J.D. Vance Is a Grifter—Just Like His New Boss

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Tuesday blasted J.D. Vance for being a “grifter,” because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with “24 kids in my graduating class,” where “12 were cousins.”

In Vance’s autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech, pointing out his own mother’s drug use.

In fact, they’re victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor; his mother’s addiction is a symptom, not a cause.

Vance, of course, “nobly” rose above it all with the help of our socialist G.I. Bill (which Republicans opposed) paying his way through Yale, and with help from right-wing billionaires who took Vance under their wings and helped him set up a hedge fund that made him fabulously rich.

Often, the media refers to his life as a true “Horatio Alger story.”

When I was a kid, my dad was the national president of the book-collecting group The Horatio Alger Society: Vance’s is a story right out of Alger’s books. Alger wrote stories about poor young men being lifted up into business success by wealthy older men, although he’s now out of favor because he was busted as a sex predator. Even the Horatio Alger story itself, it turns out, was a grift.

Just like Vance’s career and his life story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump’s failed businesses. Just like Nixon’s racist “law and order” grift. And Reagan’s tax-cut-for-the-rich “supply side” grift. And Bush and Cheney’s oil-grabbing Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” grift.

Republican policies, in fact, have been one long grift for more than half a century.

Largely thanks to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other similar legislation, the entire American economy has become one giant grift.

Every company, it seems, is trying to hustle us. Pretending they care about customer service or making/selling quality products as a corporate mission statement has become a rude joke. It’s all a grift.

So why should it surprise us that our post-Reagan politics have also been dominated by grifters for 40-plus years? And now two grifters are running for the presidency on the Republican ticket.

As I document in gruesome detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, since Reagan and Republicans on the Supreme Court adopted Robert Bork’s idea that monopolies were a sign of economic success rather than a crisis, everything has gotten more consolidated and, thus, more expensive. Reaganomics killed competition.

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the U.S.) averages nearly $70 per month in the U.S. 

America is literally the only developed country in the world where families get wiped out and rendered homeless by medical bankruptcy simply because somebody got sick.

We’re the only developed country in the world with widespread college debt.

We’re the only developed country whose entire health care system rests on predatory for-profit health insurance companies, doctors’ offices and hospitals owned by hedge funds, and “pharmacy benefit managers.”

Similar metrics are found with virtually every other product or service category dominated by giant corporations. They’re all grifting us and getting rich doing it. 

The average American family pays around $5,000 a year more for the general necessities of life than the average European, Japanese, South Korean, Canadian, Taiwanese, or Australian family. And things are steadily getting worse as monopolistic corporations and cartels tighten their grip on every American industry, from banking to telecom to energy to food. 

They even used inflation as an opportunity to grift, pushing prices up way above the actual inflation rate. Corporate profits and executive pay in America over the last two years are higher than they’ve ever been in American history.

It’s all a grift, making stockholders and executives rich while impoverishing working people.

We pay more for pretty much everything and, as a result (along with stagnant wages from the war on unions that Reagan started), more than half of America is stuck in something close to (if not deep within) a type of debt-driven poverty from which escape is nearly impossible. 

Social and economic mobility in America, the envy of the world for over a century, is today lower than in any other developed country.

The GOP grift that started with Reaganomics and began destroying unions and imposing “austerity” took us from a nation where two-thirds of us had a middle-class lifestyle that let people buy a home and car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and retire comfortably with a pension to where only around 45 percent of us today qualify.

The largest cohort in America today is, like it was before the New Deal, the working poor. The Republican grift has already reversed over 50 years of progress, and now Trump and Vance want to double down.

Meanwhile, conservatives on the Supreme Court told us that those same rip-off corporations are “persons with constitutional rights” and their “money is First Amendment-protected free speech.”

Thus, businesses and billionaires can now buy and sell politicians as easily as they buy and sell companies. Five conservatives on the court—Clarence Thomas being the deciding vote after taking millions in “gifts” from billionaires with business before the court—nailed down this new grift in 2010, over the loud and shocked objections and dissents of their colleagues, with their Citizens United decision.

So now corporations are people, and they can legally buy politicians and judges/justices. Most recently, the Republicans on the court ruled that if a bribe is paid after the vote, legislation, or decision is rendered, it’s merely a “tip.” It’s a whole new grift.

But when corporations kill people—like Pacific Gas and Electric Company, or PG&E, did when they were convicted of burning 84 people to death in 2018 and faced charges of murdering four more people in 2020—they don’t get the death penalty or even have to send their decision-making executives to prison. They just reduce slightly the payouts to their stockholders to cover the fines so they can keep on making money and, from time to time, killing more people.

And, up until recently, we’ve just been accepting these grifts.  

Few California politicians dare stand up to PG&E any more than national politicians are willing to stand up to any other corporation: The resources of even middle-size national and transnational corporations are more than adequate to destroy—or put and keep in office—any politician from a town clerk to the U.S. Senate. Just ask sellouts like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema.

A column in The Washington Post asked the question: “Why is Washington so dysfunctional?” The author interviewed two former members of Congress (a Democrat and a Republican) and a reporter whose beat is Congress. 

Not a single one identified the obvious and simple answer to the question: the giant grift driven by money in politics, adopted by literally every Republican in Congress and more than a handful of Democrats, courtesy of Republicans on the Supreme Court and the last four Republican presidents.

It’s as if big-money grifting in politics has become so normalized since Reagan that it just doesn’t occur to people inside the Beltway that it’s at the core of our problems.

The latest grift is Trump and Vance promising that they’ll “restore American greatness” when it was their party and policies that stole America’s greatness, handing it off to the morbidly rich and the world’s largest corporations.

This is not complicated, and voters finally have figured it out.

Joe Biden is the first American president to repudiate neoliberalism since Reagan adopted it and imposed it on America in 1980, writing Nafta, creating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, gutting unions, defunding education, blocking enforcement of antitrust laws, and cutting taxes on the morbidly rich.

Kamala Harris promises to continue Biden’s return to the policies of Keynesian economics, and the proof that Americans want it is obvious from the explosion of donations and support for her candidacy.

After two generations, the working class is beginning to climb out of the hole the GOP (and a few bought-off “problem solver” Democrats) threw us into.

We’re on the verge of a new day in America. And it can’t come soon enough.