A Hillbilly aims for the White House

JD Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President, grew up in a war zone. Not Iraq, where he was deployed as a military journalist with the US Marines, but a decaying Ohio steel town, where he lived with his family and its chaotic, often violent, transplanted Hillbilly culture.

There’s a seminal moment in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s bestselling memoir-turned-movie when his whip-smart, foul-mouthed grandmother (Mawmaw) turns on her daughter (Vance’s mother). She had been on another drug-fuelled rampage.

“You’ve always got a reason! But it’s always someone else’s fault! At some point, you’re going to have to take responsibility,” she virtually spits at her.

This is the core of Vance’s belief system and, in turn, his appeal to millions of Americans: self-reliance and personal responsibility anchored in traditional conservative values of flag, faith and family.

Vance is a smart pick. His story will resonate loudly in key battleground states – the Rust Belt. There the backwash of America’s engagement with the rest of the world has left a trail of economic devastation. Poverty, as Vance puts it, is a family tradition. He will present himself as the American dream made flesh from Central Casting.

Vance, who once called Trump “an idiot”, is a serious pick. Perhaps, if things work out for him, even Trump’s successor. Trump is essentially a salesman on the make with no fixed moral compass — beyond his belief in the deal and his own infallibility. His running mate, by contrast, is a thinker.

Trump has instincts. Vance has views. They may be deeply divisive and occasionally ignorant, such as his suggestion that Labour Britain could become the first Islamist nuclear power. But by and large they’re coherent. Vance is now the leading elected proponent of America’s far-Right. He articulates with clarity the frustrations, despair and anger of conservative, working-class Americans who feel they’ve been left behind by the East Coast elite. Vance’s ancestors didn’t step off the Mayflower. They don’t holiday in Martha’s Vineyard. They live on the edge, hand to mouth.

Hillbilly Elegy is aptly subtitled: “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”. The young Vance was surrounded by domestic violence, drug-abuse and chronic instability. His mother was in and out of rehab.  His father left when he was a toddler. He and his sister, Lindsay, were taken in by their grandparents.

Vance catapulted himself from a childhood steeped in hardship to the Marines, Yale and Harvard. Unlike his boss, who inherited several trust funds and was a millionaire by the time he was eight, Vance’s family struggled to buy a house and car. When he speaks of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, he’s not making it up. He speaks the same language as the poor Americans who back Trump. But, unlike, say, Barack Obama, who blamed entrenched poverty on structural problems the state could fix, Vance believes Hillbilly culture induces a kind of learned helplessness passed down the generations. It’s Benefits Street in the Appalachians.

Vance and Trump are two peas in a pod. They are both climate sceptics. They want to restrict immigration. They oppose US aid to Ukraine. “Personally, I don’t care either way what happens to Ukraine,” Vance said recently.

Both insist the 2020 election was stolen. Both favour import tariffs to protect US industries. Neither much likes multilateral institutions like NATO, the IMF and the World Bank.

Vance, now a Catholic convert, takes an even harder line than Trump on abortion. He opposes it even in the case of rape or incest, but has stopped (just) short on calling for an outright ban.

This may still be Trump’s Achilles’ heel in November. Millions of Americans were outraged when Roe v Wade, which guaranteed abortion rights, was overturned by the Supreme Court. Marshalling that anger was considered the Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections.

But the landscape has changed dramatically in a few, short weeks. Trump has survived an assassination attempt captured in harrowing detail and in full view of the world. While a visibly weakened Joe Biden faces a rising chorus to step down ahead of the Democratic Convention in August. The contrast could scarcely be starker.

History often turns on a dime. Trump’s instincts in that moment, the raised fist, the bloody face, the defiance, will drive home his physical superiority over the irreversible weakness of his opponent.

The Republican ticket is now firmly in the hands of a nationalist, America First, arch-conservative, socially illiberal, faith-based movement. The choice of Vance lays to rest the hope that Trump would pick a moderate Republican to balance the ticket.

Vance is his spearhead in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The implications for America, judging by the Heritage Foundation’s reactionary blueprint for a conservative presidency Project 2025, are profound. America is divided. Violence is never far from the surface. Trump has predicted a “bloodbath” if he loses. If he wins, how deep will the conservative revolution go and what will be the reaction?

Elsewhere Vladimir Putin will be smiling softly. Benyamin Netanyahu will hope he can wait out the war in Gaza until the changing of the guard in the White House. Fossil fuel companies will be counting the days till the inauguration. Governments will brace for a trade war – not least with China — as Trump throws a protectionist “ring” around America.

Europeans sneer at Trump’s malapropisms and meanderings. Trump can be all over the place. But he’s not a joke or a buffoon. His operation has matured into a serious electoral force. Big money is flowing in. Among other tycoons, Elon Musk has endorsed him and pledged $45 million a month to his campaign. The Democrats might still pull it off. But the window is closing fast.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s America’s time to pull in its horns. Perhaps the post-WWII Truman doctrine, which stated that the United States would support democracy around the world, is drawing to a close. Perhaps the lesson for the rest of us is that it’s time we started weaning ourselves off our dependence on America.

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