JD Vance Is the White Kendi

Against indigenous ways of knowing for hillbillies

As long as I remember, I’ve always deeply hated self-pity. The world is full of enough cruelty, sadism, and injustice. The least we can do is not add to the suffering by imagining new forms of oppression that don’t exist, or sitting here as privileged people living centuries after the start of the Industrial Revolution feeling sorry for ourselves.

This naturally influenced my politics. To me, leftists were the people who exaggerated their problems and blamed others for them. Anyone living in a modern developed country is absolutely blessed by historical standards. We can of course complain about remaining injustices and work hard to try to make the world better. But this should be done in the context of understanding that in the grand scheme of things, we are very lucky. And even if you have been objectively victimized, what good is wallowing in self-pity? Pessimism should be treated as a narcotic. It dulls the pain but makes the problems that caused it worse. And it is fundamentally indecent, reflecting a dearth of understanding about one’s place in the human story and a lack of gratitude towards what has been accomplished. Marcus Aurelius was right two thousand years ago about how men should live their lives, and his philosophy is more true and useful in an era of antibiotics and central heating. In fact, at this point, to live any other way is grotesque.

Life has gotten so good and so easy that for a large percentage of people, their problems overwhelmingly result from their own choices. We used to not have enough food to eat, now we stuff ourselves until it requires medical intervention. We used to lack affordable and enjoyable entertainment options, now we are so overwhelmed by them that many of us have trouble finding the motivation to go out and do things in the real world. Childbirth used to carry a substantial risk of death and women produced offspring anyway, now it’s become a relatively safe medical procedure and we don’t bother populating the next generation.

The problem of modernity is that people have become weak. Leftists were those who told their followers to embrace the weakness, and tear others down in the hopes of temporarily feeling slightly better. This was especially true when their politics centered among those who fell into “protected” categories: women, minorities, and later LGBT. Conservatives, in contrast, talked of lifting yourself up by the bootstraps, individual responsibility, and the impact of culture in shaping the behavior of individuals in a positive or negative direction. They rejected hyperbolic talk about the unfairness of society because they realized that Americans have it very good by historical standards, and pretending otherwise is counterproductive for both individuals and the wider culture.

I thought that the left had basically cornered the victimhood market. And then came JD Vance. While supposedly a figure of the right, his embrace of the politics of victimhood is so over the top and deeply embedded in his worldview that he makes Al Sharpton look like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. Every time you ask Vance about any topic in the world, he will return to some story about how elites or immigrants hurt regular, working-class Americans, particularly those who live in the Midwest or Appalachia. There is rarely a hint that human beings have any agency, unless he’s talking about the need for conservatives to use government power to crush their enemies.

All politicians demagogue to some extent. What makes Vance special is the degree to which his worldview is conspiratorial, tribal, and zero sum, without any ideologically consistent aspects beyond that. These are things you would think conservatives would have antibodies against, given the kinds of arguments the movement has been making over the last several decades. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Vance has been able to ride the train of lower-class white grievance all the way to the vice presidency, and perhaps it will get him to the top job itself. His success is perhaps the clearest indication of the degree to which conservatives no longer believe in much of anything beyond being attracted to a political style that centers around denouncing foreigners and elites.

Vance as Political Entrepreneur

The more I watch Vance, the more I realize he’s doing something quite dangerous beyond advocating for bad policies. He can be understood as a political entrepreneur, having taken the form of black identity politics pioneered by figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in a previous generation and applied it to lower-class whites. Because Vance is a Republican, hates the media, allies with Silicon Valley billionaires, and is anti-woke, observers have trouble taking his actual worldview on its own terms. Yet once you start comparing Vance’s outlook to that of practitioners of inner-city identity politics and their sympathizers in the press and academia, you can’t unsee it. And if you believe, like I do, that black identity politics has not only been wrong on the issues but contributed to deeply unhealthy cultural trends, you must admit that there is a great deal of risk in Vance eventually becoming the leader of the Republican Party and being able to shape lower-class white America in his own image. Let’s look at some of the commonalities between his worldview and that of black identity politics.

1. Zero-Sum economic competition between groups

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were tensions between Korean store owners and black residents in inner-city communities, which came to the forefront during the Rodney King riots. As Ice Cube complained:

So don’t follow me up and down your market
Or your little chop suey ass’ll be a target
Of a nationwide boycott
Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got
So pay respect to the Black fist
Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp
And then we’ll see ya
‘Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into Black Korea

At the time, conservatives would ask what exactly prevented locals in cities like Los Angeles from opening their own stores to compete with Koreans, if the experience of shopping in their establishments was so unpleasant. Groups like the Nation of Islam did promote what has been called “black capitalism,” telling their followers that the reason they were suffering had nothing to do with their own cultural shortcomings, but resulted from the mere existence of other people in their vicinity engaging in commerce.

Vance likewise adopts a zero-sum mentality when it comes to economic opportunity. He’s constantly talking about “wage competition” as a reason to restrict immigration, apparently not realizing this idea is one of the oldest and most blatant economic fallacies in existence.

Other politicians have used this fallacy before, but Vance is different in that he always returns to foreigner bashing almost no matter what the topic is. Why is housing expensive? Immigrants buy houses. What has gone wrong for the American worker? Foreigners came into the country and competed for jobs, and other foreigners took the jobs that were shipped overseas. How can we explain variation in economic growth between nations? Canada has suffered because it let in too many immigrants. Worried about communicable diseases? Forget the fact that Trump appointed the most famous anti-vaxxer in the country to run HHS. Blame immigrants!

It’s one thing to be an immigration restrictionist. It’s completely another to use immigration as a theory of everything to explain all that has gone wrong in the world. The nature of public opinion means that just about every politician has to say some economically illiterate things about immigration and trade. You rarely see someone of Vance’s prominence portraying new arrivals to the country as a complete negative across every conceivable dimension. It so dominates his thinking on economic and policy issues that, if you cut out hostility to foreigners, it is difficult to see what Vance substantively stands for.

2. Disparate impact

Ibram X Kendi famously called for a Department of Antiracism that would be responsible for “preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity.” To Kendi, there is no such thing as an idea or policy that is “non-racist.” It can only be racist, if it perpetuates inequalities, or antiracist, if it does the opposite. Academia is full of scientific-seeming studies blaming one black-white disparity after another on past or present discrimination – everything from test scores to crime rates to high blood pressure and heart disease.

Conservatives have tended to be allergic to this kind of thinking. They understand that often, populations will differ due to the choices and traits of individuals in those communities. Maybe the group that gets arrested more commits more crime, for example, and this isn’t traceable in a straightforward manner to some way that a different group has victimized them.

Or at least conservatives did understand this, until JD Vance came along. Here he is just last month:

You know what really pisses people off? When they realize that their loved ones are dying much sooner than everyone else. And that is a big part of the story of what is going on in Appalachia and why I think so many people in Appalachia feel left behind.

I feel like I’m going crazy here being the only person out there making the Kendi-Vance connection. Conservatives spent decades rolling their eyes at leftists who assumed disparities can only be caused by discrimination. And someone who once understood this better than just about anyone else is JD Vance himself. As I wrote in my review of his memoir,

Before recently starting Hillbilly Elegy, I had heard that it was harsh on poor whites. Yet other reviews hadn’t prepared me for just how negatively it portrayed them. Not only does Vance tell us that they do drugs, neglect their children, and recklessly buy things they can’t afford, but he also spends a good bit of time psychologically analyzing what’s wrong with his people, at a few points mentioning how Obama made them feel inferior. It’s one thing to talk about the behavior of a group, but once you go into the realm of psychological explanations for their pathologies and all the ways in which they delude themselves, it feels different. This is something that you do after you have achieved some distance.

At the time, he explicitly called out those who would blame China, immigrants, and far-off elites for what has gone wrong in their local communities. JD Vance today is what you’d get if someone read Hillbilly Elegy and used its portrait of demagoguery as a guide for how to run for office.

3. Judge ideas by the identity of the speaker

Marxists and wokes believe that you can evaluate people’s opinions according to their identity-based characteristics. Whites, males, and the wealthy work to maintain their racial, class, and gender privilege. Objectivity is denounced as a smokescreen to mask the process of the favored group pursuing its interests. You might have a scientific sounding study or a straightforward logical argument about why you are correct, but if everyone who agrees with you happens to be a white male, you need to step back and reflect on why that is. This kind of thinking reaches its most absurd form in the depths of academia where they talk of “indigenous ways of knowing.”

If you think this is a bad way to go through life, note that Vance has said that those with more ancestors in the country have “a hell of a lot more claim over America” than their political opponents. And when people disagree with him on an issue, it is because of their privileged position, as revealed in the following tweet.

Mass migration is theft of the American Dream. It has always been this way, and every position paper, think tank piece, and econometric study suggesting otherwise is paid for by the people getting rich off of the old system.

The vast majority of economists agree that immigration is good for the economy. To Vance, then, the entire field of economics is simply a conspiracy paid for by people who get rich off migrant labor. Vance’s tweet is accompanied by a video of a man from Louisiana with a heavy Southern accent talking about how ICE raids have improved the fortunes of his construction company, since he no longer has to compete with more efficient firms. Who cares what every academic study says? Some redneck recording a video in his car about his feelings is how we should judge the effects of policies!

What is particularly galling about this is that Vance himself has gained power from taking the anti-immigration position. I doubt there is any scholar who writes in favor of immigration who is anywhere near as wealthy as JD Vance. Many of them are employees at state and private universities, and may be funded by rich people in a very indirect sense since rich people pay more taxes. The possibility that economists might think immigration is a good thing because they know something about the way the world works doesn’t appear to cross his mind. Again, this isn’t just about being against immigration. It’s about reaching for an identity-based explanation of why every expert disagrees with you. It would be less annoying if Vance said that economists were wrong because they’re misled by their ideological priors. That would be a straightforward argument about bias that would have some plausibility. Instead, he goes straight for the identity-based, class resentment analysis to explain political disagreements. Once again, I’m showing you here that there are ways to oppose immigration without adopting the politics of victimhood, but Vance simply loves the idea of his supporters being oppressed by others too much to see things in any other way.

4. Belief in murderous conspiracy theories surrounding drugs

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack epidemic was ripping apart black communities, there was a somewhat widespread belief that the CIA or other government forces were behind what was happening. After a series of 1996 media reports implying that the CIA-aligned drug dealers introduced cheap crack into black areas of Los Angeles, Maxine Waters of California and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus demanded government investigations. The DOJ looked into the matter and did not find evidence to back any of this up.

Nonetheless, the idea that the federal government was directly responsible for the crack epidemic remained a part of black politics and culture. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam ran stories with headlines like “The CIA Drug Pipeline: How the US government spread crack cocaine in the Black ghetto.” Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2008, continued to spread the conspiracy theory a decade later.

In pop culture, this idea shows up in 2Pac’s “Changes,” released posthumously in 1998, with the following lyrics.

Give the crack to the kids, who the hell cares?
One less hungry mouth on the welfare
First ship ‘em dope and let ‘em deal to brothers
Give ‘em guns, step back, watch ‘em kill each other

How is this any different from Vance’s explanation of the fentanyl crisis? As he once explained,

If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?… It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.

Of course he claims it just “looks” intentional. Vance is smart enough not to say that this was Biden’s plan and be called on it, so he maintains plausible deniability. Yet there’s no question that he knows what he’s doing here, and the typical Republican listener is meant to walk away from this conversation believing he’s being targeted for death by the Democratic president.

Drug epidemics don’t happen because nefarious forces are out there trying to get some race hooked on a substance for the sake of political gain. The opioid crisis in particular seems to be straightforwardly the result of prescribing practices in the US, mostly from the best of intentions. People suffer from pain, and these medications can and often do help them. We can debate policy here without going straight to murderous conspiracy theories.

If Biden’s plan was to open the borders to kill MAGAs, this was quite strange as a campaign strategy. Sure, maybe you throw some Trump supporters off the voter rolls, but they’re disproportionately in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, which aren’t exactly swing states. Those who die are often young male junkies, a group that doesn’t get to the polls that often. Moreover, the backlash to the chaos at the border seems like it had a much bigger effect on the 2024 election than whatever gains the Democrats made by killing a few Trump supporters.

Putting aside the stupid conspiracy theories, there is something deeply unseemly about considering people who die of drug overdoses as victims having had no role in bringing about their fate. We can have compassion for them, but I think a healthy society understands that it is much less of a tragedy when someone ODs because of their own choices compared to someone suffering due to no fault of their own. Today, Republicans regularly talk about Americans being “murdered” by fentanyl dealers, an abuse of language that they only began embracing when those dying were seen as more likely to be white. In the war on drugs of previous generations, we used to demonize both the dealers and the users. Today, the right directs all of its scorn at the drug dealers, because it prefers a narrative in which Americans are victimized by foreigners over one in which junkies themselves have to share at least some of the blame for what happens to them. As with the way they discuss the loss of jobs and what has happened to certain communities, it’s part of a newer form of conservatism that now rejects the power of culture or individual agency to shape behavior.

5. Corporations are at fault for struggling communities

You’ll often hear left-wing academics and politicians talk about “food deserts” or complain about supermarkets and convenience stores closing down in inner-city black communities. They seem not to understand that there are market forces at work, and it is difficult to run a business in an area where the residents are poor, theft is rampant, and employees have to worry about their personal safety. In 2017, Philadelphia even took the step of banning some establishments from using bulletproof glass, which I thought was the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with food deserts logic.

When Vance talks about outsourcing and jobs getting shipped overseas, it’s simply a matter of globalists deciding to be disloyal or line their own pockets rather than take care of their fellow Americans. Just as businesses are supposed to eat the cost of operating in inner-city ghettos to show loyalty to certain communities, they must hurt their own interests to keep factories open in places where doing so doesn’t make economic sense. Instead of asking members of struggling communities to think about how they can contribute to society by becoming the kinds of people who others would voluntarily want as consumers or workers, it is the job of government to compensate for their shortcomings by restricting the freedom and harming the living standards of others.

JD Vance apparently believes that corporations are responsible for the plight of not only hollowed out factory towns, but inner-city communities too. See this tweet from 2021:

Insurance companies promote BLM.

BLM riots drive up insurance premiums.

Businesses and family wealth get destroyed. Insurance companies get rich.

Identity politics makes the multiracial working class poor and the ruling class rich.

Wait, what? Insurance companies get rich by…encouraging stores to be burned down? I’ve heard of business owners burning down buildings for the insurance money, but not the companies that have to pay the claims. Now, in the Washington Free Beacon article Vance links to, it does make a case for how insurance companies could have not exactly ended up worse off due to the unrest. Even if true, implying that self-interest, rather than general ideological currents, explains their support for BLM is a hallmark of the conspiratorial victim mentality we have traditionally seen in ghetto politics. Interestingly, the Free Beacon article referenced added a correction the day after Vance’s tweet that seemed to distance itself from his interpretation of it.

Vance also blames BlackRock for housing being expensive. This is of course economically illiterate; if corporations invest in homes, it is so people can live in them. When you ban firms from participating in this market, rent goes up. Restrictions on what kinds of profits businesses can earn lead to fewer homes being built and maintained. The housing affordability issue is a straightforward matter of restricting supply, but Vance basically never talks about this, and is only interested in the topic to the extent that he can demagogue against corporations or immigrants. On the left, there is now a far reaching discussion about just this issue, and even Democrats like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson acknowledge that we need to encourage land use reform. But Vance, who styles himself an intellectual, is completely missing from this discourse, because he has no interest in acknowledging that markets work or drawing attention to any narrative that talks about problems without blaming foreigners or corporations for what has gone wrong.

Victimhood and Postliberalism

I don’t think I’m cherry-picking quotes here to make Vance look bad. As someone who has read his book, personally known the man, followed him on Twitter, and watched or read countless interviews, I can say that quotes like the ones highlighted above accurately reflect his worldview. He has also identified strongly with postliberal thinkers, who are skeptical of markets, favor populist identity politics, and oppose immigration and trade. They share Vance’s contempt for objective reasoning and empirical evidence when it gets in the way of the class war narrative that they are trying to sell.

One thing that is truly frustrating here is that I appear to be one of the only people out there able to make the connection between Vance’s thinking and the worst pathologies of the left. Ben Shapiro, to his credit, admitted to Ezra Klein that Vance and Trump do traffic in the kinds of victim mongering and spiritual poison that have more often been identified with the other side of the political spectrum. But my experience is that when I bring these arguments up to conservatives — ones who agree with me on most things — they simply are incapable of understanding what I’m talking about.

Are there parts of Vance that this analysis misses? I talked to Jesse Arm about this, and he brought up the AI speech in Paris. I agree that it was pretty good, and hit on a lot of themes that I agree with. It’s just difficult to reconcile the speech with the views of the guy who blames foreigners for all of the world’s problems, and embraces class-based analysis to the extent that he believes that insurance executives are burning down buildings to profit at the expense of the multiracial working class. We should probably consider the AI speech an aberration. It’s a position that he takes to please his backers in Silicon Valley worried about government regulations, but does not appear consistent with most of the other things he believes or reflective of his overall worldview.

Vance rarely cites futurist or pro-market thinkers. Conversely, here he is on a panel praising the work of Patrick Deneen, one of the worst purveyors of intellectual victim porn out there, who complains about working class Americans becoming serfs and suffering under the rule of the worst elites in history. The postliberal crowd returns Vance’s affections, recognizing him as their champion. He’s also beloved by Tucker Carlson and other conspiracy theorists, as there’s a natural synergy between believing that shadowy forces control the world and not understanding how markets work.

Perhaps the ultimate tell here is which Democrats Vance goes out of his way to praise. While being a partisan warrior most of the time, and ignoring the abundance discourse, he will find opportunities to say nice things about Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani, Lina Khan, and Bernie Sanders. Not everyone who is into left-wing economic ideas embraces the culture of victimhood – I wouldn’t say that Stalin or even FDR did – but the correlation is quite strong, and Vance’s clear affinity for a form of politics that centers around bashing corporations and the wealthy adds to the case that he is indeed the White Kendi.

Vance seems to have cast a spell over rightists, and they have trouble understanding that this guy is the personification of nearly everything they once claimed to hate. Partly, it’s culture war brain rot. Vance detests Democrats and wokeness, so that trumps everything else in their minds. Moreover, Vance is good about reaching out and cultivating relationships with those he needs to impress, and most people will go out of their way not to criticize powerful individuals in their coalition, especially if they have a personal connection that can potentially lead to influence.

But I was always a poor fit for the contemporary conservative movement, since I care about ideas and what’s true, and very little about personal relationships or what is fashionable. I was attracted to the right because I like free markets, optimism, seeing man take control of his own destiny, and individual responsibility. I hate victim culture, blaming others for one’s problems, demagoguery, and placing identity concerns over truth. Sure, I was once racist just like them, but at least there were other aspects to my intellect and personality! If a movement claims to believe in principles like free markets and individual responsibility while embracing Vance – whose worldview stands in direct opposition to them – one can question how much they ever really believed in these ideas in the first place. Or any ideas at all really, aside from racial resentment.

America has suffered terribly by conspiratorial identity politics taking off and eventually dominating our urban politics. Yet the damage was always contained, since inner-city blacks always made up a small portion of the American population. A political entrepreneur who is out to make whites think about themselves in a similar way is a much greater threat to the future of the country.

Vance hasn’t been single-handedly responsible for changing the culture of the right. It was Trump who was the original political entrepreneur here, and the scams, lies, corruption, and overall bad behavior of the contemporary GOP is downstream of it becoming a low-class, identity based movement. As his presumed successor, Vance has the potential to solidify this change, and give it an intellectual gloss. If eventually elected president, he will inspire true believers — people who make white grievance the center of their worldview — to join his administration. There, they would govern without the moderating influences of Trumpworld: contempt for losers, a friendlier attitude toward business, and even the endemic corruption that, as with tariffs, sometimes blunts the damage of misguided populist policies.