J.D. Vance’s Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled.

MILWAUKEE—As he introduced himself to the national electorate on Wednesday—the day of the Republican National Convention devoted to the theme of “Making America Strong Again”—Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio senator J.D. Vance lingered on the virtues of tough labor.

The former Silicon Valley venture capitalist leaned into the fulsomely hymned origin story he recounted in his reputation-making 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, to craft an extended homily about the senseless destruction of working-class America, and its unlikely salvation at the hands of a real-estate developer and reality TV impresario turned pseudo-populist savior. 

It was quite a yarn, and Vance, a deft prose stylist and serial self-reinventor, tailored it expertly to the convention crowd.

It began with the heroic setpiece of last week’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump. “Donald Trump didn’t need to run for president,” Vance announced, in what’s become a common refrain for the restorationist 2024 Republican convention. “He chose to endure abuse, slander, and persecution, and he did it because he loved this country.” Then, after nearly being felled by the gunman’s bullet, Trump rose up to vindicate us once more. “Even in his most perilous moment, we were on his mind,” Vance marveled. And then the shared redemptive moral of it all; speaking of Trump’s media detractors and political rivals, Vance declared, “They said he was a tyrant, they said he had to be stopped at all costs. But what did he do? He called for national unity.  . . .And then President Trump got back to work.” 

This great man reverie follows the standard arc of Vance’s trademark heartland jeremiad. A once-noble and virtuous American yeomanry is led astray by the predations of a remote and all-powerful class of exploiters. Only tough, disciplined leadership and hard work can restore its rightful birthrights and destinies.

Vance’s Midwestern community of Middletown, Ohio, was, he explained, a case in point: a place where “people spoke their minds and loved their God and their country and their community” was “cast aside and forgotten by the American ruling class in Washington.” After faithless liberal one-world interventionists like Joe Biden shipped off manufacturing jobs under NAFTA, appeased communist China’s economic ambitions, and sanctioned “the disastrous invasion of Iraq,” the remedy was clear: “We needed leaders who would put America first.” 

Vance’s parable of reclaimed power for working Americans comes with a major disclaimer, though, one he slipped in via a rushed clause: “There is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland, but for these places to thrive, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country. A leader who answers to  the working man, union and nonunion alike.”

Come again? In what was framed as a big-tent rhetorical overture, Vance had cannily diluted the central plank of true working-class political power: workers’ capacity to organize their own productive lives, and collectively bargain for just treatment at the hands of bosses and owners. Indeed, Vance’s blanket condemnation of the “Washington ruling class” omits the actual bad economic actors who have despoiled the Midwestern working class: the corporations and lobbyists who crafted NAFTA and Asian trade accords, and abetted the importation of cheap opioids that fueled the addiction crisis in Appalachia and other stretches of the country’s deindustrializing interior. 

In place of a direct confrontation with that ruling class, Vance offers what right-wing politicians have always peddled to downwardly mobile Americans: the quasi-spiritual saga of family-bred individual uplift, which serves to neatly underwrite the broader political fable of great-leader salvation. These themes followed hard upon one another in Vance’s speech.

As “our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor, and in years to come with cheap Chines fentanyl,” Vance announced with relief, “I had a guardian angel”—his Ohio grandmother, immortalized as “Meemaw” in Hillbilly Elegy. The rapt convention crowd took up the chant of “MEEMAW” in jubilant recognition, and thrilled to Vance’s later parable of Meemaw’s cache of handguns. After she had died in 2005, he related in folksy relish, “We went through her things [and] we found 19 loaded handguns,” strewn throughout various corners of her house.

The convention crowd hooted and applauded in recognition, and then Vance delivered another redemptive moral: As Meemaw contended with the challenges of aging and illness, she made sure that “she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family.” Here the crowd plunged into a reflexive chant of “USA!”, which at first blush seemed a non-sequitur: what does the domestic arsenal of an aging relative have to do with the glories of our Republic? But of course that is the very lesson of Vance’s American redemption tale: a bellicose citizenry must rally to save and bolster its imperiled birthright by any means necessary—under a great leader’s tutelage, of course.

Lest we somehow overlook it, Vance also made that imperative the centerpiece of his most sonorous evocation of our shared national mission, when he parsed the meaning of the American ideal. “You often hear that ‘America is an idea,’ Vance said. “And to be clear, America was founded on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and freedom of religion.” But in pointed contrast to the past orations of Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan, who appropriated the old Puritan ideal of a covenant-bound “city on a hill,” Vance’s version of the country’s civic theology took on a pointed blood-and-soil turn. America, he argued, “is, in short, a nation. And when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”