By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, July 19, 2024
You knew J.D. Vance was going to make
it all about Mamaw.
America is a funny old place. Not many people know J.D.
Vance’s grandmother, the person. A lot of them know Mamaw the literary
character, and a whole lot more know Mamaw the movie character, played by Glenn
Close. In his convention speech, vice presidential nominee Vance credited his
success in life to his Mamaw. That was smart: J.D. is about the
fourth-most-interesting character in Hillbilly Elegy, and Mamaw is the
crowd-pleaser. As the noted philosopher Darrell Royal once said, “You’ve gotta
dance with them what brung ya.”
There is a problem with Vance’s odd political and social
position. He wants to talk about how America doesn’t work, but he personifies
how beautifully it does work. One of the things America is awfully good at is
locating bright, intellectually inclined young people in modest circumstances
and helping them along. Terrible, dysfunctional families can make that a lot
harder—I know whereof I write—but three cheers for our institutions of higher
education and our ruthlessly efficient labor market.
The first time I encountered Vance was on a sidewalk
outside of San Francisco City Hall, of all places, and we were both wearing
tuxedos. It was the ceremony for the William F. Buckley Prize, and Vance, at
the time, was something not unlike a Buckley conservative. It was a
hillbilly-flatbilly summit, of a sort. I’d been writing about
lower-class, mainly white dysfunction for a few years at that point, and
Vance had just published his famous book, which
I had reviewed in Commentary. I admired his work tremendously—and,
naturally, envied him some, too. We had a good conversation.
Watching his descent into … whatever it is he has become
… has been dispiriting. Have you ever had an acquaintance, someone you see only
infrequently, who had a terrible problem with addiction or some sickness, and
every time you saw them they were noticeably worse? I see Vance only in the
news, but that is kind of what it is like. Or like visiting your hometown every
few years and seeing it decline.
Declining hometowns are a theme of Vance’s. It’s mostly
bulls—t, of course. What’s true of much of Appalachia is true of much of the
Rust Belt: Nothing
happened to those communities. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because
of NAFTA or the WTO—it was poor when Andrew Jackson was president, and it has
been poor since.
Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps
equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what
poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got
out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of
American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law
school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the
ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a
job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic
connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational
corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose
clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he
himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town
hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter
Thiel scratches
him behind the ear.
One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a
little.
It is good to have a Mamaw. I could have used one myself.
I was lucky to grow up in a college town, which meant that I had friends with
parents who were professors and other educated professionals, who gave me some
of the direction I did not get at home. But Vance isn’t running for Papaw. He
is running for vice president, the No. 2 executive officer of the U.S.
government, the job of which is entirely different from the job of Mamaw,
worthy as the latter profession may be. What troubled Vance’s family was not a
poor economy or lack of economic opportunity—as I noted in my review, his
supposedly hardscrabble family had a household income in excess of $100,000 a
year, at times—and it was not public policy, either. He was raised by low and
incompetent people, who, like the poor, we will always have with us. What young
J.D. needed most were things that the state cannot provide.
What the state can provide are analgesics, in the form of
welfare payments and other benefits that lighten the burden of dysfunction. And
what politics can provide is another analgesic, one that is even more powerful:
someone to blame. But, like all analgesics, that only treats the symptoms.
There was a time when J.D. Vance knew that.
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