When Vance Told Appalachians to Leave Appalachia

At a rally in Atlanta last weekend at the Georgia State University Convocation Center, Senator J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, sought to drive a wedge between white working-class voters and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Using a familiar culture war playbook, Vance said, “Every time the Democrats attack us and attack our movement, they can’t help but tell on themselves. They reveal how much they hate the American people … Barack Obama said we cling to God and guns. Remember that? Hillary Clinton called us deplorables. And now Kamala Harris says we’re weird.”

The Ohioan took these comments out of context, none more than Harris’s. When the vice president said, in the same venue where Vance spoke, “Don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird,” she was referring to the Republican ticket, not their supporters or any broad class of voters.

For a Republican politician to lie and say Democrats “hate the American people” is not unusual.

What is unusual is for that Republican politician to have previously written arguments sharply critical of members of the white working class and to have even argued some should be encouraged to abandon their downtrodden hometown communities in pursuit of a better life elsewhere.

A Democrat who wrote the following would get skewered by Vance and his Republican ilk today:

We’ve learned, painfully, that for the multigenerational poor, home might be the worst enemy. Appalachian loyalty to the land is the stuff of legend, yet the stubbornness of poverty in the region means that those who stay risk being poor forever. When the government paved thousands of miles of roads in Appalachia, it hoped to provide employment for the masses and infrastructure to sustain future economic growth. But the best and most lasting effect of those roads was to give people a faster way out. If we cannot improve the urban ghetto or the mountain hollow—and the evidence suggests we can’t — then the best anti-poverty program is a ticket to somewhere else.

Vance wrote this in 2014, fresh out of Yale Law School, in National Review, telling predominantly white Appalachians that their communities are beyond salvaging, they are too stuck to their land, and they should get out.

The future U.S. Senator got out, of course. After Vance finished Yale in 2013, he practiced corporate law in Washington, D.C. In 2015, the then-recently married 30-year-old moved to San Francisco to become a tech industry venture capitalist. After his book Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller, he moved to an affluent area of Cincinnati and plotted his political career.

Vance argued that Eastern Kentucky (where, as he recounted in Hillbilly Elegy, he spent parts of his childhood though that is not mentioned in the National Review article) effectively teaches its children “destructive” behavior:

Young students in eastern Kentucky sometimes tell their teachers that they hope to “draw” when they grow up. But they’re not talking about a career as an artist; they’re talking about drawing a government check. These kids weren’t programmed like that at birth; they were taught something destructive by their communities. A world where very few work, where many use (or deal) drugs, where more go to prison than to college, changes the expectations of all but a few remarkable souls. And with destructive expectations comes destructive conduct.

Vance didn’t bother to tell National Review readers how his ideas should be translated into specific policies. He concludes vaguely, slighting policies he doesn’t like:

Appalachia teaches us that breaking people out of bad communities has more promise than changing those communities wholesale; that encouraging family stability—or at least not discouraging it through the tax code or needless incarceration—promotes upward mobility more effectively than transfer payments; that educating people for employment somewhere other than the depressed local labor market is a better investment than short-term public works; and that helping kids overcome low expectations creates more hope than giving money to those kids’ parents.

As a policy agenda, this is a little less ambitious than transforming the mountains from a den of poverty into an engine of economic growth. But if the failures of Appalachia are any guide, a narrower policy agenda might actually serve the poor—white and black alike.

Does “breaking people out of bad communities” mean government subsidies for job relocation? More money to cover the costs of college? Vance doesn’t say, though in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance credits “Pell Grants and government-subsidized low-interest student loans that made college affordable, and need-based scholarships for law school” for providing him with opportunities for advancement, and the “old-age benefits that Mamaw [his Appalachian grandmother with whom he lived for various stretches] generously shared” so “I never went hungry.” He also suggests in the book that “Section 8 vouchers ought to be administered in a way that doesn’t segregate the poor into little enclaves.”

In the National Review article, we can see the early germination of Vance’s current position that adults with children should get lower tax rates than the childless when he argues that “family stability” should be encouraged in the tax code. But confusingly, he also wrote that “helping kids overcome low expectations”—an ill-defined policy objective—is preferable to “giving money to those kids’ parents.”

Hillbilly Elegy has more pointed advice for the white working class: Quit blaming Democratic policies for your bad choices.

The 2016 memoir covers Vance’s childhood—split between suburban Middletown, Ohio, and hardscrabble Jackson, Kentucky—and his unlikely journey to The Ohio State University and Yale Law School. Vance peppers his narrative with political and policy lessons drawn from his experiences as a “hillbilly” navigating disparate socioeconomic cultures, like this one from a visit back home.

I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents … the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser, it’s the government’s fault.

When Obama talked about people in “small towns” who “cling to guns or religion,” he was speaking sympathetically, if over-simplistically and insensitively. He described people who lived in communities where “jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them” and who had legitimate “frustrations” after “each successive [presidential] administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate, and they have not.”

Unlike Obama, Vance is a scold, blaming these same folks for their problems. If Harris or Obama ever wrote that members of the white working class are losers who only have themselves to blame for their economic disappointments, they never would have been elected to their local school board, let alone president or vice president.

The “cultural movement” Vance described in 2016 became Trump’s MAGA movement. By running for the Senate as a MAGA acolyte and accepting a spot on Trump’s ticket, Vance apparently decided that gaining power meant joining the movement, not beating it. He no longer dispenses tough love to his fellow Ohioans and Kentuckians. No longer is he trying to defuse the culture war. Now, he wages it, telling movement members that enemies are to blame for their woes. He tells them what they want to hear and who to fear.

Vance concluded Hillbilly Elegy pleading to his fellow hillbillies, “I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Today, he pumps up crowds as Trump’s opening act by telling him how Obama, Clinton, and Harris “hate the American people.”

He doesn’t talk about the “destructive” behavior bred in impoverished Appalachian communities. He told the Republican National Convention that where his family came from in Eastern Kentucky, the people would ” give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat. And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.”

The J. D. Vance of the previous decade would probably be deeply impressed by the vice-presidential opponent of J. D. Vance’s today: Tim Walz, who hasn’t forgotten his humble origins and worked to improve the quality of life for the working class.

Walz was raised in a small town in Nebraska and was a schoolteacher before getting elected to the House of Representatives and the Minnesota governor’s office. In his Philadelphia address on Tuesday after being tapped as Harris’s running mate, Walz spoke of how he “worked across the aisle” in Congress “on ways to grow rural economies.” He stressed the importance of “working together, seeing past our differences, and always being willing to lend a helping hand”—all “values I learned on the family farm.” Harris praised Walz’s gubernatorial record, noting, “he secured paid [family and medical] leave for workers in Minnesota and refused … to allow any student in their public schools to go hungry, so he made school breakfast and lunch free for every child.”

Walz’s Minnesota sounds like a place that a younger Vance would have left Appalachia for.

The post When Vance Told Appalachians to Leave Appalachia appeared first on Washington Monthly.