In J.D. Vance, Trump Picks the Perfect Butcher Boy as Vice President

In the Summer of 2016, J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was vomited into the world. Nearly every page and sentence vibrated with the type of conservative worldview designed to dehumanize people, creating a wretched portrait of the poor in which they deserved every bad thing they had coming. Vance even took his own family and presented them as an example of dysfunction in Middle America. Around them, communities were too busy swigging Mountain Dew and getting addicted to opioids to make their lives better. After hundreds of pages of turning his back on his people, Vance emerged a boostrap hero, proving if you tried hard enough, if you just put down the soda and picked up a book, you too could get an Ivy League education and join the Wealth Class.

The book would have been successful regardless. It’s standard American fare, the kind of thing the Middle and Wealth Class can’t get enough of. As America struggled into obvious decline, it was the type of tome that reassured people the meritocracy actually worked in sorting the good from the bad, the deserving from the deplorable. It would have sold a ton of copies, undoubtedly. But it answered a vital need.

Vance was welcomed onto every network and show you could imagine. The rise of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee necessitated it. Anchors and media types living their cloistered lives in New York City and Washington, D.C. wanted to understand exactly what all those jug- hooting rednecks in Nowhereville were up to. How could they possibly identify with a billionaire real-estate fraudster- turned- nascent -demagogue?

What Vance sold alongside his book was exactly what the elites wanted to hear. A reassurance that the people were stupid and beyond help. They were determined to destroy themselves. If they were given so much as a solitary penny, they’d hurt themselves with it and only make their situations worse. His segments usually ended with some media elite shaking their head and thanking him for his invaluable insight, like Jane Goodall had guested to share some clips of her favorite tribe of chimpanzees.

I blame Vance more than I blame the anchors. The latter don’t know any better. The bubbles they’ve lived in are almost impenetrable. To move outside of them, in any reasonable way, would be akin to Siddhartha taking a stroll among the beggars. Vance knew what he was doing and he did it all the way to the bank. His people, his family, the fates of living human beings, they all didn’t matter to him.

And now we find ourselves one election and a heartbeat away from Vance becoming the most powerful person in the world. Holy shit.

I have been loudly critical of Vance for years. His people are my people and I loathe him for what he did. I recognized, very quickly, that this man would happily hurt anyone he had to in order to profit or gain power. And so, when he threw his hat in the senatorial race in Ohio in 2022, I was less than surprised to find that he had partnered with fascist Peter Thiel and was pressing for the evolution of the Republican Party into a new and gleeful engine for techno-feudalism.

You’re going to hear a lot that Vance openly criticized Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter. Vance would happily hurt his own mother to gain more power. You can read about it and catch Ron Howard’s adaptation and its gruesome 25 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score if you don’t believe me. The majority of Vance’s “principles” are as malleable as his loyalty and disloyalties. What matters is what he has done with his ill-gotten power, and that is to push for democracy’s destruction.

This isn’t hyperbole. Vance is the vanguard of the generational shift within the Republican Party that was primarily neoliberal and libertarian, focused on tax cuts for the wealthy, and more than happy to dabble with white, patriarchal supremacy. Vance, like Thiel’s other puppet candidates, is happy to be a vessel in handing power over to tech oligarchs in exchange for control of the internet and social media so they can push ideological conformity on the populace, representing the perfectly twisted marriage of techno-oppression and the Far Right. He has joyfully spread White Replacement Theory. His “pro-family” talking points are like missives from a dystopic dimension in which women are reduced to breeding mares, the progress of the 20th century has been erased, family patriarchs wield multiple votes on behalf of every member of their brood, and God knows what else.

This is many measures beyond Mitch McConnell and Bob Dole. We are watching the next step in the evolution of the GOP skulk ahead of the pack and, make no doubt about it, Vance intends to use every ounce of power he’s given. For years now, these new Republicans, including Missouri’s proud Christian Nationalist Josh Hawley, have been pushing a hybrid ideology that targets neoliberal capitalism and dominance by corporations in a way that Leftists like myself ostensibly agree with, all while offering some of the most neo-fascist solutions you could ever imagine. It is steeped in hypermasculinity and an aggressive, muscular state that wields incredible power based on Christian and “traditional” values. It would control markets and culture.

And as a Marine, Vance’s experience brings one of the missing components of the MAGA Movement’s extremism – militarism – to the table.

I fully expect, should Trump and Vance win in November, that Vance will become the heir apparent to leadership of the MAGA Movement. Mike Pence, as Trump’s VP, was never a danger in that way. Some worried Ron DeSantis might be the successor, but MAGA wasn’t particularly interested in a forceful executive. They wanted the anger and theatrics and out and out cravenness that Trump provided them in spades.

Vance can do that, and so much more. His ruthlessness is remarkable and only eclipsed by his shamelessness. His is truly a Horatio Alger story, only if a poor boy from the Midwest gained his fortune slicing his family up like so much meat and then got an invitation to dinner from the Wealth Class. He is a good little butcher boy, and he has been sharpening his knife for a very, very long time.