J.D. Vance Puts the Con in Conservatism

J.D. Vance once feared that Donald Trump might become “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s Trump’s running mate. But never mind that history. Trump and Vance have a lot of things, including this, in common: They’re both con men who despise their most avid supporters.

Indeed, Vance, despite stiff competition, may be the most cynical major figure in modern American politics. You never know whether Trump believes the false things he says; Vance is smart enough to know that he has pulled off a monumental political bait-and-switch.

And if the Trump-Vance ticket wins, there’s a fairly good chance that, given Trump’s evident lack of interest in the details of policy and — yes — his age, Vance will, one way or another, end up running the country.

So, about that con: Vance, now the junior senator from Ohio, talks a lot about his hardscrabble roots. But people should read what he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” which shows startling contempt for the people he grew up with but who, unlike him, didn’t escape small-town poverty. And people should also be aware that while his convention speech on Wednesday denounced “Wall Street barons,” his rise has to a large extent been orchestrated by a group of tech billionaires; he’s a protégé of Peter Thiel.

“Hillbilly Elegy” was part personal memoir, part social commentary and, to be fair, it responded to a real issue. Over the past couple of generations, something has gone very wrong in much of rural and small-town America. There has been a sharp rise in the fraction of men in their prime working years without jobs, notably in the eastern part of the American heartland. Social problems have proliferated; as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented, there has been a surge in “deaths of despair,” which they defined as deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide.

What happened? I’d focus on changes in the economy that undermined many small towns’ reason for being, a process that began during the Reagan years and isn’t unique to our country. This loss of economic opportunity led, in turn, to social dysfunction — echoing the earlier rise in social dysfunction in America’s cities when blue-collar urban jobs disappeared.