Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate has been met with heightened anguish in mainstream US media and political institutions. The senator from Ohio is an outspoken representative of the MAGA movement, who rarely pulls his punches in public statements. After the July 13th assassination attempt on the former president in Pennsylvania, Vance said that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s assassination attempt”. He has also supported the accusation that the 2020 election was married by irregularities, confirming that he would not have certified the vote as then-Vice President Mike Pence did.
Such positions are notable in themselves, as Vance’s aggressive approach adds to that of Trump, rather than offering voters a more moderate choice for the number two spot, with the idea of balancing the ticket. Yet even more attention is given to Vance’s hypocrisy. Just a few years ago he claimed he was a “Never Trumper” and suggested that Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. His tune changed when he needed an endorsement for Senate, and he now admits that he was skeptical in the past, but claims that “Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind”.
As has happened for years, Democrats and the legacy media are focusing much less on the substance of Vance’s political thinking. Yes, there is plenty to freak out about on cultural issues, such as strong opposition to abortion and a hard line on immigration. Yet on abortion Trump has already imposed a more moderate line publicly, conscious of the damage done to the party by extreme positions from the right. Immigration, on the other hand, is already an effective issue for the Republicans, and it seems unlikely that Trump can be heavily influenced by his running mate on a question he has made so central to his campaigns.
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The meaning of the Vance pick is much more interesting as regards the America First agenda. The Ohio Republican espouses the new populist positions that Trump has brought into the party, in sharp opposition to what establishment Republicans have pushed for decades. Vance represents a clean break in particular with the policies of free trade and foreign military intervention. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on July 17, he tested a number of succinct lines tying the policies of Washington elites to the deterioration of life for the middle class, such as “jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war”, and “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again”.
There is substance to these barrages. In his short time in the Senate (he was elected in the midterm elections of November 2022), Vance has been a strong critic of the financial sector and corporate monopolies. He even joined forces with progressive heroine Elizabeth Warren to draft a bill aiming to hold bank executives responsible financially when their institutions fail. And Vance has praised Lina Khan, Biden’s progressive chair of the Federal Trade Commission who has brought antitrust lawsuits against giants such as Amazon.
There are no paeans to the free market in his speeches: he says that we need supply chain insourcing, to beef up manufacturing, and enact pro-worker policies rather than “sell out to multinational corporations”. Vance is adept at tying day-to-day hardship to larger political issues. He gave a brief explanation of how financial speculation led to higher housing costs, claiming “we’re done catering to Wall Street”; and he promised to build more factories, to fight for “good jobs and good wages”.
On these issues, Vance brings meat to Trump’s rhetoric, offering economic prescriptions – and a compelling personal story, as someone who escaped the despair of the downtrodden working class – that seem tailor-made for voters in Rust Belt states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. As to be expected in a political campaign – unfortunately – he ignored reality in pursuit of an advantage for his party, avoiding giving any credit to the other side. The Biden administration has worked aggressively to develop a new industrial policy, aimed precisely at the areas of the country hardest hit by globalized free trade. There have been considerable investments in reorienting supply chains, and promoting the construction of new factories in the United States, both to help rebuild the middle class and to maintain a technological and strategic advantage in the competition with China. And contrary to Republican laments, US energy production continues to grow, touching an all-time global record for oil, for instance, in early 2024.
Yet much of the Republican Party leadership has been slow to accept the new paradigm, as Nikki Haley showed in this year’s primaries by reverting to calls for fiscal austerity and an ideological foreign policy to combat dictators around the world. If Trump wins the November election, the Vance pick could mark a definitive shift away from the previous orthodoxy, the point when the establishment lost any hope of a near-term return to the neoliberal policies of globalization. A similar point can be stressed on foreign policy, as Vance has made little effort to hide his skepticism of foreign military interventions. He has criticized support for wars abroad as another facet of elite policies that damage the country, and acted accordingly in the Senate attempting to scuttle military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan earlier this year.
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As with all populists in this period, we do not have the chance to choose between the good and the bad. We get the whole package, the economic nationalism that contains considerable elements of sanity, and the cultural nationalism which aggravates division and represents a threat to the country’s institutions. Towards the end of his speech at the Republican Convention of July 15-18, Vance spent time trying to shift the definition of the United States: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future”. He talked about a “homeland”, and people willing to die for it. He seemed to protest too much, as Shakespeare might say, arguing that “people will not fight for abstractions but they will fight for their home”, a claim clearly contradicted by the country’s history.
The message was that America is not for just anyone, but for “us”. There is certainly something to be said for shared experience, but blood and soil ideology has consistently been rejected in US politics. J.D. Vance’s nationalism is a mixed book, with some pages that could become very dark.