Ain’t That America?

Had Donald Trump not turned his head slightly to the side on Saturday, just as the assassin pulled the trigger, he would have been killed. History turns on such tiny events. You’ve heard of the Butterfly Effect: a butterfly that flaps its wings off the coast of California could cause a hurricane in Sri Lanka. So it is with the astonishing rise of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance.

In July 2016, “Surly,” a liberal reader of my American Conservative magazine blog, sent me this:

She gave me a Kindle version of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s astonishing memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia. I downloaded it and finally got around to reading it on a flight to Boston. It knocked me flat. I did not grow up poor, but rather lower middle class in the rural South. Yet I knew plenty of people like J.D.’s family. They were our neighbors. For the first time, I saw the story of our people—country people—told with truth and affection by, well, one of us.

From my hotel room in Boston, I found out how to reach Vance, and asked for an interview. He agreed to answer my questions. We produced this interview for The American Conservative’s website, titled, “Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People”.

None of us at the magazine were prepared for what happened next. The interview, which was perfectly ordinary, for some reason went mega-viral, crashing the servers two, maybe three times that weekend. Suddenly, in that election year, the national media all wanted a piece of J.D. Vance. His career rocketed into the stratosphere. Hillbilly Elegy went on to sell over three million copies, and to become a 2020 feature film directed by Ron Howard.

J.D. and I remained friends. A couple of years later, we talked about his interest in entering politics. The thing he cared about more than anything else was what his wife Usha thought. I admired the younger man’s deep devotion to his wife and growing family. Then, in 2019, when he chose to enter into the Catholic Church, he invited me to fly to Cincinnati to be present for the event. We had spoken at length over the years about faith. I had hoped that he might become Orthodox, like me, but as he was living in Washington, and was interested in Catholicism, I introduced him to Father Dominic Legge, a Dominican who, like J.D., was a Yale Law graduate. They hit it off, and next thing I knew, J.D. was living in Cincinnati again, and had decided to become a Catholic. I was honored to be there when he professed Christ and joined himself to that Church.

It was a small, intimate affair. I stayed with the Vances that weekend. What struck me was the palpable love they have for each other, and how unfussy J.D. was about his conversion. He was serious. We went for drinks the night before with Father Henry, the Dominican who had continued J.D.’s catechesis. I remember well what I thought that night: This man is the real deal. Completely unpretentious.

The next day, after his reception into the Catholic Church, he took me and some other friends to eat Cincinnati chili, and to meet members of his family. Nothing fancy, just folks.

Earlier that summer, he had agreed to come down to Louisiana to speak at Walker Percy Weekend, a literary festival some friends and I started in my hometown, St. Francisville. My mom, Dorothy, really wanted to meet J.D., because in many ways, Hillbilly Elegy was her story too. It was the story of so many ordinary people in West Feliciana Parish. J.D. was a big hit at the festival, and with my mom:

She told me later, “I love him. He knows what it was like to grow up poor like I did. He made me feel special.”

Of course he did, because though J.D. Vance has a Yale education, and was by then a bestselling author, he has not forgotten where he came from. Mama texted me from her assisted living facility last night, “I can’t get any more excited. I prayed for him!” I think the odds are pretty good that that old folks’ home is going to turn out 100% for Trump-Vance.

I can’t pretend to be neutral about his pick as Donald Trump’s vice president. I love the guy, and told him not long into our friendship that I hoped one day to be able to vote for him. Now I can. As I write this, tears are running down my cheeks, not simply because I’m happy for my friend, but because I think about Bonnie Vance, J.D.’s grandmother—“Mamaw,” he called her—who raised him. Mamaw, played by Glenn Close in the movie, was a chain-smoking, pistol-packing working-class queen who took no crap from anybody. She made sure that boy made something of his life. She died some years ago, but as someone not far removed from J.D.’s humble origins, I know what it means that a salt of the earth woman like Mamaw can have raised a boy who grew up to be near the pinnacle of American power. That’s the promise of America.

We all need to remember that. The last time I felt such overwhelming pride in my country was when we elected Barack Obama as president. I did not vote for him—I’m a conservative—but the fact that in my lifetime, we went from being a country where in some parts, black people were treated under the law as second-class citizens, to electing America’s first black president … man, how could you not be proud of such a country?!

And now, a poor white boy from Appalachia, who didn’t really know his father, whose mom was drug-addicted, and who grew up raised rough by his grandparents, has reached this summit. Ain’t that America?

It is true that J.D. Vance was a stern critic of Donald Trump back in 2016, but as he has explained many times, he changed his mind. I get that. So did I. It was for me the fact that Trump was a better president than I thought he would be, plus seeing how the establishment treated Trump and his supporters during his presidency that moved me in his direction. It was the lies, and the persecution. And it was seeing the Great Awokening, as institutions throughout the country lurched leftward, as if to escape the taint of Trump and the “deplorables” (Hillary Clinton’s word) who supported him.

It was seeing Nick Sandmann, the high school kid confronted on the Washington Mall for wearing a MAGA cap, provoked by a left-wing activist—and then, in turn, cruelly crucified by the national media as some sort of bigot. He had done nothing wrong, but it didn’t matter. He was MAGA, and therefore deserved destruction.

There were more examples, especially during the Biden Administration, which has extended wokeness in power, tearing America apart by separating us along racial lines, and through forcing gender theory on the US military and American schools. At some point, I realized that whatever misgivings I have about Donald Trump, he’s right that the establishment goes after him because ultimately, they despise people like, well, me. Whatever differences we have don’t matter nearly as much as what we have in common: that we are all Deplorable in the eyes of the ruling-class elites.

J.D. Vance is a brilliant man, make no mistake, but more than that, he knows who he is, and what America is. He is bold and different, not an echo of dull Republican Party regulars. J.D. is a true believer—and he is a fighter. Donald Trump rose off his symbolic deathbed on Saturday, stood tall, blood streaming down his face, and pumped his fist in the air, urging his followers to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”—and now he has chosen a wingman who can brawl with the best of them.

Above it all, J.D. Vance, who would be the first Millennial vice president, represents the future of American conservatism. By naming J.D. Vance as his running mate, Donald Trump has given the American Right a dynamic future—one that is more in tune with the plain people than with Republican Party patricians.

And to think it all started in 2016 with a Democratic reader in Washington state who read this new book and thought the small-town Southern guy she liked reading at The American Conservative might see a lot of truth in it. Surly, my dear, you are one hell of a butterfly.