Only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone
This past week, Donald Trump finally named his Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, his all-but-crowned heir to his all-but-burning throne: J.D. Vance.
Twenty minutes later, POLITICO Magazine published "55 Things To Know About J.D. Vance, Trump's VP Pick". An hour later, Hillbilly Elegy was leading the New York Times bestseller list -- and not by a small margin. The following morning, every leading newspaper had penned an article about his meteoric rise within the Republican Party.
What fascinated me, however, was that, unlike articles about candidates Biden and Trump, these headlines weren't scathing critiques or glorified odes. They were character studies, essays not dissimilar to those I would've written about Tom and Daisy from The Great Gatsby in AP Language. It was a careful examination of all the inherent contradictions present in Vance's stocky body, an empathetic dissection of how a man born to two registered Democrats could become so Trumpian in just forty years.
Which is to say: J.D. Vance is our Rosetta Stone. He is the illuminating missing piece explains to us what we could never figure out alone: how, despite it all, Donald Trump resonates with the "hillbilly", working-class, family-values American.
J.D. Vance, raised by his grandmother while his mother recovered from addiction, grew up in Ohio, in one of the four poorest cities in America. After serving in the United States Marines and completing an undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, he was accepted into Yale Law. The Washington Post describes his experience at Yale well -- he would sit in seminars entitled 'How to Make Poor People Less Sad', discussing poverty and privilege with students who knew nothing of the former and nothing but the latter. I often think this about higher education in the United States: we discuss racism sitting in the Winston Churchill Auditorium, built on land stolen from the Native Americans. We march into lectures and boldly declare "Racism is bad!", then leave, confident we've solved the problem by simply stating it. To J.D. Vance, being surrounded by such obvious ignorance and entitlement was understandably frustrating. He hated the rich, and the pseudo-liberal elitism that allowed them to remain so.
And while this seems like the perfect place to start, I want to first rewind to 2012, when Ella Yelich-O'Connor, an artist professionally known as Lorde, burst onto the scene with her debut album, Pure Heroine. Born and raised in suburban New Zealand, Lorde arrived in Hollywood already skeptical of its superficiality. Her debut single, Royals, was not released via an extended marketing campaign with RCA Records, but rather surreptitiously dropped on SoundCloud for free download. She sung about how the "tigers on a gold leash" she found in America were foreign and strange, and seemed to aggressively reject the stardom and Pop Prodigy throne being offered to her.
Which is to say, Lorde in 2012 and Vance at Yale shared a certain feeling of displacement. They were qualified to be here, and usually treated as such, but felt nonetheless like outsiders.
One day at Yale, Vance attended a talk by acclaimed venture capitalist Peter Thiel. For the first time, Vance would later confess, someone broke the sound barrier and spoke directly to him, promising him a future beyond the meaningless corporate rat race. Vance quickly formed a personal connection with Thiel, and later began working at his venture fund. This work made Vance rich, and quick. Similarly, after Pure Heroine's commercial success, Lorde was seen at Coachella, dining with Taylor Swift, and wearing the gowns she once lamented not being able to afford on the Academy Awards' stage. Their comeuppance was unexpected, but at the top, they both found shockingly little resistance; whether in Hollywood or Silicon Valley, mentors seemed all too willing to open the door, welcoming these former outsiders into the glass castle house.
There's a Dave Chappelle SNL clip where he explains why Trump won the 2016 election. He says, "never before have we seen a man walk out of the house, tell everyone that every bad thing we think is going on in there is going on in there, then walk back in and continue playing the game." This one sentence almost perfectly encapsulates why Americans support Trump: he's emotionally honest, even when telling nothing but lies.
Vance and Lorde were not Trump, however. Once admitted into it, they refused to succumb to the hypocrisy and corruption of their respective worlds. In other words, they were "the call is coming from inside the house" characters, using their position on the inside to criticize instead of benefit. The Washington Post writes, "Vance was eloquently decoding Donald Trump supporters for liberal elites, while lamenting the rise of Trump himself." In fact, Vance cites his allegiance to his impoverished Ohio community as the reason he left venture capital for politics, returning to become a politician on the smallest, most local scale he could find. While Lorde never left the music industry, she was doing the same thing -- decoding the world of glitz and glamor for all the small-town girls, while never participating so gluttonously in the superficiality of it all herself.
Now, of course, they've both reversed course. By 2020, both Vance and Lorde had radicalized, shifting to extremist ends of the political spectrum in ways that felt disingenuous and upsetting to their base followers. Lorde became a crystal-loving, spirituality-driven "hippie", the very Californian, materialistic woman she once satirized for having no real substance. And J.D., of course, became Trump's Vice President.
As a longtime Lorde fan, I obviously want her to make Melodrama and Pure Heroine again and again for all eternity. Those are albums I can write literary analyses on, music dense with meaning and power that personally means so much to me. But as someone who, for lack of kinder phrasing, touches grass, I wasn't personally offended by her sudden and dramatic shift in Solar Power. She wants to write about the sunlight and beaches? She wants to write about how she's hot and fit now? That's fine. I didn't understand why so many fans were so aghast.
But now, I think I get it, because it's the same reason Mitt Romney is aghast and disappointed in Vance: both could've been extremely fresh and insightful voices in worlds that are fundamentally averse to change, but ultimately were trapped by the very thing they once hated, becoming the thing they once feared they would become. In Still Sane, Lorde writes "I won't be her, tripping over on stage," and sings about weed and cocaine five years later. Vance promises to protect the underdog for as long as he is able, then sides with Trump, a man who decidedly cares about nothing but his own personal wealth and legacy.
Jennifer Senior once wrote that, in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance wrote about his community's problems in a "fatalistic belief, born of too much adversity, that nothing can be done to change your lot." This thematic thesis -- one of despair -- is one he shares with Lorde's earliest work, where they both lament how broken and unfixable the worlds they find themselves in truly are, but somehow work to find beauty in their position in it anyway*. It is the loss of this perspective, rather than the adoption of their new ones, that makes fans and voters angry. Rather than a Trump clone, Vance could've been a powerful advocate for blue-collar workers, a champion against the elitism in liberal (and conservative!) circles. Instead of another Gwyneth Paltrow, Lorde could've spoken truth to power, creating art for those of us who will never purchase $400 candles.
Which brings me to my final point, which is really another Washington Post quote. (Really, read that article, it's wonderful.) "Vance's new political identity isn't so much a facade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story." He's intelligent and well-educated, a fantastic debater and generally qualified speaker, but this doesn't make him any less of a threat to our democracy when he's chosen to ally himself so obviously with one of history's most terrifying men. And while Lorde isn't taking rights away from women and other marginalized communities through her music, her new identity rings of the same sadness: in an unavoidable turning of tables, we no longer have our spies inside the house. They're now informants on us instead, and we're all worse off for it.
*I'm not quite sure how to eloquently make this point, especially since I haven't read Hillbilly Elegy, but let me try: based on reviews and summaries I've read since Vance was named Trump's VP pick, it appears that Vance pins poverty and societal problems within poor cities (like the one he grew up in) on personal moral failings and addiction problems, rather than acknowledging broader historical and economic contexts. This is obviously not a perspective I share with him, and it's evidence that Vance doesn't quite succeed in finding the aforementioned beauty as well as Lorde, whose albums always ring of pride and joy in communal experience. However, what Vance was successful at doing was identifying the failings within the elites in both parties: the liberals, for having Socratic Seminars about racism and poverty without ever confronting their personal privilege in a meaningful way, and the conservatives, for rejecting any systems of support for these communities so strongly that a man as vitriolic and dangerous as Trump could rise in the first place. And this, too, is a valuable perspective/addition to the political conversation.
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