Date July 15, 2024 Add Article added Download PDF Share
J.D. Vance is a Republican senator from Ohio elected in the November 2022 midterm elections. Born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, to a working-class family, he grew up in Appalachia between his home state and Kentucky. At age 18, a few months following the September 11 attacks, he enlisted in the Marine Corps before being deployed to Iraq during the 2003 war, where he served as a combat correspondent with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.
Upon his return to the United States, he began graduate studies and graduated in political science and philosophy from Ohio State University. He then attended Yale Law School, where he received a Juris Doctor degree in 2013. After working in a law firm, in 2016 he joined Mithril Capital Management, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, an American billionaire who has financially supported the campaigns of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates.
He later joined the investment firm Revolution, co-founded by Steve Case, and in 2019 created his own venture capital firm, Narya Capita, alongside Colin Greenspon and Falon Donohue. It was not until 2021 that Vance decided to enter politics and run for the seat vacated by former Republican Senator Rob Portman. He was elected with 53.04% of the vote once morest Democratic candidate Tim Ryan, in a formerly purple state that had become firmly Republican in recent years.
Although he had a dazzling and successful career, this is the book retracing his life, Hillbilly Elegy : A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisispublished in 2016, which launched Vance’s career and made him one of the most prominent political figures in the Republican Party. Hillbilly Elegythe senator and running mate of Donald Trump, paints a portrait of an America in decline, characterized by poverty, drugs, violence and the chronic misery of small towns in the rust belt.
His story also praises the Appalachian values passed down through his family. Although largely idle, sometimes dependent on welfare to survive, Vance repeatedly refers to the pride, solidarity, and sense of work and family of the people of Middletown and Appalachia. Vance’s argument is not simply to denounce the ravages of deindustrialization, but also to what he describes as the causes of the poverty in which he grew up: the American political class’s disinterest in the America below, the white working class neglected by successive administrations — both Democrats and Republicans.
In the 2016 presidential election, Vance was one of 730,000 Americans who voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin, rather than choosing between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Vance scorned Clinton and Obama for their condescension toward the white working class and rejects Trump for his populism and the emptiness of his program. In an interview with Charlie Rose Following the publication of his memoirs, Vance claimed to be a ” never Trump guy “He also distances himself from Trump’s use of fear to attract voters and worries regarding its negative influence on the political debate in The American Conservative.
For years, Vance rejected the Republican Party’s new messianic figure. The American media today likes to recall the many insults publicly hurled at Trump: “unfit” to govern, “crook”, “idiot”, a potential “American Hitler”… Such a history might have ended Vance’s career within the Republican Party if Trump did not have a taste for repentance and forgiveness. In 2021, when the former president did not benefit from his current aura within the GOP, Vance publicly declared that he had “been wrong regarding Trump” and multiplied his expressions of remorse on television sets. He finally won the support of Donald Trump in the GOP primary for the Senate election in Ohio in the spring of 2022.
Since arriving on Capitol Hill in January 2023, Vance, then only 38 years old (in a chamber where the average age was then over 65), has emerged as one of the leading figures of the Republican “new right” that is set to supplant the Senate rearguard, embodied by figures such as Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He is one of those Republicans who are helping to transform Trumpist diatribe into doctrine: on Ukraine in particular, as in his speech when the additional aid package was voted on in April, but also on immigration, the economy, and trade.
Outside of Congress, Vance has also managed to get himself co-opted by the major figures of the MAGA movement: Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., have worked in the shadows to advocate for him. Trump’s choice reflects a rejection of this rearguard that Mike Pence was the product of in 2016, and at the same time marks a now-assumed shift towards a more nationalist, populist right, resolutely turned towards traditionalist values.
