For those of you who haven’t come across these already, here are Trump’s running-mate’s takes on (a) Donald Trump himself in 2016; and (b) the corrosive effect of his own alma mater (Yale), and of universities generally, today. The first is remarkable not only for the volte-face it illustrates in order for Vance to be able to come to the support of Trump in 2024, but also, I believe, for its generally intelligent reading of the situation in ‘rust-belt’ America eight years before. The second is a vivid example of what I would regard as the ‘anti-intellectualism’ which powers many ‘populist’ movements on both sides of the Atlantic presently. Academics (and ex-Academics), beware!
(a) Opioid of the Masses
To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh.
By J. D. Vance JULY 4, 2016
A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood. After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards. That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin. A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: “It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.”
He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day. Folks back home speak of heroin like an apocalyptic invader, something that assailed the town mysteriously and without warning. Yet the truth is that heroin crept slowly into Middletown’s families and communities—not by invasion but by invitation. Very few Americans are strangers to addiction. Shortly before I graduated from law school, I learned that my own mother lay comatose in a hospital, the consequence of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet heroin was only her latest drug of choice. Prescription opioids—”hillbilly heroin” some call it, to highlight its special appeal among white working-class folks like us—had already landed Mom in the hospital and cost our family dearly in the decade before her first taste of actual heroin. And before her own father gave up the bottle in middle age, he was a notoriously violent drunk.
In our community, there has long been a large appetite to dull the pain; heroin is just the newest vehicle. Of course, the pain itself has increased in recent years, and it comes from many places. Some of it is economic, as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist. Some of it is aesthetic, as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and vibrant gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders. Some of it is domestic, as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs. Some of it is political, as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interests even less, sputters along. And some of it is cultural, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation’s children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.
During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump. Last Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, I met a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War at a local coffee shop. “I was lucky,” he told me. “At least I came home. A lot of my buddies didn’t. The thing is, the media still talks about us like we lost that war! I like to think my dead friends accomplished something.” Imagine, for that man, the vengeful joy of a Trump rally. That brief feeling of power, of defiance, of sending a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen. Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.
In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic. Yet a common thread among Trump’s faithful, and even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities. These are places where good jobs are impossible to come by. Where people have lost their faith and abandoned the churches of their parents and grandparents. Where the death rates of poor white people go up even as the death rates of all other groups go down. Where too many young people spend their days stoned instead of working and learning. Many years ago, our neighbor (and my grandma’s old friend) in Middletown moved out and rented his house on a Section 8 voucher—a federal program that offers housing subsidies to low-income people. One of the first folks to move in called her landlord to report a leaky roof. By the time the landlord arrived, he discovered the woman naked on her couch. After calling him, she had started the water for a bath, gotten high, and passed out. Forget about the original leak, now much of the upstairs—including her and her children’s possessions—was completely destroyed.
Not every Trump voter lives like this woman, but nearly every Trump voter knows someone who does. Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.
What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
(b) The Universities are the Enemy
https://bryanalexander.org/politics/the-professors-are-the-enemy-j-d-vance-on-higher-education/.
Looking back to the 1930s, doesn’t this sound just a little Fascistic to you?
Porter’s Pensées 
Hello Bernard, We are about to go to Oslo for a week in August…our first visit, can you imagine, to “Scandinavia”! It all looks amazing and encouraging. A million miles from what Mr Vance is describing. It is not wonder that Mr Farage is welcomed – he would describe Clacton in the same way. As for the Universities – Suella and her acolytes are already down this road – talking about the degrees that go nowhere – a bit BA History I suppose…..but it’s the same attacks on the liberal arts… We were at a graduation ceremony yesterday in Brighton – Uni of Sussex – to see my sister get an Hon PhD…her second……if only, like migrating seabirds, we could tag all these excited young people to re-assure them about what they have -=more than just a “credit score”….and see them through safely into stable adulthood….. Keep writing. and I will continue replying! I will let you know of our reactions to Norway! John E
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Hej John! V. good to hear from you again. I’ll reply at more length later. In the meantime, why not come across to Stockholm? – More details in an email…
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Thanks for some really interesting information.
I think the article shows that Vance knows how to communicate and that he could be a force to be reckoned with in future, especially given that Trump is 78 years old.
I was scared by his past hardline comments on divorce and abortion. Of course, you could argue that’s just consistent with his faith as a Catholic convert, but even in historically Catholic countries like Ireland, Italy and Spain there are few politicians who’d take such a reactionary stance.
Somebody commented that he is a sophist, and he certainly has the ability to reach paranoid conclusions from apparently reasonable premises. I think the challenge for the left is to disentangle the problems that need addressing from his right-wing rhetoric.
For example, the argument that the welfare state sometimes disproportionately rewards the affluent middle class is neither new nor exclusively right wing; it can be traced back at least as far as the late eighties and nineties, in the work of such broadly social democratic luminaries as Nicholas Barr. You can see its influence in the abolition of mortgage interest tax relief and in the introduction of tuition fees. Although many former students naturally see accumulated debt as a burden, critics argue that concessionary terms and relief are still subsidies that go to people who are not generally the poorest. This may tie in with the observation, taken up by right-wing gurus like Matt Goodwin, that graduate/non-graduate status has become one of the key influences on political allegiance in modern Britain. What do the school leavers who don’t go to university get that equates to student finance?
Similarly, the argument about the USA outsourcing jobs to ‘dirty’ producers like China and India is worth addressing, even if in Vance’s hands it is merely an excuse to scrap very necessary policies to mitigate climate change and to introduce protection. There are shades here of the C19 debate about allowing slave sugar to compete on the same terms with sugar produced by free labour.
The rhetoric of “the professors are the enemy”, taken without apparent embarrassment from Nixon, is clearly alarming. Vance claims to believe in “liberal” education. Fair enough; I hope no leftist would disagree simply because of the political baggage that the word carries. Academia surely has to be about the interplay of conflicting ideas. Yet Vance is illiberally in favour of banning Critical Race Theory from US institutions.
I would not call myself a proponent of CRT but I am surprised by the kind of “omerta” it has acquired in Britain, even in postcolonial quarters. I would not call myself a Marxist, but I would never call for Marxist theories to be banned from education. If and where CRT is wrong (and like Marxism, it is a broad field) it should be debunked or critiqued, but not banned. Instead, in the hands of the right, Critical Race Theory, like Marxism, has become a catch-all and often inaccurate term of abuse.
The right is clearly thinking strategically. It has noted the left-leaning tendencies of graduates and identified universities as agents of socialisation, perhaps even more important given the decline of traditional trade unionism. They are reviving the sort of conflict seen in late C19 Spain and France between the secular teacher and the curate. The difference is that this time the right seeks to cast the education system in the role of the church, as exponents of the religion of “wokeism”. The role of emancipator, I believe, is to be taken by parents and students, who will be given more power over teachers. This is being rolled out at this very moment in Israel, where a new law – supported by students!! – threatens to silence lecturers who challenge Israel over Gaza (aka “supporting terrorism”).
Whether this National Conservative strategy has a hope in the UK remains to be seen. Evangelical Christianity is much weaker in the UK than in the USA. The Nat Cons had months before the election to plan their takeover of the right. Instead they demonstrated an ineptitude to rival Sunak’s. Matt Goodwin has become little more than a gibbering anti-immigration obsessive. Reform produced a set of candidates who had crawled out from under a stone. Nigel Farage (surely the reincarnation of Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice) looks like a mere spiv compared to the gravitas of Vance. We must hope that the UK doesn’t produce its own hillybilly elegist (maybe a right-wing version of Alan Bleasdale?). I certainly wouldn’t rule it out.
Excuse the long post!
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Thank you so much for this! I hope you can get it broadcast more widely than as a comment on a very marginal blogsite.
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