J.D. Vance is a jump to the left and a step to the right

J.D. Vance is Donald Trump’s pick for vice president should he win the November US election. That’s either a move to the right for the Trump campaign or a big move to the left for the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy.

By now it’s well-known that Vance once compared Trump to heroin, a balm to mask the pain felt by America’s left-behind as they succumbed to despair. Since then he has told the media that his differences with Trump were over style and not substance.

But his chosen analogy points to their substantially different messages. Where the memoir that made Vance famous focused on reintroducing a sense of possibility and the importance of personal choices to communities like the one he grew up in, Trump has just offered them an analgesic. They may be in pain but they have no responsibility, in Trump’s telling. They’ve been squashed by a malignant elite class – the swamp, or “deep state” – and can’t rise until the elites have been vanquished.

In essence, Vance is arguing for equality while Trump wants equity. Equality is when everyone is provided the same opportunities; equity tries to achieve the same outcomes for all by building some up while tearing others down. Appropriately, The Atlantic published Vance’s article under the headline “Opioid of the Masses”, a phrase coined by the father of communism, Karl Marx, who described his vision of equity as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

Insofar as using the terms “left” and “right” is useful any more (they’re an increasingly misleading shorthand) it is helpful to understand the effect the Trump-Vance ticket will have from this “left-right” or, better, “equity-equality” perspective. As pre-VP candidate Vance hinted, Trump’s is a politics of grievance.

“Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers,” Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy. But, he argues, “what separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives”. This is why he’s concerned that “the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault”.

This is a notion that former US president George W. Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. It’s why Trump’s approach alienated many on the traditional right, like Vance. Conservatives, some of whom coalesced under the banner of “Never Trump”, are suspicious of grievance politics, identity politics and the politics of envy, which have been central to the Trumpian playbook.

Vance has been accused of changing his tune. But when he took to the stage at the Republican National Convention, he made it clear that his message as vice presidential candidate remains the same message he laid out so thoughtfully in his youthful memoir. In fact, it’s the Trump campaign that is changing to get closer to him.

A popular recent short video shows that Trump supporters are now talking about possibility and hope. Vance didn’t move left to accommodate Trump, Trump has moved rightward, to the politics of aspiration. That is a shift of substance by Trump.

Trump was, of course, on a path to victory before bringing on Vance. Yet Vance could broaden the Republican ticket’s appeal with this shift. Thanks to his wife Usha, born to academics who migrated to the US from India (her father lectures in aerospace engineering and her mother is a marine molecular biologist and chemist), he is well-placed to make a measured case for considered immigration.

J.D. Vance and his wife Usha during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention.Credit: nna\EMcPherson

His obvious love and respect for his wife and her family will make it harder for Democrats to claim that he is racist for opposing the effectively open southern border over which Biden has presided. While Vance grew up in poverty and dysfunction he studied law at Yale, meaning he doesn’t just talk about the importance of aspiration but has demonstrated that it can be successful.

He can communicate on an intellectual level to those turned off by Trump’s anti-intellectualism while remaining a man of the people. In his RNC speech he spoke of the abstract “idea of America” – a society governed, he said, by the rule of law and religious liberty – but emphasised that America is much more than an idea. It is, he declared, “a group of people with a shared history and a common future … in short, a nation”.

This echoes the great epiphany of the right following Brexit and Trump’s success in 2016: that highly educated and mobile global citizens had been careless of less privileged people’s lives when they traded national pride and solidarity, something of little value to them, for global business opportunities.

Vance also brings something less tangible that would serve a Trump presidency: an understanding of ambiguity. In perhaps one of the most overlooked passages of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes the contradictions of good policy that smash ideological purity. He describes his grandmother “Mamaw” as “a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat”, depending on her mood.

“Yet I realised that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom,” he writes. “I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.” There’s a conservative humility in that statement that is a much-needed balance against Trumpian bombast.

With Vance there is hope that the American conservative movement could rebuild, providing an important counterweight to evangelical revolutionaries. Trump was born to wealth yet has a knack for connecting with those left behind. Vance grew up as one of them and has since transcended his disadvantage in a demonstration of what the idea of America is meant to be. That makes him an important symbol of what the future can hold. With Vance as Trump’s vice presidential candidate, the medium is the message.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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