J.D. Vance has a Story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/01/04/jd-vance-hillbilly-elegy-radicalization/

J.D. Vance wrote a book critical of his family, hometown, and ethnic group; it sold well and he got a movie deal out of it; Ron Howard directed it. He’s a graduate of Yale Law School, a friend and mentee of Peter Thiel, and has gone from never-Trumper to opposing vaccine mandates. Vance has worked in venture capital, though he did not study engineering. He is now running for the Senate in Ohio and is all-in on Trump. He has an online persona as a nasty right-wing troll, and he’s on record as saying that Americans shouldn’t be concerned with Ukraine’s problems. He has converted to Catholicism and thinks that’s the solution to America’s culture wars. He recently grew a beard.

Is there anything in the preceding paragraph that says “likable” to you? And yet J.D. Vance is sad because people don’t like him; he blames the limitless malice of the “elites.” The worst example of this elite malice is apparently that critics mostly didn’t like the movie based on his book. Right, liberal movie critics are exactly what George Orwell was talking about!

Still, even unlikable people have their share of light:

Ironically, this breakup seemed to bring Vance closer to certain critics who had accused him of blaming low-income Appalachians for their own problems. In his book, Vance cited the research of Harvard economist Raj Chetty, which found that a region’s lack of social mobility was strongly correlated to its percentage of single-parent households. Subsequently, he has been more likely to cite MIT economist David Autor’s work on globalization, which estimates that imports from China cost the United States about a million manufacturing jobs in the first decade of the 21st century. By 2020, Vance was tweeting that the legacy of Reaganite-Thatcherite conservatism was “the rise of China, the decimation of the American family, and a lot of tax cuts for the rich.” As his friend Sohrab Ahmari — one of the leading intellectual proponents of national conservatism — suggested to me, Vance had eventually come around “to the correct conclusion of his memoir.”

When we spoke on the phone, I told Vance I found it noteworthy that his book dissected the “learned helplessness” of Scotch-Irish hillbilly culture, while now he plays up external factors. He pushed back on my characterization, arguing that it made sense to talk about one thing in a memoir and the other in a Senate race. Besides, they weren’t mutually exclusive. Take “trade and industrial policy and fatherlessness,” he said. “We should understand deindustrialization as, in part, something that decimates working-class families, and, of course, when you destroy working-class families, then a whole lot of social pathologies move in.”

“National Conservatism” is a movement that includes a number Catholic intellectuals. Adherents are cultural and religious conservatives but not opposed to social programs that benefit the working class. There’s an isolationist and protectionist strain in their thinking, and Pat Buchanan appears to be an influence. Ross Douthat has adopted at least some of their ideas, particularly around social support for pregnant women who might otherwise abort. (see: Ross Douthat and “Just-this-one-thing”)

The problem with National Conservatism is no one can fix American’s social or cultural problems without:

1. A critique of capitalism. America is the most successful capitalist country in the world, and all our problems either stem from, or are deeply intertwined with, capitalism. My critique is that capitalism is a system of socialization which is economically useful but fatally destructive and dehumanizing in other ways. (See A Greater Power, Air Safety and Capitalism, “the very rich are not like you and me”, Mother’s Milk and Potosi).
2. An understanding of the American class structure. Vance, Douthat and others like them throw the word “elites” around a lot, without any understanding of the class structure itself. They don’t even realize that the American class structure has a purpose. (See: Class and Underclass).

I hope National Conservatism can do some good, I really do. But it can’t just ignore capitalism—and particularly Billionaire Capitalism—and get anywhere. People like Vance and Douthat and Kevin Williamson are mostly reactive. They sense that liberalism doesn’t have all the answers, which is fair enough, but then they freak out and act as if liberalism has betrayed them in some deeply personal way. To them, liberalism is the enemy.

I have my own disagreements both with liberalism and with identity politics, which Vance and Douthat seem to believe are the same. But liberalism has an honorable history, and Paul Krugman and other liberals often do excellent work.

And in any case, ranting about the illusions and blind spots of liberals is uninteresting to me. Yes, they don’t have all the answers, but I would rather develop my own vision.

At least liberals (for the most part) are not actively furthering the cause of Billionaire Capitalism, which is a threat to humanity and civilization. JD Vance, by his support of Trump, is.

It’s odd that Vance can see the damage de-industrialization did in his native Ohio, without wondering how it came about and who benefited. Nowhere was the transition from industrial capitalism to Billionaire Capitalism more dramatic and damaging than in the industrial Midwest, and it hurt Vance’s own family. And yet Vance supports Trump—and Putin! — without the slightest understanding that Trump and Putin are now the leaders of Billionaire Capitalism, the same political and economic movement that destroyed Vance’s hometown and his childhood.

Does Vance ever stop to think that the “social pathologies” he mentions might include voting for self-destruction?