Between the memes: J.D. Vance and the reactionary mind
Rather than transcend the evil he once experienced, J.D. Vance has decided to embrace it
This essay is the sixth in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.
If you’ve been on political social media at all over the past few days, you have almost certainly encountered an onslaught of memes and parody articles about Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance and his supposed proclivities involving dolphins and sofas. Obviously, no one believes that the freshman Ohio senator is sexually aroused by chesterfields and cetaceans, but the memes’ incredibly rapid proliferation points to something which almost everyone can perceive about Vance: He is an extremely disturbed person.
Everyone thinks their family is weird, but Vance obviously has a lot more to say in that regard than most. In his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, he chronicled a childhood filled with domestic violence, parental neglect, and addiction. Fortunately for him, Vance had several relatives and community leaders who helped him move into much more rarefied social and career circles.
The journey must have been a painful one, however, and during a 2017 NBC interview about his memoir, he was asked to talk about what happened by Megyn Kelly.
“When I finished the book, I felt a little worried about you,” Kelly stated. “I wondered if you had really dealt with everything.” She referred to Vance’s sister, Lindsey, as having expressed similar concerns.
“That’s a really good question,” Vance replied. “I think that the honest answer is that I probably haven’t dealt with everything.”
It’s impossible to know the innermost thoughts of another person, but Vance’s confession to Kelly seems like the most self-reflective statement he made in public.
I think I have some ability to say that given that I also had a very traumatic childhood. I was homeless for many summers and my family often had little or nothing to eat for weeks on end. One of my brothers was born in a tent. My father thinks he’s a prophet.
As I’ve been working on my own memoir about growing up as a fundamentalist Mormon and later working in Republican politics (please subscribe if you’d like to stay in touch), I realized that there was something fundamentally different about my perspective than Vance’s. While I am glad that I broke free of the dangerous religious and political ideologies that caused my family and I so much pain, I realized that it’s more important to counteract the poisonous ideas than to celebrate my exit from them. I also recognized that I enjoyed some advantages that helped me escape from poverty that many people will never have.
As I attempted to make my way through Hillbilly Elegy, I was struck repeatedly by how little Vance seemed to think of his family and the community from which he came. I eventually gave up after finding nearly every page filled with contemptuous remarks about how lazy and foolish other people were and almost no self-criticism.
The callous and angry person that Vance shows himself to be in his campaign interactions today was not entirely who he was before. He was always on the political right, but in a 2011 blog post, he blasted Republican then-presidential candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann for being intolerant and superstitious:
Perry and Bachmann’s conservatism is defined by what it opposes: science, liberalism, and gays. Others insist that their conservatism is reflexively anti-government, but each supports the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposal that would annul the marriages of gay couples—ripping apart new families, many of which count young children as members.
Their assertions that evolution is “just a theory” miss the mark, and discourage otherwise sympathetic voters from joining the conservative cause. Jonah Goldberg recently argued that the Democrats are just as anti-science as Republicans, citing the president’s unwillingness to increase our nation’s nuclear energy production. I agree with Goldberg that the president’s policy is wrongheaded, but until President Obama tells the American public that nuclear physics is “just a theory,” I’m going to continue to give him the edge over Perry and Bachmann when it comes to science. […]
With few exceptions this observation has been turned on its head. The American Right is no longer a bastion of maturity, but a factory of anger and contradiction. We fulminate against federal power, but our frontrunner would have the U.S. government destroy marriage rights created by the states. We criticize federal spending, and then lambast [sic] Jon Huntsman, the only candidate to endorse a serious plan to control it.
Thirteen years removed, Vance’s old analysis stands as a perfect description of the tyrannical agenda of the Republican party that is most perfectly exemplified by Project 2025, the radical policy platform created by the influential right-wing activists who are certain to staff the highest positions of power in a second Trump administration.
The Republican activist class hasn’t changed its views much at all since Trump came along, except perhaps in international matters such as funding for Ukraine or immigration. On abortion, same-sex marriage, science, LGBTQ public expression, and social safety net, today’s right wing is no different than the one that was there before Trump.
But Vance has changed. He’s been clear that he supports banning abortions even in the “inconvenient” cases of rape and incest. After standing up for lesbians and gays in the past, he says he opposes same-sex marriage. And he’s fully onboard with the vicious censorship campaign that Christianist activists are imposing on teachers and students across the country against discussions of gender identity, racism, and religious non-belief.
After calling Trump “America’s Hitler,” Vance is now his second-in-command. Despite having changed his own name repeatedly, he routinely slanders trans people, who often change their names as part of embracing their true gender identity.
Vance seemingly wears makeup daily but hates drag shows which he falsely compares to the “grooming” behaviors sometimes engaged in by child sexual predators. And after denouncing right-wing superstitions, he now claims to believe in the myth of Satan.
What could possess someone to so deeply rewrite what once appeared to be deep-seated philosophical and political beliefs?
The answer is hiding in plain sight in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy. Just like Donald Trump, Vance desperately wants to be loved and accepted by a fatherly authority figure, even if he cannot bring himself to fully acknowledge this. As Michelle Goldberg noted in her New York Times column today, Vance’s willingness to completely remake himself to suit the tastes of his mother’s significant others is one of the most consistent themes in Hillbilly Elegy:
Vance’s yearning for a father is a constant theme in the book, as is his willingness to rationalize the flaws of the men he looks up to. At one point, he is reunited with his biological father, who gave him up for adoption when he was in kindergarten. The women in Vance’s life — not just his mother, but also his beloved sister, grandmother and aunt — told him that his dad had been “mean” and abusive, but he doesn’t believe it, preferring to think that there had only been “a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more.”
His father was a devoted Pentecostal, and for a time Vance gave up his Black Sabbath CDs and became one, too. “I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” he wrote.
“Devoted convert” may be the role he inhabits most naturally. […] In attaching himself to the most bellicose patriarch he can find, he’s re-enacting a childhood pattern.
The Republican party before Trump was fond of fake populism, lying to convince gullible religious people to vote for welfare for billionaires. But based on my own past experience as a right-wing political consultant, I can say that many, if not most, of the people who work outside of Republican campaigning actually did believe the things we spouted about “job creators,” “makers and takers,” and “freedom.” This was actually why almost every Republican in the DC political class hated Trump when he first came on the scene in 2015 and well into his single term of office. He was a New York liberal, as far as most of my former colleagues were concerned.
But Trump’s continued dominance has completely rewritten the rules for right-wing careerists. I had gotten out shortly before Trump came along and I know so many others who could not live with having to excuse and promote the thousands of idiotic and malicious things Trump and his underlings were constantly doing. They got out as well.
As the normal wing of the Republican intellectual class has headed for the exits, mostly only two types of people have remained: 1) religious and economic extremists who see Trump’s low intelligence and willingness to do anything for advantage as the first-ever opportunity to impose their extreme agenda on an unwilling country, and 2) broken people like J.D. Vance who have decided to embrace the evils they’ve experienced and inflict them on others. (There’s definitely significant overlap between the two groups.)
Trump’s corrupt and evil nature has made the Republicans who didn’t leave into twisted facsimiles of their former selves. After branding himself as a “Never Trumper,” Vance had a choice to become a better person, to learn from his traumatic past, to see the myth of meritocracy, and to realize that most people urging others to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” were handed their riches by their parents like Trump was.
He chose the easier path. Vance has written and spoken extensively about toxic social mores that cause poverty in his view. And yet he’s not tackled the central one in his own life and that of the Republican base: They believe obviously stupid superstitions.
The thing about stupidity though is that you can’t run from it. Voltaire was right: If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities. When you believe stupid things, it makes you hate others, because deep down, if you are intelligent, you know you’re wrong.
After briefly turning away from the fundamentalist Christian beliefs in which he was raised, Vance has returned to them with a vengeance. It was thus inevitable that he would gravitate toward Republicans, a party of religious fanatics run by a rapist sociopath.
Overwhelmingly, most young people loathe the tyrannical ideas of Project 2025 and the authoritarian Christianist worldview that birthed it. But there is a minority of young people who enjoy it: Men who hate that women now have the freedom to choose whether to marry, divorce, or have children. JD Vance is married and his kids, but his worldview is that of an incel: Misogynist, creepy, hateful, and weird as hell.
No one like him should come within a 1,000 miles of the White House. And you don’t have to be a “cat lady” to understand that.