What's Tony Thinking

What J. D. Vance Gets Right

J. D. Vance has become the whipping boy of liberals (what would Andy Borowitz do without him?). Even Taylor Swift has joined in by signing off her endorsement of Harris/ Walz as, “Childless, Cat Lady.”

By now Vance himself probably regrets some of his more “catty” remarks. But what consigning him to ranks of the “weird” and “crazy” misses is that Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, has something to say about the American economy and its societal implications that needs to be heard, especially by liberals and Democrats.

In a late July blog I titled “The Anointing of Kamala Harris” I noted that while we liberals and Democrats are all over Trump as a “threat to democracy,” we tend to miss (or go mute) about the other big threat to democracy, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. We miss or overlook, or worse, denigrate, those whose lives have been undermined by the neo-liberal economic policies that have made that concentration possible. Here’s what I wrote then:

“Here’s a key, but often unnoticed, point: American democracy is imperiled not just by Trump and his contempt for the rule of law. It is also imperiled by the vast gap between the super-rich and ordinary Americans. The concentration of wealth is as also a threat to democracy, if not so obviously as Trump.”

What Vance gets right, that has been overlooked in vilifying him, is that our economy works for some but not for all. The ascendency of free markets and globalism have left out and left behind many millions of the people.

Here’s Vance from a June interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

“The main thrust of the postwar American order of globalization has involved relying more and more on cheaper labor. The trade issue and the immigration issue are two sides of the same coin: The trade issue is cheaper labor overseas; the immigration issue is cheaper labor at home, which applies upward pressure on a whole host of services, from hospital services to housing and so forth.

“The populist vision, at least as it exists in my head, is an inversion of that: applying as much upward pressure on wages and as much downward pressure on the services that the people use as possible. We’ve had far too little innovation over the last 40 years, and far too much labor substitution. This is why I think the economics profession is fundamentally wrong about both immigration and about tariffs. Yes, tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things — though I think it’s massively overstated — but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects.

“It’s a classic formulation: You raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour, and you will sometimes hear libertarians say this is a bad thing. ‘Well, isn’t McDonald’s just going to replace some of the workers with kiosks?”’That’s a good thing, because then the workers who are still there are going to make higher wages; the kiosks will perform a useful function; and that’s the kind of rising tide that actually lifts all boats. What is not good is you replace the McDonald’s worker from Middletown, Ohio, who makes $17 an hour with an immigrant who makes $15 an hour. And that is, I think, the main thrust of elite liberalism, whether people acknowledge it or not.

“Or the hotels example. If you cannot hire illegal migrants to staff your hotels, then you have to go to one of the seven million prime-age American men who are out of the labor force and find some way to re-engage them.”

Let’s acknowledge a couple things. One, Vance is clearly not a traditional “business-first” Republican. He sounds more like one of the “Bernie Bros” of 2016 or 2020. He has said he found common cause with them. Second, despite the Trump/ Vance downsides, a major part of their appeal is to the have-nots and “forgottens,” those without a college diplomas, left out by both the center-left and center-right elites.

In my July blog, mentioned earlier, I cited a piece from Harvard professor Michael Sandel who urged Kamala Harris to make “the dignity of work” a centerpiece of her campaign. Here’s Sandel:

“Standing up to Mr. Trump and defending reproductive rights is not enough. To defeat him, Ms. Harris needs to address the legitimate grievances he exploits — the sense among many Americans, especially those without a college degree, that their voices aren’t heard, that their work isn’t respected and that elites look down on them. She needs a message that reconnects the Democratic Party with the working-class voters it has alienated in recent decades.”

Harris/ Walz need to heed not only a respected Harvard prof like Sandel, but to also pay attention to what J. D. Vance gets right about what our economy has gotten wrong.