Opinion: J.D. Vance Has Nothing to Offer Working People

Earlier this week, I was reminded of the screenshots that leaked a while back from the X group chats where J.D. Vance earnestly tests out what he calls “cool kid lingo” with teenage Republicans. Most of us got that kind of thing out of our systems when we ourselves were teens, but Vance in his youth seemed more preoccupied with getting as far from his hometown and family as possible. Following the announcement that he is Donald Trump’s VP pick, you and I likely cannot imagine how cool he must be feeling in those group chats right now.

I bring this up to say that I have never interacted with Vance. Most of us are not in the kinds of circles he is in. What many of us are more likely to relate to, however, is the place he comes from and the people he depicts in his best-selling memoir-turned-Netflix Oscar bait Hillbilly Elegy . Middletown is my father’s hometown and where I spent much of my childhood and teen years. My parents live there now, not far from the high school. Like Vance, much of my family moved there from Kentucky coal country on the promise of manufacturing jobs that could pave their way to the fabled American middle class during the post-World War II boom. My grandmother and great-grandmother were part of that migration, and both played large roles in my life. Early memories with them include Sunday school at what was then Bonita Drive Church of Christ, celebrating family birthdays with cake from Central Pastry, or just being watched after school at the house they shared on Johns Road. With us both being millennials, I imagine Vance and I would share many of the same reference points for the city and its history. It is not a mysterious place: the impacts of deindustrialization, the descent into widespread poverty and rampant opioid addiction are broadly featured throughout much of the Midwest.

For the record, my parents’ house was a few towns over from Middletown in my childhood, so it would be as disingenuous of me to try and say that I’m “from” there as it is for Vance to say he’s from Appalachia. As far as I can tell from his book and movie, Kentucky was just a place he visited occasionally. The astroturfed Appalachian Spokesperson role he was appointed to in the mid-10s was only ever pretense. More disingenuous than any convenient mischaracterization of his biography, though, is any instance in which we have ever seen Vance lecture about how the “elites of both parties” have left working-class people behind. In reality, he has only ever used his upbringing as an opportunity to exoticize and sell himself to those exact same forces, who could then use him as a mouthpiece for their preferred narratives about the working poor.

This was first demonstrated while making a name for himself as a Never-Trump Republican darling when liberals in the media propelled his book to the top of bestseller lists. In reality, he was just there to lend authenticity to what they wanted to say about poor and working people who voted against Hillary Clinton in 2016 — that they were vile, ignorant slobs at their essence, incapable of attaining the virtue that Vance had achieved as a reward for his life spent Doing Homework and Playing By Rules. Never mind that Trump’s victory was actually owed to the same upper-middle-class demographic that has always been the bedrock of the Republican base. When it became clear that Trump’s grip on the party would not loosen, he pivoted easily into the blood and soil nationalist he is today just in time to launch a bid for the senate, repurposing his biography to emphasize the ragged conservative fixation on nuclear families and updating it to invoke the cultural grievances that were always just under the surface. His nationalism offers nothing new for the working class — it only further empowers patriarchy, the church and Silicon Valley oligarchs to lord over them, in the same way the GOP was doing before he showed up on the scene.

In fact, nothing Vance has said over the past eight years should be seen as novel. His attempts at appearing marginally more pro-union than your typical Republican — which has received breathless coverage from outlets desperate to paint him as a maverick — fly completely out the window when confronted with his run-of-the-mill platform and very limited record in congress. He has not sponsored the PRO Act, which would expand worker protections and employees’ rights to organize and collectively bargain in the workplace, nor has he worked to fortify the National Labor Relations Board against the legal assault from Elon Musk, one of his ticket’s most invested backers. Should Musk succeed in court against the latter, any union contract in the country will be rendered unenforceable. Instead, all say that workers may look to have in their working conditions, their wages and benefits, and even their own safety would be replaced by the demented vision of oligarchs like Vance’s mentor and benefactor Peter Thiel.

Much is said about the connection between those two in particular, but you really cannot understand Vance properly without Thiel. Vance himself has referred to the day he met the venture capitalist following a talk Thiel gave at Yale as “the most significant moment of [his] life” — an experience I’m sure is relatable for anyone punching a clock. Thiel has expressed regularly that he “doesn’t believe in democracy” and that America should be run as a corporation — the same type of corporation that has only ever turned working people into grist for the mill of profit.

Of course, the Thiel-Vance gambit is nothing new. It's the same basic force that Chamber of Commerce Republicans have represented as they ushered in three of the main weights that dragged Middletown from its “All-America City” designation in 1957 to being named by Forbes as one of the “Top 10 Fastest Dying Cities in America” by 2008: the slashing of safety net programs, the collapse of manufacturing jobs and the opioid epidemic. Vance is no different than Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were 30 years ago, except now the Welfare Queen myths have been expanded to apply to poor white people as well, marrying moralizing liberalism to vengeful conservatism. Nor is he distinguishable from the host of self-hating Ivy League strivers who — in both parties — ushered in disasters such as NAFTA in service of the corporate bottom line, sapping the economic lifeblood out of steel-producing Middletown and similar cities and shattering the prospects that families like his and mine left Kentucky to attain. It is entirely predictable that cronies like him will continue to serve the Thiels of the world, whose only true political project is to dismantle any entity that may, for example, protect consumers from the malfeasance of the pharmaceutical or tech industries.

Vance is not a hillbilly or a working-class savant, or a disruptive shock to our political system. He’s certainly not anyone the downtrodden should have any faith in. He is not even a meaningful departure from the business interests-first Republican Party. He is merely some dude indebted to venture capital weirdos who would hiss at a poor person if they ever had to see one. His story is not some unique tale of rags-to-riches success or an example of how to live a virtuous life. If there’s anything that’s “one-in-a-million” about Vance’s experience, it’s that most of the millions of people who go through the challenges he faced in his early life do not make the decision to go to work for the people responsible for inflicting those hardships.

The only thing Vance offers working people is an opportunity to misunderstand themselves via his own biography, as if they personally could have scored internships at the most anti-worker think tanks in America if only they’d found the right boots to lick. His cynical wager is that you too would sell out your coworkers, your neighbors and your family if it meant you could maybe someday see Glenn Close fail to win an Oscar for playing your meemaw in a very dumb movie. The fact that Vance is from a place so thoroughly ravaged by the politics of the last 50 years, and still commits himself to overseeing the status quo, should show what he is: merely the new boss, same as the old boss. Any insistence that he is otherwise, from any political pundit or party, is an insult to working people.

Geoff Daniels was born in Cincinnati and raised in Butler County. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 2014. He currently resides in Chicago and has worked as a labor organizer for essential workers since 2019.