When I think of JD Vance, Trump’s choice of vice-presidential candidate, the image that comes to mind is of one of those skilful circus performers, who make their way with astonishing dexterity to the top of a human pyramid with the willing assistance of others. Becoming a vice-presidential candidate at 39 is quite a feat for a self-declared hillbilly.
The people boosting Vance in his mesmerisingly swift rise span quite a range. His memoir Hillbilly Elegy, later adapted as a film, cheerfully exposed the poverty, addiction and violence of his extended dysfunctional family – as well as the fierce loyalty and courage of some – to an initially enthralled public gaze. It is dominated by his potty-mouthed, protective grandmother, Mamaw, who once poured gasoline over her husband and set him on fire when he came home drunk for the umpteenth time. (Papaw survived with minor burns.)
Let’s just say that Mamaw believed in robust self-defence, including teaching Vance how to gut-punch a bully in primary school. He credits her with his escape from the vicious cycle so many of his relatives were caught in.
But his influences also include Peter Thiel, the conservative libertarian tech billionaire, whose earlier investments include PayPal and Facebook. Terrifyingly, Thiel is to the forefront of bringing AI to warfare, using Ukraine as a live lab. He donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign.
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Thiel also funds an array of what might be best described as techno-libertarians who are lukewarm at best about democracy. One of them, blogger Curtis Guy Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, believes that US democracy is a failed experiment and that a quasi-monarchy akin to the chief executive of a corporation is needed instead. Vance hangs in the same circles as Yarvin.
Vance’s wife, Usha, is another one of the key people around him. It is one of life’s little ironies that like Kamala Harris, her family originally came from south Asia and she is also a lawyer, working until recently for a Los Angeles firm where Harris would probably feel right at home.
Vance refers to Usha as his spirit guide at Yale, where he studied law after a stint in the Marines that developed his preternatural discipline. She understood how to work a system impenetrable to him. Already, like Harris, Usha’s skin colour and immigrant parents have been the subject of poisonous online attacks.
In a more genteel fashion, when rumours spread in Washington’s expensive Del Ray district that the Vances had bought a house there, a neighbour yarn-bombed it. (It involved wrapping hand-knit LGBT+ symbols around trees and telephone poles to remind Vance of fundamental freedoms.) The fact that Thiel, one of Vance’s principal mentors, is gay, is a level of complexity not reducible to yarn bombing.
But in a world where Trump avoided a bullet by millimetres and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney spends $5,000 a day since the Capitol riots on security for his family, yarn bombing is probably the least of the Vances’ worries.
Vance’s path from the Marines (where he ended up in media and communications) to Yale, where Amy Chua of Tiger Mother fame mentored him, to venture capital, could have led to a future where the neighbours in Washington were thrilled to have him. He did not choose that path.
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Vance does not so much flip-flop as ruthlessly shed anything that does not serve his ambition. Hillbilly Elegy is already out of date. It does not include his conversion to Catholicism, which is central to understanding his worldview but also demonstrates how capable he is of compromise to advance his agenda.
The revealing title of his conversion story in Lamp Magazine is How I Joined the Resistance. He says that Catholicism, with its emphasis on virtue tempered by forgiveness and structures such as families and communities, fits better for him as a solution to the poverty and dysfunction he grew up among than the Right’s emphasis on culture and personal responsibility, which can be somewhat heartless.
It also sits better with him than what he acknowledges as the left’s more compassionate stance, which he characterises as reducing everything to material circumstances but has little expectation of people’s ability to form community or to change by surmounting circumstances.
However, just as he once despised Trump but is now his vice-presidential candidate, he is not so Catholic that he cannot live with the abortion pill, despite formerly declaring staunch anti-abortion views. Sixty-three per cent of abortions in the US in 2023 were due to abortion medication.
Despite his many and deep connections to Silicon Valley, Vance is allegedly not a friend of big tech, believing instead in little tech. For example, he believes that Lina Khan, another south Asian-American and the antitrust commissioner in Biden’s administration, is doing a good job and that big tech needs to be reined in because behemoths such as Google have too much influence, including on how voters access information.
Only a fool would make predictions about the presidential election. It is not impossible that Harris may win by a landslide, even if it is hard to identify anything that energises her other than abortion. Meanwhile, her idiosyncratic speeches keep the meme factory humming.
Vance is preternaturally smart, articulate, and scarily capable of ruthless compromise when it suits his agenda. Where will his vaulting ambition eventually bring him in the circus that US politics has become?