The Comfortable Queen and the Conflicted Country Boy

Vance, Kamala, and the malleability of identity

Many rightists think racial conflict is inevitable in a diverse society. People naturally identify with those who look and speak like themselves, and this is supposedly bound to have political implications. Many leftists have a similar outlook, though it’s usually more implicit, with a focus on the ways in which groups with disproportionate economic and political power might use it to disadvantage others.

One of the reasons I have a hard time taking this view seriously is that it seems to only represent one possible path that society can take. The salience of race doesn’t simply change across historical eras, but we can observe shifts within the lives of individuals on an extremely short time scale.

Consider Kamala Harris and her two books, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer (2009) and The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019). Published a decade apart, both should be understood as tools to help an ambitious politician advance her career. They are time capsules, showing in each year of publication the kinds of things a politician thought she needed to say to get ahead in Democratic politics.

Smart on Crime was released during Obama’s first year in office, when educated liberals would still optimistically talk about transitioning to an America where race doesn’t matter. In that environment, Kamala mostly ignored the topic. The word black to refer to the racial category (i.e., not “black-eyed peas”) is used twice in the entire book. One of those instances is as part of a proper noun: Congressional Black Caucus. The term African American appears seven times. This is especially impressive in a book about the criminal justice system, given the subsequent rise of BLM.

In her second book, not even including the endnotes and references, black appears over 80 times. If you do include endnotes and references, you get dozens more results. African American has completely disappeared.

When Trump says Kamala wasn’t always black, he’s definitely wrong, as she attended Howard University and never did anything that can be interpreted as hiding her background and identity. But it is true that the salience of race in her life story has changed over time.

Moreover, going beyond simple word count, when 2009 Kamala talks about black people, it’s often done not to push a leftist narrative on race, but to reassure us that they have no sympathy for criminals. The following paragraph contains four of the seven references to African Americans in Smart on Crime.

When I was working as a prosecutor in Oakland, California, where there are large numbers of African Americans, I used to see an example of the pervasiveness of this myth in action. When I would be prosecuting a young African American offender for assault or robbery, for example, time and again an inexperienced public defender would ensure that there were African American men and women on the jury, thinking they would be sympathetic to their client because of race. Well, as the prosecutor, that suited me just fine. What I knew to be true is that most African Americans of any economic class, like most people, are deeply offended and angry about crime in their neighborhoods. But these public defenders ended up being shocked that the jurors didn’t align with the knucklehead who robbed a gas station or provoked a street-corner brawl. It was no surprise to me.

In contrast, 2019 Kamala sees both societal issues and her own life story largely through the prism of race. She tells us blacks are more likely to be killed by police, incarcerated, or have their cars searched after being stopped. Kamala cites studies saying that they live shorter lives due to structural racism, and recommends all medical schools adopt implicit bias training programs. We find out that in 2016 she became the first black woman ever elected to the Senate from California and the second from any state in American history, but she didn’t find such milestones worth mentioning in her previous book.

Which version is the real Kamala? No one gets to Harris’ position without probably being at least at the 99th percentile of ambition. Nothing in her life gives me any indication that she has any kind of deep racial hangups that have left psychological scars, nor that she is particularly averse to talking about her identity. The difference between 2009 and 2019 Kamala was that an ambitious black politician after the Great Awokening would find herself in a situation where it made more sense to talk about her racial identity and related topics.

Interestingly, when Harris recently released her campaign policy page, she was back to barely talking about race at all, indicating that we may be at the beginning of a shift back towards more color blindness. Clearly, elites can choose what kind of society they want, and how much attention we devote to racial issues.

JD Vance provides a similar example of how ambitious people change their understandings of their own identities over time, but with an interesting twist that explains why Kamala is likeable while he isn’t. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Vance’s 2016 Hillbilly Elegy is dripping with contempt towards the poor whites he grew up with. They spend recklessly and have children they can’t afford and don’t take care of. They’re fat because they eat too much junk food, and steal from their employers. If surveys say they work hard, it’s only because they lie to pollsters to make themselves look good. Vance even denounces the tendency of poor rural whites to blame China and Obama for all their problems. In fact, our first black president filled these rednecks with shame because he is unlike them a decent man and good father, which their primitive racist minds can’t handle. When Trump came on the scene, Vance predictably denounced him as an “opioid of the masses” who engaged in exactly the kind of scapegoating he denounced in the book. Today, of course, Vance is Trump’s running mate, and he has become a caricature of the kind of politician he used to hate.

It’s difficult to understand this transformation as not being rooted in ambition. Most analysts did not believe Trump would win the primaries in 2016, and even after getting the nomination he was considered a long shot to beat Hillary Clinton. The Republican establishment, fresh off the Tea Party era, was inclined to blame poor people for their own problems and reject leftist narratives that faulted society for their circumstances. Intellectual conservatives believed in culture of poverty explanations put forth by thinkers like Thomas Sowell. In the years before Hillbilly Elegy was published, Vance was writing articles for David Frum’s website on topics like the need for entitlement reform. Then Trump came along, and showed that playing to lower class white grievance was a popular strategy, or at least a potentially successful one given the realities of the Senate and electoral college. During the Trump administration, it became clear that the cult of personality was here to stay and would remain a strong force within Republican politics for the foreseeable future.

2016 Vance was a kind of Bill Cosby for white rednecks, telling them to put down the Krispy Kremes and go get a job. He started out just as they did, but made something of himself instead of sitting around all day blaming others. Now, without ever really explaining why, in his mind he has become the tribune of his former class, using his intellectual energy to provide rationalizations for what many in poor white communities intuitively feel, which is that foreigners and elites are responsible for their problems. Most of all, he had to rationalize their love of Trump itself.

Given his current belief that new arrivals to the country pose a cultural threat, I was particularly struck by Vance talking in his memoir about how his wife and her immigrant family modeled good behavior he hadn’t seen much of before, exerting a civilizing influence on him. An acceptance of the positive effects of immigration was once central to Vance’s understanding of how he became the man he is today, and his new Trumpist position can’t help but create cognitive dissonance.

The stories of Harris and Vance both reveal how identities are constructed over time. Depending on what kinds of incentives are created by political realities and the wider culture, ambitious individuals will recast not only their positions, but the narratives of their life stories in the direction of what will help them achieve power.

Harris, however, appears a lot more comfortable in her own skin, and the fact that she can shape shift so seamlessly is what separates her from Vance.

Think of public figures as being high or low on two axes: ambition and need for intellectual coherence. Harris is high on the first and low on the second. She comes to believe whatever she needs to in order to get ahead, and doesn’t think too much about any inconsistencies or shifts in her worldview. This makes her likable. She’s in a very fundamental way unconflicted, which puts people at ease. She laughs easily and loudly because there is no voice in the back of her mind telling her that something isn’t right and she needs to explain herself better. Perhaps being low on the need for intellectual coherence is just a reflection of low levels of neuroticism; if you’re going to be a politician who moves with the times, you might as well not feel bad about it.

Vance, in contrast, is high on both ambition and need for intellectual coherence but with the former tendency clearly dominant. After 2016, if he wanted to go anywhere in Republican politics, he had no choice but to get on the Trump train. The problem is that it is hard to imagine a man who is more difficult to defend while remaining intellectually honest than Trump. Any complaint you can make about his opponents applies much more strongly to him. So Vance comes out and blames the rhetoric of the left for attempts to assassinate Trump, as if the guy he is talking about provides a model of how to engage civilly in public life. Any criticism that liberals are behaving in an unfair or antidemocratic manner is similarly laughable coming from someone who defends what was a literal coup attempt in 2020.

To square this circle, Vance feels the need to come up with elaborate justifications as to why he’s behaving as he does. So after being reminded that stories about Haitians eating dogs and cats are false, he tells CNN that sometimes he lies for the greater good of bringing attention to the problems with immigration. Of course, what’s bizarre about this is that, if your strategy involves lying, admitting to it tends to be counterproductive. We saw a version of this too when Vance told a group of conservatives that it’s fine if Marjorie Taylor Greene believes crazy things, and Alex Jones is in some sense more reliable than Rachel Maddow.

Greene and Jones are disturbed individuals whose prominence in conservative politics indicates something deeply sick within the movement that goes well beyond normal human stupidity. Unlike Trump, who might just say Greene is great and leave it at that, Vance feels forced to acknowledge that his coalition includes a lot of people who are obviously out of their minds. This requires that he perform mental gymnastics to make them appear not so bad, at least compared to the other side. Maddow is of course — and this is something one shouldn’t need to say — a more reliable journalist than Alex Jones, but even if she wasn’t, there’s no logical reason to make such a comparison unless you are thinking tribally. The other side being full of lying lunatics doesn’t necessarily mean you gain advantage by defending your own lying lunatics, and nothing about that fact changes if you convince yourself that they’re in some sense better than your opponents.

Vance’s need for intellectual coherence also leads him to sometimes say politically damaging things on policy. Here he is practically admitting how his economic nationalist agenda would raise prices and make Americans poorer. Protectionism is clearly stupid, and Vance is smart enough to see it, but I think he needs to somehow justify it in order to provide logical coherence to his version of intellectual Trumpism. Republican voters want to bash foreigners and if you see yourself as their voice you need to come up with something that makes sense to explain why you’re advocating such obviously disastrous policies. Trump, again in contrast, just straight up lies and says that tariffs have no cost to Americans so there’s nothing to worry about.

The fact that Vance is high on both ambition and need for intellectual coherence, along with his underlying anger that is in some ways related to these traits, are what I think people are sensing when they refer to him as weird. He often looks physically uncomfortable with the things he has to say. You would feel bad all the time too if you were a person with a real intellectual life who was forced to go out and praise someone as stupid and corrupt as Trump on a daily basis. All politicians have to lie and twist the truth to a certain extent, but Trump is simply an outlier in how morally grotesque and uniquely indefensible he is, both as a person and a politician who one would expect to act like a serious person and put forth coherent policy ideas. His clear discomfort might also just reflect neuroticism, but if Vance is naturally angry or depressed it seems in a sense tied to his need for intellectual coherence, as these traits reinforce one another. Hillbilly Elegy was an angry book, even if the targets of his rage have changed.

Nonetheless, in the end, you don’t get many chances to become vice president, and Vance was clearly always going to do what it took to get ahead. Sometimes he plays his current role with admirable skill. On more than one occasion, I have watched an interview and come away thinking that he basically did the best one possibly could given that he was forced to talk about the last crazy thing that Trump said or did. But Vance still carries an underlying guilt that often makes its way to the surface.

Some rightists have called Kamala a chameleon because she changes her positions over time and even her accent depending on the context. But this is such a natural part of human behavior that it has a name in linguistics: code-switching. Vance seems to have the same accent everywhere he goes, which is actually strange for someone who has moved between Appalachian poverty and the highest reaches of American life. People don’t find chameleon-like behavior that disturbing, which is why flip-flopping is fine unless you seem uncomfortable doing it. Trump completely lacks shame, and can be seen as an even more extreme version of Kamala, or anyone else really, in this aspect of his personality. People criticize Trump for a lot of things, but calling him a flip-flopper seems to be one of the least effective lines of attack available. Harris’ high ambition combined with her lack of interest in ideas similarly make her seem authentic. To actually care that the ideas she expressed about the centrality of race in American life in 2019 are not consistent with what she believed a decade earlier, or what her campaign platform says now, would be weird.

One final thought is that I think Trump’s unique awfulness explains the political bitterness of our era for a reason that has remained largely unexplored. Something that is particularly disturbing about Vance, which plays into the weirdness discourse, is how extremely angry he seems at the world. I think I have an explanation as to why. As mentioned, he’s been in a position where to make it in Republican politics he needs to be pro-Trump. But since Trump is obviously a corrupt and scatter-brained maniac, it’s hard to convince yourself that he’s actually honest and decent. This means that the easiest way to make him look comparatively good in your mind is by tearing your opponents down. If Trump is a two on an ethics scale from zero to ten, adding points to Trump is much more of a challenge than taking away points from liberals, so they need to be a zero or one. Maybe you start to believe that everyone is immoral and corrupt. Make the world ugly enough, and Trump becomes beautiful. Or at least the reasons why anyone would support him become understandable.

Institutions like the media, academia, and the leaderships of both parties therefore aren’t just full of people you disagree with or biased against conservatives. Elites are seething with contempt towards the good men and women who built this country. If they allow high levels of immigration, it isn’t because they think it’s good economics or the right thing to do morally. The point is to humiliate, destroy, and replace regular, implicitly white, Americans. Such a worldview is truly poisonous, but I think adopting it is the only way a smart person with a need for intellectual consistency can justify defending Trump. The intellectual haters become natural allies to and leaders of the pure haters who would hate no matter what because it’s fun, as they all together rage against cat ladies and Haitians eating cats and whatever else happens to grab their attention in the moment.