02 Aug JD Vance: Also Born Fighting
As I have noted in these pages more times than I can count, the contemporary Left embraces a morality based exclusively on thoughts, sentiments, and intentions, as opposed to behavior, actions, and outcomes. I put it this way just last month:
Bill Clinton famously told Tom Brokaw that he should be judged not by his personal life but by the causes he “fought for,” and the people he championed. Ted Kennedy famously left his wife, made bastards of his children (though annulment), left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown, and drunkenly harassed and molested cocktail waitresses for decades, but was still called “the Lion of the Senate,” a “champion” of women, and the “conscience” of the Democratic Party because of his unflinching liberalism and support for abortion. Old rules don’t matter, as long as you support the new rules.
As long as you support the right causes and argue for the right policies and fight for the right people, it doesn’t matter how you act or how much harm you inflict on others. You are a good person.
It is worth noting, given the political developments of the last couple of weeks, that this same moral calculation works in reverse as well. It doesn’t matter how good a person you are, how well you live your life, or how perfectly you embody the purported ideals of society. If you do NOT support the right causes and do NOT argue for the right policies and do NOT fight for the right people, then you are a bad person, irredeemably evil.
Consider J.D. Vance.
By any objective measure, Vance is the epitome of achievement and decency. He was raised in poverty and dysfunction by a single mother. After living with his grandmother for a while and seeing all that she sacrificed for him, he dedicated himself to doing well in school and making something of himself. He was the first person in his family to attend, much less to graduate from college. He joined the Marines and served in a war zone. He returned from war, went to law school, worked hard, started his own business, got married, had kids, wrote a best-selling book, and became a massive success – all the while never forgetting where he came from or those who gave of themselves to help him achieve that success. In short, JD Vance is the personification of the American dream – and especially of its modern version, which celebrates the success of non-traditional families and the transcendence of the working class to the middle class.
And they hate him for it.
J.D. Vance thinks women should have children, not abortions. He thinks the welfare state is, at best, a necessary evil that can be overweening, enabling, and hurtful, even if it is also sometimes indispensable. He thinks that immigrants to this country should be limited, accounted for, and should come legally. He thinks that the U.S. military is a tool for national defense, not global social work. In short, he thinks a great many unthinkable things. And so his actual behavior – not to mention his actual biography – is irrelevant. He’s a bad, bad man.
The other day, the execrable Molly Jong-Fast, who currently writes for Vanity Fair, appeared on MSNBC to blast the evil and nasty Vance, declaring that the Senator is an authoritarian and a racist who doesn’t want all Americans to have more children and only really wants more white children. It doesn’t matter to her – or to those of her ilk – that Vance’s wife, Usha, is Indian-American and that his own children are, accordingly, of mixed race. All that matters is that the guy engages in wrongthink and must therefore be an evil person.
The Democratic strategy for dealing with Vance is to call him “weird,” to suggest that he is outside of the political and social mainstreams and, as a result, is kinda creepy. In reality, Vance is the opposite. He very much represents a return to traditional American political normalcy.
Along these lines, on Twitter/X the other day, I suggested that people could learn a great deal about Vance by reading the book Born Fighting, Jim Webb’s paean to the Scots-Irish, who, as Webb noted in the book’s subtitle, “shaped America.” What I didn’t realize at the time I posted that tweet is that it wasn’t the first time I’d made that connection. In February 2016 – 8 ½ years ago – I wrote the following:
Late last week, USA Today published an op-ed piece by a man named J.D. Vance, who is a contributor to National Review and the author of the new book Hillbilly Elegy. Vance is a former Marine and a former supporter of Donald Trump. He is also a member of the white working-class, the demographic to whom Trump appeals most and which is in the throes of a deep and relentless crisis. Indeed, Vance’s book is subtitled “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” In USA Today, Vance wrote thusly:
The presidential debate that evening pitted Trump against nearly a dozen would-be nominees, with donor favorite Jeb Bush taking a prominent position on stage. Though I hadn’t chosen a candidate, I liked Bush: a conservative problem solver, a good governor and a man of first-class intellect. I had even briefly considered working for the former Florida governor. But during an exchange about former president George W. Bush, Jeb said something that made me want to scream: “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure: He kept us safe.”
My anger sprang, not from a difference over policy, but from somewhere more primal. I wanted, as Walt Whitman might say, to sound my “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whatever I thought about Jeb’s education plan or record as governor, he had touched a raw cultural nerve. His defense of his brother ignored and insulted the experiences of people like me, and he was proud of it.
In an instant, I became Trump’s biggest fan. I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe. Was it the veterans lingering in a bureaucratic quagmire at the Department of Veterans Affairs or the victims of 9/11? Was it the enlistees from my block back home, who signed their lives on the dotted line while Jeb’s brother told the country to “go shopping” — something kids like me couldn’t afford to do?
Though Trump held his fire in the debate, he lit into George W. Bush on social media and in interviews afterwards. Other candidates defended the former president. They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.
It is no coincidence, we suppose, that in this Vance sounds almost exactly like Jim Webb, the former Senator, former Secretary of the Navy, former combat Marine, and former Democratic presidential candidate, who literally wrote the book (Born Fighting) on the Scots-Irish contributions to American culture and especially its military. Webb too resented George W. Bush’s military adventurism, the role that the political elites played it enabling it, and the damage that was done to the Scots-Irish community as a result. In any case, Vance continues:
I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd. But as a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in a struggling Rust Belt town, I understand why many adore him — why I, if only briefly, cheered him on. He tells America’s rich and powerful precisely what we wish we could tell them ourselves: that many of the things they view as accomplishments suck for people like us.
What unites Trump’s voters is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful.…
Three generations ago, Jim Webb represented the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Two generations ago, Webb represented an opportunity for the Democratic Party to oppose wanton foreign adventurism, and the Democrats took temporary advantage of that. One generation ago, that temporary advantage became inconvenient, and so the Democrats abandoned Webb and his kind – for a second time. Today, J.D. Vance represents a return of hard-scrabble Scots Irish – and everyone like them – to the heart of the GOP. And again, they hate him for it.
I’m not saying that you should love Vance or embrace his politics or accept his radical change of heart about Trump or…whatever. All I’m saying is that he is probably the least “weird” and the most traditionally “normal” member of a presidential ticket in decades.
He is also, by all appearances and by traditional standards, morally normal – which is, of course, why they must destroy him.
