Right and Left Are Wrong about J. D. Vance

By Neal B. Freeman

Friday, July 26, 2024

 

You have probably read, more than a few times, this consensus Beltway story: Trump is seeking to entrench MAGA as the governing force in his new Republican Party, and he picked J. D. Vance to carry forward that legacy.

 

Put aside for a moment the surface problems. There is nothing in the public record to suggest that Trump does long-range planning. His time horizon seems to stretch out to, oh, early September. Nor does Trump do political philosophy. He governs spontaneously, proudly unrestrained by the dead hands of practice and precedent.

 

The fundamental problem with the story concerns J. D. Vance. He cannot be relied upon to carry forward the MAGA legacy because he is not yet wedded to it himself.

 

The story of his adult life begins at Yale Law School. He’s older than many of his classmates, but he’s already well behind them, both academically and socially. He has spent the previous seven years in the U.S. Marines and, for college, at Ohio State. That is invaluable experience, all of it, but less than comprehensive preparation for a high-pressure academic face-off.

 

Vance is inspired by a fellow student, Usha Chilukuri, who is better prepared for the challenge they face. She has spent the previous six years excelling, first at Yale College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, and then at Cambridge University, where she earned a graduate degree. (Usha Chilikuri is a caricature of the high-performing, second-generation Indian American. She later becomes an editor of the Yale Law Journal, then clerks at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and at the U.S. Supreme Court before becoming a litigator with the top-tier law firm, Munger, Tolles and Olson, founded by Warren Buffett’s business partner, Charles Munger. All this while having three children in five years with her new husband, J. D. Vance.)

 

By all accounts, Usha provided critical help to Vance as he tried to navigate the murky waters of that most elite of Ivy League institutions. When they became a couple, and then married, it was clear to their friends that Usha would be the brains in the family.

 

Does this story remind you, mutatis mutandis, of those earlier Yale Law School classmates, Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton? It should. Hillary was raised in an affluent Chicago suburb and graduated from one of the Seven Sisters, Wellesley College. Bill was the boy from Hope, Ark., and it showed. Both academically and socially, Hillary wore the pants in the new family then forming.

 

But there was something else, beyond their superstar wives, that Bill Clinton and J. D. Vance had in common. They were both sons of an alcoholic parent.

 

What that meant was that, after years of dark and dangerous practice, they had learned how to read a room. They could sense tension building — and knew how to defuse it. They could anticipate assaults, both physical and rhetorical — and be quick to deflect them. They became good on their feet, glib and likeable. What they gave away in terms of academic achievement, they more than made up for in street smarts. They both had rizz, if you like. Some people just called them bullsh** artists.

 

Bill Clinton went on to a dazzling political career, at least in part because he never became a finished man of settled views. (He ran for the White House as a moderate liberal, but then declared that “the era of big government is over.” He twice turned in a budget surplus, something that no Republican from Eisenhower through Trump had managed to do even once.)

 

Vance married Usha in 2014. In the ten years since, he has been a lawyer, an author, an investment manager, and a politician, first as a self-described Never Trumper and now as a more-or-less Always Trumper. His legal career was brief and forgettable; his fund-managing career was brief and only marginally profitable. (His most recent financial disclosure pegs his net worth at $7 million, most of it, presumably, the fruit of his bestselling book-cum-movie, Hillbilly Elegy, and Usha’s lucrative years at Munger Tolles.) Vance, manifestly, is not a man of settled views. After a slow and difficult start in life, he is at 39 just now becoming a fully formed adult.

 

J. D. Vance, along with the rest of us, now faces the question the answer to which will define our generation’s legacy to the next. It is neither ideological nor cultural. It is a question of temperament and outlook. It is this: When you look at the American economy, which is the envy of the world, what do you see? Do you see success? Or do you see greed?