The problem of JD Vance

(FIRST OF TWO PARTS): Who is he, what does he believe, and why are his (current) politics so far out of step with his life?

PART ONE OF TWO

I wish I liked JD Vance.

He’s an American success story. He survived a broken home, served in Iraq, went to college and a top law school. He headed to Silicon Valley, impressed the tech elite. With their backing, he won a Senate seat. He married a smart, beautiful woman and built a family.

Along the way he wrote a best-selling book that draws on his own experience to explain the crisis in rural and rust-belt America. And he’s not even 40.

Except. Except - to use a line from a different context - when it comes to JD Vance my parts don’t match my feelings. I’m not alone. As someone I know said: He’s a chameleon. It’s not clear who he serves. He was a bad choice. This person grew up not far from Vance. He’s also an outsider who came east. He should like Vance. He doesn’t.

Make no mistake, the doubts Vance stirs are important, particularly since Joe Biden’s cognitive decline has reminded everyone how much the vice-presidency matters¹.

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(I know some of you aren’t going to like this one. So be it. Feel free to tell me off. But know this; I’ll always give you the truth, or at least my unvarnished opinion of it.)

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So, yes, JD Vance deserves a close look.

But even if the race weren’t close, even if Vance had no chance of being president this term, he, and his story, would matter. Weird is a cheap word, a cheap attack. But it has resonated against Vance because he generates such unease.

It’s worth considering why.

But before looking at Vance the person and how his biography and views intersect, I want to mention a crucial disagreement I have with his politics.

In fact this issue is deeper than any single political point. It goes to the very conception of America.

In the most crucial part of his vice-presidential acceptance speech, Vance criticized the idea of America. The people he grew up with don’t see the United States as an idea, they see it as a place, he said:

They love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.

That is the source of America’s greatness…

Now in that cemetery [where Vance’s family is buried], there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War… generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

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Welp.

I’ll assume JD Vance means every word he said, that despite his peripatetic travels around the United States - from the Midwest to the Marines to the Midwest to the Northeast to Silicon Valley to the Midwest (and Washington) - he believes his homeland is Appalachia.

Ironically, I’m far more of a homebody than Vance. I’ve lived most of my life within a 100-mile radius of New York City, a place I love, for all its troubles. (This is a great regret of mine; I wish I’d moved more before I had kids.)

But my homeland is not New York.

It’s the United States of America.

And the United States of America is an idea first and foremost.

It’s the greatest idea the world has ever had, the idea that every American citizen has rights guaranteed at our founding by our Constitution², that everyone is equal before the law, and that anyone who comes here legally and works hard can succeed and become an American.

Further, that every American can move within its borders at any time for any reason. This concept too is fundamental to the United States of America.

Even in the most basic geographic sense, this nation was born in motion. It went West until it couldn’t go any further. It is huge. Houston is further from both Seattle and New York than London is from Moscow.

But any American can move freely around the 50 states, no permits or reasons necessary, no second language needed (yet another reason the efforts early in Covid by states like Rhode Island to restrict interstate movement were an abomination).

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(Please. New Yorkers would rather die than live in Providence.)

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The Civil War must be mentioned here.

Unlike most civil wars, our conflict was not driven by religion or tribal hatred. It was not driven by the desire of competing clans to seize power.

It was simply a geographic battle driven by the South’s desire to break off in order to preserve slavery: the war between the states.

As Abraham Lincoln said in the Second Inaugural:

Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war…

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(Savior of the Union. And our greatest President. Though Joe Biden’s heroic decision not to run for reelection after it became clear he’d lose in a landslide makes him a close second.)

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There are two lessons here, two lessons I hope JD Vance will consider.

First, people sure will fight for abstractions, if those abstractions are important enough. In 1861, it would have been far easier for the North to let the South go.

Second, yes, of course the United States is a physical place with borders, borders that must be defended. Of course it has the right to restrict entry to its soil. But more than any other country, America exists first and foremost as an idea in the minds and hearts of its citizens.

And every American should be grateful for that.

(PART ONE OF TWO)

1. Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee only because she’s the veep. And if Biden’s decline had surfaced earlier we’d be talking about the 25th Amendment. Even putting Biden aside, since 1945, three of our 14 presidents have come straight from the vice presidency - the result of natural death, assassination, and impeachment.

Donald Trump seems like a fortress. He’s 78. My dad was 74 and had hardly been sick in his life when a blood test at his annual physical came back with some odd results. Less than three years later he was dead of leukemia.

2. Yes, I know we didn’t get there right away.