it by their bootstraps and join one of the “respected” circles. Vance’s story was pure propaganda and there was a reason our media and political class ate it up. His family and his community members - well, sort of his community as he used his proximity to “hillbilly” communities, rather than his actual privileged background to gain credence - were cannon fodder as he lionized himself and found favor because of a very recognizable strategy.

He curried favor by telling the wealthy and powerful what they wanted to hear.

The Liberal Center wants to be tolerant and advocate for what they see as a better world, but they want to retain their institutions as they are in order to maintain their power and wealth. Vance’s portrait of the poor and the working class gave them a vision that allowed them to do that.

This is who Vance is. He was more than happy throwing his family and portions of the country under the bus to reach bestseller status, become very wealthy, and climb the ladder to political power. When he reached it, he cozied up to Peter Thiel, embraced the Far Right, and climbed another rung. Then, in the next stage, he backed away from any criticism of Donald Trump because that was what was required of him.

For all of this, Vance has been rewarded. He’s a senator. He’s on Trump’s short-list for vice-president. And he could very well earn that VP slot and, potentially become a future President of the United States.

I hate this. I really, really do. Because Vance has shown who he is time and time again. An ambitious man without principles. And he’s intelligent enough to do real damage.

So, with this mindset, I clicked on his op-ed in The New York Times ready to be disgusted. And I wasn’t disappointed.

I don’t especially disagree with a lot of what he said. As I discussed on Tuesday’s episode of The Muckrake Podcast, the situation in Ukraine isn’t great. A realist view is that the U.S. and the world has largely viewed Ukraine’s struggle for independence through a pragmatic lens and has, as proxy wars in the past have been used, capitalized on an opportunity to cause as much death to a rival as possible. There hasn’t been a lot of movement to solve the issue or prepare for where we are now. In this, Vance isn’t wrong.

But his treatment of the war is abhorrent. Some might call this “rational,” but Vance doesn’t even bother to consider the fates of Ukrainians who have died and suffered and those who would die and suffer should Vladimir Putin achieve his goals. Why? Because they don’t matter. What does matter, however, is that Vance is once more able to climb another rung while shifting the Liberal Center.

This op-ed, in The Times, is targeted on two things: appealing to Donald Trump in an attempt to secure the VP slot and provide a “reasonable” position for Liberal Centrists to accept Trump and the Right’s approach to Ukraine.

As Vance has already done before with Hillbilly Elegy, and then with a whole host of Trump’s problematic statements, he is attempting to apply his intellectual sheen to wash away the ugliness. Here, it’s with “facts and figures” that are all meant to shift the concerns from the attack on democracy and the tragic circumstances. If Vance is chosen as VP, and I think there’s a very good chance he will be, this will be his role. And he will do it in a way that Mike Pence could never have hoped to.

It’s also meant to prepare the Liberal Center for what now seems, to many, to be the inevitable. Ukraine is going to lose, it is told, and we’d better go ahead, put aside our principles, and do business with Putin. Of all of the possible outcomes, this is the most unacceptable and the most grotesque. It depends on a lack of imagination, a lack of actual ambition, and the slow, quiet, and steady acceptance of Right Wing authoritarianism in the world.

I shouldn’t expect any better from Vance, but each time he reveals himself for who he is, I can’t help but look at the Liberal Center and recognize how easily they are swayed and attracted to this. I get so much pushback when I try to explain historically how authoritarianism takes hold. And that’s because it’s awful to see that the Center proclaims a host of “principles,” only for the struggle of crisis to reveal they are quite, quite comfortable with the shift to the Right. We saw in the 1980’s with the acceptance of Ronald Reagan and Neoliberalism. We see it every day now with decisions that run counter to slogans and speeches and feigned “powerlessness.”

Vance has made himself a ton of money and gained so much power by playing to that ugly truth. He has been rewarded by the market, by the media, and by the political class for being the one who scratches that itch. And that’s why I loathe him. Because I know there are other ways. Because I know it is harder and less lucrative to use that ability to advocate for better things and to fight to lift others up and struggle to make a better world.

But he doesn’t give a shit. And he never has.