10.04.2025

Articulate attack dog

Despite being from a troubled background, JD Vance found the help of some very rich friends. Mike Belbin looks at the ideas, compromises and ambitions of the US vice president

Why discuss JD Vance? As US vice president, he has played sidekick to Donald Trump - for example, at the Munich security conference, attacking the EU; or back in the Oval office, upbraiding Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

He makes extreme statements that anyone can dismiss, if they care to. The most recent one was his rudeness about certain “random countries who haven’t fought a war in 30 to 40 years”. He could have been referring to Germany, but, of course, it was taken up in the UK as insulting British troops. Vance may one day say the wrong thing as far as the boss is concerned and be frozen out, but as VP he has the power, along with a cabinet majority, to start a process of impeachment against the president. However, for now he is comfortable as the voice ready to articulate a total rightwing vision.

Background

Vance was not his original name. He was born as James Donald Bowman in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, his mother and grandparents (the Vances) being from Kentucky. His parents divorced and his mother, Beverly, became a drug addict.

In 2016 he brought out his autobiography, Hillbilly elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis (lauded by the then liberal Washington Post as “the voice of the Rust Belt”), emphasising his working class roots. Vance himself has said that the book was written to explain why his people supported a candidate like Donald Trump. He was at the time one of Trump’s opponents, saying, “I never did like him”. His book shows how his relatives and neighbours were formed by (1) the Scots-Irish ‘hillbilly’ culture and (2) their condition after they moved northwards and were hit by recession and infrastructure cuts. It closes with his reflections on how this group might resist these detrimental influences.

After his father left, Beverly had a succession of partners, some of whom Vance liked, describing them as “caring and kind men”.¹ As a boy Vance found that his grandparents were a relief from his stressed parent. He describes them as self-reliant and hard-working, while his mother and her neighbours were “consumerist, angry and distrustful”.

Acting now as his new ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’, his grandparents meanwhile believed in “defending your own”. When a pharmacist was rude to JD they busted up the pharmacy! ‘Mama’ would also use a gun at the slightest provocation. However, they had that attitude that many parenting figures shared post-World War II: they wanted their kids to do better, to rise and “get out”. Vance comments that, though they did not want help from “outside the family”, they would accept such help when it was offered.

Vance, however, “wasn’t ready” for college, the “unstructured” life and “the rigors of advanced education” (pp155-56). So he joined the Marine Corps, which initially hurt him, but then made him a “man”, who was self-reliant and with enough cash to buy rounds of drinks. Vance was selected to do senior work in media relations, and found he enjoyed working on the “optics”, especially for US forces in the Iraq war, although he never himself saw actual combat.

Back in the USA he went on to Yale Law School. After Yale, Vance began briefly as a corporate lawyer and worked at Mithril Capital. From 2017 to 2021 he was a member of the board of AppHarvest, which carried out indoor vertical farming. Workers - mainly migrants from Mexico and Guatemala - eventually protested about the “brutal” high temperatures in the company’s greenhouses. It went bankrupt in 2023, owing $350 million, yet later Vance said he had been unaware of the complaints.

Vance started “our Ohio renewal”, focusing on advocacy regarding education, addiction and other “social ills”. It closed in 2021 with sparse achievements. Vance had already decided to run for the Senate and the organisation spent over $63,000 on an executive who also acted as a political advisor to him - more than it spent on programmes to fight opioid abuse.

In 2011, while at Yale, Vance attended a talk by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. It was on how tech professionals were being constrained by government bureaucracy. They became close friends, as Thiel went on to sponsor Republican senators. In March 2021, it was Thiel who introduced Vance to Trump, and Vance at last “crossed to the dark side”. In 2021 he explained on Fox News that “I didn’t fully appreciate the president’s appeal as a person”. He had realised that Trump was advocating his kind of politics, such as opposition to US Marine pilots policing the no-fly zone over Ukraine.

In 2022 David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, gave a pressure group $900,000 to support this “American patriot”, Vance. Thiel then added $15 million. In 2023 Vance endorsed Trump as candidate for president and in 2024 Trump chose him as his running mate. Had then Vance found in Trump his perfect father figure, who would save his community and ‘Make America Great Again’ by recruiting Russia, subordinating Europe and intimidating China?

In the last half of his book Vance discusses what he thinks was wrong with the class he escaped. He is not above mentioning the effect of recession and the flight of industry from Ohio as part of the problem. He mentions the other influences, according to him: permissiveness (easier divorce) and weak child-rearing. The crisis in his book’s title had arrived because his hillbillies had moved north to ‘improve”, but life there had made them worse.

He also lays into the masculinity ethic for discouraging his appreciation of school; he thought “boys who get good grades were ‘sissies’ and ‘pussies’” (p245) - a critical observation he forgets in some later podcasts.

How it happened

He does admit that his own career is one where he got plenty of assistance from both family and official structures. He recalls that “many thumbs were put on the scales” for him (p239).

Like others in his community he distrusted politicians, but distanced himself from the Republican cliché of blaming ‘big government’. Instead, he was looking for a new ethic of personal responsibility, not simply frontier resilience. He asserts that policies should be “based on better understanding of what stands in the way of kids like me” (p244). They were lacking in the grants he had received, as well as low-interest student loans and “need-based scholarships for law school” (ibid).

However, in college Vance still had to take on extra paying jobs and once fell sick due to lack of sleep, alcohol abuse and cheap food. When his mother heard about this, Beverly drove straight over and cared for him till he was well. Vance tells us that she too, like his grandparents, encouraged an interest in education and learning, but observes that “the real problem for many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home” (p245).

But he also blames the policy on schools, for example, segregating working class children from the middle class. When the Middletown administration tried to mix “lower-income kids and those who have a different life-style model ... the federal government balked” (ibid). Such divisions produced a lack of belief in the future and the self-activity of the young - a hopelessness that leads to drug abuse and violent relationships. When he left Yale, he wanted to promote personal responsibility and greater expectations among his brethren. He was confident then that a mix of self-help and economic support could do it.

People often talk about young men falling in with the wrong crowd: older guys who hang around street corners, whom the younger admire for their attitude and for getting somewhere. Vance fell in with the wrong crowd, but they were not on street corners. The people and ideas he came in contact with after college began to inform him what he judged possible to do.

By 2020, as he had considered running for the Senate, he turned to the solutions of certain key figures of the new right or neo-reactionary ideology, following his buddy and sponsor, Peter Thiel, and that main source, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin himself was drawing on a 2001 book by Hans-Herman Hoppe: Democracy: the god that failed. This neo-reactionary message (also stemming from the 19th century Scot, Thomas Carlyle) was one in favour of a capitalism without electoral competition, one commanded by corporate elites and political dictators not unlike the party structures of the People’s Republic of China.

This mix of economic ‘libertarianism’ and political ‘authoritarianism’ was aimed at an ‘enemy within’ - the votes from liberals and minorities who had ‘weakened the national order’. Such a concern with the negative effects of ‘democracy’ goes back at least as far as the 19th century British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli: the fear that if you grant the majority the vote, all too soon they may vote against the ruling minority.

Thiel himself had declared that democracy and liberal progress had failed the American people - that is, an individual’s right to live well and do better. As Curtis Yarvin has asserted in his many blogs, democracy had precisely declined into a corrupt oligarchy, which he called “the Cathedral” - a left-leaning culture that dominated the universities and government agencies. This should be replaced by the power of one man - very much a monarch, “a national CEO” - who could debug the political order like a computer programmer dealing with a virus of bad code. As Vance advised in a 2021 podcast, “I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.”

When Vance was introduced to Trump in March 2021, he had no doubt found that the candidate had similar ideas about democracy versus liberty. In becoming the running mate, the confident Vance began to make those less nuanced statements he is infamous for.

However, he also had to trim certain other opinions, such as on abortion. In early 2021 he was still opposing abortion without room for any exceptions, like rape and incest. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. He preferred to frame the issue as “whether a child should be allowed to live” rather than a woman’s right to choose her life and not be enslaved to another’s wishes. In February, after meeting Trump, he began making the allowance for each of the US states to decide on their policy rather than observe a national edict.

At the time, members of Trump’s campaign were concerned about the “suburban women’s vote”. In fact, 60% of the whole US electorate believed abortion should be a universal right. In November 2023, however, Vance still could not resist reminding people that “we can’t give in to the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this matter”.

Overall, Vance is an attack-dog for Trump (certainly agreeing early on about the importance of Russia as an ally), but he has not thrown away his other ideas that are less attractive to the president - he is perhaps waiting to take over as the heir apparent and become even more extreme than the current boss.

As his ‘childless’ opponents know, his obsession is with children and the youth - hence his ideas on taxing universities and opposing ‘sissy boys’. As long ago as September 2021 (after meeting Trump), he said that boys who fought imaginary monsters “become proud men who defend their homes”, while the other kind of boys who “want to feed the monsters” will not want to defend the ‘interests of the United States’.

After publishing his memoir, JD Vance could have supported greater help for his people’s morale and even continue to insist on the destabilising effects of capitalism, but he chose to join the neo-reactionaries and “make things happen” - things like his own rise up the ladder.

Our response

In May 1981, one Margaret Thatcher said: “Economics are the method: the object is to change the heart and soul.” President Trump sees himself as the deal-maker (with the instincts of a bully), the bringer of more profits and greater power to the USA plus the networking of useful alliances.

As for Vance, he may have stepped back for a while, but he has his eye on ‘the soul’ - that is, the creation of a neo-monarchist patriarchal state, in order to discipline the majority and to repel perceived enemies, both foreign and domestic. He is still there, alongside the boss, regarded among many of the inner circle as the coming leader.

Can we provide an answer to both the vice president and his book? That can only come in the shape of our own movement for transformation - social and personal: that is, a party not just for changing the government, but for rejecting the “script” (as Adler would call it) of passivity, encouraging in each and every member a belief in an active, supported intelligence.

We need a culture not just of complaints, but of an alternative: countering the bossy plan of Vance and the others in his Project; approaching the same questions, but with different answers.

1. JD Vance Hillbilly elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis London 2017, p288.↩︎