J.D. Vance’s surprising win in the Ohio Republican primaries signals a possible sea change in the American political landscape. It indicates the strengthening and viability of a political voice that has consistently been on the losing and disregarded side since the Bill Clinton years and the de-industrialisation of the U.S. – that of working class Americans.
These are the ordinary people Hilary Clinton called deplorable and who Joe Biden contemptuously calls chumps and clingers. They have felt, not just the casual contempt of the Democrats, but indifference and neglect from many of the pre-Trump Republicans.
They have been completely abandoned by the elites in favour of shiny new “progressive values”- issues that affect the social cohesion of society: such as jobs, family, and culture, and America’s endless foreign wars – and they are making themselves heard at the ballot.
Vance is not the only one talking directly to working class and middle class Americans on populist issues.
There are more of these candidates in other states, such as Blake Masters in Arizona who says: “that in America you should be able to afford to raise a family on one single income”, and who criticized the Roe v Wade judgement in December last year before the Supreme Court decided to review it.
You should be able to raise a family on one single income. pic.twitter.com/oiq8E5LmBc
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) October 28, 2021
“We gotta get back to not killing babies…. Because life is always worth protecting” he said in a short video, hitching his political vision to the most crucial moral question of the age
Kanye was right. We need to get back to not killing babies. That starts with overturning Roe. pic.twitter.com/eUi5AKXDc6
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) December 2, 2021
These and others such as Barnette in Pennsylvania and Joe Kent in Washington State are eloquently and unapologetically bucking the establishment insider political narrative. Is this a sign of a global trend? Can an Irish political alternative learn from this?
In legal circles they say “the gentlemen of the bar protect the gentlemen of the bar” and the same is true of the institutions of politics. So, when an outsider comes in and threatens to upend the institutional system with all its institutional protectionism and special interests – especially with a populist message – the elite as a whole join together and turns all their ire on them.
In the circles of the American political elite, J.D. Vance is an outsider who doesn’t care much for the issues that those elites obsess over (such as the support for foreign wars and woke identity politics), and so is a threat to the system itself, which he has vociferously decried as a kleptocracy.
In startling ways he points out that the ruling elite have nothing in common with the people they rule. Childless people are making policy that will affect your children and they will not suffer the consequences – why is this, he asked.
“Kamala Harris; Mayor Pete Buttigieg; who’s now the secretary of transportation; Cory Booker; AOC… What is the one thing that unites every single one of them? Not a single one of them has any children.
“Why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life? That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”
Such thoughts are, you would expect, totally taboo in polite circles. Certainly in Washington’s rarefied circles, where abortion is hysterically protected and foreign bloody wars are assigned massive budgets which circle back into accounts of donors and lobbyists, such speech is considered aesthetically offensive, and certainly “not inclusive”.
Vance isn’t saying that people who don’t have children shouldn’t be part of politics, that would be ludicrous. He’s saying that it seems to be a trend that people who don’t have children now decide what your children should learn and think – and what future they might have. And he is saying that the political establishment has failed families.
“If nothing else we should be about healthy, stable families” he said.
Incidentally, this is absolutely true of Ireland also. It struck me last October outside Dail Éireann during a rally about the abortion review that Carol Nolan TD was absolutely right when she pointed out that “no party in that building (pointing at the Dáil) has ever done anything for families”.
How true – and strange to hear – this is. This statement sounded so strange because it has long been an accepted norm that Irish legislators would never do anything to encourage “healthy stable families” in Ireland. Policies such as tax individualisation have now been in place for 20 years or more, and back in the 1980s, Mary Robinson was representing the government in court defending policies which limited tax allowances for married families.
Vance laid out his critique of the political class and their values and policies as being anti-family, anti-worker and ruining the lives and culture of middle America.
He asked why American families should care about a war in the middle of Europe when thousands of them were dying from drug overdoses every year and their societies were being eroded to nothing while their jobs were being shipped to China? He argued that all this was being done to profit the elite investor class and corrupt media complex who then lectured ordinary people about how awful they are.
The response to Vance went through the three classical stages described by the Indian nationalist, Mahatma Ghandi: first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they attack you. Vance had a massive target on his back and the corporate media as well as the political establishment lined up to take him out.
However, not for the first time the elites and the corporate media misread the public sentiment by a mile. Here is a small sample of elite opinion setters getting it completely wrong.
Gabe Kaminsky on Twitter: “”Vance is imploding,
"Vance is imploding," — @BulwarkOnline
"Apathy toward Ukraine is backfiring," @NYMag
"and it's likely [Vance] will lose," @RadioFreeTom pic.twitter.com/YpEt8TGpew— Gabe Kaminsky (@gekaminsky) May 5, 2022
Despite all this, and the opinion amongst the managerial elites that Vance’s populist platform wouldn’t get an audience, his message struck a chord with the disenfranchised community he talked about. It turns out that the opioid epidemic and the fentanyl epidemic pouring across the southern US border, do concern the communities of the Midwest who are most impacted by these gross and enervating problems.
It turns out that these communities are dissatisfied about their jobs – and the social fulfilment they bring – being shifted to China and other low cost economies purely for the benefit of political donors. Vance said, quite fearlessly, to the beleaguered people of Ohio that the political class serve their donors not you.
Vance’s only problem was getting heard. He couldn’t be ignored by the establishment because ordinary people took notice of him when they heard him. The more people heard him speak the more strongly they felt about him. Some felt unfavourably towards him, its true, but much more felt strongly favourable. Between April and October 2021 his very favourable measure rose from 7 to 15% while his very unfavourable measure rose from 2 – 4%. His name recognition in the same period rose from 42% to 61%. It seems the more people hear of him the more his message wins.
New OH-SEN poll by pro-JD Vance super PAC shows Vance closing the gap with Josh Mandel to within 3. Poll conducted by Tony Fabrizio pic.twitter.com/bOpCeFcPAu
— Alex Isenstadt (@politicoalex) October 21, 2021
Even when he was a relative minnow with around 6% support amongst GOP voters and very low recognition, the establishment seemed to recognise the danger of his presence and went on the attack. As there is a large overlap between populism and the MAGA sentiment, attack adverts from within the GOP tried to wedge between him and that populist voter base, targeting a perceived allegiance to a Trump personality cult amongst his supporters.
But you can’t deny Vance’s common appeal. He hits back at his attackers’ position on all the neo-con globalist issues using very relatable working class language. Three weeks ahead of the primary, Trump both endorsed and campaigned for Vance. He was described by Vanity Fair as a leading light in the ‘New Right’ – “a movement made up of young nationalists with a disdain for a dystopian world created by the Big Tech, free trade, and hawkish foreign policies that defined the pre-Trump Republican Party” – which is also being backed by billionaire Peter Thiel.
Vance has shown he is unafraid to go against all the major media narratives. Even before the Kyle Rittenhouse trial began, Vance was criticizing the whitewashing and lies carried out by the media and legal establishment against the kid.
The prosecution of Rittenhouse is a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/VS2DhcLXn8
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) November 10, 2021
He was one of the very few voices who called it out for the trial-by-media ‘stitch-up’ that it was, or who was willing to defend Rittenhouse’s right to justice.
Vance’s determination not to compromise, and to write his own rules, has paid off so far. He went from being an odd novelist with a quirky bestselling book, to being a critic of the elite institutions and their globalist rulers.
He moved from a position of a pet hillbilly within the Ivy league (a sort of quota filler from the single parent drug addict identity group) to a position of an informed critic with an insider’s knowledge of the system and its values. He rejects these outright, and has sided with the “deplorable and the clingers” – the American families and communities under assault from the coastal elites. It can’t be denied that there there was a demographic crying out for his voice.
What the elites have found out since 2020 is that the populist sentiment is much more than Trump.
Trump had the marketing savvy to attack the corporate press and identify them in the eyes of ordinary Americas as being dishonest, even enemies of the people. But as author Michael Malice says, Trump was the dam not the river.
The clear-visioned message and systematic governing approach of Florida’s Ron De Santis is the future of a populist backlash against the corporate assault on American workers and families. Vance could well be getting ready to take his senate seat by November.
He hasn’t pulled back on his aggressive campaigning style since getting the nomination and has sharply criticized his Democrat opponent, Tim Ryan, who he is not shy of blaming for the misfortunes of Americans.
.@JDVance1: "I'd love for Joe Biden to come and campaign with Tim Ryan."
"It highlights, again, how much that agenda has failed normal people in this country." pic.twitter.com/i6i0ITifEO
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) May 6, 2022
The gloves are off. Vance says he is not interested in losing gracefully and selling out his constituents whenever they get in. This could be the beginning of a radical transformation.