The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance
Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has
become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.
By Tom Nichols
J. D. Vance
Jeff Dean / AP
July 14, 2021
What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe?
For a practitioner of petty and self-serving duplicity, we use �sellout� or
�backstabber.� (Sometimes we impugn the animal kingdom and call him a rat,
a skunk, or a weasel.) For grand betrayals of weightier loyalties�country
and faith�we invoke the more solemn terms of �traitor� or �apostate.�

But what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned
Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist
turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio
is too big to allow him to escape with the label of �opportunist,� and yet
the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand
him a defector or a heretic.

My friend Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District
of New York, tried to describe Vance recently and came up with �pathetic
loser poser fake jerk,� but that is a lot of words. To distill the essence
of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical
reference beginning with the letter a.

I do not use that word lightly or comfortably. I am, in the formal sense, a
man of letters. I have been an officer of instruction at several
institutions of higher education (and I remind you here that I do not
represent any of them and speak only for myself). I would not advise my
students to use the term.

But the word is apt when I consider Vance�s silly and yet detestable moral
collapse. Some people back in Vance�s home region of Appalachia thought his
memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was hollow and inaccurate, but for a time, other
people�including me�were intrigued by his writing and public speaking.
Vance lived as a child in a steel town in Ohio and spent his summers in the
hills of eastern Kentucky, while I grew up amid the rotting factories of
New England, solidly in the working class but not poor. I welcomed his
willingness to cast a critical eye on his (and my) people, especially after
years of conservative hand-wringing focused solely on the dysfunction of
minority communities.

Vance gained early support in the political center, particularly among
conservatives. The American working poor, no matter where they are, do in
fact need civic representatives from the center-right, people who can talk
candidly about the limits of government and who can make a moral case for
tough love and personal responsibility, but one based on a sense of shared
experience, common values, and genuine compassion. Someone like Vance could
be that candidate.

Cassie Chambers Armstrong: �Hillbilly Elegy� doesn�t reflect the Appalachia
I know
Someone like Vance, perhaps, but as we now know, not Vance himself. Not so
long ago, he talked about the self-defeating bias against education among
poor whites. He acknowledged the self-destructive habits of some of the
people he grew up around. Vance wrote, in this very magazine, that Donald
Trump �is cultural heroin��a powerful charge from someone who hails from
the epicenter of the opioid epidemic�and provided a �quick high� that could
not fix what ails the country. All of that vanished once Vance decided he
wanted to go to Washington�and after the Trump supporter Peter Thiel
dropped $10 million into a political action committee.

Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has
become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown. His attempts at
authenticity are so grating because they are so blatantly artificial. His
recent tweets, for example, attempting to ingratiate himself with rural
Ohioans by slagging New York City were embarrassingly amateurish; we can
only wonder which social-media consultant thought them up. �Serious
question,� Vance tweeted. �I have to go to New York soon and I�m trying to
figure out where to stay. I have heard it�s disgusting and violent there.
But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?�

When the Republican commentator Liz Mair called him on this inane fear-
mongering, he responded that �these people��which is everyone but him, one
assumes�have no sense of humor about what he claimed was only a joke.
Again, this is why a certain word immediately springs to mind.
Worse, Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has
done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing the former president and his
madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the
stupidity of Ohio�s voters. �If I actually care about these people and the
things I say I care about,� he told Time, �I need to just suck it up and
support him.�

Well. One can only imagine their gratitude now that Vance the wealthy
venture capitalist has deigned to accept Trump as his political savior.
Read: Ohio is now fully Trumpified

These incidents are not isolated missteps. The writer Tim Miller recently
noted in The Bulwark that within the space of a week, Vance not only
tweeted his performative fear of New York, but also �defended a Nazi from
being kicked off of twitter � shared a thread defending election fraud
conspiracies � fantastically claimed Google was �hiding� his website� and
�mocked reporters for saying they were traumatized by the Capitol riot.�
Vance�s rhetoric is even worse than Miller�s description. For example,
Vance minimized Nick Fuentes, the leader of a white-nationalist group, by
referring to him merely as �a giant troll� who should not have been kicked
off Twitter by one of the �tech companies� that want to �control what we�re
allowed to say in our own country.� And, more recently, he ventured onto
the former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka�s crackpot videocast to claim that
the �Democrat� Party�a usage common among educated right-wingers trying for
working-class cred��is a party of childless people� who therefore do not
value the future.

Vance has struck back at his many critics across the political spectrum by
referring to them all as �degenerate liberals,� which is exactly the kind
of thing a smarmy and pretentious asshole would say.

I apologize. I had hoped to avoid the word, but nothing else will do.
In fairness, Vance is hardly the most offensive Republican out there. He is
no Louie Gohmert, the Republican congressman from Texas, or Marsha
Blackburn, the senior Republican senator from Tennessee, people who create
an electrostatic field of stupidity around themselves when they speak. Nor
is he even the most craven candidate in Ohio; his primary rival Josh Mandel
recently filmed himself burning a surgical mask in the name of freedom. The
Republican Party is chock-full of such performative buffoons.

But what makes Vance so awful is that he knows better. His intentional
distancing from his earlier views shows that he is fully cognizant of what
a gigantic fraud he�s become.

I suspect that Vance is also reading his own press, which would explain why
a young man who attained early fame is convinced that he can jump right to
national office. Take, for example, the Trump-friendly columnist Henry
Olsen of The Washington Post, who wrote that Vance scares America�s elites
because �he hasn�t surrendered his mind to polls or to the donor class in
an effort to fit in.�

But following the polls and capering to a jig played by rich donors is
exactly what Vance is doing. His gooberish tweets, his recent declaration
that the most important issue for Ohio is securing the southern border, his
multimillion-dollar support from �ordinary folks� like Thiel�these all show
that Vance is as mossy a creature as the swamp ever produced.
This hypocrisy makes him indistinguishable from other figures in American
politics, such as Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who are products of
privilege and elite education and who now pretend to be tribunes of the
Forgotten People. (Vance, predictably enough, has recently expressed his
admiration for both.)

Vance, so far, is less of a hazard to American democracy than aspiring
authoritarians like Cotton or Hawley. Nor does he seem to have developed
the full dedication to being a soulless careerist like Elise Stefanik, the
Republican congresswoman from New York. Mostly, he�s just a � well, you
know.

Instead of a candidate who�s willing to speak hard truths to his people,
Ohioans now have a native son who has returned to weaponize their
resentment and cultural dysfunctions. His ambition is fueled by the money
of others who would never deign to live in the Midwest. And like other
populist charlatans, he has convinced himself that he should be anointed to
lead the rubes out of their misery.

Vance would no doubt welcome terms such as populist, savior, native son.
But when thinking of a plastic fraud trying to harvest their votes, poor
and working-class voters might come up with a different word.