J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Hokum

T hose of us who are old enough to have watched too many Hanna-Barbera cartoons in our youths can fully comprehend the elementary logic in the phrase, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Defeat and resignation aren’t hard concepts to wrap your head around. But it’s a rare species of capitulation that wreathes itself in the laurels of victory. Donald Trump might have pioneered that form, but on Wednesday night Senator J. D. Vance perfected it.

To Republicans old enough to recall the monumental political conflicts waged before Trump descended the golden escalator, Vance’s address to convention attendees reads like a declaration of unconditional surrender, albeit one cloaked in pugilism and superficial self-confidence. On foreign policy, for example, Vance conceded the premises argued by Democrats for the better part of this century.

The “disastrous invasion of Iraq” — not merely the occupation or counterinsurgency, but the war itself — is an example of how “the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.” Vance served his country in Iraq, and he has earned the right to repudiate the mission. But he relied on the calcified narratives that have sprouted up from a potted history of the Iraq War to make his arguments for him.

The Iraq War was not “disastrous” if you support the Abraham Accords, which would probably never have come about if Baghdad had remained a base from which terrorism was funded and exported. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was not a place of peace from 1991 to 2003, throughout which time American servicemen and servicewomen were exposed to attacks meted out by a dictator ensconced behind sovereign borders. At no point after the Gulf War was the West capable of washing its hands of the place, and that condition would persist today if Hussein or his psychotic sons were still in power. The proto-democratic covenant emerging in the heart of the Arab world — a government that works with Washington and allows it to conduct anti-Islamist counterterror operations from on the ground rather than from the suboptimal “over the horizon” posture that has failed to contain terrorism in, for example, newly Islamist Afghanistan — is preferable to the only real alternative.

Likewise, Vance’s pat explanation for why housing costs have ballooned in recent years is another concession to premises Democrats promulgated in the aughts and early 2010s. “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business,” he said. That’s the beginning, middle, and end of the 2008 financial meltdown. Oddly, Vance’s account failed to make note of the existence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the Bush administration’s repeated warnings to Congress that those agencies were in desperate need of reform. That’s perhaps understandable, given that Vance’s walk-on music throughout the convention has been an anti-Bush protest song (it’s a big tent so long as you repudiate your support for the last two-term Republican president). But the ideas promoted here and elsewhere in the speech represent a fatally flawed economic conception against which conservatives have argued for decades.

“We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street,” Vance fulminated. “We’ll commit to the working man.” This conception of economics as a zero-sum game — one in which the pie does not grow and, therefore, its declining remnants must be divvied out by powerful, enlightened redistributionists — is fatalistic. It’s precisely the economic outlook promoted by Barack Obama, who distinguished Wall Street from “Main Street” in terms that rendered them somehow in conflict. They’re not. Conservatives understand that monetary and fiscal policy aligned toward the promotion of stable growth lifts all boats — from the producers who make goods to the speculators who raise capital for commercial investment, which subsequently builds businesses, employs more people, and creates more producers.

The Right used to understand that pitting Americans against other Americans was a fool’s game. But that was a theme to which Vance returned again and again last night. “As always,” Vance said while mourning the friends he had lost to the opioid epidemic, “America’s ruling class wrote the checks, and communities like mine paid the price.”

That assessment represents a repudiation of the premises in Vance’s best-selling book. “His family was indeed miserable, but theirs wasn’t the misery of poverty and privation,” Kevin Williamson wrote in his review of Hillbilly Elegy. “It was the misery of people determined to be miserable at any price.” Vance’s insight, bravely and eloquently stated, was that his friends and family chose to sacrifice their agency, wallow in a persecution complex, and surrender themselves to addiction and irresponsibility. The drug-use problem that so tormented his hometown was, in Vance’s estimation, as much or more a demand-side problem. When, last night, he reversed course to lay the blame for the circumstances his loved ones endured at the feet of the “ruling class” — who knows what this means precisely — he was tightening the very psychological shackles around the ankles of his kin that he once set out to break.

Perhaps the most self-serving notion Vance sought to popularize is one that has become a nationalist mantra — the idea that ideas don’t matter. “Even though the ideas and the principles are great,” Vance generously allowed, America is more than “principles” alone. “That is our homeland,” he said. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

This claim — the notion that people are not stirred to fight for anything that is not tangible and parochial — is simply bizarre. Stories move the world. They have since at least the Peloponnesian Wars. Ideas compel men and women to serve their countries — Vance himself admitted that his “soaring patriotism and love of country” compelled him to join the armed services after 9/11 — as much as the pursuit of personal advancement and the simple desire to defend home and hearth. As Vance wrote in his book, the United States was to his grandmother a “second God,” and to his community something “akin to religion” — outlooks that “always inspired” him and which he was troubled to see wane along with his neighbors’ material circumstances.

Great contests of ideas are not exclusive to battlefields. Conservatives waged and won a bruising fight in the closing decades of the 20th century against the squishy, semi-socialist “Middle Way” that Social Democrats (and just plain-old Democrats) pursued at the expense of economic dynamism and individual liberty. Plucky and bold exponents of a philosophy that rejected the communitarian stagnation that prevailed behind the Iron Curtain went to war against central planning and won. Those who would abandon these hard-won gains cloak their submission in churlishness, but the instinct toward surrender of which they accuse everyone else is evident in their deeds if not their words.

There is political utility in this posture. Because so many conflicts are waged over the power of ideas — liberty, representation, egalitarianism, and the like — denuding ideas of their power provides a way to avoid the fight. That’s a defensible outlook, but its proponents shouldn’t then go and accuse conservatives who still have a stomach for the fight of being the true submissives. We’re still in the fight even if our erstwhile allies on the populist right are not.