J.d. vance

It is an irony of history that the bronze Statue of Freedom which stands tall atop the US Capitol dome was commissioned by the man who would seek to break the nation apart a few years later. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when the statue was ordered, clashed with Yankee sculptor Thomas Crawford over his original design, which included a liberty cap, the symbol of an emancipated slave, above the statue’s crown. The statue is adorned with a sword, a shield and a wreath of victory. It’s symbolic in other ways as well: struck hundreds of times by lightning, it conducts and dissipates that violent energy into the earth. Freedom makes an excellent lightning rod. Today, critiques of the statue and what it represents arise from different sources.

J.D. Vance gained prominence in 2016 for appealing to two camps. His critique of the roots of rural poverty, relayed in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was generally well received on both sides of the aisle. After crediting the American Conservative magazine for putting Elegy on the map, the New York Times’s Jennifer Senior wrote in a review of the book that Vance used “a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans.” Fast-forward seven years, and a lot has changed for Vance. He has evolved from Never Trump conservative to enthusiastic MAGA disciple. And he has also gone from bestselling author to United States senator.

In recent years, Republican candidates and media figures have become increasingly critical of one portion of the population. At the same time, this same demographic has turned against them at the ballot box. As the GOP became the party of men — married or unmarried — they drove away the single women, who voted against them en masse in the 2022 midterms. It's not hard to see why.

Newly minted senator JD Vance of Ohio has wasted no time in extolling the virtues of a soft isolationist foreign policy. In a January 31 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Vance endorsed Donald Trump for president largely because Trump isn't a hawk. A prominent member of the GOP's national conservative wing, Vance has made skepticism of American leadership abroad a centerpiece of his political identity. The senator attacks the “bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has led the country astray many times.” Never mind that the so-called "consensus" only really exists under extreme circumstances, such as after the 9/11 terror attacks. Think of the deep divide between right and left over how to deal with Cuba and Saudi Arabia, for example.

Take a drive through Steubenville, Ohio, Patrick Deneen urged the crowd at the recent Restoring a Nation conference. In downtown Steubenville, he assured us, the “blessings of liberty” are on full display. I didn’t bother making the trip. I know what those blessings are. We have the same ones where I grew up, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, less than an hour away: a population that’s dropped 50 percent since 1940, record fentanyl overdoses, crippling brain drain, hulking husks of abandoned steel mills, empty storefronts on main street, the steady decay of once-beautiful public spaces and everywhere the poisonous fallout of family breakdown. The people I grew up with are dying — and the best the libertarians can offer them is a U-Haul.

Pittsburgh Fresh off the campaign stage in Arizona, where he stumped for gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made his way to Pittsburgh for another Turning Point Action rally. This one was supposedly for Doug Mastriano (DeSantis was headed to Ohio for J.D. Vance right afterward), who’s challenging state attorney general Josh Shapiro to replace Democratic governor Tom Wolf — but his address sounded every word a DeSantis 2024 presidential speech. The polls suggest Mastriano needs all the help he can get, as Shapiro — who has already spent $12 million on ads — leads Mastriano — running a “shoestring campaign” — by a healthy margin (one recent poll has Shapiro leading by fifteen points). But DeSantis hardly mentioned Mastriano at all.

With the collapse of Liz Cheney's political career in Wyoming, Donald Trump's supporters are fully ensconced in the vast majority of critical candidacies headed into November. He and his supporters have remade the GOP, at least for the moment, into a party devoted to the Trumpian America First agenda and running on that set of priorities — at least when it comes to the lip service they give to border concerns, trade, anti-globalism and culture war issues. But will this be a Republican Party that actually delivers on these priorities should they receive voters' endorsement in November? That’s a more questionable proposition. The core problem that many traditional GOP forces have with a Trumpian agenda is one of prioritization, not of positioning.

Two men stare down as they prepare to brawl in a made-for-TV spectacle. The cameras spotlight their faceoff as the referee restrains them from coming to blows prematurely. No, this wasn’t a promotional for the UFC heavyweight world championship live on HBO at the MGM Las Vegas. This was the GOP Ohio Senate Forum hosted by FreedomWorks. The Buckeye State has produced some of America’s greatest statesmen. It’s given us eight presidents and giants of the Senate from Robert A. Taft to the retiring Rob Portman. Now it's given us a car full of clowns. A few months ago, I wrote about how the Republican primary contest for Ohio's Senate seat was descending into madness. It’s now entered the realm of complete absurdity.

Six short years ago, J.D. Vance penned a piece in the Atlantic comparing Donald Trump to opioids. “Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” he wrote. “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” In the six years since writing those words, it’s Vance, not Trump’s voters, whose mind has changed. Since announcing his run for Senate, Vance has become what he used to chastise: the worst kind of whiny, angry, instinctively hostile, dismissive, dog-whistling troll. Vance first burst onto the scene as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir which told the story of an often-forgotten cross-section of the American public. I loved Hillbilly Elegy.