How 'faux populist' J.D. Vance went from Trump hater to top VP pick

09 July 2024

During the 2016 presidential race, "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance was a scathing critic of Donald Trump and argued that he would be terrible for the Republican Party if he won the election.

But Vance, now a U.S. senator via Ohio, has since taken an ultra-MAGA turn and become a strident Trump supporter. And he is reportedly on Trump's short list for a running mate.

In a biting op-ed published by The Guardian on July 9, Jan-Werner Müller attacks Vance as a "faux populist" who favors style over substance.

"The junior senator from Ohio has a massive advantage that makes him more similar to Trump than any other contender: a presence in popular culture, created by 'Hillbilly Elegy,' the moving memoir to which both conservatives and liberals dumbfounded by Trump's triumph turned eagerly to understand why the 'left behind' were opting for right-wing populism," Müller explains. "People think they know Vance, because they know his narrative: growing up in poverty in Appalachia and making it to Yale Law School and Silicon Valley, only to then turn into political champion of blue-collar folks…. Vance has perfected what, on the right, tends to substitute for policy ideas these days: trolling the liberals."

Müller emphasizes, however, that Vance's culture-war politics do nothing to benefit working-class voters.

"Like so many faux populists," the Princeton professor observes, "Vance talks the anti-elite talk, but walks the walk of what observers rightly call plutocratic populism…. Having called Trump an 'idiot,' a 'moral disaster' and a potential 'American Hitler,' Vance now fawns over Trump as a man of depth and complexity with merely minor issues of style."

Müller continues, "Maybe he genuinely changed his mind: after all, the point of a free society is also that we can all learn from our mistakes. But praising a man who evidently relishes cruelty as a paragon of 'compassion' beggars belief. Of course, despite all the sycophancy, Trump might pick someone else: the very fact that Vance can seem a bit of a 'mini-me' of the aspiring autocrat might turn the political showmaster off."

Jan-Werner Müller's full op-ed for The Guardian is available at this link.

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