Donald Trump has anointed Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance as his running mate.
By
Sohrab Ahmari
Donald Trump’s decision to pick JD Vance as his running mate is a clear sign that the former president is determined to re-harness the populist and working-class energy that propelled his first campaign in 2016. The immediate task is to present that agenda in a winsome way to the country. In crucial ways, Vance has already demonstrated that he’s up to it, and it helps that the other side is in disarray following Joe Biden’s precipitous decline.
Should the Trump-Vance 2024 ticket win – and polls indicate they will – the deeper challenge will be preserving that energy in office come January 2025. They will need to prevent the forces of the status quo from re-channelling that momentum into familiar Republican grooves, such as with mindless corporate tax cuts – as all too often happened during Trump’s first term.
Trump could have tapped a more conventional nominee to please the Republican party’s plutocratic and hawkish donor class – or even one of the plutocrats themselves, like the gazillionaire North Dakota governor Doug Burgum. Instead, he settled on Vance, a figure who has already won the disdain of the keepers of Reaganite orthodoxy with his forays into domestic populism and emphasis on foreign policy restraint.
The 39-year-old freshman senator from Ohio came to prominence with Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling 2016 memoir about growing up amid the poverty and instability that have wracked working-class Americans over the past two generations. The book became a go-to guide for liberal media seeking to understand the sentiments that had driven a shocking proportion of working-class and union households to back Trump, often after having voted twice for Barack Obama.
Soon, liberals’ earnest curiosity about the disaffected white working class gave way to “defend-our-democracy” hysteria and four years of lawfare attempts to undo the outcome of 2016 that followed. Vance, who had initially positioned himself as a “Never Trumper”, set his eyes on high office and became more Trump-y into the bargain. No doubt, his anti-Trump statements will now supply grist for the Biden electoral mill, such as it is. But that would have happened with any number of other veep picks as well.
In the event, Vance’s populist shift took hold. The Vance of 2016 ended his memoir preaching a classic middle-class message of self-help for the people he’d left behind in Appalachia. By 2020, however, he had converted to Roman Catholicism, and would cite the Church’s social teaching in talking about the structural causes of poverty and dysfunction, not least the destruction of dignified industrial jobs under free-trade neoliberalism.
