You knew J.D. Vance was going to make it all about Mamaw.
America is a funny old place. Not many people know J.D. Vance’s grandmother, the person. A lot of them know Mamaw the literary character, and a whole lot more know Mamaw the movie character, played by Glenn Close. In his convention speech, vice presidential nominee Vance credited his success in life to his Mamaw. That was smart: J.D. is about the fourth-most-interesting character in Hillbilly Elegy, and Mamaw is the crowd-pleaser. As the noted philosopher Darrell Royal once said, “You’ve gotta dance with them what brung ya.”
There is a problem with Vance’s odd political and social position. He wants to talk about how America doesn’t work, but he personifies how beautifully it does work. One of the things America is awfully good at is locating bright, intellectually inclined young people in modest circumstances and helping them along. Terrible, dysfunctional families can make that a lot harder—I know whereof I write—but three cheers for our institutions of higher education and our ruthlessly efficient labor market.
The first time I encountered Vance was on a sidewalk outside of San Francisco City Hall, of all places, and we were both wearing tuxedos. It was the ceremony for the William F. Buckley Prize, and Vance, at the time, was something not unlike a Buckley conservative. It was a hillbilly-flatbilly summit, of a sort. I’d been writing about lower-class, mainly white dysfunction for a few years at that point, and Vance had just published his famous book, which I had reviewed in Commentary. I admired his work tremendously—and, naturally, envied him some, too. We had a good conversation.
Watching his descent into … whatever it is he has become … has been dispiriting. Have you ever had an acquaintance, someone you see only infrequently, who had a terrible problem with addiction or some sickness, and every time you saw them they were noticeably worse? I see Vance only in the news, but that is kind of what it is like. Or like visiting your hometown every few years and seeing it decline.
Declining hometowns are a theme of Vance’s. It’s mostly bulls—t, of course. What’s true of much of Appalachia is true of much of the Rust Belt: Nothing happened to those communities. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because of NAFTA or the WTO—it was poor when Andrew Jackson was president, and it has been poor since.
Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear.
One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a little.
It is good to have a Mamaw. I could have used one myself. I was lucky to grow up in a college town, which meant that I had friends with parents who were professors and other educated professionals, who gave me some of the direction I did not get at home. But Vance isn’t running for Papaw. He is running for vice president, the No. 2 executive officer of the U.S. government, the job of which is entirely different from the job of Mamaw, worthy as the latter profession may be. What troubled Vance’s family was not a poor economy or lack of economic opportunity—as I noted in my review, his supposedly hardscrabble family had a household income in excess of $100,000 a year, at times—and it was not public policy, either. He was raised by low and incompetent people, who, like the poor, we will always have with us. What young J.D. needed most were things that the state cannot provide.
What the state can provide are analgesics, in the form of welfare payments and other benefits that lighten the burden of dysfunction. And what politics can provide is another analgesic, one that is even more powerful: someone to blame. But, like all analgesics, that only treats the symptoms.
There was a time when J.D. Vance knew that.
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