Deluded: JD Vance has lurched to the hard right since the publication of his autobiography. Photo: White House
In Hillbilly Elegy, the best-selling memoir of 2016, JD Vance generally comes across as the sensible victim of want and domestic breakdown.
Vance calls himself a conservative. But he also excoriates the right-wing conspiracy-mongers flooding the internet with claims, for example, that Barack Obama is a foreigner out to destroy America, his government engineered a massacre to promote gun control and “everything the media tells us is a lie”.
“This is deep scepticism of the very institutions of our country. And it’s becoming more mainstream,” he laments.
Vance’s fond description of his student “family” at the Yale Law School points to his embrace of multicultural diversity.
It includes a black Canadian “with decades of street smarts”, an aspiring civil rights attorney, the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants (perhaps his wife, Usha), and an “extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humour”.
A friend at Yale, Josh McLaurin, describes an exchange in which Vance called Donald Trump “an idiot” and could not decide whether he was “a cynical asshole” or “the American Hitler”.
Is this really the current US vice-president? Since his elevation to the Senate in 2016, for which he sought Trump’s endorsement, Vance has been the darling of the Make America Great Again (Maga) right and a highly biddable Trump loyalist.
There is no chink in his far-right space-suit.
An anti-globalist who scorns DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) as a “destructive ideology”, he wants a national abortion ban and the militarisation of schools in place of further gun controls.
His foreign policy outlook amounts to “America first — except for Israel”, which he believes deserves unlimited US support.
Last year he urged president Joe Biden to deny immigration protections to Palestinians, “a population of potentially radicalised individuals”.
His hatred of Vlodymyr Zelenskiy was unmistakable at last week’s media circus, and he allegedly told an intimate he couldn’t care what happened to Ukraine — including, presumably, the millions exiled by Vladimir Putin’s missiles.
He lauds Trump as the “best president in deterring Russia in a generation”. (On February 24, after Trump took office, a record 276 drones fell on Ukraine in a single night.)
The recent security conference in Munich, where he addressed European leaders, starkly showcased Vance’s hostility to moderate Europe and sympathy for Putin’s military dictatorship.
In an 18-minute tirade, he accused European leaders of retreating from democratic fundamentals, including free speech, and warned they could no longer depend on US backing.
The speech was remarkable for its hypocritical self-righteousness — a fault of the Appalachian poor Vance’s book lambasts — ignorance of modern Europe and generous smattering of falsehoods and half-truths.
Ignoring the Ukraine war, he described immigration as Europe’s greatest crisis. In fact, illegal arrivals over the past decade — about 1.5 million, or 0.3% of the European population — are heavily outweighed by 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees.
Peaking at one million in 2015, the illegal influx fell steadily to about 210 000 last year (according to European Union statistics).
He suggested power hunger drives mainstream politicians who refuse to co-operate with Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), seen as having neo-Nazi leanings.
In this, and in paying court to AfD leader Alice Weidel, he showed no understanding of Germany’s decades-long de-Nazification programme.
The free speech charge is particularly ironic given Trump’s barrage of threats, brickbats and lawsuits against the “fake news media” and handpicking of members of the White House press pool.
During the election run-up, Vance played the organ-grinder’s monkey, encouraging supporters to boo journalists and branding the media “biased”.
In Munich, he falsely alleged Scotland may have outlawed silent prayer at home in measures to shield abortion-seekers. His inflammatory claim that Haitian migrants were devouring pets (which Trump has echoed) turned out to be baseless.
He has also offered the ludicrous canard that the United Kingdom could become the world’s first Islamist state with nukes.
What happened to the author of Hillbilly Elegy? In his rightward lurch it is hard not to see the influence of his pauperised childhood, which the book sketches in alarming detail.
As one of two Ohio fugitives at the Yale school, Vance was poor and surrounded by privilege — he tells of holding down two jobs and a full-time class load.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that he seems unusually open to the blandishments of wealth, and particularly the Trump-supporting moneybags who surfaced during his first term in historically liberal Silicon Valley.
Vance describes as “the most significant moment of his life” a speech at Yale in 2011 by the world’s 101st-richest man — the $16 billion-worth PayPal founder Peter Thiel.
With an eye for budding prospects and a taste for accumulating political power, Thiel is a Trumpite who funded pro-Trump groups before the 2016 election, when few corporations would touch him.
He reportedly escorted Vance to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to iron out past differences.
As his financial mentor, Thiel invited Vance to join his venture capital firm, Mithril, (a Tolkien reference; he is a fan) as a partner in 2016.
A colleague is reported as saying he did not see him in the office for a year.
Thiel and other bloated Godzillas of the microchip such as David Sacks (net worth $200 million), Marc Andreessen ($1.8 billion), and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt (wait for it — $24 billion) then reportedly backed him in launching his own venture capital outfit, Narya.
He has become very rich very quickly, with an estimated $10 million fortune in investments, royalties, Bitcoin and a sumptuous real estate portfolio. Other than a bond on a Washington townhouse, he is reportedly debt-free.
In 2016, Thiel bankrolled his republican Senate run with the largest ever donation to a single candidate — $15 million — while campaign advertising went to a tax-exempt political action committee Thiel supported.
Thiel’s influence showed in other ways — for example, through their joint investment in Rumble, YouTube’s right-leaning rival.
Impressed by his links with the West Coast tech elite and keen parroting of the Maga priorities reshaping US conservatism, Trump named him as his running mate in mid-2024.
It was a profitable coup: after a 35% raise, Vice-President Vance earns $235 000 a year.
In a party not renowned for its high median IQ, Trump may also have wanted to enlist his gloss of intelligence.
Vance is a Catholic convert who admires St Augustine. He says he was drawn to Thiel, a “heterodox” Christian, because the latter disproved the notion that Christians are dumb and atheists clever.
Thiel’s conservatism is a complex — even incoherent — interweaving of libertarian and authoritarian beliefs.
A free-speech fundamentalist, he unexpectedly handed the Committee for the Protection of Journalists a “substantial” cheque. But he also threw $10 million at third-party privacy invasion suits against the irreverent blog Gawker for “outing” him as gay, forcing it to close.
Thiel has termed votes for women “unfortunate”. The son of German immigrants with South African links, he is ardently anti-immigration.
He has written that he considers democracy and freedom incompatible. His hobbyhorses of space colonisation and formerly “seasteading” — permanent settlements in international waters — are about putting him and fellow plutocrats beyond the reach of governments and taxes.
As with the world’s premier plutocrat, Elon Musk, Thiel’s governance model is the private corporation.
He is influenced by “neo-reactionary” Curtis Yarvin, who argues that the “failed” US democracy should make way for “an accountable monarchy” along corporate lines. Author Max Chafkin talks of Thiel’s longing for a stronger executive.
“There’s got to be a tendency for any candidate who wants money to move towards his politics,” Chafkin observes.
In line with this, Vance, the reputed owner of $500 000 in cryptocurrency, has become a loud promoter of Bitcoin.
This is of little interest to the working stiffs he claims to champion. But Chafkin remarks that it “matters a lot” to the libertarian/tech and rightwing community, which applauds Bitcoin’s decentralised character.
Vance fancies himself as a conservative Catholic intellectual in the mould of William Buckley, but has very few ideas of his own.
Perhaps because his father, indeed, his surname, changed constantly during his childhood with his mother’s dalliances, he seems subservient to his political and financial patrons and bereft of independent thinking.
For example, he has endorsed the mindless, internet-driven myth of Biden’s theft of the 2020 election.
He is also hung up on the need for gratitude to the US, saying this was the lesson of a cheap eraser (rubber) he gave to a delighted Iraqi boy during his military service.
Why should Zelenskiy thank the US for military aid, as Vance demanded at last week’s media circus? In global matters, it looks after only its strategic interests.
Vance puts a Yale-educated, high-sounding patina on the fanatical prejudices of the American ultra-right. And his mind follows the money…
Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.