View this post on the web at [link removed]

By Jon A. Shields
On the surface, J.D. Vance seems like a good cultural conservative. The Ohio senator and GOP vice presidential nominee says all the right things. He’s vociferously opposed abortion; in fact, in January 2022, he said that he’d “like abortion to be illegal nationally [ [link removed] ].” And of course, his 2021 lament [ [link removed] ] that the country is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” gained a lot of attention this summer as proof of his pro-family bona fides.
But when you look a little deeper, Vance actually seems to have lost interest in culture altogether.
In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance offered a deeply conservative analysis of working-class America, one that placed a troubled culture at the center of its problems. Now, Vance is saying the near opposite: He is claiming the down and out face largely structural impediments to their mobility, stymied by a rigged system. Vance’s about-face suggests that cultural conservatism may have no real future in a Republican Party he hopes to lead one day.
Culture or Government: Who’s to Blame?
Vance’s memoir lamented the fraying of cultural norms in Middle America, particularly industriousness, religiosity and life-long marriage. But he dwelled especially on the white working class’s sense of fatalism. Vance noted that the “one thing” he’d change about the white working class is “the feeling that our choices don’t matter.”
For that reason, Vance especially hated blaming the system—and he noticed that the populist right was doing too much of it. As Vance bluntly concluded at the time, the new right too often says of the white working class: “It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
This doesn’t mean that the Vance of the “Hillbilly Elegy” era thought the government was blameless or powerless to improve his people’s fortunes. He thought small reforms could make a positive difference, at the margins. But, in the end, Vance couldn’t escape the sense that cultural change from within was the real panacea, the only way to make America great again. As Vance reflected: “These [government] services were far from perfect, but to the degree that I nearly succumbed to my worst decisions (and I came quite close), the fault lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control.”
That conclusion was born of experience. For Vance personally, change partly came from contact with the members of the upper middle class he now reviles, particularly his wife Usha, whom he met when the two were students at Yale Law School. Usha taught him what his humble upbringing in working-class Middletown, Ohio, could not. She taught him how to resolve marital conflicts by talking through hurt feelings and disagreements. Those norms contrasted sharply from what he had learned at home, where all feuds were resolved by threats, violence or abandonment.
In his July VP nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Vance provided a glimpse into this world through a humorous story of his pistol-packing grandma. Apparently, when she passed away in 2005, she had no fewer than 19 loaded handguns in her home. But in his memoir, Vance sees this sort of behavior as the symptom of a culture that resolves too many interpersonal conflicts through violence. Vance lamented that “hillbilly” families like his “often escalated normal disagreements beyond where they should go.”
His encounter with Usha was so transformative, he even concluded that young people in his world may need to marry “out.” Only upper-middle-class women could save hillbillies from Ohio. But today, Vance is now singling out those same women for not having children and being too career-oriented. Declining fertility may be a real social issue that merits more public attention, but it ignores the titanic problems he diagnosed in “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Embracing Cynicism
More troubling, though, Vance is now stoking the cynicism he once placed at the root of America’s class troubles. In his convention speech, he juxtaposed a virtuous common people against a venal ruling class. His people, the folks back home in Ohio and similar places, are victims of a deplorable bag of elites: Wall Street barons, Bush-era neoconservatives and Democrats. “As always,” Vance said, “America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price.”
This is little more than a right-wing version of the left’s structuralism, one that says the problems of the working class are entirely the fault of a rigged system.
Of course, it’s hard to run for office in America without some level of obsequiousness toward voters. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed long ago, American politicians are “perpetually flattering” the people, who rule the nation “as God rules the universe.” Understandably, Vance finds himself bound by these democratic laws. He couldn’t easily become an apostle for elite virtues in our populist age.
But that doesn’t mean Vance can’t talk about the loss of industriousness, marriage and religion in communities like his—and do it sensitively. Nor does it mean he can’t work to develop programs that attempt to strengthen the institutions of work and family. Republicans have done so in the past.
George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative is perhaps the best example. Before it was largely shelved after the calamity of the 9/11 terror attack, its aim was to allow religious institutions to use federal monies to fund their social services. It attempted to support the very religious institutions that buttress family life in places like Middletown.
Our class divide is increasingly marked by widening cultural differences that disadvantage the poor and working-class Americans. And that’s the tragedy of Vance: The man who placed working-class culture on the national agenda now has nothing to say about it.
Vance’s evolution may also tell us something about the future of the GOP. As Republicans continue to court voters down the socio-economic ladder by vilifying the professional class, they will have a strong incentive to not talk about the social problems that plague their working-class voters. That means cultural conservatism may have no real home in tomorrow’s Republican Party.
Jon A. Shields is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?