Living through days of stifling heat has prevented me from going outside, except in the early morning. But it has also given me too much time to watch TV coverage of the seemingly buoyant Republican convention and the accompanying commentary.
At the moment, there is little solace in the political world for liberals, especially with the November election so near and a defensive, faltering Biden still obstinately holding on. Of course, it is now probably too late for a viable alternative to wage a campaign. This may be my last vote in a presidential election, and I am filled with dread about the possible result. The failed assassination attempt has only helped promote images of Trump as a fighter and martyr, who narrowly escaped death, an incident on which he has skillfully capitalized. Trump may be crudely insensitive and ignorant, but he is dangerously shrewd about how to use demagogic rhetoric to arouse the public.
His choice for vice president, J.D. Vance, personifies New Right, populist conservatism—supporting tariffs on trade and opposing U.S. intervention in the war between Russia and the Ukraine. He also is anti-abortion and pronounces that government should find ways to encourage people to have children.
In 2017, I wrote a piece about Vance and his decent, very personal book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” which was a depiction of his growing up poor in a very broken Appalachian family in Ohio’s Rust Belt.
He viewed his familial world as bound by ”spiritual and material poverty”; his mother was a drug addict. I wrote then, “Vance himself is a rarity, transcending the disadvantages of a family life fashioned by a culture that he saw with great honesty as toxic: socially isolated, violent, chaotic, distrustful of outsiders, and often addicted and abusive.” Despite his success, it is a culture whose demons never left him.
The Vance of that period was an outspoken critic of Trump, going as far as calling him “America’s Hitler” and a total fraud. And his mentors then were neoconservative intellectuals like David Frum (a Never Trumper who voted for Hillary and is a senior editor for The Atlantic). But Vance never in any way embraced liberalism and was antagonistic towards Obama as an elitist and was critical of government programs.
However, Vance opportunistically shifted to become an ardent MAGA supporter, stating that Trump had “a very legitimate grievance” about the conduct of the 2020 election. He was elected senator in Ohio in 2022 and by then had cynically taken back all his criticisms of Trump. He is now a supposedly good friend of Trump’s (a meaningless term given who Trump is), and at 39, he is ready to be Trump’s heir.
