J. D. Vance Is the Best Trolls

Milwaukee—Be worried. Be very frightened.

Glance at J. D. Vance’s history, as many have done in the last few days, and you’ll see a guy with no qualities who may say and do whatever it takes to maintain the rise that led him from the hollers of Eastern Ohio to Yale Law School to the top of the New York Times best-seller listing to the Republican ticket, and now to the next spot on the Democratic ticket.

But that was n’t the man I saw last night at the Fiserv Forum. Or at least that was n’t the manner he seemed—not on the agreement floor, and perhaps not to the television market. The Vance I saw last night gave a talk that, with its poignant analysis of underdevelopment, calm appreciation of the local costs of royal invasion, and stirring depiction of working-class pride, could have easily been delivered by his Democrat colleague from Ohio,:

” Work were sent abroad, and our kids were sent to war”, Vance said. ” America’s ruling class wrote the check, and areas like stone paid the price”.

It is just impossible to imagine Joe Biden, who voted in favor of the Iraq War and was a NAFTA Senate supporter, saying anything similar.

Or regard Vance’s five-sentence of the enclosure problems:

Wall Street financiers crashed the country’s business, and American engineers shut down their businesses.

As merchants scrambled for work, houses stopped being built.

The lack of great work, of course, led to sluggish wages.

The Democrats therefore flooded this nation with thousands of illegal aliens.

So citizens had to compete—with people who should n’t even be here —for precious housing.

Some on the left, including some, have long argued that choosing a nationalist struggle against Wall Street and the businessman course is the only way to achieve success. This has been a difficult market given the party’s rely on Wall Street donors since Bill Clinton’s administration. And it is certainly true that Vance’s claim to be a herald of the people is belied by his —and passion to—Peter Thiel, the PayPal leader, Facebook entrepreneur, and, through his holdings in Palantir, federal contractor and war profiteer.

But as my colleagues have noted, Vance’s shameless hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, enabling him to deliver lines like” We’re done catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit for the working man” with smarmy sincerity.

Despite having an extremely accomplished wife ( who, judging by her own speech last night, is also poised and personable ), Vance—whose opposition to abortion allows for no exceptions—will probably not bring many women into the GOP fold. But then for Republicans these days, as last night reminded us,” It’s a Man’s World”. And despite the fact that he reportedly attended law school, his contention against gay marriage, one of his few fixed-point victories, might not be able to propel him up the ranks. ( Though it clearly has n’t hurt him with Thiel. )

But the vision of belonging he invoked—a Midwestern-nice version of —could have been grown in a lab aimed at winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Although inaudible cosmopolites like your correspondent, Vance’s repeated invocation of his family’s Kentucky cemetery plot was a sign that his message was likely to resonate with the Appalachian migrants whose descendants make up a significant voting bloc up and down the Ohio River valley.

By choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has done three things —none of them good news for Democrats. Like Joe Biden in 2020, he has shown he has the confidence to pick a capable former critic as his choice rather than an innocent cipher. But unlike Kamala Harris ( at least on recent evidence ), Vance is also the perfect troll candidate. His speech was heavily slashed by both anti-NAFTA Democrats like Brown and Sanders as well as JFK ( “citizens who ask what our country needs of us…” ) and even:

We are very active in this party on everything from economic policy to national security.

But my message to you, my fellow Republicans, is—we love this country and we are united to win.

Now, I believe that our disagreements actually make us stronger. And my message to my fellow Americans, those watching from across the country, is should n’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?

If you do n’t believe the sting at the end of that last quote was intended specifically at the Democratic National Committee’s recent maneuvers, which included a stifling debate on Palestine and Gaza, you are seriously underestimating the opposition.

Which is the error that many of us committed in 2016. Due to the fact that Vance’s party’s final accomplishment is to change Donald Trump’s numerous past crimes and misdemeanors to a vision of the future, in addition to his celebrity status, military record, fluency on the stump, and vaccinations her Indian wife and her immigrant parents offer against blanket charges of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. The delegates exited to Fleetwood Mac singing” Do n’t Stop ( Thinking About Tomorrow )”, which, as John Nichols reminded me, was the. Ouch!

You and I might not want to live in the home-owning, family-centered, factory-working, deeply rooted patriarchal American Vance conjured for his audience last night. Especially since his devotion to the” Drill, baby, drill”! policies of his running mate will render it, and the rest of the planet, uninhabitable. But it would be foolish, and dangerous, to deny its appeal. Or to attempt to defeat it without laying out a competing vision of an America that, while not centered on blood and soil, gives voice to the desire for a shared home, shared values, and attainable prosperity.

Because we tried that in 2016, and it did n’t go well.