I trashed Vance's book on Amazon in 2019 and declared it to be Reader's Digest material. Vance was a self-serving hypocrite then and he's worse now. I recall his nasty reaction to the guy in one of his classes at Ohio State with the scraggly beard he deemed idiotic or ill-informed and by then I knew, from that and other evidence in the book, that he was a bigot, a tribalist and an opportunist who didn't appreciate his good fortune at all.
He's now both a rich Social Darwinist and a religious nut so he straddles the two elements that make up the Republican coalition in an unusual way, and his conversion to Catholicism makes him more of a rare form of sleaze, the evangelicals having farmed out the intellectual heavy lifting at the Supreme Court level to Franco-authoritarian Catholics because they're apparently incapable of producing such people in-house. Vance seems to think he knows better than the people who wrote the Constitution AND the pope so it will be interesting to see how it plays out if Trump drops dead. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in any case, but watching him crush his own soul and become a certified shill for the apocalypse has been a disturbing and disgusting spectacle.
Well said. If Trump implodes somehow, I think a short-term Vance might be survivable because so few fear or respect him. Maybe, just maybe, some GOPers will grow a spine. One can dream!
Well, that is an excellent account of a young man coming to grips with some deep soul searching (philosophy can run hot and cold) in a crowded room of whip smart ambition.
Social capital ain’t worth a hill of beans if you can’t stand hanging out with them it at the pub.
Plenty of room in the world for well educated decency. Make yourself useful to those that need a leg up from someone who can help. Always a good idea to remember humanity is like being in a band, music sounds better if everyone practices.
If you have been blessed, then you should be a blessing to some else. From what I can see, those “elite” schools like Yale don’t turn out graduates with much consideration for others.
Read this and tell me if you see JD Vance anywhere. I suspect you will.
If you do, maybe you can consider that what you’re talking about isn’t really a recent thing. (Or maybe only an American thing, since it also happened in other societies.)
Shirer is similarly incredibly interesting in his reflections on the rise of the Nazis. There's a Bill Moyers interview with him that's readily accessible. I also recommend the Moyers episode Capitol Crimes that describes events that I think were a turning point. And Boogie Man, a film on premium shit-pile Lee Atwater, who it was said was such an opportunist he could as easily have been a Democrat. That's Vance, a pure opportunist, ambitious beyond accounting, and utterly out for himself and unprincipled though he sees himself as a crusader for a return to ethical purity, which is a projection of his own fall from innocence and unreconciled sense of worthlessness.
So much of this is compensatory, as Thompson and Shirer seemed to understand, people who feel small or inadequate or scared taking their revenge on the world, the obvious and most extreme case being Herr Donald whose ego isn't fragile or fragmented it's nonexistent. Nothing ever works. Nothing sticks. They can't ever feel secure. So this will go on until we stop them. Or until they reduce their world, which is now ours, to rubble. This all goes back to slavery, America's original sin. So, those of us whose families' experience was in fact of the incredible opportunity of America often find this dumbfounding. For my family, trying to get away from the same shit that caused our country to be founded in a way to avoid the horrific killing sprees that plagued Europe, the country was in fact a miracle.
Remarkable column. Thank you. She was spot about Jews - my co-religionists - jumping into Naziism if only it weren't so personally uncomfortable. Except it currently isn't, is it for Jews? At least, not yet.
There’s are many lessons of history and morality that Jews tend to understand better than most but this moral knowledge is like all moral knowledge—you can’t secure it completely against other things in the human personality, other desires and weaknesses that we tend to have. And sometimes reflection on one’s own vulnerability or the feeling of fear can even create an opening for the kind of moral corruption where you turn against your own humanity, and become a person who embraces inhumanity toward others. (The recognition you are an apt target should do the opposite but humans are very good at lying to themselves when they think they can get something they really want—sometimes it’s nothing more than a feeling! E.g., the feeling of self-importance or the feeling of strength and invulnerability).
It’s very tragic. The kind of decency to stand up to evil is not something we can completely secure in anyone, maybe even in ourselves but I do think that certain social circumstances can make people more or less susceptible to losing it. We’re unfortunately in very bad social circumstances just as they were in the 30s. Not the SAME ones but a lot of the dynamics are similar. I am very frightened by the antisemitism. I saw it rising on reddit in the 2010s, and it’s been scaring me ever since. So it was absolutely shocking when I saw these Jewish billionaires giving money to Trump when he was clearly the favorite candidate of the Nazis. I couldn’t figure it out. But now I think I sort of have? At least in an intuitive way. This essay makes sense of it—some people will ally themselves with power no matter what.They believe this is the safest/smartest/most status-enhancing thing to do. It’s truly amazing they do not realize fascism is a scam on every level—if you enhance their power, they will take your power and ratchet themselves forward, happily crushing you in the process. But if you are arrogant enough, you may believe that nobody can ever do this to YOU. Also, I think this minority of Jewish people running cover for Naziism also dislike liberal democracy in the same way the Nazis do because it forces them to tolerate the people they hate. Did they forgot that history shows it’s the easiest thing in the world to make people hate Jews? And that, in fact, one of the reasons the Nazis hate liberal democracy is that it makes it so most people don’t see much of a reason to hate Jews? I don’t know how anyone could forget that but perhaps their hostility toward the people they hate has caused them to forget it.
My impression after reading his book was he was a light weight who as a straight white man has failed upwards, vaulted into the role of VP attaching himself to a man he had compared to Hitler to gain power. His arrogance is off the charts. After two years in government his performance on the world stage is an embarrassment. Hes lectured EU leaders on their approach to free speech and opinions on Catholicism so lacking in his understanding of Christian charity that the Pope actually corrected him publicly after his very short time as a catholic. He’s insulted Zelensky in front of the world and then the countries who answered Bush’s invoking Article 5 for the first time in their history.
So in the 50+days he’s been in the office he’s managed to insult all of Europe. How they let him out of Washington to insult the rest of the world is beyond me
So pleased to have come across your Substack today, Jacob. And pleased to have read this post. One thing that I cannot ever imagine will be an accurate descriptor for you is "failure." I do hope you get the opportunities to pursue, long term, your desired life - one which you are so completely well suited for and one for which you have put in the hard work to be qualified to do brilliantly. But whatever happens, I know you are a remarkable success story.
"Yet they sit atop a politics that is by turns cruel and outlandish. Its cruelty lies in its refusal to see the kinds of working class communities from which Vance emerged as comprised of fully formed people subjected to forces beyond their control. "
Exactly. Or as the originator of the "Hillbilly Genre" puts it, "when Vance takes a bleak look at the rotten-toothed, opiate-addled, food-stamp-slinging people who apparently didn’t have the smarts or character to lift themselves out of their environment like he did, he can’t seem to bring himself to blame anyone but the hillbillies."
In which we learn how two tiger moms, Amy Chua and Usha Vance, raised j.d.vance. No wonder he doesn’t even return the calls of his first cousin who came back after serving in Ukraine and was appalled at the WH show of humiliating a leader of a country experiencing imperial aggression.
“Shepherded by his girlfriend Usha and Professor Amy Chua, Vance learns about etiquette and “networking power.” He learns about the social and emotional scars trauma leaves behind. And he learns how to pursue a healthy and fulfilling life on his own terms.
Hillbilly Elegy is a just so story. In one overwrought anecdote, Usha teaches a bewildered J.D. how to use his many utensils at a law firm recruitment dinner. Later, she helps him navigate his communication struggles within their relationship, challenges stemming from his rough-and-tumble upbringing. For her part, Professor Chua gives Vance a permission structure to forego raw career ambition in favor of his budding life with Usha. “My professor gave me permission to be me.” “
Decades ago I want to say it was il probably around civil rights era time, there was a political cartoon in one of the major newspapers. Don’t remember which one it was. Just a single “cell”. The caption read””Pick yourself up by your bootstraps”. The illustration was of an African-American older male. Dressed sort of country style but tattered. He was reaching down to pull up his boots with his boots straps however, his boots had no soles in either of them, and so the boots were coming halfway up his leg as he tried to “pull himself up”.
I would also like to mention a book that simply entitled DIGNITY. I’m so sorry I don’t remember the author right now. It’s kind of a photo essay book, but the author went into a number of sort of hardscrabble communities that had as we sometimes say now been “left behind“. Or as you say “hollowed out”, which is an excellent term. And the author/photographer went into these communities and sat and spoke with the folk who were still trying to live there and somehow or other make ends meet day-to-day let alone week to week or month to month.
For a poor country boy - I was one - wealth, especially generational wealth - is pretty seductive stuff. The absurd confidence of this swath of people, who live their entire lives knowing they can never really fail. Setbacks, divorces, embarrassments - sure, but regardless, whatever happens, I’ll ALWAYS be rich and secure. So free to take risks the rest of us can only dream about. I gotta admit I kinda loved it for a while. The freedom and choices you have. But I chose friends and family and it worked out fine.
Some years later, well off folks invited me to their annual salmon fishing trip up in Alaska, big family event, chalet, guides, pristine river. Kind of them, but had to say no thanks - $10k for that week, which I’m sure was the discounted version - I was just a working neighbor with a young family. I could buy a lot of fish for $10k. Each summer up on the river might have cost $1M for the whole clan - ah but the memories. Of course, we helped pay for it, as I have no doubt it was a “corporate retreat” and entirely written off. Very seductive - it’s why we watch Downton Abbey and Yellowstone - what did Adam Spade say “the stuff dreams are made of”.
I trashed Vance's book on Amazon in 2019 and declared it to be Reader's Digest material. Vance was a self-serving hypocrite then and he's worse now. I recall his nasty reaction to the guy in one of his classes at Ohio State with the scraggly beard he deemed idiotic or ill-informed and by then I knew, from that and other evidence in the book, that he was a bigot, a tribalist and an opportunist who didn't appreciate his good fortune at all.
He's now both a rich Social Darwinist and a religious nut so he straddles the two elements that make up the Republican coalition in an unusual way, and his conversion to Catholicism makes him more of a rare form of sleaze, the evangelicals having farmed out the intellectual heavy lifting at the Supreme Court level to Franco-authoritarian Catholics because they're apparently incapable of producing such people in-house. Vance seems to think he knows better than the people who wrote the Constitution AND the pope so it will be interesting to see how it plays out if Trump drops dead. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in any case, but watching him crush his own soul and become a certified shill for the apocalypse has been a disturbing and disgusting spectacle.
Well said. If Trump implodes somehow, I think a short-term Vance might be survivable because so few fear or respect him. Maybe, just maybe, some GOPers will grow a spine. One can dream!
Well, that is an excellent account of a young man coming to grips with some deep soul searching (philosophy can run hot and cold) in a crowded room of whip smart ambition.
Social capital ain’t worth a hill of beans if you can’t stand hanging out with them it at the pub.
Plenty of room in the world for well educated decency. Make yourself useful to those that need a leg up from someone who can help. Always a good idea to remember humanity is like being in a band, music sounds better if everyone practices.
You will have far less sleepless night.
Thanks for the essay, I enjoyed reading it.
Thanks for reading and this really kind and thoughtful response, Jeff.
If you have been blessed, then you should be a blessing to some else. From what I can see, those “elite” schools like Yale don’t turn out graduates with much consideration for others.
Read this and tell me if you see JD Vance anywhere. I suspect you will.
If you do, maybe you can consider that what you’re talking about isn’t really a recent thing. (Or maybe only an American thing, since it also happened in other societies.)
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
Shirer is similarly incredibly interesting in his reflections on the rise of the Nazis. There's a Bill Moyers interview with him that's readily accessible. I also recommend the Moyers episode Capitol Crimes that describes events that I think were a turning point. And Boogie Man, a film on premium shit-pile Lee Atwater, who it was said was such an opportunist he could as easily have been a Democrat. That's Vance, a pure opportunist, ambitious beyond accounting, and utterly out for himself and unprincipled though he sees himself as a crusader for a return to ethical purity, which is a projection of his own fall from innocence and unreconciled sense of worthlessness.
So much of this is compensatory, as Thompson and Shirer seemed to understand, people who feel small or inadequate or scared taking their revenge on the world, the obvious and most extreme case being Herr Donald whose ego isn't fragile or fragmented it's nonexistent. Nothing ever works. Nothing sticks. They can't ever feel secure. So this will go on until we stop them. Or until they reduce their world, which is now ours, to rubble. This all goes back to slavery, America's original sin. So, those of us whose families' experience was in fact of the incredible opportunity of America often find this dumbfounding. For my family, trying to get away from the same shit that caused our country to be founded in a way to avoid the horrific killing sprees that plagued Europe, the country was in fact a miracle.
https://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/capitol/index.html
It was a fantastic piece
Remarkable column. Thank you. She was spot about Jews - my co-religionists - jumping into Naziism if only it weren't so personally uncomfortable. Except it currently isn't, is it for Jews? At least, not yet.
There’s are many lessons of history and morality that Jews tend to understand better than most but this moral knowledge is like all moral knowledge—you can’t secure it completely against other things in the human personality, other desires and weaknesses that we tend to have. And sometimes reflection on one’s own vulnerability or the feeling of fear can even create an opening for the kind of moral corruption where you turn against your own humanity, and become a person who embraces inhumanity toward others. (The recognition you are an apt target should do the opposite but humans are very good at lying to themselves when they think they can get something they really want—sometimes it’s nothing more than a feeling! E.g., the feeling of self-importance or the feeling of strength and invulnerability).
It’s very tragic. The kind of decency to stand up to evil is not something we can completely secure in anyone, maybe even in ourselves but I do think that certain social circumstances can make people more or less susceptible to losing it. We’re unfortunately in very bad social circumstances just as they were in the 30s. Not the SAME ones but a lot of the dynamics are similar. I am very frightened by the antisemitism. I saw it rising on reddit in the 2010s, and it’s been scaring me ever since. So it was absolutely shocking when I saw these Jewish billionaires giving money to Trump when he was clearly the favorite candidate of the Nazis. I couldn’t figure it out. But now I think I sort of have? At least in an intuitive way. This essay makes sense of it—some people will ally themselves with power no matter what.They believe this is the safest/smartest/most status-enhancing thing to do. It’s truly amazing they do not realize fascism is a scam on every level—if you enhance their power, they will take your power and ratchet themselves forward, happily crushing you in the process. But if you are arrogant enough, you may believe that nobody can ever do this to YOU. Also, I think this minority of Jewish people running cover for Naziism also dislike liberal democracy in the same way the Nazis do because it forces them to tolerate the people they hate. Did they forgot that history shows it’s the easiest thing in the world to make people hate Jews? And that, in fact, one of the reasons the Nazis hate liberal democracy is that it makes it so most people don’t see much of a reason to hate Jews? I don’t know how anyone could forget that but perhaps their hostility toward the people they hate has caused them to forget it.
YLS ‘87 here.
I recently saw our alma mater described somewhere as “Juilliard for Supervillains.”
That more or less tracks with my experience.
My impression after reading his book was he was a light weight who as a straight white man has failed upwards, vaulted into the role of VP attaching himself to a man he had compared to Hitler to gain power. His arrogance is off the charts. After two years in government his performance on the world stage is an embarrassment. Hes lectured EU leaders on their approach to free speech and opinions on Catholicism so lacking in his understanding of Christian charity that the Pope actually corrected him publicly after his very short time as a catholic. He’s insulted Zelensky in front of the world and then the countries who answered Bush’s invoking Article 5 for the first time in their history.
So in the 50+days he’s been in the office he’s managed to insult all of Europe. How they let him out of Washington to insult the rest of the world is beyond me
I'd say your the one who has risen up and jdv is still mired in trash thinking
So pleased to have come across your Substack today, Jacob. And pleased to have read this post. One thing that I cannot ever imagine will be an accurate descriptor for you is "failure." I do hope you get the opportunities to pursue, long term, your desired life - one which you are so completely well suited for and one for which you have put in the hard work to be qualified to do brilliantly. But whatever happens, I know you are a remarkable success story.
Great to see you on here, Professor Rudisill! And thanks so much for these incredibly kind words. I hope everything is good on your end
"Yet they sit atop a politics that is by turns cruel and outlandish. Its cruelty lies in its refusal to see the kinds of working class communities from which Vance emerged as comprised of fully formed people subjected to forces beyond their control. "
Exactly. Or as the originator of the "Hillbilly Genre" puts it, "when Vance takes a bleak look at the rotten-toothed, opiate-addled, food-stamp-slinging people who apparently didn’t have the smarts or character to lift themselves out of their environment like he did, he can’t seem to bring himself to blame anyone but the hillbillies."
https://www.unz.com/article/vances-hillbilly-elegy-a-dissent-from-personal-experience/
“But the fact is that I was remarkably ignorant of how to get ahead.”
—Another J.D.Vance lie!
In which we learn how two tiger moms, Amy Chua and Usha Vance, raised j.d.vance. No wonder he doesn’t even return the calls of his first cousin who came back after serving in Ukraine and was appalled at the WH show of humiliating a leader of a country experiencing imperial aggression.
“Shepherded by his girlfriend Usha and Professor Amy Chua, Vance learns about etiquette and “networking power.” He learns about the social and emotional scars trauma leaves behind. And he learns how to pursue a healthy and fulfilling life on his own terms.
Hillbilly Elegy is a just so story. In one overwrought anecdote, Usha teaches a bewildered J.D. how to use his many utensils at a law firm recruitment dinner. Later, she helps him navigate his communication struggles within their relationship, challenges stemming from his rough-and-tumble upbringing. For her part, Professor Chua gives Vance a permission structure to forego raw career ambition in favor of his budding life with Usha. “My professor gave me permission to be me.” “
Decades ago I want to say it was il probably around civil rights era time, there was a political cartoon in one of the major newspapers. Don’t remember which one it was. Just a single “cell”. The caption read””Pick yourself up by your bootstraps”. The illustration was of an African-American older male. Dressed sort of country style but tattered. He was reaching down to pull up his boots with his boots straps however, his boots had no soles in either of them, and so the boots were coming halfway up his leg as he tried to “pull himself up”.
I would also like to mention a book that simply entitled DIGNITY. I’m so sorry I don’t remember the author right now. It’s kind of a photo essay book, but the author went into a number of sort of hardscrabble communities that had as we sometimes say now been “left behind“. Or as you say “hollowed out”, which is an excellent term. And the author/photographer went into these communities and sat and spoke with the folk who were still trying to live there and somehow or other make ends meet day-to-day let alone week to week or month to month.
Long story short, JD was, and is, a DEI hire.
For a poor country boy - I was one - wealth, especially generational wealth - is pretty seductive stuff. The absurd confidence of this swath of people, who live their entire lives knowing they can never really fail. Setbacks, divorces, embarrassments - sure, but regardless, whatever happens, I’ll ALWAYS be rich and secure. So free to take risks the rest of us can only dream about. I gotta admit I kinda loved it for a while. The freedom and choices you have. But I chose friends and family and it worked out fine.
Some years later, well off folks invited me to their annual salmon fishing trip up in Alaska, big family event, chalet, guides, pristine river. Kind of them, but had to say no thanks - $10k for that week, which I’m sure was the discounted version - I was just a working neighbor with a young family. I could buy a lot of fish for $10k. Each summer up on the river might have cost $1M for the whole clan - ah but the memories. Of course, we helped pay for it, as I have no doubt it was a “corporate retreat” and entirely written off. Very seductive - it’s why we watch Downton Abbey and Yellowstone - what did Adam Spade say “the stuff dreams are made of”.
I remember thinking the book wreaked of Rand's objecticism. And a woman would have been called out for marrying her way into money.
Van Jones mentioned JDV on CNN, exactly referring to YLS techniques he acquired: 'Slick, slick!'
"my mentor pressed me kindly but firmly on whether my stated desires were genuine"
This is like a Hollywood origin story if he meant he could get you into the big time.