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Paul Krugman
J.D. Vance Puts the Con in Conservatism
Opinion Columnist
J.D. Vance once feared that Donald Trump might become “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s Trump’s running mate. But never mind that history. Trump and Vance have a lot of things, including this, in common: They’re both con men who despise their most avid supporters.
Indeed, Vance, despite stiff competition, may be the most cynical major figure in modern American politics. You never know whether Trump believes the false things he says; Vance is smart enough to know that he has pulled off a monumental political bait-and-switch.
And if the Trump-Vance ticket wins, there’s a fairly good chance that, given Trump’s evident lack of interest in the details of policy and — yes — his age, Vance will, one way or another, end up running the country.
So, about that con: Vance, now the junior senator from Ohio, talks a lot about his hardscrabble roots. But people should read what he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” which shows startling contempt for the people he grew up with but who, unlike him, didn’t escape small-town poverty. And people should also be aware that while his convention speech on Wednesday denounced “Wall Street barons,” his rise has to a large extent been orchestrated by a group of tech billionaires; he’s a protégé of Peter Thiel.
“Hillbilly Elegy” was part personal memoir, part social commentary and, to be fair, it responded to a real issue. Over the past couple of generations, something has gone very wrong in much of rural and small-town America. There has been a sharp rise in the fraction of men in their prime working years without jobs, notably in the eastern part of the American heartland. Social problems have proliferated; as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented, there has been a surge in “deaths of despair,” which they defined as deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide.
What happened? I’d focus on changes in the economy that undermined many small towns’ reason for being, a process that began during the Reagan years and isn’t unique to our country. This loss of economic opportunity led, in turn, to social dysfunction — echoing the earlier rise in social dysfunction in America’s cities when blue-collar urban jobs disappeared.
These issues are real, and we should be making a national effort to ameliorate the problems of left-behind regions. Actually, the Biden administration has been doing just that, with much of its industrial policy aimed at helping depressed areas. Among other things, a Biden administration grant of up to $575 million — partly financed by legislation Republicans unanimously opposed — will help upgrade a steel plant in Vance’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio.
And let’s not forget that many rural Americans have health insurance only thanks to policies Republicans fiercely opposed.
But in “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance rejected the “cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government.” Instead, he argued, there are lots of small-town white Americans who have nobody to blame but themselves. They’re lazy: “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” They’re poorly educated, not because of a lack of opportunity, but because they aren’t motivated: “We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents.”
Imagine the reaction if a liberal Democrat were to say any of that.
After entering politics, however, Vance suddenly decided that the white working class isn’t lazy, it’s a victim of external forces. He became vehement about accusing immigrants of taking jobs that should be going to the native born.
One passage in his convention speech appeared to suggest that illegal immigrants are responsible for inflation. Of course, he didn’t acknowledge that inflation has fallen by two-thirds since mid-2022, and that nonsupervisory workers — especially low-wage workers — have seen their earnings, on average, rise more than prices.
In fact, immigrants aren’t taking our jobs. Unemployment among the native-born remains near a historic low. To the extent that native-born Americans are leaving the work force, it’s largely because baby boomers are retiring.
And it’s especially strange to blame immigrants for the problems of small-town and rural America, which began long before the recent surge in immigration, and where even now there are relatively few immigrants to be seen. In Vance’s home state, only 5 percent of the population is foreign-born, compared with around 40 percent in New York City.
Anyway, there’s no reason to believe anything Vance says about supporting the working class. His book makes it clear that, at least to a degree, he looks down on those who haven’t managed some measure of his professional trajectory. He may have grown up poor, but these days he’s just a smart, unscrupulous politician using his background to hide the extent to which he represents the values and interests of plutocrats.
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Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
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