The Same Vance

C onsider two statements: 1) The virtues of thrift, hard work, sobriety, piety, and levelheadedness tend to produce good results in individual lives, regardless of external conditions and challenges. 2) The structure of government policy and patterns of capital investment can help or hinder the flourishing of towns, regions, and even nations, shaping the lives and choices of the people therein.

Do those sound like contradictory statements? Only to people who have determined to hate J. D. Vance. Which of the two statements is the primary subject matter for elected officials and policy-makers? If you think it’s the first one, maybe you don’t understand what elected governments are for.

It has become a cliché of commentary to note that Vance, as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, described how cultural pathologies — substance abuse, listlessness, perverted sense of honor — caused people in the deindustrialized areas of Ohio to fail in life and squander available opportunities, whereas his hard work eventually pulled him all the way out of a struggling region and chaotic family life and earned him a place in the same elite law school that educated four of our current Supreme Court justices.

But now that he’s a politician, they add, he never talks about the moral and spiritual failures and weakness of people in those regions; instead he talks about how policies took away economic opportunity and how different policies can bring renewal. “Isn’t this a contradiction?,” they ask. “What happened to J. D. Vance?”

No. In fact, it’s not a contradiction. What happened to J. D. Vance? He submitted himself to service as a policy-maker in the U.S. Senate, therefore his subject matter had to change to that on which all senators will be judged by their constituents and God, by what policies they institute and how those conduce to the well-being of the citizens of this country. Many conservatives apparently think it’s unseemly or unprincipled for Vance to consider policy. They’re dead wrong.

Hillbilly Elegy is a great book that was loved for bad reasons. It was devoured by liberals because it painted Trump supporters as blameworthy authors of their own misery, and some of these supporters were so politically incorrect as to be beyond any sympathy. It was loved by conservatives who believed its tale of bootstrapping success meant that no serious reflection about economic or trade policy was required because, well, if Vance could do it, then the rest of these folks were the blameworthy authors of their own misery.

In fact, Vance’s rise out of poverty is partly due to government intervention in the form of the G.I. Bill, which technically trespasses against the doctrinaire conservative aversion to “picking winners and losers” by giving certain advantages in tuition, admissions, and housing to veterans as compensation for their honorable service. Vance’s admission to Yale Law School — his actual portal into America’s elite class — was surely guided by that institution’s complex formulas for achieving diversity, including regional and socioeconomic diversity.

Personal virtues produce good fruit in individuals in every circumstance. Staying sober, remaining disciplined, and loving God will make a free man a better and more prosperous free man, and those same virtues will strengthen a political prisoner who is unjustly held. But the leaders who preserve freedom or who unjustly imprison dissidents will be judged on how the laws they preserve alter and shape that environment.

In the very introduction of his book, Vance acknowledges that there are political factors that contribute to what Appalachia and the Rust Belt have become. “Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites,” he writes. “What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough — I worry about those things, too” (my emphasis). But, as a memoirist, he writes that his “primary aim” in the book “is to tell a true story about what that problem feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.” He did so very effectively.

But now that he is a politician, he is accountable to God and the voters for how the laws and policies he enacts shape the environment in which people exercise virtue or succumb to vice. Merely saying that if Vance could rise, then everything must be fine is as silly as saying that just because Joseph rose to become Pharaoh’s most-trusted servant, there is nothing for Egyptian slaves to gripe about.

When we see the hollowing out of a society in a foreign country, especially when it is evidenced strikingly in quickly declining life spans, we never spare the political and economic conditions from critical examination. The post-Soviet decline of life spans in Russia can be attributed to alcohol abuse. But everyone describing what happened there then proceeds to analyze the venality and corruption of that era’s political leadership, and the profound economic dislocation, that contributed to the hopelessness and general moral decay.

Vance’s hillbilly family had its near-breakdown experience in the 1980s and 1990s. But in previous generations, like hundreds of thousands of other hillbillies descended from the Scots-Irish, the Vance family moved itself out of Appalachia to the better-paying jobs of the Rust Belt. In other words, if Vance’s conservative critics are right, when job opportunities for non-college-educated white men were plentiful, and capital investment high, the hillbillies just happened to have the morale and the discipline to take advantage of them. And somehow, at the exact same time, regions in Ohio were experiencing deindustrialization led by the China Shock (as one study phrased it), they also experienced a simultaneous and rapid collapse of moral fiber, leading to social pathology and deaths of despair. But, to such critics, the economic shock and the collapse of personal virtue are completely separate and unrelated coincidences. Such a thesis is utterly preposterous. In fact, the authors of the China Shock paper found in their preliminary work that Chinese import competition reduced male employment rates and salaries in a way that led to sharp increases in divorce, family breakup, and youth living in poverty-struck homes.

By critically examining how the fate of America’s middle class is bound up with the geopolitics of our nation’s trading arrangements, J. D. Vance is not luxuriating in victimhood but taking up the actual responsibilities for which he signed up when he joined the Senate. Those who object to this work are under the delusion that it is unprincipled for an American government to look after the interest of Americans — as if our citizenry were a “special interest” or it was somehow wrong to pick winners and losers between American freedom and Chinese tyranny. Such an objection marks a person out as fit to be safely ensconced in a padded room or a global humanitarian NGO. People who pretend to think that Vance would make better use of his Senate seat or the vice presidency by sending notes to constituents telling them to hike up their pants or making them feel bad about their divorce have confused the job of statesmen with that of parents, pastors, therapists, and life coaches. In fact, given that no conservative politician who won their praise in the past has ever done such a thing, I think they are just lying.