Donald Trump’s decision to pick JD Vance as his running mate is a clear sign that the former president is determined to re-harness the populist and working-class energy that propelled his first campaign in 2016. The immediate task is to present that agenda in a winsome way to the country. In crucial ways, Vance has already demonstrated that he’s up to it, and it helps that the other side is in disarray following Joe Biden’s precipitous decline.
Should the Trump-Vance 2024 ticket win – and polls indicate they will – the deeper challenge will be preserving that energy in office come January 2025. They will need to prevent the forces of the status quo from re-channeling that momentum into familiar Republican grooves, such as with mindless corporate tax cuts – as all too often happened during Trump’s first term.
Trump could have tapped a more conventional nominee to please the Republican party’s plutocratic and hawkish donor class — or even one of the plutocrats themselves, like the gazillionaire North Dakota governor Doug Burgum. Instead, he settled on Vance, a figure who has already won the disdain of the keepers of Reaganite orthodoxy with his forays into domestic populism and emphasis on foreign-policy restraint.
The 39-year-old freshman senator from Ohio came to prominence with Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling 2016 memoir about growing up amid the poverty and instability that have wracked working-class Americans over the past two generations. The book became a go-to guide for liberal media seeking to understand the sentiments that had driven a shocking proportion of working-class and union households to back Trump, often after having voted twice for Barack Obama.
Soon, liberals’ earnest curiosity about the disaffected white working class gave way to “defend-our-democracy” hysteria and four years of lawfare attempts to undo the outcome of 2016 that followed. Vance, who had initially positioned himself as a “Never Trumper,” set his eyes on high office and became more Trump-y in the bargain. No doubt, his anti-Trump statements will now supply grist for the Biden electoral mill, such as it is. But that would have happened with any number of other veep picks as well.
In the event, Vance’s populist shift took hold. The Vance of 2016 ended his memoir preaching a classic middle-class message of self-help for the people he’d left behind in Appalachia. By 2020, however, he had converted to Roman Catholicism, and would cite the Church’s social teaching in talking about the structural causes of poverty and dysfunction, not least the destruction of dignified industrial jobs under free-trade neoliberalism.
Aiming for a Senate seat from the Buckeye state, he ran both a Trump-y campaign and a Trump-y Twitter feed that jarred with the thoughtful persona familiar to those who know him. But on that count, too, he was far from alone. Adopting the Trumpian style is par for the course of most Republican politics post-2016, for good and ill. More notable, perhaps, is the bipartisanship that has characterised his tenure in the upper chamber since then.
Last year, for example, after a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, revealed the dangers associated with under-regulation of the train industry, Vance signed a letter with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida that blamed the neoliberal, just-in-time model of “hyper-efficiency”. Later, Vance drafted reform legislation alongside the Democratic senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown, that was held up by Chamber of Commerce Republicans in the Senate. Likewise, in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Vance teamed up with arch-progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to craft a bill that would claw back executive compensation at banks that end up being bailed out by taxpayers.
Left-wing critics of Vance-style pro-worker Republicans argue that such steps aren’t enough. Vance, they point out, has failed to support the labour movement’s signal legislative priority, known as the PRO ACT, which would make it easier to organise workplaces after mainly Republican national labour boards and judges spent decades gutting American labour law.
When I pressed him on this point for a New Statesman profile in March, Vance noted that he supports a regime of sectoral bargaining like the ones that prevail in continental Europe, rather than shop-by-shop organising bequeathed by the New Deal. He also noted that, as it is, the existing, mainstream labour movement is irreconcilably hostile to Republicans and that more trust-building is needed before a comprehensive rapprochement can take place.
I think Vance should support the PRO ACT, both for policy and political reasons. But it is worth pausing for a moment to note the unprecedented terrain we find ourselves in: whether or not Vance has gone far enough in supporting organised labor, the fact is that we find ourselves dealing with a Republican vice-presidential nominee who says he welcomes sectoral bargaining — and who last year joined a picket line of striking auto workers in Ohio.
All this could be evidence that the United States is inexorably shifting to a post-neoliberal stage, regardless of which party is in charge. As Vance himself noted in his NS interview, Team Biden consolidated some of the post-neoliberal turns first taken by the first Trump administration, not least by retaining Trump’s tariffs against China. Yet for Vance, these concessions to populism weren’t enough, especially in light of the Bidenites’ commitment to the free movement of labour. “The anti-free-movement-of-labour argument,” Vance told me, “is not just a workers’ rights argument, though it is that. It’s not just that this decimates the bargaining power of workers, though I believe it does that. It’s also a tech-forward argument. If you can’t constantly do the same things with cheaper and cheaper labour, your economy is forced to innovate.”
The case against Vance from within the Republican party came from a different direction. The argument has been that Vance, The Populist will turn off suburban America, especially suburban women, due to his harsh public style, occasional indulgence for 2020 election deniers, opposition to Ukraine funding (anathema in upscale neighbourhoods dotted with Ukraine flags), and anti-abortion stance — though, on that last issue, Vance has recently taken a reconciliatory stance in line with Trump himself, opposing further national restrictions and supporting the abortion pill. Yet, overall, those concerns about appeal became less urgent as the Biden-Harris campaign spiralled into disaster territory, a dynamic that only intensified in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on 13 July.
The hard part will be governing on populist terms. The Republican party, like the Democratic party, is a coalition of different class interests. It includes a growing share of the multiracial working class, yes, but also important segments of Wall Street and the petty bourgeoisie — what I have described as small and regional capital. The Trump 2.0 agenda will inevitably be a compromise between these groups. This is where Vance will be tested. Would he promote a bill to replace the rickety National Labor Relations Act with a system of sectoral bargaining and regional wage boards fit for the 21st century? One can dream. More realistically, convening a meeting with the heads of the mainstream labour movement in his first week as vice president would set the right tone – and help JD Vance prove his pro-worker mettle.
[See also: JD Vance’s hillbilly energy]
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