Was Vance Sincerely Radicalized, Or Is He Just An Opportunist?

It can be both.

J.D. Vance in 2017, Image: New America, CC

I’ve written a number of pieces about J.D. Vance already (here on his phony populism; here on his obsession with cat ladies and eugenics; here on why debunking his biography is counterproductive.) But his horribleness is hard to contain in…well, really any number of posts. So, hey, I thought I’d write another.

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The New York Times published a piece this weekend based on email messages between Vance and a trans friend of his from law school named Sofia Nelson. In the correspondence from 2014-2016, Vance discusses his love and support for Nelson and her transition. He talks about his mistrust of the police, and his support for Michael Brown, the Black 18-year-old murdered by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO in 2014.

During Trump’s rise in 2015 and 2016, Vance said that while he understood Trump’s appeal to some degree, he adamantly rejected his racism, homophobia and xenophobia. He even argued that Black people should receive reparations for redlining and denial of federal benefits—a progressive position which most Democratic politicians hesitate to embrace.

If your read the Times article, and if you know Vance’s current public persona, one obvious question comes forcibly to mind. That question is, “What the hell happened to J.D. Vance?”

Vance the opportunist

Vance was always conservative. But a decade ago he was a moderate Republican, who pushed back against the party’s increasing hatred and bigotry. Now he’s become known as a rabid, foaming, weirdo extremist, who has opposed gender affirming health care for trans youth, has attempted to deny nonbinary people the right to have passports that accurately reflect their gender, has said that the federal government should prevent women traveling across state lines for abortion services, and has argued that women leaving violent marriages are harming their children.

A lot of people on social media have suggested that Vance changed not out of a sincere shift in worldview, but because he wanted to be a high-powered politician. You don’t have to be a genius (and Vance is not a genius) to realize that the route to power in a Trumpified Republian party was to be…well, Trumpy.

Vance embraced his inner bigot and bent the knee to Trump. That got him Trump’s endorsement in the 2022 Ohio Senate race and some $15 million from billionaire hatemonger and techbro shithead Peter Thiel. The J.D. Vance who criticized Trump and offered support to trans people would never have become Senator Vance, and certainly woudln’t have captured a Republican vice-presidential nomination.

Vance’s hard right swerve was of direct pragmatic benefit, which makes it seem like it must have been a pragmatic choice. He’s a soulless opportunist, who has chosen hate to advance himself, even though somewhere in the dank little room he calls a soul, he knows it’s wrong.  

Vance and Kevin Williamson

I’m sure that Vance is well aware that his former anti Trump stance was incompatible with his political ambitions. And I’m sure that influenced his (repulsive) life choices.

At the same time, I think we may be letting Vance off the hook too easily if we presume that he, in some sense, knows better. People do get sincerely radicalized; people can, over time, lean into and embrace their own hatred. And Vance, even in his kinder and gentler phase, had a lot of hatred to lean into.

Law professor Lisa R. Pruitt—who is from a working class Appalachian background herself—points out that in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy Vance “places the responsibility for poor and working-class whites’ failures—including their downward mobility—squarely at their own feet.”

Pruitt insightfully juxtaposes Vance’s approach to poor white people with that of National Review columnist Kevin Williamson. In 2016, Williamson wrote an article about poor white communities that exhibited his typical (lack of) subtlety and compassion. (Italics are mine.)

The white middle class . . . failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization….

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. . . . The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.

“What Williamson states with unmitigated vitriol and disdain,” Pruitt says, “Vance states in a folksy, aw-shucks way that one reviewer referred to as ‘tough love,’ another as a ‘bracing tonic.’ In short, Vance makes Williamson’s core message more palatable.”

The juxtaposition with Williamson is valuable in part because Williamson doesn’t just hate the poor. His contempt for the white working class, his insistence that those who suffer are to blame for their suffering, is consistent with his generalized, across-the-board hatred and bigotry.

Williamson notoriously called a nine-year-old Black child a “primate” in one of his essays. he also argued that women who have abortions should be executed. His racism and misogyny are extreme and disturbing. They’re also in line with his views on poor people. When you think that people are always to blame for their own troubles, you’re likely to blame marginalized people for being marginalized, and revel in stereotypes and cruelty. Vance’s compassionate contempt is just a step away from Williamson’s gleeful contempt. The difference is in the affect, not the ideology.

Radicalization is easy if you’re already a bigot

The younger Vance’s politics were somewhat incoherent. He wrote a book touting an ideology of hatred, which blamed people for their own misfortune, poverty, and illness. But in his personal relationships, and sometimes in his public statements, he waffled, refusing to fully embrace the ugly implications of his thinking. He said that poverty was the result of individual moral failure…but he also said that Black people had been pushed into poverty by federal policy, and deserved reparations. He insisted that traditional family values were the only path to virtue and success. But he was unwilling to judge his friend for being trans, even though most conservatives (wrongly) see trans identity as a glaring attack on family values.

Radicalization doesn’t usually mean that someone abandons their old beliefs. Instead, it usually means that someone is convinced to embrace the worst version of themselves. For example, Seyward Darby in her book Sisters In Hate, profiles a New Age hippie obsessed with natural living whose focus on purity and health led her eventually to become a far right tradwife influencer. Fascists didn’t convince her to change her ideals, exactly. Instead, they convinced her that if she was truly committed to purity, she should double down and be a fascist.

Similarly, the new hateful Vance is not Hyde to old Vance’s Jekyll—or, rather, if you do a closer reading of Stevenson’s novel, you could say that just as Hyde is one possible variation of Jekyll’s personality, so new Vance is a logical, if despicable, outgrowth of old Vance.

J.D. started off with a lot of reactionary and invidious ideas about marginalized people; he believed they were immoral, he believed they were irresponsible, he believed that their lack of traditional values led them astray. Then he marinated in the eugenic ferment of Silicon Valley techbro reaction, and he came away convinced not that he was wrong, but that he hadn’t sufficiently appreciated his own rightness. Trump’s cruelty and contempt had put Vance off; Thiel and company convinced Vance (by argument or example) that he was being too soft. They told him to listen to his own hate. That’s how radicalization works.

Of course, Thiel and company didn’t just show Vance the true path. They dumped millions of dollars into his beard. It’s easy to believe that you are righter than you even knew when the people praising your courageous rightness are also funding your Senate campaign. Trump and Thiel and others offered Vance a choice; continue to support LGBT rights and reparations in the face of his own ideology, or fully own his own hate and become a Senator.

Self-interest and radicalization

Darby’s book points out that Vance isn’t alone; self-interest and radicalization are often linked.

People tend to focus on the psychological effects of radicalization—gaining a community, being told you’re special. But not infrequently joining far right groups can also be a direct source of income. Conversion stories sell; white people hawking white supremacy and conspiracy theories can access far right niche audiences and see direct financial benefit. In spaces where whiteness and hate are valuable commodities, hateful white people can cash in.

Vance has gotten more money out of the deal than most people manage to. But I think the same general rules apply. Radicalization isn’t (just) brainwashing. It’s a complicated process in which people are urged to be a certain version of themselves in exchange for certain kinds of community, certain kinds of power, and varying amounts of money. Vance was paid to be more sincere in his hateful beliefs. And I’m certain he is sincere. And I’m also certain he was paid.

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