Episode 26: J.D. Vance with Gabe Winant

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, since we were last in the podcast feed, a lot of stuff has happened.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been a long time.

We should have just kept recording.

Like us hours of what?

No.

Really?

So we are recording now on Tuesday, July 16th, on day two of the Republican National Convention,

and three days after an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and about 24 hours after the announcement of J.D.

Vance, senator from Ohio, as Donald Trump's presidential nominee.

And I thought this was kind of an influencing confluence of events because, you know, Trump's politics have always been about ventriloquizing a wounded middle American white masculinity, right?

And that has also been Vance's claim to fame, this sense of embodying and vindicating the grievances of the forgotten white man.

And now over this past weekend, that wound has been made like really literal, right?

Like it's actually a wound on Trump's ear that is bleeding very picturesquely in those now famous photographs.

And I thought there was nobody I would really want to talk about this historical development with more than Gabe Winant of the University of Chicago, who joins us here today.

Gabe, thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

And so I should say, you have sort of several connections to this.

You've written a beautiful essay in N Plus One about J.D.

Vance, very prescient.

And also your first book was about sort of like the, the,

you, in a scholarly way, chart the transitions that J.D.

Vance kind of ab reacts towards and against in his famous Hillbilly elegy, I would say, right?

Like you're, you guys are sort of in however inchoate a form, grasping at the same elephant, except that he is running, you know, kind of hog wild with it.

And you actually are analyzing like how the structural transformation of these areas really, you know, how, well, I guess you're thinking more Rust Belt, he's more Appalachia, but like he's from Ohio.

He's, you know, he's his grandparents left Kentucky.

So really, he's thinking about there's a, there's a narrative of decline that you kind of explore in a scholarly way.

And he kind of like turns, as Maura says, into like grievance and trauma.

And so I'm really, really glad that we get to talk to you about him.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think he's actually,

he's an unpleasant figure to spend time with mentally, but he's in some ways a rewarding one.

I think there's a kind of complexity to him.

that Trump, for example, doesn't really have.

Right.

And so I'm looking forward to talking about it.

Yeah.

I also think Vance is a really interesting figure because he's somebody who pitched himself in the 2010s as sort of an intermediary or like a translator figure, right?

He's positioned himself with Hill Billy Elegy, his runaway success of a memoir, as someone who could be an empathetic and cogent explicator of white working class grievance, kind of for liberal coastal elites, right?

He understood himself as, or pitched himself as a bridge between the two

worlds.

And that was a sort of marketing ploy that a lot of white liberals really bought, right?

So, you know, J.D.

Vance is also very much a product of sort of elite liberal consensus that I think also has to be the object of some soul searching.

So, Gabe, would you walk us through?

J.D.

Vance's rise and sort of the myths that he wrote for himself about his life, and then we can maybe do some fact checking.

Certainly.

so jd vance i think everyone knows at this point right he as you just said more

he first became well known as a memoirist of a kind he's from middletown ohio which it's true is not in appalachia proper but there is an enormous kind of appalachian some diaspora across the industrial midwest that he was part of and which does involve you know return and circuit migration and so on i recommend max frasier's excellent book hillbilly highway on this and you know he grew up in and this this is the topic of the book, a fairly difficult and sort of traumatic childhood environment.

His mother struggled with addiction and much to his kind of chagrin in the book, also was in a sort of series of relationships with different men.

And he was raised in significant ways by his grandparents, who are described in the book as mama and papa.

His grandfather was a steel worker.

hence the connection to my own research, which is about Pittsburgh and the transition from steel to healthcare.

Grandfather was a steel worker and union member, and his mother, in fact, was a nurse.

Your other topic.

My other topic.

So I wrote the essay

that brings me here, actually prompted by Lisa Borst, who works at N Plus One, when she observed that Hillbilly Elegy is a kind of upside-down version of my book, or my book is an upside-down version of it in some way that they seem to be about the same thing.

Anyway, Vance, he had a kind of difficult childhood, I think legitimately, and that's worth talking about, made his way eventually, due in no small part to the help of his grandparents, first to the Marines, then to Ohio State, and then to Yale Law School.

And at Yale Law School, I met him there, actually.

I did my PhD at Yale.

I was friends with Usha, who's now his wife, you know, before they had met, not very, very close, but actually friends.

And so when they started dating, I met him once or twice.

I haven't had any contact with her,

much less him in more than a dozen years now.

And at Yale Law School, he was mentored by the infamous Amy Chua.

Chua pet.

Yes.

The tiger mom.

The tiger mom, exactly.

Was also attracted controversy for her complicity or cover-up of her husband, Jed Rubenfeld's sexual harassment of Yale Law students, if I'm remembering correctly, this like five-year-old scandal.

Yeah,

there's been enormous kind of scandal circulating around Chua and Rubenfeld for years there now.

You can read any number of articles about it.

They're also closely linked to Brett Kavanaugh, for whom Usha clerked, I believe, at the Supreme Court.

And that's a kind of career path from Chua Minti to Brett Kavanaugh Clerk.

Anyway, much of the book, much of the memoir is about, or the later part of it, is about, you know, how kind of alienating and difficult the environment of Yale was and how Vance kind of learned to adapt to it.

And indeed, the book is the product of that adaptation, as you were saying, Mara, basically giving a kind of culture of poverty account of his own origins, you know, this kind of wonderful, hard-scrabble, but pathological world where I grew up, where people, you know, are loyal to a fault, but, you know, don't have a strong work ethic.

And it's a kind of a classic, I mean, you know, about Appalachia and in fact, about lots of places, right?

There are, this is a classic genre.

Yeah, if anything, like the innovation is that he uses racist tropes on poor white people, right?

Like that's the, that, that, that, that, it's, if you, if you replaced, you know, Appalachia with the,

south side of Chicago, we'd all be able to, it'd be quite legible what this book is doing.

But because it's about

Papa,

it kind of seemed to slip people's notice.

Also, the fact that the people that you think you're getting explained to yourself

are being

not so faintly condescended towards also says a lot about 2016,

that this could really become the best sell that it did.

There are like actually weird racism arguments deployed against those poor whites.

At one point, Vance

assigns at least some responsibility for what he diagnoses as the pathologies of his community in the fact that they are of Scots-Irish descent and therefore, you know, belligerent and not very hard workers.

It's real 1840s style racism.

This is a shockingly enduring kind of myth in American political culture.

You may remember Jim Webb, the senator, also, who has a whole book on this theme.

And it's a kind of idea that, you know, the Scots-Irish were this kind of frontiersman, Jacksonian kind of ethno class who built the country, right?

They crossed the Alleghenies and they settled the interior and, you know, they fought the Indians and they built the country, right?

And they have a certain kind of, you know, hard-scrabble, fighting, populist spirit that linked them to Andrew Jackson in the first place.

And that somehow endures kind of intact down into the present.

And, you know, it's, it's illustrative of the general kind of thing Vance is doing, where he is

appearing to participate.

I mean, he's appearing to kind of

glorify or, you know, honor his origins.

And if you're kind of not reading closely, you might think that that's what he's doing.

And then if you kind of stop and think about it, you realize that the

contempt and the scorn in this is just

you know, although he doesn't seem to be aware of it, actually.

I think that's interesting and we're talking more about, but it's just off the charts, right?

As in fact, any kind of, you know, such racialization is bound to communicate.

Yeah.

Right.

So he is, he's, to summarize, he is making an assessment of this region and its problems that are not economic or structural.

They are in a kind of like essentializing.

patronizing like cultural diagnosis that locates the problem in an unchangeable inherited facet of the population, right?

Exactly.

And it was an amazing thing about the book, if you read it closely, is again and again and again, he will consider the pathologies of his region and his people and his family, and especially his mother, right?

His mother is the main target of this.

And it even operates with a kind of exceptionalism, right?

The grandparents are the exception, even though, as you point out in your N plus One piece, if you read it even not that carefully, it's clear that they're fully emblematic of whatever it is he's describing.

They are fairly prototypical residents of that area and members of their class, but he thinks of them as like somehow exceptional in a way that, frankly, having just spent a lot of time thinking about Clarence Thomas is exactly how Clarence Thomas thinks of his grandparents, right?

And like same kind of scorn for the parental generation and right, like kind of fixation on like on grandparents, I think.

Yeah, so I think two things to say about this.

One, you know, he again and again and again in these kind of considerations of the various kind of emblems of pathology, sometimes people close to him, sometimes people far from him, will entertain the possibility that there's a structural explanation, right?

He's not a moron and he's capable of kind of thinking, well, maybe there's a structural explanation there.

And then without fail, what he'll do is say, like, maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, there's not.

Without any actual engagement with what such an explanation might be and how it might work to understand a situation.

So what that allows him to do, and this is the second piece, right, is then assign blame where he chooses.

And so, like, as you're saying, Adrian, he wants to assign blame to his mother and not to his grandparents.

And I'm not here to say, you know, screw his grandparents.

They're bad people.

Certainly not.

And in fact,

you do get, you do come away from the book quite liking his grandparents and especially his grandmother in a certain way.

Right.

Every, I say in the essay, every moment in the whole book that's actually moving at all and not totally contaminated by his worldview is about the actual love of his grandparents for him.

And that's clear, right?

But

what's important about it is that he's not able to see

his grandparents as

people caught up in the structural

disinvestment and abandonment of

the working class in Appalachia in a way that's similar to, say, what is happening to his mother or to the various father figures or to the other people in his community, right?

So like, for some people,

there

is

blame for a few particularly his grandparents there's sort of uh exception and excuse and for no one is there actual analysis yeah which would be to move beyond the kind of moralizing view right like in my in my way of looking at the world you know to understand what has happened to people and the way that that has affected their relationships is not to blame them and in fact it's to understand them and humanize them but he's in he's interested in dealing with the people around him as kind of cardboard cutouts of good or bad which is also kind of where the fact that this is a memoir sort of become, you know, sort of this is the, I mean, as a literary critic, right, like this is the demonic side of the memoir and that it like relentlessly personalizes and that can be very, very humanizing and wonderful, but it can also in the wrong hands be deeply regressive.

I mean, you, this is so interesting, right?

You write in the piece that what links Vance the memoirist and Vance the politician is a continuous policy of nearly absolute non-confrontation with what made him who he is, right?

And like, of course, the pitch of the book is finding out what made him who he is, but it's just about the grandparents and the parents.

It's not about like, yeah, as you say, structures of investment,

you know, class relations.

And even when we get to the kind of class questions, sort of fish out of water stuff at Yale, especially, right?

Like,

you know,

far be it from me to say what happened, it didn't happen, but a lot of that shit didn't happen, right?

Like, it's just, he has, you know, it's this kind of,

the kind of writerly flourish clearly takes over.

And like, he, he names real disconnects and real kind of structural inequalities at Yale and about the fact that places like that don't draw equally from across the United States.

But

the kind of episodes and anecdotes he provides for it feel very memoiristic in the sense, right?

Like that, again, there's no question about, no criticism of the institution, more of the people in it and sort of their individual shittiness kind of.

Right.

I mean, i would be the last person to say um you shouldn't feel bad when you arrive at yale and i mean again i spent eight years there everyone i know who got there who didn't you know come from the upper crust of the american aristocracy felt the violence of the institution in some way you can't not um

what's distinct about vance's reaction is that he feels it as like oh i don't know which fork to use i don't know which wine to order right right and that's a fair way of feeling it as a kind of first cut sure right And then, you know, Amy Chua or, you know, Usha, his girlfriend says, use this fork, order that wine.

And he's like, oh, okay,

all good.

Right.

And is unable to recognize in a proper way, I think, that the actual class dimensions of what he's experiencing, which is to say something not particular to him.

He thinks something unique in particular is happening to him in this place that is like, you just, you can't find a better emblem of American inequality than New Haven.

You know, it's this de-industrialized black and brown city with, I mean, it used to be what

people would always describe it, and they still have when he was there, as one of the poorest cities in America.

I don't think that's true anymore, but that was still certainly circulating as a thing people said about New Haven in the 2010s.

You know, white, I mean, all students arriving there, especially white students are kind of, you know, instructed in like the neighborhoods they shouldn't go in immediately and all this kind of thing.

And he just like can't clock that as like that he's in a place like where he's from, right?

A place that has also been devastated by deindustrialization and is suffering a whole bunch of really familiar problems as a result.

And that's racism, right?

I mean, the way to understand that is that it's racism, but it's not just, it's analytically important, not just because it's like, oh, let's cat J.D.

Bands is a racist, although he is, but because it tells you that his way of thinking about.

class and class inequality and class relations

is completely mediated and kind of permeated by race and racism.

Right.

So he's not able to actually think the thought that he has anything in common

with this place that's just like where he's from.

So let's move on to

Vance's sort of post-Yale career, right?

Because he really plays up his origins as a, you know, orphaned son of

deindustrialization.

But I think he pays a a little less attention when he's making this public pitch for his own authenticity to his time as a, you know, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Can you tell us a little bit about that part of his life?

Yeah.

So

basically, Vance, you know, he kind of bursts onto the scene around 2015, 2016.

He writes some things for National Review and places like this.

He publishes the book.

It's a huge sensation.

As you were saying, beginning of the conversation, Laura, it's very heavily promoted by liberals, right?

Who are thrilled to have someone come along and explain the Trump phenomenon to them in terms of, you know, these idiots in Appalachia who can't help themselves, right?

And that's a very convenient thing

for

the, you know, like

elite liberal intelligentsia, whatever, to hear.

And so that is his creation as a kind of cultural voice.

And the book is a huge hit,

right?

Makes him rich.

And then his kind of,

you know, he does a judicial clerkship and Usha more pursues a legal career, but eventually he winds up in San Francisco working for Peter Thiel.

The venture, you know, the, I'm sure you talked about him, the farmer.

Talked about him.

I've talked with him many a time.

And,

you know, Peter Thiel eventually

seeds Vance's own VC firm, Naria Cacketall, which is the Lord of the Rings motif that the Teal Empire.

Yeah, it's one I don't even recognize.

And I'm a Tolkien nerd.

What is Naria?

I hate Tolkien.

I don't know what it is.

I bet you that like Peter Thiel just has like a spreadsheet.

Yeah, it's some kind of thing of power.

It's cool.

Yeah.

We have a taxonomy of right-wing masculinities.

And

Teal falls pretty firmly into what we call the creep.

Yes.

Yes.

JD Vance is comfortable with the creep.

Anyway, go on.

So he starts his own.

He moved back to Ohio, I think in 2017,

18 maybe.

I forget exactly when.

He briefly runs a nonprofit that's supposed to be, you know, kind of doing something about the opioid crisis and never really does.

And I think the most significant thing about him across these years is that he politically reorients himself.

Just the Curtis Yarwin contact, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, and you know, by

the end of the decade, he's clearly positioning himself to enter politics kind of on the right-wing, you know, on the kind of populist far right, much to the shock of the liberals who loves him, you know,

who are not really able to see the continuity, which we can talk more about.

I think there's a really important thread of continuity.

Yeah.

But anyway,

you know, this eventually, you know, leads him to run for Senate in 2022

when a seat becomes open.

Bankrolled by Peter Thiel, right?

Bankrolled by Peter Thiel.

I think in the biggest single individual expenditure on a U.S.

Senate race ever.

Oh, wow.

And this was a this was a pretty bad or at least worse than expected cycle for Republican.

candidates, including a few that Thiel had backed elsewhere.

He had that odious little like freak

serpentine guy in Arizona.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Blake Masters.

And Blake Masters, I also do slightly in college.

So I really feel like there's something cursed

here.

Yeah.

But, you know, this is, he was

an outlier in that cycle when he won that Senate seat.

Yeah.

I mean, Ohio has become a pretty Republican state.

I think the general consensus is like,

you know, in the current, in the current state of things, a Democrat is just, you know, really not likely to win under almost any circumstance.

I mean, you know, maybe Sherry Brown, the incumbent, will win this year.

I don't know.

But

so to advance, sort of slightly underperformed Republicans nationally and Republicans nationally, slightly underperformed expectations or whatever.

He ran against Tim Ryan, who kind of did this like,

you know,

populist, but not in a left-wing way kind of thing.

Right, anti-Chinese, a Democrat, Democratic congressman from Northeastern Ohio did a anti-Chinese kind of thing.

That was a real sense of the motivation.

But he was not convincing.

And

he did not have as coherent a message as yes.

And, you know, to be honest, probably there was no Democrat and no message that was going to win in that situation, I would guess.

But anyway, Vance wins in part or crucially, really in whole, thanks to the endorsement of Trump in the primary, right?

There's a contested primary, a bunch of really freaky candidates are running.

Don Jr.

struck up a relationship with JD at some point.

I'm not sure when exactly, in the run-up to the primary and convinced his dad to endorse him.

And there's these great videos of Trump campaigning for Vance

and doing the Trump's thing, which just articulates in an unmediated way the things.

Yeah, and he just says like, JD is kissing my ass.

He wants my support so bad after he's already endorsed him.

I do think there's a kind of psychoanalytic thing going on with the

Vance-Trump relationship that we could also talk about.

But

yeah, so that, you know, he wins the primary on that basis.

He wins the general election on the basis of Ohio being a Republican state

and

becomes a voice in Washington for the kind of

populist right,

you know, including

these very freaky speeches he gives at cpac periodically you know and he talks about like the debothification of the american government you know the purge of the left you know from from civil service and

um

you know his campaign involved tons of very obvious kind of references to great replacement theory and uh right he just he's in that world he likes yeah a lot of creepy uh like pro-natalist like almost trad wifey propaganda stuff uh very much going on.

He's like, we need to have more babies.

Quote unquote, our people are not having enough babies.

He characterizes child care subsidies as an attack on quote unquote normal people,

says that women should not leave marriages in which they are being abused, has been one of these Republicans coming out against

no fault divorce.

You know, he's got

a really specific like oppression of women agenda that he also starts starts stumping on about this time.

Definitely.

And, you know, I mean, in a way that I think is going to be not possible for Democrats to figure out how to communicate in national politics, he's just part of this kind of like

Nazi internet world.

I mean, he like, for example, I don't know if this will mean anything to you all, but like he was on Amy Terice's podcast, for example, and he was running for Senate.

You know, he like follows Bronze Age pervert on Twitter.

He's just like, he's in that scene.

He is incredibly online.

I feel like there's

a way in which we have maybe understated the amount that, like, this millennial Republicans are

just completely brain poisoned from the right-wing social media sphere and how it has really shaped their politics.

In a way that I think is much more commented upon when it happens to like Democratic staffers who, you know, start saying Latinx or whatever.

But, you know, Republican staffers are too online and they become like actual Nazis and monarchists.

You know, it's, it's very asymmetrical.

Well, we notice it, we notice it when it happens to Silicon Valley billionaires, I suppose, but we don't notice it that it's also happening to, yeah,

to

Republican vice presidential candidates.

And I should also note.

He is the exact conjunction, right?

Of Silicon Valley right-wing billionaires and Republican politics.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I should also mention that he is, on a personal note, the first vice presidential candidate, I think, younger than me, which like fucking A, this

just sucks.

Yeah, there's definitely going to be a lot of like tedious generational commentary on my

first millennial VP, you know, but I think we can maybe save that.

Break out the oat milk lattes

or avocado toasts.

What do we do?

I don't even know.

But he's got a his cultural signifiers are actually pretty

heavy-handed.

They're very deliberate.

Yeah.

They seem

affected, right?

But like you mentioned, Gabe, in your wonderful essay, The M Plus One, that everybody should read, this ad he says that he put out when he was running for Senate that was like, are you a racist?

Do you hate Mexicans?

In this like kind of wink-wink way, where he purports to be parodying like hyperbolic, hysterical, liberal characterizations of Ohio voters, but he's actually just suggesting like, like you, I am a racist and that's why you should vote for me.

You know, it's um, it's very internet in that it is a simultaneous disavowal through ironic distance

and like subterranean avowal with plausible deniability.

Does that make sense?

That's exactly right.

I think.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, you would never be able to get him to answer, I think, like why it is that he simultaneously thinks our people need to have more babies, right?

To reverse the decline in fertility.

And also we need to remove,

you know, so-called illegal aliens or whatever he would call them,

right, in order to increase American workers,

you know, labor market power, right?

Like those two positions are only reconcilable through racism, right?

It's the only logic that makes sense there.

And, you know, he knows that, right?

And he's friends with all these people, as as you were saying, like Curtis Yarvin and so on, who, and Teal, right, who are very open about, you know, thinking the races are biologically different and have different IQ levels and are differently likely to commit crime and all of this stuff that's back now, right?

He's just like, he's in that scene.

He thinks that.

It's the only way his position makes sense, but he's

able to do this thing of like saying yes and no at the same time.

Now, this might be a moment, Gabe, for us to circle back to that continuity, right?

Because I think over the past couple of days since uh jd vance got this nomination there has been a lot of talk about how he positioned himself you know five ten years ago as an anti-trump or a never-trump guy you know called him the american hitler called him the heroine of the population etc etc

But I think what I'm seeing from you here is actually a degree of intellectual continuity, right?

I mean, I think, I think for one thing, it's a little bit credulous for these people to be pointing out his previous statements as if those were the sincere ones

and now he has changed.

But, you know, you have sort of drawn this line of

racist, essentializing,

you know, sort of willfully blind characterizations of what's happening in the U.S.

that I think, you know, are there in Hillbilly Elegy and not just now in his like much more upfront racism.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the, there, there's certainly a threat of continuity in terms of racism and essentialism and so on, but I think there's even the kind of more profound one in a way, which is about like

the assignment of blame,

right?

The kind of personalistic assignment of blame

in place of the kind of explanation of inequality and social, you know, processes through life structure, right?

I mean, this is, again, I can't overstate how much you see this in the book if you read it, right?

They just like every page, he's like, maybe it's a structure?

No, probably not.

And that kind of energy that he's devoting to suppressing that possibility, I think,

opens up two possible kind of modes that he could, he could go, or

cast he could go down in terms of how he interprets the world.

One is it's the fault of the victims, right?

And that's like what Hillbilly Elegy does

is like the people who have been abandoned by American capitalism and, you know, betrayed by it and had their, you know, communities destroyed by it, it's their fault because they don't work hard for racial essential reasons.

And that, that was a very popular, you know, that was a very popular line for a certain kind of elite liberal audience, as we've been saying.

Then when the opportunity emerged to reorient himself politically,

he took the other route, which was, it's the fault of a kind of shadowy conspiracy of elites who are, you know, malicious and evil.

And, you know, far be it for me to say that the American elite is not malicious and evil, but that's also actually not an explanation, right?

Because like

he is also part of an American elite, right?

As we've been saying, he is a millionaire.

He's integrated into this world of Silicon Valley billionaires who have their own elitist agenda, obviously.

And

so that's just a kind of line about like, well, we're good elites.

They're bad elites, right?

Which is a very common kind of thing, really, universal thing, in fact, in right-wing populism.

Like, right-wing populism universally is about an interpretation in which different elites are in competition with each other.

Yeah.

And like the people are never actually capable of ruling themselves.

So he's gone from like, it's the fault of the poor to it's the fault of these bad rich guys, not like us good rich guys, but in neither case is there like an ability to actually think about

you know, the structure of our society, right?

And the way that like the way that we've arranged our society, the way that,

you know, American capitalism works

being the thing that,

you know, is to blame as opposed to kind of personal, you know, shortcomings or villainy, right?

So like the new version is basically the great replacement theory.

And he, you know, won't say like, oh, it's like Jews plotting to bring in Mexicans to replace white people.

But that's what all his, like his kind of ideological, you know, online buddies think.

And since he's been nominated for vice president, you know, I mean, I just saw on Twitter this morning, um, you know, the guy, Benjamin Braddock, who's like a right-wing influencer guy.

He's one of many like him, he's not distinctive in any way, but you know, um, he was commenting on the fact that Vance's wife is Indian

to say, um,

you know, maybe there's an ancient symbol of renewal that they could be displaying at the convention, meeting a swastika, right?

Um,

and like that, like he,

the kind of personalization of

uh blame for you know racial transformation and economic and miseration onto a kind of malicious sinister elite that's operating behind closed doors right that is it is nazism right i mean he hasn't quite articulated it at that level but that is basically what it is so um that's i think the threat of continuity right is like how he personalizes blame uh as opposed to engaging with the very real thing that the book is about, right, which is like the actual misery of people who have suffered economically, engaging with it as something that can be explained at a level other than individual.

Yeah, it seems to me that the other one, of course, is, as you were saying, kind of about

the idea that the wrong elite is in charge, right?

I mean, he is very, very comfortable clearly in elite spaces.

And I mean, ironically, for someone who made his name, kind of being the spokesperson for people that sort of don't penetrate into a bubble like Yale, he spent really an inordinate amount of time with some of the most insulated people on the planet, right?

Yale Law School, Silicon Valley, and the U.S.

Senate.

You know, like you're, you're, you know, there's just, there's also just kind of a,

there's an incuriosity to all of it.

I mean, it's a wounded incuriosity.

Because, you know, so much clearly comes, as you say, out of his own personal traumas, which are legitimate and right, like, and you're not going to sort of wave away.

But it's interesting that

he rose to

prominence miming kind of curiosity when, in fact, he is really matched only by his running mate in lack of curiosity what the Americans he seems so eager to represent are actually like and doing.

Yeah, I mean, I have to admit that I sometimes think that the whole essay I wrote is like, it is just like men would rather become

fascist dictators and go to therapy.

I mean, there is an explicit passage in the essay or in the book rather about,

you know, how he doesn't want to go to therapy, how he therefore like tries to understand his,

you know, genuine mental health struggles, which one can't blame him for having

for, you know, like kind of through force of will or something like that.

Right.

And I do think you can see his whole trajectory as a series of displacements of, you know, this set of like real traumas from real challenging childhood circumstances.

He displaces again and again and again

as a way of not

actually

understanding himself and his world and where he comes from.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, this might be a good place to return to your point about the psychoanalytic explanation for Trump or for Vance's relationship with Trump.

I think there's like one very vulgar Freudian analysis that just diagnoses this guy as mommy issues, right?

And you can,

you know, explicate his

gender politics, which are very extremist and very resentful

towards women and, you know,

gender minorities in the sense of, you know, his mother failed to perform this nurturing, subservient role of caretaking and presence and sort of

fixated attention on him.

And therefore, he is going to compel all the nation's other mothers to do so by force, right?

Another recurring theme in his gender gender politics statements is his real hatred and resentment for childless women.

It's like a bizarre fixation he has that he returns to

over and over again.

But then I think his relationships with other men are also

really telling.

Could you tell us a little bit about that Trump endorsement and this sort of like almost like desperately sycophantic relation with Trump himself?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think in general, like it's clear that,

or it's easy to see, let me put it like that, it's easy to see just from his memoir and from his public record, the way

Vance is constantly recaffecting to new parental figures, mainly men, although not only, right?

I mean, Amichua is an interesting character there, too.

But like, he lets these parental figures remake him really intensely, right?

And that's the story he tells about Amy Chua is like he doesn't know what to do.

He's out of place at Yale.

She remakes him.

And then he repudiates that remaking right for teal and then for trump um

and

uh you know i mean the the sycophancy for trump it's just like uh you know it's it's amazing he's not more embarrassed and humiliated it's absolutely slavish it's actually

prostrated himself the way he yeah and it works against his politics of masculine domination, right?

I mean, being Trump's vice president is always a kind of emasculating position.

I think Mike Pence was

almost deprived of manhood by the end of his service in that position.

Well, almost deprived of his neck.

Yeah, I know.

But, you know,

but his pitch is that he is a strong man, right?

And the strong man necessarily has no boss.

But

JD Vance is so clearly desperate for this, you know, transformative,

redeeming father figure that it very clearly seems like there are there are people who can get JD Vance to do things not in his interests and will.

Yeah, I'm not so sure.

I mean, I have to say, like, I think the basic logic of what you're saying is true, but I also think like Vance betrays his parents systematically.

Not to say like we should be hopeful that he'll like betray Maga or anything like that, but like, you know, the whole book is a betrayal of his mother and in a suppressed way, his grandmother.

I think it's like, it's, there's no other way of reading it than a repudiation of these people, an unconscious one, right?

Because he thinks it's praiseful, but it's like the hatred is just under the surface.

Yeah.

And,

you know, he like betrays Amichua and the elite world of elite liberalism and so on, right?

That, that he came out of there.

And like, that makes sense in this psychoanalytic register.

He is trying to get parents who will, you know, like provide him the thing that he can't, he was, he, you know,

that his wound wants.

He can't find them because no one can do that for him.

Obviously, that's something he has to do for himself.

And then finding that again and again, he kills those parents.

I mean, symbolically.

The other thing you point to is that

his whole self-presentation is, and I quote this, built on the notions of willpower and self-discipline that are at the heart of pop psych and self-help genres.

And that's the other thing here, right?

This is...

right our first millennial candidate meaning like this is

isn't this also how self-help gurus kind of function like the andrew tates of the world both this kind of like hyper masculinity that that is so obviously lacking the thing it projects but also the fact that it so obviously apes other

people

and sort of follows slavishly follows their prescriptions um in order to then murder them right like it there is this kind of like in order to substitute itself for them because like there can only be one grift at any given time and like that that's the other thing here right like that this is almost like two two kind of grifters, the aging one and the younger one, sort of, sort of

doing one score.

And the question is who's going to end up chained to the vault when the cops finally show up, right?

Like there is a kind of element here of

the contradiction that Mora is identifying, I think, is both salient and actually so widespread that I think it actually becomes a selling point.

Like this is, there are young men, especially in this country who are so inured to this pattern that like it probably sweetens the deal

rather than making it any any uh giving them any pause yeah i think that's true i mean i think this the way in which like they are they will be read as a father and son team trump and vance

um

and the tension between them as well as the kind of collaboration between them that is bound to come out of that uh i think it's easy to easy to kind of see the outline of already right i mean

there's no way that uh trump doesn't retain some sorry that vance doesn't retain some uh internal hidden kernel of scorn for Trump, right?

We don't know exactly how he would articulate it or what the form of it would be.

I think it's wrong even to think of it in terms of sincerity and insincerity and so on.

But like,

you know, he surely thinks like Trump was better than he expected as president, and I reoriented him or whatever.

But the things that he saw in Trump can't be unseen.

They're there, obviously.

And the initial betrayal

of

Vance, when Vance called him American Hitler and so on, right?

Like, I mean, Trump obviously relishes bringing this guy to heel, but he also will remember that forever, right?

And so, like, you have to assume that

that will be the content of the form of a kind of father-son rivalry, right?

That will be collaborative in some way and also,

you know, involve Vance positioning himself to be the more serious, you know, intellectual, ideologically committed version um

and to you know distance himself subtly from Trump Trump's idiosyncrasies and excesses I mean all that surely will happen right and I wouldn't predict whether you know it will take the form in the end of Vance like you know kniving Trump in some way but I do think that

I mean he betrays his parents I think it's it's it is fundamental to who he is and he now has a new father you know I can see a mob already screaming hang JD Vance

It's written in stone.

It almost feels like a prophecy that there's going to be a rupture and instability.

I mean, the other problem, though, is, of course, that

tension will work to their favor, won't it?

Because,

you know, again, a lot of the liberal commentariat and elites helped make this guy, and they're still thinking that this man that they

liked in 2016 is still somewhere in there.

And if you're thinking that like people keep, you know, that liberal media will look for a Trump pivot until the cows come home, right?

Like, they're going to wait even longer for J.D.

Vance, right?

I mean, like, any tension within that White House, if they were to return to it,

would be interpreted, or even within the campaign, I think, would be interpreted in terms of like, oh, is Vance now staking out the more centrist ground that Trump sort of,

you know, constitutionally can't occupy?

And like, and of course, that's the thing.

He invites that kind of reading because, you know,

the

newscasters of America do not hang out in the spaces where he clearly gets most of his

talking points and that we have spent some time in.

And we're like, oh, oh, brother, no,

this is not moderation, my friend, you're hearing the boots clacking, you know, but that's not how they're going to see it.

I think that in some way,

that tension, that Oedipal tension is going to make them actually really quite, really quite,

it's going to be really, really difficult for American media to cover that

adequately.

I think also there's a weird

coalitional dynamic in the Republican Party where Vance is associated and has worked hard to associate himself with a kind of economic populist

element in the Republican Party that has been, I wouldn't say dominant now, but is on the ascent for the last few years.

And that shows up in his kind of relationship to antitrust.

Right.

And at least in his symbolic gestures around organized labor, which have very little substance to them.

Right.

But, you know, are enough that like the fucking head of the Teamsters, who just gave his speech at the RNC.

Crazy.

You know, Sean O'Brien,

you know, praised the Vance choice and so on.

And like, there's this great video, which everyone should watch, of Vance turning up at a UAW picket line during the UAW strike last year,

where Marcy Kaptur, who's a kind of longtime, you know, sort of working class old school New Deal Democrat type representative from Northern Ohio.

She's at the picket line already.

And you see in the video, JD Vance walk up and she says, hi, JD.

He says, hi, Marcy.

And she says, first time for first time.

He's like, yeah, they shake hands.

She says, welcome.

Thanks for coming.

It's a very dead plan, you know.

But like, I think that

question about what is the

what kind of alignment is he able to produce between, you know, the Republicans and a kind of, you know, nationalist, chauvinist, kind of populist politics.

I don't know.

I mean, it's scary to me, honestly.

I think it's not impossible that he will find some, although, you know, I mean, well, first of all, like the people at like Compact Magazine are totally exultant over this, right?

They see this as the realization of that program.

And I think it's, they're not totally wrong, too.

I think it's right for us.

I mean, for me, as someone who thinks of myself as a kind of, in the labor left, I feel scared about that possibility.

But I also think there are real structural obstacles to that alignment really developing very far in the Republican Party.

And we know that Rupert Murdoch tried very hard to stop Trump from choosing Vance, which is a kind of reflection of that.

So it'll be interesting.

I think if we see that these tensions emerge, it will be in part around this kind of thing, right?

Like

Republicans who just want to

further deregulate private equity and have taxes for the rich, which is still the predominant thing in the party.

um

versus what vance wants to do which is not straightforwardly populist but is interest you know he's interested in kind kind of weakening one elite in favor of another through populist politics.

And that is likely, I think, to generate some fissures.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think there's an interesting question here in terms of

how far exactly this kind of alignment can go.

But there's also, of course, the related question, which is,

can his insistent moralization of these issues sort of like ultimately,

you know, unions are structural institutions.

They tend to think in structural terms, at least if they're functioning.

I mean, unless they're like police unions or something like that.

But there is

a real,

it would seem to me that there are real limits to his pitch.

But then again, it only has to hold for the next three months for him to be vice president.

But,

you know, I do agree with you that like the kind of realignment that Compact Magazine is kind of

hoping for and anticipating, that seems to me very difficult.

But the problem, like, can he peel off some union voters?

Like, yeah, that's the, that's the other question.

Yeah, well, and, you know, the Democrats, I think, like, Vance is a very good symbol of the total failure of liberal, you know, liberals and Democrats to comprehend the genuine problem of which Vance is a symptom

and to confront it properly.

Right.

Right.

And instead, they used Vance and other symbols like Vance as a way of kind of,

you know, refracting and obscuring that.

So that they, you know, even now that Biden, you know, has taken his own kind of pro-labor turn over the years and whatever, right?

Like it, it doesn't wash that well.

So, you know, I think it's, you know, that in some ways, the electoral question is already that you're raising Adrian.

Like it's already true.

It was true before this year that,

you know, it depends on the industry and the region and so on, but lots of union members voted for Trump.

Right, right.

He won a majority in 2016 of union households.

Is that right?

Yep.

Oh, wow.

The general kind of way of thinking about it is like it's so in the service sector and public sector unions, you know, that's still as democratic as ever.

In the industrial unions, so the autoworkers and steel workers and so on, in 2016 and 20, they more or less split 50-50 between Trump and Clinton and then Biden.

And in the building trades, which are the right wing of the labor movement traditionally, it's more like two-thirds for Trump.

uh and those are different sizes and you know uneven it's a rough clock rough kind of cut um

but it's worth saying also on this advance you know uh said i mean like he said that you know unions are good for some workers and some things but you know not all like he he is very kind of

interestingly on the record about you know the idea that there are kind of good parts of the working class and bad parts of the working class right good kinds of workers organization and bad kinds of workers organization which is exactly in keeping with this idea that like what he's really interested in is a rival elite which is able to partner with some kinds of organized labor labor, but not with an actually strong working class, right?

What he wants is a very managed from above

form of, you know, partial redistribution.

And he's pretty explicit about that.

Along racial lines, I'm imagining.

Yeah.

That's a subtext.

Well, industries are racialized, right?

Like, I mean, like these, the three buckets that Gabe just outlined, right?

Like

service sector unions are, I'm going to guess,

not exactly the whitest organizations on the planet.

Right.

I mean, like, the, you know, obviously these industries are not as segregated as they used to be.

And, you know, I don't think the form of Vance's racism is like a, you know, old-fashioned Jim Crow, right?

It's a, it's a newer thing than that.

So like, you know, he's happy, I think, to,

you know, build an alliance, if he can, with the Teamsters, right, who are certainly not an all-white organization.

But it's an alliance on the basis of like hostility to immigration, right?

Which has obviously a kind of racist politics to it, as we were talking about, and about the recuperation of a kind of single breadwinner model,

which has a Texas politics, obviously, that is really central to who he is.

And,

you know, in general, like he, you know, he said this thing,

he's on the record in terms of labor policy as supporting

what's called sectoral bargaining.

Now, there is actually sectoral bargaining legislation that he does not support.

So maybe this is just fake, like lots of stuff with him.

But what he says about it is, like, yeah, we should have a model like this that they have in Europe.

And this is a kind of traditional form, in fact, in Europe, of like

state management of income to different classes, right, through a form of collective bargaining that's very heavily overseen by the state and doesn't often involve a lot of actual workers' initiative.

And I think this is really the key with all of this right-wing populist stuff.

Like,

for

reasons of being interested in

recuperating recuperating a certain kind of male breadwinner you know national citizen putatively white uh kind of figure right they're potentially interested in some kinds of workers power and redistribution and so on within within limits but the limits have to be really sharply drawn because what you don't want is like workers taking initiative reinventing their situations, building their own organizations that are independent and accountable to them.

Because in that process,

all those kinds of social boundaries start to break down

around race and around gender and around citizenship and so on.

In historical moments where that kind of initiative is coming up from below in the working class, like you see that really clearly.

And so, like, J.D.

Vance wants to give the working class a handout, right?

Like, he wants to,

not in the kind of pejorative sense that conservatives use that about welfare, but rather in the sense that like he wants the government to aid and protect certain kinds of workers under certain circumstances in a tightly controlled way.

That might be a good place to wrap up.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Gabe.

That was really amazing.

I mean, it's a great piece, and I really encourage people to read it in full.

But yeah, it was great talking with you through this and,

you know, elucidating this particular

side stream of our long and meandering national nightmare.

Thanks for anthony.

We've been talking to University of Chicago professor, labor historian, and absolute mensch, Gabe Winant.

Thank you for listening.

In Bedwith Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lau.