Vance

Hillbilly Elegy, the book Vance published a few years after he graduated from Yale law school, struck me as an intelligent and perceptive account of a world very different from mine. My initial reaction to Trump choosing him as his vice-presidential candidate was positive. Listening to one of his speeches and seeing some of the things he had said in the campaign gave me a less positive impression. To resolve the conflict I reread parts of the book plus whatever I could find of his public articles and interviews.

In doing so, it occurred to me that there were three possible explanations for anything he said — his actual beliefs, his decision to ally with Trump, his attempt to get votes. The first is the one I am interested in, both to satisfy my own curiosity and to predict his behavior after Trump, forty years older than Vance, is no longer around. The second and third are relevant to how willing he is to misrepresent his views in order to achieve his objectives — but I assume that most professional politicians are willing to do that.

The best source for his actual beliefs is his book, written before he had any serious involvement in politics. My conclusion from that was that his central motivation is loyalty to his people, the population he described in his book, largely working class, plagued by failed family structures, drug addiction, short term planning. Talking about his time at Yale Law School, he makes it clear that he felt like an alien, a person from a different world.

From the book, it sounds as though the problems of his people are mainly cultural, not economic or political. When they have money they spend it — that is what money is for. While the families he describes were not very well off, the toys at Christmas, bought largely with borrowed money, sound more expensive than the toys I gave my children. When he, a young marine, had some money, his intent was to buy the most expensive car he could. He was deterred from buying a car that would probably have been repossessed when he ran short of money for payments by an officer who persuaded him instead to research and buy the least expensive car that would serve his purposes. That was part of his escape from the culture he was born into.

In the book his picture of the other class, the successful people, is mostly positive, most clearly in descriptions of his wife and her family. They are what he wants his people to turn into, while preserving such hillbilly virtues as dignity and loyalty.

And however you want to define these two groups and their approach to giving — rich and poor; educated and uneducated; upper-class and working class — their members increasingly occupy two separate worlds. As a cultural emigrate from one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn — recently an acquaintance use the word “confabulate” in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream. But I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower their church attendance higher. their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damn game. (Hillbilly Elegy)

The Politician: 2024

The two worlds reappear in his current articles and interviews in a darker form, this time with villains.

The reason for mass immigration — the rich:

More immigration means lower wages for their workers and easier access to servants for their decadent personal lives. (“True 'Compassion' Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration”)

US involvement in the Middle East:

… the more cynical answer is that as our country has successfully bungled, or sorry successively, bungled Middle Eastern wars and allowed China to rise, there is of course a group of people who've gotten very wealthy off of China's growing power, and that's the financial elites who actually run the country, who donate to the think tanks, of course, that produce the policy papers that so many of our politicians rely on.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight,” 1/3/20)

Support for abortion:

When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children, Stacey Abrams is right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business. (“Fighting Woke Capital”)

The Black Lives Matter riots:

And if you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefitting financially from it.

Insurance companies in Minneapolis, which saw hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth, black and white, destroyed by those riots, have consistently underpaid the premiums to the owners of the businesses who had their lives destroyed. In one example, a guy had to pay $140,000 to have the rubble from the business that he built carted off by the city of Minneapolis, and his insurance company reimbursed him to the tune of about $40,000.

Now who was one of the biggest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement? The insurance companies. (“Fighting Woke Capital”)

Vance’s book provides one possible explanation for the change in his picture of the world:

I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. This makes little sense in my current relationships, but without that attitude, my childhood homes would have consumed me. … Usha (his wife) still sometimes reminds me that not every perceived slight—from a  passing motorist or a neighbor critical of my dogs—is cause for a blood feud. (Hillbilly Elegy, Chapter 15)

If a problem, for him or his people, is an attack there must be an attacker, a villain, an enemy to fight.

Contrast the quotes above with what Vance wrote in 2016:

Without some recognition that some of these problems in our community are not the fault of other people — they're not going to be solved by a Mexican border wall or better trade deals with China — without some recognition along those lines, I don't believe these problems are ever truly going to get better. (Vance interview by Michael Lindenberger, Dallas Morning News, 2016)

A combative attitude is not, I think, the most likely explanation of the change in his expressed views. He had the same attitude in 2016 — and since then a wife to moderate it. The more likely explanation is that he is saying the things he believed he has to say in order to ally with Trump and, having done so, get elected. That provides a better explanation of the decline in intellectual quality from his book to his current articles and interviews. It is harder to make good arguments for positions you don’t actually believe in, less necessary if the target is the electorate rather than your own mind.

Consider again his claim that insurance companies profited from the Black Lives Matter riots. Riots destroy  property, some of it insured. By his account an insurance company paid only $40,000 for $140,000 of damage due to a riot. That may be evidence that the insurance company was cheating its customers — he does not offer any details — but it is not evidence that the company profited by the riot, which is his explanation of why it supported the movement. $40,000 is less than $140,000 but it is more than zero, which is what the company would have had to pay out if there had been no riot. Either that did not occur to him, hard to believe of someone who could graduate from Yale Law School and write the book he wrote, or he did not expect it to occur to his readers; it was sufficient to show that the company was evil. “Give a dog a bad name and hang him.”

That was the clearest example of a bad argument offered for a conclusion Vance wanted an argument for that struck me, but there were others. He repeatedly links the immigration policies he opposes not only with low wages for poor Americans, a possible result, but with drugs coming into the country. Carried  by illegal immigrants is one way illegal drugs could come in but there are lots of others, as illustrated by American experience with a previous experiment in prohibition.

His position on trade raises the question of whether he understands the arguments he is rejecting. In some places it seems as though he might. The standard analysis of trade economics implies that, outside a few special cases, tariffs make the country that imposes them on net poorer. They may, however, make some people richer; that is why companies lobby for them. If a tariff on auto imports makes mid-western auto workers richer and west coast programmers poorer that may, from Vance’s standpoint, be a net gain — Silicon Valley programmers are not the people he cares about.

Further, the economic arguments depends on the assumption that richer is what matters, that if people have higher real incomes, the ability to buy more, they are better off. Vance rejects that assumption. The problem for his people is not, or not only, poverty. Writing about an author he approves of:

“He argues that the obsessive focus of policymakers and economists on "consumer welfare" has been misguided because it is as workers and productive contributors that people flourish and build strong families and communities.

It is logically possible that the trade policy Vance supports and I, like most economists, oppose would achieve his objectives, but he never offers the arguments necessary to show that it would. Midwestern auto workers vs Silicon Valley programmers is my example not his. As best I can tell from what he writes, he does not realize that the same tariff that reduces US imports also reduces US exports, that with fewer dollars going abroad fewer will come back, that he is buying jobs in Detroit at the cost of jobs not only in California but in Midwestern farm states — one of the things the US exports is food.¹ Similarly, he seems to think that the reason other countries can sell us goods at a low price is that their wages are lower than ours. It does not seem to have occurred to him that US wages are in dollars, Chinese wages in Yuan, and what determines the exchange rate between them is the cost, in each country, of producing things. He discusses trade policy in the language of someone who does not understand it, whether because he does not understand it or because he believes, correctly, that the voters don’t.

In Defense of Flyover Country

“Flyover Country” is everything between the east coast and the west coast, New York and San Francisco, as seen by the coastal elites — or, at least, as people who live there imagine the elites seeing it. It is only metaphorically a geographical term. Part of the explanation of Trump's implausible success is the arrogance and condescension of the coastal elites towards the inhabitants of flyover country.(Me, in an earlier post)

the most patriotic people, the best and most devoted to the country, whether they’re black, white, whatever, whatever party that they’re in, it’s almost consistently those without a college education. (Vance)

Flyover country contains a lot of people with college degrees, stable marriages, functional life styles, but it also includes the people Vance described in his book, his people, which helps explain his decision to ally with Trump. Whether or not Vance really believes that the problems of his people are the fault of the elite, they are the people that flyover country resents, hence people it is prudent for a Trump ally to attack.

Vance in the Future: Revising the Republican Party

Stay tuned.

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1. I sketched the analysis in an earlier post.