J.D. Vance and the New Republican Party

The elevation of J.D. Vance, the forty-year-old Ohio senator and author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), to Republican vice-presidential candidate signifies another step in the transformation of the GOP into the party for ordinary working people. Vance, given his dissimilar background and temperament, was in the first instance antagonistic towards Trump’s political ambitions. At the time of the 2016 election, he may have been Trump’s most vitriolic conservative critic. Trump, according to Vance, was a billionaire celebrity from New York seeking to exploit the misery of the American heartland for his own personal glory: “I think that he is a total fraud that is exploiting these people.” By 2020 Vance had changed his mind, giving the Trump administration credit for genuinely addressing the challenges faced by “forgotten Americans”. Critics might argue that it is now Vance being an opportunist, exploiting Trump’s resurgent popularity to serve his own political ends. On the other hand, perhaps both Trump and Vance have responded, in their own ways and at their own pace, to a shift in society that requires the Republican Party, given the radicalisation of the Democrats, to take up the cause of ordinary working people.

Vance, back in 2015-16, regarded Trump’s economic remedy for what ailed America as too simplistic and brash to succeed. Trump, bluntly put, blamed the hollowing-out of American-based manufacturing on the incompetence or corruption of America’s political and economic elite and inequitable trading practices with China, Mexico, South Korea, Japan et al—but mostly China. In his 2015 political manifesto, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, Trump did not hold back:

There are people who wish I wouldn’t refer to China as our enemy. But that’s exactly what they are. They have destroyed entire industries by utilizing low-wage workers, cost us tens of thousands of jobs, spied on our businesses, stolen our technology, and have manipulated and devalued their currency, which makes importing our goods more expensive—and sometimes impossible.

Perhaps because so few expected him to become the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 2016, let alone occupy the White House from 2017, Trump’s anti-China invective was mostly written off as attention-seeking bombast. Trump, being Trump, sometimes softened his tone—“I love China … I have made a lot of money there,” he acknowledged at one campaign rally—but on other occasions, such as in May 2016, he ratcheted up the rhetoric: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

There are any number of reasons why Trump chose China as one of his targets on the way to the Oval Office.

Not the least, as I argued in “China’s Dream, America’s Nightmare” (Quadrant, May 2024), is that Beijing really does aim to replace Washington as not only a regional but also the global hegemonistic power. As a private citizen, Trump had been posting warnings about the threat of the Chinese behemoth as early as 2011, before Xi Jinping assumed leadership of the PRC: “China is neither an ally or a friend—they want to beat us down and our country.” This now seems not unreasonable in the light of the Covid era, wolf-warrior diplomacy, the trade war on Australia, and so on. But back in 2011 Trump was an outlier in his scepticism about China. Meanwhile, politicians in the West, on both sides of the political aisle, from Angela Merkel and David Cameron to our own Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd, were adamant that the liberal international economic order could only benefit from the PRC’s participation.

Today the political landscape looks very different on the subject of Sino-American trade relations. Even if the China-United States trade war did not deliver all the benefits Trump promised, at least the problem of Beijing’s bad faith was addressed in his term in office. Pointedly, Biden has never lifted Trump’s tariffs on imported Chinese goods. Though George W. Bush and Barack Obama had introduced some tariffs to protect the domestic textile industry from China’s predatory economic practices, the predominant mood at the time remained upbeat about the efficacy of NAFTA (1993), China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (2001) and the merits of the US joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Even Trump’s critics are now liable to acknowledge that the replacement of NAFTA with USMCA (the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) in 2019-20 was to the advantage of American farmers, workers and businesses.

Vance, at the 2024 Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, sounded as if he had always been a convert to Trumpism:

When I was in fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico. When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.

This, of course, is somewhat revisionist on Vance’s part. Not only did Joe Biden, and the Democrats, embrace NAFTA and China joining the WTO in 2001; it was the accepted wisdom of conservative and progressive elites alike. The flourishing of enterprises such as Walmart—and Target, KMart, Bunnings et al in Australia—is predicated upon China’s “economic miracle”. While American consumers benefited from a surfeit of inexpensive PRC-manufactured televisions, textiles and tools, and Wall Street enjoyed handsome profits on the back of their immense investments in China, the greatest transfer of wealth and jobs in the history of the world gathered pace. Preferential treatment of Chinese manufactured goods may have cost the United States as many as three million jobs in manufacturing alone since 2001; Beijing, in gratitude, has invested the rich dividends reaped from its US export bonanza in upgrading the PLA Rocket Force which now has at least 200 IRBM launchers and is capable of firing nuclear, conventional and anti-ship warheads at any attempt by Washington to defend the integrity of Taiwan, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the West Philippine Sea and even Australia.

Back in 2016, the author of the newly published Hillbilly Elegy rebuked Candidate Trump for asserting that a “big, beautiful wall” would somehow return manufacturing jobs to the America’s Rust Belt. It was allegedly another instance of Trump over-simplifying issues and, at the same time, appealing to the worst instincts of the American heartland with inflammatory remarks about illegal immigrants. By the time of the 2024 RNC, though, Vance had long abandoned the view that Make America Great Again was a “fraud” intended merely to elicit votes in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Four years of Trump in the Oval Office persuaded Vance that America First initiatives could improve the plight of blue-collar workers. Today Vance would argue that illegal immigration—on track to go beyond 10 million during Biden’s tenure according to a report issued by the US House of Representatives—is not only a matter of national security and crime. It also places a downward pressure on the wages of ordinary working Americans, regardless of whether they are black, white or Hispanic. Vance was right in 2016 to say—and it remains true today—that Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” will not magically create manufacturing jobs in the American heartland. Still, it will tighten the labour market and assure more employment opportunities and higher wages for American workers. This, obviously, is at variance from the Republican Party’s traditional pro-business focus.

In fact, much about the Trump-Vance alliance signifies a big shift from standard Republican thinking, which might be characterised (or caricatured) as reducing taxes for corporations and high-income earners, promoting global trade and treating the domestic union movement with the deepest suspicion. For most union leaders throughout America, if not the union members themselves, the Republican Party has been an anathema. Many of “Reagan’s Democrats” were working-class (or “middle-class” as Americans sometimes refer to blue-collar workers) but the union movement remained under the sway of the Democratic Party. American corporations did well in the 1980s, helped along by Reaganomics, pro-business initiatives such as reducing federal income tax and capital gains tax and cutting government regulations. As a result, conservatives at the time argued that all Americans did well, including the working class. Members of the Teamsters, the largest and most powerful union in the land, voted to endorse Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and even George H.W. Bush in 1988. But that kind of what’s-good-for-corporate-America-is-good-for-everyone no longer resonates. The Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien addressed the RNC in Milwaukee, but his message was charged with populist broadsides: “Elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock prices at the expense of the American worker.” It was not within O’Brien’s remit to formally endorse the Trump-Vance ticket, and yet his praise for Trump’s character in the face of an assassination attempt and elsewhere his frequent tributes to Senator Vance’s defence of American jobs, such as legislating against the outsourcing of American airline maintenance work, tells its own tale.

O’Brien’s anti-establishment rhetoric could have been delivered by either Trump or Vance, which says a lot about the GOP’s attempt to reconfigure itself as a conservative pro-worker party. Unsurprisingly, this dramatic shift has not been welcomed across the board.

Establishment Republicans touting international trade as an absolute good view Trump’s effect on their party, traditionally the party of common sense and global trade, as a catastrophe. Even Ronald Reagan, if he were still around, might have looked askance at the anti-establishment populism voiced during the RNC. The American Dream, as understood by Reagan, was about a free people making it big in any endeavour of their choosing. Vance, despite graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, becoming a best-selling author in 2016, getting elected to the Senate in 2022 and now nominated by the GOP for the vice-presidency, sounded less focused on promoting the American Dream than obtaining justice for those left behind.

How to explain Vance’s estrangement from elites and elitist opinion? A ready answer—and the one Vance promoted in his RNC acceptance speech—is that he identifies with the Americans who have been the victims of international trade: “Now, that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home, and like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.” Eight years ago, Vance struggled to see what a billionaire property developer from New York with a lucrative side-hustle in reality television could have in common with hard-pressed families in Middle America: “I don’t think he cares about folks … I think he just recognizes that there was a hole in the conversation and that hole is that people from these regions of the country, they feel ignored.” Vance came to believe that Trump’s America First tilt did have a positive effect on the working families out in the American heartland—Trump’s MAGA concept turned out to be more than “cultural heroin”. President Trump, as it happened, did not aspire to be “America’s Hitler”; rather, he was a genuine patriot who wanted only the best—“We’re gonna win so much you’re gonna get tired of winning”—for his fellow Americans, for all his fellow Americans. The globalism of the rich and powerful was to be replaced by Americanism.

Given that Donald Trump, before he entered the political arena, appeared to epitomise the world of the “insider”, it is not surprising—in retrospect—that the author of Hillbilly Elegy should have been suspicious of Trump promoting himself as the champion of “outsiders”. Owning your own golf course in Scotland is not exactly par for the course for ordinary working people. Vance was not the only one to disparage Trump’s man-of-the-people act, notwithstanding the billionaire’s love of fast food and general air of unsophistication. What the critics overlooked, however, was that Trump made his fortune—with, yes, some serious start-up funds provided by his real-estate mogul father—within the United States. Though he boasted of making money in China and once had plans to build a second Trump Tower in Moscow, most of his wealth accrued from projects grounded in America, from property developments in Manhattan, a nation-wide motel chain and casinos in Atlanta to his famous association with The Apprentice on NBC. To borrow from Mao, if we may, Trump was more of a high-end member of the “national bourgeoisie” than a globalist grifter ensconced in the “comprador bourgeoisie”. Betraying ordinary American workers through the relocation of local jobs to China, Mexico et al, had never been his modus operandi for getting rich.

The contrast between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race on the subject of global trade makes the point. Though Clinton did tardily mention the possibility of “targeted tariffs” if the situation demanded, a Wikileaks exposé tells a different story: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders …” The conservative-populist (MAGA) alternative proffered in Trump’s Crippled America stands in stark contrast to Clinton’s business-as-usual attitude. Candidate Trump’s complaint that he could not, for instance, purchase American-made televisions for his motels since televisions were no longer manufactured in in the United States offended his patriotic (and, let us admit, egoistic) sensibilities. If, however, his fortune had derived from manufacturing electrical goods or investing in their production, he might have adopted a different perspective. Obviously Donald Trump was part of America’s rich and famous set. How else to classify a billionaire businessman who owned his own private jet and attended Chelsea Clinton’s celebrity wedding in 2010? And yet his unfashionable economic nationalism—America First—can be explained, at least in part, by how he made his billions. He really did want all Americans, including the working-class tradesmen he associated with as a property developer, to flourish. His connection with the working class of the American heartland, which resulted in the fall of the Democrats’ so-called Blue Wall at the 2016 election, was no fraud.

J.D. Vance, thirty-two when Hillbilly Elegy was published and Trump made his first run for the White House, was a fervent Never Trumper in the first instance because he viewed the solution to the “culture in crisis”—drug addiction, parental irresponsibility, domestic violence, single-parent households, pervasive despair and cynicism and so on—as psychological or even spiritual rather than economic or political. In other words, any social malaise was a result of “factors outside the government’s control”. This is a long way, Vance’s critics have noted, from the populist stance he later adopted as the junior senator from Ohio and now as the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee:

It’s about the auto worker in Michigan wondering why out of touch politicians are destroying their jobs. It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship. It is about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio, who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country.

Vance, like many former-Never Trumpers, belatedly acknowledged that Trump was simply ahead of the curve when it came to economic nationalism and protectionist initiatives to defend the United States against the predatory and antagonistic practices of foreign interests—not least Beijing which, according to some estimates, steals as much as half a trillion dollars a year in American intellectual property.

There are passages in Hillbilly Elegy that lend themselves to a conservative-populist critique of contemporary American life.

Vance rightly pointed out that working-class whites, customarily Democrats, became less enthusiastic about Barack Obama as time wore on not because of racism but because Obama’s progressive ideology seemed “alien” and his professional life teemed with “new privileges”, privileges available to those socially and politically well-connected but concealed from ordinary working people: “President Obama came on the scene right as many people in my community began to believe that the modern American democracy was not built for them.”

Vance’s time at Yale University provided him with the opportunity to witness “the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind”, meaning a state-school boy from Middletown, Ohio. Ivy League colleges such as Yale claim an entrance policy based on diversity—in terms of ethnicity, gender, religion and so on—and yet people from low-income families, white or otherwise, are no more represented in these palaces of privilege than they were in the past. And for those who find themselves in an Ivy League college, the lucrative job opportunities made available to them are almost obscene. Yes, Virginia, there is a ruling class.

If the deluxe version of the American Dream did not always avail itself to the white working class, there was always American patriotism, almost religious in its power, to fuel a potent sense of belonging to the greatest country in the world. But many of the patriotic projects that once bound rich and poor Americans together, such as the Second World War, the space program, and the Cold War, are receding into the distance. In the past, for instance, America’s working class, both black and white, have played a disproportionate role in America’s foreign wars. J.D. Vance himself was a Marine from 2003 to 2007, straight out of Middletown High School, deployed to Iraq for six months as a combat correspondent. Vance, like Trump, is never anything less than respectful of the men and women of the US Armed Forces, but even in Hillbilly Elegy he referred to the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War as “unwinnable”. It was, again, Donald Trump who reconfigured the Republican Party on this score: no longer will the GOP be the pro-war party needlessly embroiling the US in foreign wars that spill American blood and squander America’s treasure while serving no strategic purpose.

J.D. Vance becoming the Republican vice-presidential candidate is important, if for no other reason than that were Trump to win—or be allowed to win—the November election, the youthful Vance would likely represent the future of the GOP. He would, for instance, be the same age as Richard Nixon when elected vice-president under Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Vance, now an unapologetic acolyte of Trump, can be expected to keep pushing the GOP in the direction of a conservative pro-worker party, protectionist, strong on border control, distrustful of Beijing’s intentions, pro-Christian, anti-DEI and preferencing Americanism over globalism. Vance’s America First pronouncements on foreign policy also appear to echo Trump’s concerns, and yet their views are by no means identical. Vance, like Trump, is critical of NATO countries not paying their way and, former Marine or not, fulminates at the false promises made by the military and political establishment at the outset of American military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. All this is uncontroversial in MAGA-world, and yet his remark on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is more contentious: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Although this reflects the opinion of many America First advocates, it is far less nuanced or sophisticated than Trump’s position, which is a worry given that Trump, despite his gift for seeing things as they really are, is not exactly renowned for nuance and sophistication.

And so if there is a criticism to be made of J.D. Vance it is this: the world is more complicated than any simple political formula would have us suppose.

Apparently it is not only Trump’s friends but some of his supporters who believe the America First mantra is a throwback to Charles Lindbergh’s America First isolationism of the 1930s. The Trump Doctrine, as I outlined in “No World Order” (Quadrant, March 2024), was not so much a case of isolationism as conservative internationalism. And so, we might presume, it will be with the Russo-Ukraine War—that is, Trump caring very much about “what happens to Ukraine one way or another”. Moscow is not going to be rewarded for invading Ukraine any more than Iran will be rewarded for its adventurism in the Greater Middle East or China for threatening Taiwan and the Philippines. J.D. Vance has come a long way since his Never Trump days, but he is still young and has some way to go before his political judgment is fully developed.

Daryl McCann, a regular contributor, has a blog at https://darylmccann.blogspot.com.