‘The tragedy of Trump’s candidacy is that, embedded in his furious exhortations against Muslims and Mexicans and trade deals gone awry is a message that America’s white poor don’t need: that everything wrong in your life is someone else’s fault.”
That was JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, writing on the eve of the 2016 presidential election about the man who is now his boss. Trump, Vance wrote in another essay, serves up “cultural heroin”, his promises “the needle in America’s collective vein”, providing an “easy escape from the pain”. Voters would eventually have to “trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine”.
It is Vance, though, who has made the trade, and in the opposite direction. Two years ago, battling to be Ohio’s Republican candidate for the Senate, he realised the need for Trump’s endorsement, so backtracked, “regretting” his earlier criticisms.
Trump, in turn, recognises in Vance a useful asset in cementing working-class support. Vance may be an Ivy League-educated lawyer and venture capitalist, and a politician heavily backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, but he grew up in the decaying steel town of Middletown, Ohio, the descendant of hillbillies who had migrated in search of jobs. Raised in poverty and within a dysfunctional family, Vance escaped by joining the marines, before studying law at Yale University, giving him entry into the highest echelons of American society.
An elite voice who understood the realities of working-class life, Vance became, for mainstream commentators, one of “us” who could speak about “them”, a guide to what many consider a mysterious species: poor white people living precarious lives.
In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance chastises white workers as once he criticised Trump: for blaming everyone else for their problems but never looking to themselves. The troubles tormenting working-class communities may partly be the product of globalisation and industrial decline but, Vance insists, speak much more to cultural and moral failings; workers given to indolence (“we choose not to work when we could be looking for jobs”) and a desire to play the victim.
“We spend our way into the poorhouse,” Vance admonishes the poor of Middletown, buying “giant TVs and iPads” and “homes we don’t need”. “Thrift,” he adds, “is inimical to our being.” Vance talks of “we” and “us” but really means “they” and “them”. There are, for Vance, two kinds of workers, the deserving and the undeserving. His grandparents “embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking”. His “mother and, increasingly the entire neighbourhood, embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful”. Particularly undeserving are those on welfare, living a life of ease on “government largesse”.
It’s a diagnosis that, as Vance himself recognises, echoes the judgment many have projected on to black Americans. “I have known many welfare queens,” he writes, “some were my neighbors, and all were white.”
If Vance draws on traditional conservative tropes, his ascension to the top of the Republican party shows also how much has changed within a party that worshipped Reaganism, neoliberalism and corporate power. “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business,” Vance told the Republican National Convention in his acceptance speech, “but answers to the working man”.
That shift was emphasised by perhaps the most significant moment of the convention – not Trump’s coronation or Vance’s elevation but the speech by Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, the first address by a union leader to the RNC. Missouri’s Republican senator Josh Hawley hailed it as a “watershed moment”, while condemning Republican politicians who had “stupidly gone along with the suits” and “broken the backs of unions”.
Despite the rhetoric, Republican sympathy for workers remains limited. Vance talks frequently of “agency” – the capacity to make choices and act upon them – and of the failure of poor people to take responsibility for their actions and choices. Agency, though, does not exist in a social vacuum and the poor are always far more constrained in what they can choose than are the rich.
Nor is agency just individual but collective, too. For working-class people, collective agency – the ability to act together through trade unions or in communities – is particularly important. That capacity, though, is frequently thwarted by everything from anti-union legislation to the erosion of civic life.
Conservatives, eager to demand that individuals take moral responsibility for their predicaments, often ignore the social constraints and themselves obstruct collective action. Vance has introduced legislation to legalise corporate-run unions, the aim of which is to undermine real unions, and opposed the landmark Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
Despite his own underclass to upper-class personal story, Vance is also wary of too much social mobility, which implies movement not only “to a theoretically better life” but also “away from something” that is socially significant. What Vance means is that dignity for workers requires them to know their station in life.
It’s an argument fleshed out by the political philosopher Patrick Deneen, from whom conservatives such as Vance and Hawley draw intellectual sustenance. For Deneen, class distinctions are the foundations of social order. Ordinary people, he writes in his book Regime Change, are more likely than the elites “to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits” but cannot be entrusted with too much liberty.
What is needed, rather, is an elite capable, unlike now, of inculcating the lower orders with an “understanding of what constitutes their own good” and ensuring, through cultural and religious constraints, that they don’t tumble into degeneracy. This Deneen calls “aristopopulism – populism with a feudal touch”.
All these themes – elite politicians presenting as authentic working-class voices; poverty understood in terms of morality and culture; the demand for culture and tradition to act as guardrails for ordinary people; the desire for a more disciplined society portrayed as a critique of liberal elites – are found not just in the Republican party but are common to rightwing populists in Europe, too, from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
In reaching out to the working class, such parties and movements offer but thin gruel, often laced with Vance’s “cultural heroin”. So profound, though, is the sense among many sections of voters of being abandoned by the traditional parties of the left that many are drawn to them. Until the left takes seriously both the material reality of working-class life, from wages to housing, and that sense of disaffection and abandonment, many more will continue to be.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist’
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