Since JD Vance got more political and decided to run for office, making sense of exactly the kind of politician he is and will be has been a challenge. There are different modes of Mr. Vance as a public figure. He has been the populist intellectual who works with Elizabeth Warren and also the tech podcast right-winger who talks about America as being in the “late republican period.” He can be the lawyerly professional on a Sunday show or the guy, when asked what makes him happy, who talks about anger.
Onstage as Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, he’s a blunt instrument, the attack dog going hard about illegal immigration and hammering Kamala Harris.
In his speaking over the past couple of years, and more recently, his emphasis has often been structural, ideological and hard-core. Visible in a lot of arguments from self-described national conservatives, the loose movement influential with the next wave of Republican politicians and academics, is a picture of America as fractured, declining and overcomplicated — that everything is so messed up in such a dense, decades-piled-up way that only a kind of big bang could fix it.
That vision is a hallmark of the Trump era but can become more academic and theoretical in the national conservative point of view. When Mr. Vance was asked in an interview about which historical figures he looks to for inspiration, he talked about post-World War II Charles de Gaulle.
Throughout much of the past decade of politics, you can find the idea of a society hopelessly in stasis and unable, because of ossified systems or financial interests, to deal with catastrophic changes that might ultimately threaten basic reality, like climate change and artificial intelligence. The national conservatives, like Mr. Vance, cite fertility and immigration as our existential problems.
Mr. Vance talks a lot about the decline in American manufacturing and the increase in trade over decades and the state of the border and the inflow of drugs into the United States today as growing out of financial incentives and the disregard that people in power had for the rest of the country. “We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job,” he said in Nevada recently.
Mr. Vance’s intense, anti-immigration, structural approach can be even more apparent when he’s around ideological allies. “Look, the thing on immigration is that no one can avoid that it has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous and less advanced,” he said at NatCon 4, the National Conservatism Conference, in July. He asked: “Why don’t our elites seem to care about it? Well, No. 1, they really benefit from the cheap labor. No. 2, they actually don’t really like the people who make up the domestic populations of their own country.”
This is the substance and edge that people detected in the old clips about childless leaders — the listener can feel Mr. Vance categorizing people into concepts and creating an ideological portrait of what he believes has gone wrong with America.
But he doesn’t always sound exactly like that.
At one of his first rallies as the vice-presidential pick, in Radford, Va., Mr. Vance was talking about a woman who spoke at the Republican convention about her son who’d died of a fentanyl overdose. He said he’d heard people say after the speech, well, maybe he shouldn’t have taken that pill to begin with. Mr. Vance then mentioned his own young children, listed their ages and said, “We all know kids make mistakes.” A few people in the crowd said, “Yes.” He added, to cheers, “I want them to grow up in a country where a simple childly mistake doesn’t cost our kids their lives.”
He had, darkly, called the boy’s death “the fruit of” Joe Biden’s border policy — a return to a structural point of view before discussing mistakes, which mapped less ideologically and less absolutely. It was a brief moment, but it contained just enough personalization and universality, and recognition of fallibility, that it briefly suggested a different kind of candidate.
When other politicians describe Mr. Vance, they talk about him more like that, in personal terms, about his life story and how it might connect with the voters and their ideas of themselves.
In Virginia, at one of Mr. Mr. Vance’s first solo rallies last month, for instance, one of the introductory speakers, Representative Morgan Griffith, combined Mr. Vance’s “humble beginnings” with those of two other speakers that day, one whose family had come from Vietnam as refugees and another whose mother had fled Cuba. The three had persevered, according to Mr. Griffith, evidence that the G.O.P. was becoming “the party of opportunity for everyone, not just those whose ancestors go back.” The Republican Party had claimed, Mr. Griffith said, “that mantle of the underdog fighting to be better, which America is proud of.”
It seemed like a very traditional way of thinking about Mr. Vance.
The next week in Henderson, Nev., Sam Brown — the Republican Senate nominee who overcame severe burns suffered while he served in Afghanistan and who spoke at the convention last month in somewhat more measured tones than a number of speakers — came up onstage and looked at Mr. Vance, who had just finished a long argument tying Ms. Harris to the border. “I gotta tell you, Senator,” Mr. Brown said, “you are a happy warrior. Have you guys ever seen someone smile so much?” He said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance’s plans mirrored what he had heard from those who rescued him when he was on fire: “Their message is so similar and resonates in our hearts as they tell us they’ve got us.”
Listening to that, you can imagine a version of Mr. Vance’s vice-presidential candidacy in which he would run as, basically, a millennial dad. The campaign would cut a soft-focus ad with his family, or maybe just his wife, talking about him in the ways she did (thoughtful, committed) at the convention; the campaign would just park him in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania relentlessly focused on specific types of manufacturing, teenagers and counterfeit fentanyl pills, inflation and housing costs; it would remove the suit and tie, and put him on sports podcasts and get him doing endless retail stops, instructed to ask voters about their lives. There might be a sort of “only in America” approach to his life story that emphasizes commonalities in tough but warm tones. Looking at the full picture of Mr. Vance through the years, first as a writer and onward, this seems within his capabilities.
But that doesn’t seem to be the way Mr. Trump or Mr. Vance sees things. According to The Times, Mr. Trump has instructed him to attack, attack, attack and called him a political “athlete.” And Mr. Vance seems to resist that kind of packaging of the difficult parts of his own life, which might make sense given so many people, after the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy” and his past few years in politics, have an opinion about his life.
Instead, Mr. Vance goes bigger, more combative, more structural — which seems to be in line with how he now sees the world. After the past few weeks of people expressing deep dissatisfaction with his remarks about childless women, Mr. Trump and Usha Vance have offered a similar and empathetic read of Mr. Vance’s comments — that family’s important to Mr. Vance, that he really meant that the government should be more pro-family, that of course people struggle to find the right partner or have children.
But when he’s talked about the decline in the fertility rate, it’s often in longer-horizon, nationalistic terms — as big and structural as possible. In the spring, he told The Wall Street Journal, “I think there are all these weird ways in which technological dynamism depends on having families and children.” In the winter, he told Politico magazine that he worried about “a society that is upside down demographically, where more and more retirees are supported by fewer and fewer young people, where we don’t have children laughing in the streets” because we’ve “gone the way of South Korea and there aren’t enough kids” to fill classrooms. “That is not a ‘We can’t afford Social Security’ problem,” he said. It’s a “‘society is collapsing’ problem.”
There’s been so much said about Mr. Vance’s conversion from Trump critic to Trump loyalist, but at times he can sound like a millennial who, disillusioned, becomes more radical. “One of the things that the hyper-liberal, hyper-atomized, hyper-libertarian approach has done is that it’s led people to think of themselves as buyers and sellers, as economic agents, as purely individuals,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast in late 2020. The answer was part of a longer description of what he understands as the potential dangers of nationalism; his solution then for hedging against the tendency of nationalism to become about racial identity was to not ignore a desire for belonging. “People need to feel that they’re members of families; they need to feel that they’re members of communities.”
In the Senate, Mr. Vance has talked about railway safety and community banks; as the vice-presidential nominee, he’s talked about an expanded child tax credit. What’s so radical, Mr. Vance said in Radford, about wanting to make more stuff in the United States? And yet people can feel the radical nature of big theories spun about their lives, the dark view of immigration, the epic nature of the national conservative thinking about the clash of power.
If Mr. Vance is the future after Mr. Trump, or representative of the larger conservative swing toward the future, what kind of politician is he? The structuralist, unleashing theories that can sometimes come out in harsh terms, or more the individual who cuts against what’s expected? Is he the guy from before he joined Mr. Trump, after or somewhere in the middle? It can seem a little bit like Mr. Vance is still figuring out how to be.
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