The reviews are pouring in across the internet for Ohio senator J. D. Vance’s big vice-presidential-nomination speech last night.
The reviews are pouring in across the internet for Ohio senator J. D. Vance’s big vice-presidential-nomination speech last night, and on social media the question rages: Is Donald Trump’s heir-designate merely a petty fascist, or is he more accurately a wildly dangerous authoritarian? (Proper terminology matters here, folks.)
But otherwise, even the mainstream media had to concede what was obvious to anyone who tuned in last night: Vance came across as an appealingly relatable person with a sense of humor, a deep and abiding love for his family, and a much more reassurringly familiar political bearing than any of the other three people currently named atop a major ticket this year. Trump’s political brand is “chaos” — though the assassination attempt may color that over time — Biden’s is “senility,” and Kamala’s is “biblical, soul-destroying incompetence,” so Vance is well positioned to benefit from selling a facsimile of “normal” instead.
As a performance, the speech was flawed in one respect: It failed to tell Vance’s rather remarkable personal story with much narrative power or cohesion, and instead felt more like a series of “segments” stitched together a bit clumsily into a patchwork quilt. Matters were also not helped in the slightest by the endlessly chanting crowd, whose self-indulgent interruptions were forever throwing chocks under the wheels of Vance’s oratory as he was taxiing on the runway, preventing it from ever getting truly airborne. (This is a crowd that literally took over a minute to chant about how cool a crowd they thought they were, leading one to wonder whether pranksters spiked the water at the convention center with Ecstasy.)
But that, while worth noting, ultimately feels like a minor quibble in light of what Vance actually showed to a public eager for something — anything — that vaguely resembles normality. He demonstrated a light touch with humor (making a genuinely decent joke at Don Jr. and Eric’s expense) and an ability to think on his feet (asking the crowd not to show too much love for Ohio since Trump still needed to win Michigan was an improvisation that landed). And in his touching tributes to his grandmother, his wife, and especially his mother — ten years sober, and present in the audience — he showed a disarmingly humane warmth.
There was little in the way of stirring rhetoric in the speech, a curious choice for a senator known to be a talented writer; perhaps it was set aside as ill suited to a fundamentally demotic moment. Vance leaned heavily instead into the working-class heart of Trump’s pitch to voters: border control, trade protectionism, foreign-policy minimalism, anger about the fentanyl crisis, and a generalized lament for the dying of the civic norms of our youth. And Vance’s imagery invoking his Kentucky roots and the generations of Vances laid to rest there was genuinely moving, a vision of American patriotism rooted to an authentic connection to a real homeland.
That is not to say I am thrilled by the policy direction that an administration bent toward Vance’s ear promises. (With Donald Trump Jr. as his patron within the family, Vance has the potential for real influence within the administration, and well understands this opportunity.) Vance’s foreign-policy views — while not at all the crude isolationism his detractors are currently caricaturing them as — represent an alarmingly public casual indifference to the importance of the Western alliance structure. His avowed position on Social Security and Medicare — treating them unlike any previous modern Republican as a sacred untouchable trust — means that conservatives fighting to reform our collapsing entitlement system must realize they have been abandoned by their party on the battlefield. His unexplained disavowal of his previously held position on abortion (along with the revision of the party platform) makes it clear to conservatives that they will lack an ally in the pro-life cause like the one they had in Mike Pence. These are no minor things to a person who cares about the long-term future prospects of conservatism, as opposed to the short-term electoral fortunes of the Republican Party; they are in fact a near-total repudiation of the majority of modern conservatism’s core principles. Reagan Republicanism is now well and truly dead.
Vance also couldn’t help but strike a discordant note for all those who have actually read the book that catapulted him to fame, Hillbilly Elegy. In that memoir, Vance tells a tale of an underclass undone in large part by its own unwillingness to take personal and moral responsibility for the destructive life choices they make. It is a tale well familiar to all Republicans of an earlier era, because his rise from hardscrabble post-industrial misery to the Senate (and now possibly the vice presidency) would have been sold in any other time as a truly remarkable illustration of the reality of the American dream. That was once the vision of it that he himself endorsed. Last night, however, the American dream itself was arraigned for trial by his rhetoric. Perhaps with justification; but if so, it represents a remarkable repudiation of the core message of his original work.
Persuadable voters will care naught about such things. (I do, but I have long been used to being outvoted wherever I go.) I’m primarily evaluating the act of salesmanship itself, seeing as how I’ve expressed my thoughts about various aspects of Vance as a politician already. And on that level, Vance’s introduction to the nation last night was an unqualified success. He came across as winsome and charming — his youth did not translate as unpreparedness in any way — and given our national mood, I suspect he will impress voters the more they see of him.