Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance at a campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on July 27.Adam Bettcher/AP
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.
When JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he lauded the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. Though it’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, he said, its residents are “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He then added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.”
Privileged? Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain and moved on to talk about “American greatness.” But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to a demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years.
During his convention speech, Vance repeated the message that has led the political press to label him a populist: The ruling elites have screwed over Middle America by pushing economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (His support for Donald Trump, who implemented a tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy, has not undercut his standing as a populist.) But Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.
Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.
Vance has blended working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. According to Vance, these powerful interests deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face. This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:
Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people.
As I noted over a year ago, this is deft demagoguery. Vance conflates legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It’s much more sophisticated than the usual GOP playing of the race card. Instead, Vance fuses toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. Look at how he weaved all this together when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year and sparked a chemical fire. Vance blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s racial equity initiatives for the catastrophe: “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.” So the good (white) folk of East Palestine were victimized supposedly because Buttigieg was spending too much time trying to help Black people.
This is what Vance meant when he groused about the media calling his people “privileged.” It was code for “white privileged.” And he was insinuating that such labeling—a.k.a. wokeness—is used to repress these working-class Americans.
This is what Vance meant when he groused about the media calling his people “privileged.” It was code for “white privileged.”
In Milwaukee, Vance did not spell out his racism-shaped populism. He hinted at it, and there’s no telling whether he’s going to be more explicit as he campaigns as Trump’s running mate. But Vance—who only a few years ago was a Never Trumper who compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and who then appeared to be positioning himself as a public intellectual with center-right politics—has demonstrated that he is willing to ally himself with the extremism that has thoroughly infected Trump’s GOP. As I reported last week, Vance recently endorsed a book co-written by an alt-right extremist (who promoted the crazy Pizzagate conspiracy theory) that contends that progressives are part of a group of “unhumans” who for centuries have been trying to destroy civilization. The book says that conservatives must not abide by the rules in countering the left and describes January 6 rioters as “patriots.”
Moreover, Vance has promoted a paranoid and Manichean view of American politics. Here’s what he said at a conservative conference in 2021:
We have lost every single major cultural institution in this country—Big Finance, Big Tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media, and the government. There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control. But there’s one of them, just one that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future, and that’s the constitutional republic that our founders gave us. We are never going to take Facebook, Amazon, Apple and turn them into conservative institutions. We are never going take the universities and turn them into conservative institutions…We might just be able to control the democratic institutions in this country…This is a raw fact of cynical politics. If we’re not willing to use the power given to us in the American constitutional republic, we’re going to lose this country.
In his convention speech, Vance praised Trump’s call for national unity. But that was camouflage. He is not aiming for unity. He has enthusiastically adopted the stance of a far-right culture warrior and has shown he’s willing to exploit racism to advance his form of populism.
Vance got into hot water recently when a video emerged of him referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as one of a group of “childless cat ladies.” And Democrats have taken to calling him and Trump “weird” to cast the Republican ticket as outside the norms of American life. I’m not sure that label will stick and hurt Trump and Vance. But it’s clear that Vance deserves to be tagged as extreme. Throughout his short political career, he has been a chameleon, changing his colors to match his ambitions—that includes aligning with radical conservatives. This offers Democrats much material to show voters that Vance is not a champion of the heartland but a friend of the fringe right.
David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in an expanded paperback edition.
