JD Vance: Political heroin dealer
He's become a leading pusher of the cultural drug he once decried.
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JD Vance’s demonization of immigrants in Springfield is all the more perverse given that members of his own family were internal immigrants to the nearby Southwest Ohio city of Middletown decades ago, where they suffered from the burdens of poverty and discrimination following a wrenching move from rural Appalachia.
Vance, however, understands the benefits cynical politicians can reap by directing the resentments and disappointments of many Americans toward newcomers, particularly non-white immigrants.
In 2016, Vance warned that the poverty and despair endured by his family and many members of their larger community made them vulnerable to what Vance described as the “cultural heroin” then being offered by Donald Trump. As Vance explained, Trump’s promise that white Americans’ problems could be magically solved, including by expelling non-white immigrants, was enticing to many despite Trump’s transparent mendacity.
Now, Vance is well on his way to becoming the nation’s leading dealer of the same toxic political drug. As Vance himself predicted, addiction to it risks tragic consequences for communities like his Ohio hometown.
The child of immigrants
The United States is a nation of immigrants, but many of them have come from within the nation’s borders.
After Congress began enacting laws drastically limiting immigration during a previous wave of xenophobia in the 1920s, the industrial Midwest and West had to fuel their growth almost entirely with the labor of internal immigrants, many hailing from the rural South.
Large cohorts of these internal immigrants were African Americans who participated in the waves of the “Great Migration.” But the 20th century also saw waves of millions of whites from Appalachia, including Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, who streamed into the Midwest’s industrial cities and towns, with many Kentuckians settling in nearby Southwest Ohio.
Most of the Appalachian immigrants who moved to the Midwest, including Vance’s grandparents, came from rural Scots-Irish communities that had remained largely intact for decades. But as the coal industry on which so many rural Appalachians had relied on for their livelihoods shrank, the prospect of leaving for the North became increasingly attractive for many.
As Vance recounted in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” many of the Midwest’s internal immigrants from Appalachia faced challenges and burdens, the scars of which continue to be borne today by members of succeeding generations. That’s the case for Vance’s own family.
Many of what Vance calls the “hillbilly” newcomers were recruited in Kentucky and Tennessee by Midwest factory owners looking for laborers they believed would accept lower pay than other workers and could be prevented from unionizing. Among them was Vance’s grandfather, who was induced to move to Middletown to take a job at a steel mill.
Like most immigrants, whether from inside the country or beyond its borders, the vast majority of those who travelled the “Hillbilly Highway” northwards ultimately realized far greater prosperity. But, on Vance’s account, the mass immigration of his family and other Appalachians to the Midwest was not only a huge challenge — as immigration inevitably is — but something of a societal curse.
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The dystopian narrator
According to Vance, his family brought with them to Ohio a “tradition” of poverty that was exacerbated by the wrenching loss of community and extended familial ties that were gravely disrupted by their move North.
As many critics of his book have observed, Vance had a more than frequent tendency to generalize the pathologies and tragedies that marked his own family and upbringing — his grandfather was an alcoholic for much of his life, and his mother, who once threatened to kill her child, suffered from opioid addiction for years — to his entire community, and indeed to Appalachians generally.
In 2016, Vance described Middletown as a scene of dystopian nightmare, where multiple overdose deaths were an everyday occurrence, alcoholism was rampant, and desperate poverty was the norm. He also strongly suggested the systemic despair that had overtaken his hometown was substantially the fault of the internal Appalachian immigrants themselves, who he deemed weak and dangerously detached from organized religion and therefore susceptible to pathologies like substance abuse.
Yet the account of Middletown as a “domestic war zone” that Vance provided while living as a venture capitalist in San Francisco struck many residents of Middletown and cities like it as incomplete. While Vance seemed to attribute the pathologies he described to a purported “tradition of poverty,” some of the town’s current residents instead point to events like a brutal 2006 lockout of union workers from the steel plant where Vance’s grandfather once drew union wages, and pharmaceutical companies that profited from the epidemic of substance abuse.
The dangerous attraction of Trump’s “cultural heroin”
During a 2015 NPR interview, Vance argued that the purportedly systemic failure of his community, like that of his family, was due to a loss of connection with organized religion. He contended that he avoided the same fate largely because his father got him involved with an evangelical church.
On Vance’s account, his father’s church “provided a lot of moral pressure, a good community of believers that really supported me and supported him.” He claimed other poor Middletown “hillbillies” disconnected from organized religion (including his grandmother) lacked such “support.”
Yet, as Vance acknowledged, the “support” his father’s church offered included a deep inculcation into the conspiratorial extremism that has come to pervade many white evangelical churches in recent decades. As Vance recounted, the church he credited with saving him taught “evolution was a lie that the devil told to get Christians to believe in modern science” and that “the gay lobby was making it more and more difficult for Christians to live their lives or to practice their faith.”
The teenage JD Vance became an avid advocate for this mix of religious and political ideology, which he circulated on AOL message boards, the prevailing social media of the time. According to Vance, his message was grounded on a claim that “the devil” was in control of the nation and world and worked in the form of LGBT persons, Wall Street financiers, and the United Nations — a view rooted in a deep and abiding resentment of malign forces that purportedly threatened true Christians.
Before the 2016 election, Vance wrote insightfully about how Trump harnessed some of the same powerful resentments that led him to embrace rightwing conspiracism as a teenager and led members of his family and community into the morass of alcohol and substance abuse.
On Vance’s account, Trump was a “cultural heroin” dealer who appealed to the pessimism of members of his community by offering the “pain reliever” of “easy solutions” for their despair about the present and future. According to Vance, the causes of the “domestic chaos” and “social decay” he claimed had overtaken Middletown actually originated in “American communities and families and homes.” He claimed Trumpism offered a comforting promise that those systemic problems could be magically solved, including by removing purportedly malign newcomers from Mexico.
No wonder, Vance explained, that his evangelical Christian father — who had avoided falling under the thrall of substance and opioid abuse — had taken to Trump’s “cultural heroin,” just as he had embraced conspiratorial extremism.
But before the 2016 election, Vance opined that those attracted to the cheap rush of Trumpism would tire of him when it became clear that the “quick fixes” he promised, including that brutally expelling new immigrants would lead to prosperity for those remaining, were false. Then, he suggested, “perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine.”
Yet Vance’s own analysis called that prediction into question. As Vance acknowledged, his father — and presumably many other Trump supporters — well understood that Trump was peddling lies, but that did not prevent them from embracing his celebration of their deeply felt resentments. The promise of the political heroin fix was just too enticing to let the truth get in the way.
Vance becomes a dealer
Republican political consultant Mike Murphy recently recounted that, in 2017, Vance — who had moved back to Ohio in 2016 from San Francisco with an eye toward starting a political career — asked Murphy to manage Vance’s then-contemplated campaign for Senate as an anti-Trump Republican.
Murphy bluntly told Vance that it would be extremely difficult for him to prevail in a GOP primary with his views. Sometime after that Vance apparently chose to make what Murphy calls a “Faustian bargain” in order to succeed in the Republican Party by becoming a political heroin dealer himself.
Over the next several years, Vance assiduously remade himself as a thoroughgoing Trumpist. He ultimately gained Trump’s endorsement in a crowded 2020 GOP Ohio Senate primary, with the help of his mentor, funder, and former employer, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
During the primary campaign, Vance distinguished himself by vehemently opposing the infrastructure bill negotiated by retiring Sen. Rob Portman, which promised to bring millions in desperately needed road and bridge enhancements to his home state. Vance also presented himself as an idiosyncratic economic “populist” who purported to support organized labor, yet opposed legislation to override right-to-work laws intended to undermine unions.
Once he became a senator, Vance opposed a massive federal grant to install a hydrogen-based furnace in the steel mill his grandfather has once worked in, despite the prospect that the project would bring new jobs to the community. Like some of Vance’s other positions, this made some question whether, after years of talking down to the community, Vance actually wanted to see his hometown realize an economic recovery.
Leaving aside the curious nature of Vance’s self-declared economic populism, his primary appeal has long been grounded on the purported apocalyptic threat posed to the nation’s Christian culture. As the quotes from Vance’s numerous fringe podcast interviews that have come to light since Trump picked him as his running mate demonstrate, in recent years, Vance has not simply become a Trump acolyte; he’s become one of the leading pushers of the very kind of political heroin Trump has been selling since 2015.
Most notoriously, Vance became one of the leading “mainstream” GOP advocates for the antisemitic “great replacement” theory, which posits that a shadowy cabal (often associated with George Soros and other Jewish “Wall Street financiers”) has engineered what Vance claims is an organized “invasion” of undocumented immigrants allegedly sent into the Midwest and other parts of the nation to “displace” existing workers and dilute their votes.
It’s hard to miss how closely the conspiracy theories Vance now avidly champions resemble the extremist rhetoric he recalls sharing on AOL message boards as a teen. Against that background, Vance chose to popularize the noxious claim that Haitian immigrants who have been contributing to the economic recovery of Springfield, a small industrial Southwest Ohio town just an hour from Middletown, are stealing and eating white residents’ pets.
The power of self-loathing
Vance knew from the outset that his claims about Springfield’s Haitian community were false.
On the very day he began popularizing a rumor that Haitians residents were kidnapping their neighbors’ pets and eating them, a member of Vance’s staff had learned from a city official that it was baseless. And Vance’s claims that Haitians have brought with them increased crime and “communicable diseases,” including HIV, are also nonsense.
In fact, much like Appalachian internal immigrants to Southwest Ohio, the Haitian residents of Springfield came to their community to fill factory jobs that have contributed to economic growth, not disease or decline. Indeed, again like Vance’s grandfather, many of the immigrants have come with the encouragement of factory owners.
As the owner of a Springfield metalworking business that currently employs 30 Haitian workers recently said, “we want more jobs in our community,” and some of them have to be filled by immigrants. Yet instead of applauding Springfield’s Haitian residents for contributing to the hard fought growth of a Southwest Ohio town that suffered from the decades of decline, Vance literally made up out of whole cloth claims that the Haitians are suffering from, and imposing on the community, many of the very same parade of maladies that he once attributed to his own family and their larger internal immigrant community.
It is as if, in Vance’s mind, he has transformed Springfield’s Haitian community into the “hillbilly” dystopia he portrayed years ago in his book.
That deeply negative and strikingly one dimensional account of the people of Appalachia was never accurate. Indeed, Vance’s suggestion that “cultural” defects doomed many Appalachian immigrants and their descendants to failure was demeaning.
And now, Vance’s attempt to recycle that defamation and ascribe it to Haitian immigrants who are helping to bring economic growth to a small Ohio town is all the more false and repugnant.
In baselessly projecting the same purported evils he once ascribed to his own immigrant family and community onto a new cohort of Ohio immigrants, Vance is demonstrating one of the most toxic elements of Trumpism’s political heroin: It is, at bottom, powered in no small part by self-loathing and resentment.
That’s it for today
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The best that can be said is that, as an evangelical Christian Catholic convert, Vance believes in the Hell he seems destined for
I think most Americans are clueless about the internal migrations of our country despite our cultural history of Pioneers. As this piece said post Civil War fueled the migrations north and west. Again in post WWII the returning service men went where the jobs were and built their families and communities in areas not in their ancestors backyards. Even in my lifetime working in the high tech industry I have gone where the jobs are and many others still do. So encountering new neighbors shouldn't be such a bone of contention as the party of JDV is making it out to be.