Trump Makes Jdvances

JD Vance is a solid pick with all the right enemies

The politically concerned people who inhabit my substack feed have lots of opinions about JD Vance and his selection by DJ Trump as his VP. And they also link to and repeat (to criticize) the opinions of lots of others. A couple¹ of them² dug up old posts where they reviewed his book, which is (quelle surprise) once more an Amazon bestseller.

And a third³, echoing somewhat the second, discusses what she and JD have in common, which is quite a lot.

I don’t believe the Bushes, or Romney, or Trump or Clinton have ever had to think about economic insecurity in real, personal terms the way I have— let alone those who grew up even worse off (and there are plenty of them). (Side note: McCain is a different animal here: As a military brat with a family with a very prestigious military pedigree, I didn’t share much in common with his upbringing— but I doubt that George W Bush or Mitt Romney or Donald Trump did, either). That is something that has been missing for me in our actual politician class, and it is still in awfully short supply. Vance supplies it— at least to a decent degree.

But there is more in Vance’s background that I feel overlaps with mine. Here’s where I’m going to get into more painful stuff.

Vance’s mother struggled with addiction. Not surprisingly, given that my Dad’s side is from the general Glasgow area in Scotland, we have also had addiction struggles in my family. Much of this has been alcoholism—some of it the banal, drinking alone type, some of it the extremely violent, nasty type. But in one close family member’s case (I’ll leave out the specific identity), it was also many years of heroin addiction and multiple efforts, all but one failed, to get clean. I am the youngest of my siblings. Vance is (I believe) his parents’ only child. There is a particular toll that is taken when you see this, or are even aware of it, growing up as the youngest in a family. There’s a constant fear of your loved one ending up dead or incarcerated.

All of these comments, and many others, point to one very clear difference between Vance and pretty much any other current major US (or worldwide for that matter) politician. Vance grew up in the wreckage of the Reagan/Thatcherite deindustrialization where large, generally horribly inefficient, employers for entire towns shut down abruptly in the face of competition from Japan and other Asian countries as governments in the US and UK stopped propping them up. Vance’s family was dirt poor and wrecked by substance abuse and the like. Despite that he managed to get out, join the military, go to law school, become a venture capitalist and author before, finally, becoming a slimy politcian.

I’m not sure of the background of every US national politician but I think very few of them have been beneficiaries of food stamps and other welfare. That will certainly provide a useful viewpoint and counter to the ivory tower think tank sorts who tend to forget that there are actual people behind the statistics for addiction, overdoses and even just unemployment. We on the right often joke about wokies and their “my lived truth” shtick but there are certainly points where knowing what the actual options are when you are dirt poor is valuable because they can be quite different to what experts who aren’t poor think they are. e.g. from Helen Dale’s review:

However, his account of a debate in the Ohio Senate on a Bill to curb payday lenders is salutary.

He points out—with his poor credit history—that he has had recourse to payday lenders. On one occasion, he avoided a large overdraft fee. Without a payday lender, he’d have been forced to go to a loan shark—which, given the drug culture among poor whites—could have been injurious to his health.

‘The legislators debating the merits of payday lending didn’t mention situations like that,’ he notes. ‘The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me’.

He also (as others have noted) can provide a bridge to the techbros of Silicon Valley thanks to him having been a VC working for/with Peter Thiel. I am not sure that VCs in general are good (my experience with them has been generally negative) but no major politician in the US that I am aware of has had anything to do with that sort of culture. One partial exception may be Darrell Issa. Pelosi, despite being a SF resident, appears to have made more money from shady construction deals and possible insider trades than from insights from technologist constituents.

One of the things I notice about criticism of him is that people mention that in 2016 he was not a Trump supporter and vocally such. This is not, to my mind a big deal at all as Erick Erickson eloquently explains⁴. My own view of Trump back then was that he was at least not Clinton and that he would be less venal/corrupt than she was. This was a low bar but (unlike, say Joe Biden) he cleared it and in fact did a few net positive things despite the universal opprobrium for him from the chattering classes.

My isues with Vance’s stated policies are similar to those of Liz Mair and Erick Erickson.

As a conservative, frankly, my concern with J.D. Vance, who I like a lot personally, is that he is more of a Roosevelt Democrat than a Reagan Republican. He does not necessarily want smaller government, and while he correctly identifies economic problems, I’m not sure has the best solutions. He’s a Republican largely because the Democratic Party went nuts and hard left, not because he drifted right. But then so that also happened to Ronald Reagan, who was more practical than the mythology around him.

In this respect Vance (and for that matter Trump quite often) resemble the disasterous Cameronian and Johnsonian Tories in the UK who, as we all know, managed to sqaunder 14 years of government. However it may depend on what they decide to spend money on and what they don’t. I don’t know how successful they will be, but I do expect that they will try to stop throwing money at academics and DIE while trying to throw money at making useful things like munitions

For example this (I think) critic of Vance complains that Vance says the US (and Europe) don’t make enough munitions. This is a case where Vance is, AFAICT, 100% correct.

source

Despite a hot war in Europe for the last two years, threats in the Western Pacific and now hot wars in the Middle East, US and European governments have not increased orders of munitions. We’re still seeing countries like Germany promising to increase spending in 2027 rather than buying the kit NOW. We’re seeing US defense contractors talking about copying Ukrainian drone warfare in the next few years, but not now. And so on. Vance understands this and that’s important.

All in all, I’m not super upset at Vance as a pick. He is clearly articulate and able to speak sensibly off the cuff without needing teleprompters or similar. This is a low bar but Commie La Whoreish and few of other Democrat potential replacements for Biden are able to do so. He has identified problems that actually need resolution. Whether he has workable solutions is less clear, but he won’t be alone in failing to solve many of them. My main reservation is that I think he may not totally understand that the West should want Russia to actually lose in Ukraine rather than have some kind of stalemate, but in the grand scheme of things making Europeans pay for the defense of Europe is the right thing to do.

The main things I like about him are that he’s not a professional politician and he seems to be relatively pragmatic rather than stuck on a specific ideology. I also appreciate that he’s relatively young. We don’t need any more geriatrics

1. J. D. Vance before he was famous

2. Review: Hillbilly Elegy

3. Don't fall off your chair... Here's what I like about JD Vance

4. On J.D. Vance