J.D. Vance pulls ahead in race for Republican nomination for U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, prompting comparison to positions he took in Hillbilly Elegy

Thought it's been much in the news, I've refrained from posting about J.D. Vance's rise in the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from which Rob Portman (R) is retiring, but with Vance garnering Trump's endorsement and pulling ahead in that race, I decided to feature a particularly interesting commentary about Vance and the race. 

Anyone following the race knows that, by the time Vance threw his hat in the ring last year, he had recanted his earlier criticism of Trump (something his opponents in the primary have used against him).  Since then, he's been lurching to the right on a wide array of issues, most notably immigration.  Earlier this month, he released a television ad that begins with, "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  And tonight on Twitter I saw a clip of him accusing Joe Biden of purposefully letting fentanyl into the country to kill Republican voters in places like Ohio.  In other words, Vance is trafficking in conspiracy theories.  So, things have gotten a little out of hand.  

That may help explain the New York Times decision to run this essay about Vance's candidacy--and his about face.  Christopher Caldwell's piece is titled "The Decline of Ohio and the Rise of J.D. Vance."  More than any other piece I've read since Vance got in the race, Caldwell situates Vance's current rhetoric and positions against what he said in his best selling book, Hillbilly Elegy.  Here's a provocative excerpt: 

Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, “Hillbilly Elegy” made Mr. Vance, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums. Pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.

While the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season, Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He didn’t vote for him. Many of Mr. Vance’s cosmopolitan literary admirers must have been consoled to think that discerning citizens could see through Mr. Trump, even in the parts of the country most taken with him.

But Mr. Vance backed Mr. Trump in 2020. And now, 10 days before the Republican primary on May 3, Mr. Trump has traveled to Ohio to tell a frenzied crowd that, even though Mr. Vance once said a lot of nasty things about him, he is a “fearless MAGA fighter” and “a great Buckeye.” And here comes Mr. Vance, bounding onstage to call Mr. Trump “the best president of my lifetime.”

Mr. Vance’s readers may feel let down and misled. So too, in their own way, may his Republican primary rivals in Ohio, who have been professing their fidelity to Trumpism, only to see their leader confer his blessing on a Johnny-come-lately.

On the misled point, there is a funny video on Twitter right now showing a man walking up to Vance at one of his campaign events and asking for a refund on the book, $16.99 for the paperback, which he says he didn't care for.

Earlier in the New York Times piece, Caldwell offers another observation related to the book and how Vance has changed since its publication: 

Amid a nodding crowd of men and women in Trump T-shirts and MAGA hats, Mr. Vance’s gray suit may have looked a bit funereal, but his applause lines were decidedly unstodgy. He assailed Joe Biden as a “crazy fake president who will buy energy from Putin and the scumbags of Venezuela but won’t buy it from middle class Ohioans,” who live in a top fracking state.

“Scumbag” is a word that seems to have entered Mr. Vance’s public vocabulary only recently. It didn’t appear in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the tender 2016 autobiography in which he described his clannish and troubled Kentucky-descended family.

Then there is this: 

Readers of “Hillbilly Elegy” who find Mr. Vance’s campaign rhetoric a jarring departure may actually be misremembering the book. His Mamaw railed at the so-called Section 8 federal subsidies that allowed a succession of poor families to move in next door. Southern whites were migrating to the Republican Party, Mr. Vance wrote, in large part because “many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s,” a neighborhood grocery. There, thanks to food stamps, he wrote, “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”

And that is a good segue to my own commentary on Hillbilly Elegy, published in Appalachian Reckoning:  A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, reviewed in the New York Times here.  My big criticism was that Vance threw working class whites under the proverbial bus.  Now, of course, he needs them to vote for him.  And I think that's one of Caldwell's primary points. 

Other recent commentary on the race, in which Josh Mandel is Vance's principal opponent, is here.  

Postscript:  This news item about J.D. Vance and the Ohio Senate primary appeared in the New York Times about 18 hours after this posted went up.  It's by Trip Gabriel and Jonathan Weisman.  "Once Soft-spoken, Ohio Conservatives Embrace the Bombast." The alternative headline is, "In Ohio, Republicans have gone from the Country Club to the MAGA Club." 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.