Don't fall off your chair... Here's what I like about JD Vance

I know. It seems like he's exactly the guy I should loathe within the GOP. Somehow, though, I do not... quite.

There’s going to be a lot of chatter today about JD Vance. The overwhelming majority of it will be about what he does or does not bring to the GOP ticket, slightly less will be about what progressives and conservatives hate about him (spoiler: There’s a lot).

I’m here to offer a different take. JD Vance seems like exactly the guy I should loathe within the GOP. He’s done a hard turn towards Trumpism, is a protectionist on trade, a restrictionist on immigration, and he’s much more big government than I am.

Somehow, though, I do not hate the guy. Or at least there are things I like about him and find myself empathizing with. Yes, really.

Let me start by saying that Vance and I have had some spats on Twitter. Here’s a fun one. This was my reply.

The reply leads me to the point of this post: The nomination of Vance is the first time during which I have been politically aware (say, since about age 14) that either party has nominated as President or Vice President someone who comes from a background somewhat like mine, and who has faced educational and personal challenges somewhat like I have. Vance is younger than me (point of pride: He’s a millennial; I’m the last year of Generation X; obviously this is a negative for him and a positive for me), but he’s also generally within the same age range as me, and that will mean he has had additional life experiences similar to mine. Maybe that shouldn’t give me hope that he gets a bunch of the things that impact how I think and what I believe is important to get (or not get) from my government. But for the moment, I am finding that it does, at least a bit— even if that is going to strike some of you as irrational.

I try not to write too much about my roots and my family, and where I do, I tend to lean in to the Scottish immigrant side (Dad’s) and my mother’s Utahan-Montanan-generally Western roots. Those are both big chunks of me that have massively shaped who I am.

But there are decades of other shit, and in some cases I really do mean shit, intervening in that history that frankly is painful to talk about— and which, due to having difficult or non-existent relationships with some people in my family, I’m actually a little bit afraid of talking about. Although I did not grow up in the Midwest and have zero connections to Appalachia (apart from enjoying hiking there when I lived in DC), a lot of Vance’s story strikes me as eerily similar to my story— though of course, there are big differences. By writing this, I’m probably going to piss off multiple family members and maybe go through a period of months where communications become strained (or worse) yet again, but I’m going to write it anyway so people know where I’m coming from.

Like Vance, I don’t come from a typical background for a Republican. No one in my family, up until me, went to any elite schools (whether “school” here means elementary, middle, high school, or university). Three out of my four grandparents ended up relatively well off, economically, but in two out of the three cases, that was through a lot of really hard work (in Grandpa’s case, running the blueprint room at Boeing) and meticulous saving. In the third case (my paternal Grandmother), that was after suffering really horrific abuse at the hands of her husband (my Grandfather, who thankfully I never met), splitting from him and leaving my Dad at a very early age (this was in the 1930’s, of all times), and ultimately marrying a banker. These three of four grandparents thus ended their lives in relative economic comfort, but that wasn’t where two of those four came from— at all.

While my parents both went to university and were well-educated, they were definitely not the “elite” of American society. Until my Dad inherited some money (late in life), he was not quite what people in Seattle that I knew growing up would consider fully “middle-middle class.” Like Vance’s parents, he and my mother split when I was small (3 1/2 in my case, younger it appears in Vance’s). I lived with my mother, with plenty of time spent with Dad, thereafter, and we were definitely lower middle class (perhaps even lower, lower middle class, income-wise). There was a lot of shopping at Value Village (Seattle’s own chain of used clothing and goods stores) or with Dad, K-Mart. I remember spending a lot of time wondering why I couldn’t get a new jacket from a normal department store, even at age 4, and there was no buying anything from Nordstrom or what was then the Bon Marche (now part of Macy’s) unless there was a really massive sale going on with heavily discounted goods (that meant that even a pair of black stirrup pants was not in the cards in 4th grade). I remember watching my mother run the numbers to pay bills at the end of the month and hearing her mutter to herself about the probability that we would end up homeless.

Of course, I know now that would not have happened. Among other things, we would have moved in with her parents before we ever ended up on the streets— or I would have moved in with Dad and what were to become my stepmother and my step-siblings (who, by the way, early in their relationship were still living in her mother’s house). But as a small kid, that possibility didn’t occur to me. There was a constant pervasive sense of real economic insecurity. It haunts me to this day, though I have gotten better about coping with it.

At the same time, my parents— principally my mother, but Dad to a lesser extent— worked their asses off to ensure that I got a good education. This was not by bringing in the bucks to pay for it; it was through my mother rigorously seeking out any and all opportunities for me to get financial aid packages to attend good private schools (at which I would inevitably and visibly be the poorest, or one of the poorest, kids, all the way from preschool through graduation). Despite having gotten a master’s degree, my mother finished her career as a student adviser at the University of Washington— hardly a well-paying job (though we did have decent health coverage, and we have found that in retirement, she has good benefits, so perhaps taking the hit then paid off in a way not visible to me as a ten or eighteen-year-old). I don’t know what my Dad earned, but he juggled a lot of gigs at any time, usually including professional artist, community college professor, graphic designer, and art school teacher. I’m quite sure he made more money than my mother, but he also had two kids from his first marriage to pay for alongside me (at least for a time— my half-sister and half-brother were/are a lot older than me; my brother, the younger of the two, is 11 years older than me). And he married my stepmother and helped raise my step-brother and step-sister, whose Dad I believe had to be sued to pay up any notable amount of the child support he owed for my step-sister, particularly.

Suffice to say, when I read about the upbringings of a George W Bush or a Mitt Romney or a Donald Trump, I don’t find a lot to empathize with in socio-economic terms (with Trump, at least I do insofar as his mother was Scottish, and Romney I did insofar as he’s Mormon and so was my maternal grandmother’s family). I didn’t with Bill Clinton, either (OK, he too came from a split up family, but it was very clear to me when I read about his upbringing that as a kid, he still had far more economic security than I did— hell, he went off to college with a car!).

When these figures talk about policy designed to help people rise up economically, I know it when I spot it, and I will back it because it matters to me. That’s actually fundamentally why I am an economic conservative (well, that plus having seen and heard from a very young age what the welfare state actually accomplishes in my other country, which is to say “not much”); I believe that economically conservative policies actually do more to raise up people born into my circumstances than policy solutions progressives advance.

But I digress. I don’t believe the Bushes, or Romney, or Trump or Clinton have ever had to think about economic insecurity in real, personal terms the way I have— let alone those who grew up even worse off (and there are plenty of them). (Side note: McCain is a different animal here: As a military brat with a family with a very prestigious military pedigree, I didn’t share much in common with his upbringing— but I doubt that George W Bush or Mitt Romney or Donald Trump did, either). That is something that has been missing for me in our actual politician class, and it is still in awfully short supply. Vance supplies it— at least to a decent degree.

But there is more in Vance’s background that I feel overlaps with mine. Here’s where I’m going to get into more painful stuff.

Vance’s mother struggled with addiction. Not surprisingly, given that my Dad’s side is from the general Glasgow area in Scotland, we have also had addiction struggles in my family. Much of this has been alcoholism—some of it the banal, drinking alone type, some of it the extremely violent, nasty type. But in one close family member’s case (I’ll leave out the specific identity), it was also many years of heroin addiction and multiple efforts, all but one failed, to get clean. I am the youngest of my siblings. Vance is (I believe) his parents’ only child. There is a particular toll that is taken when you see this, or are even aware of it, growing up as the youngest in a family. There’s a constant fear of your loved one ending up dead or incarcerated. There’s the sense that because you are not a 25 year-old or a 30 year-old or a 45 year-old, you are affected by it but you really cannot do anything about it. People constantly tell you treatment will work, but unless the addict really has hit rock bottom and is truly ready to change (and usually when they say they are, they aren’t), it won’t. There’s a constant worry about drag on the limited financial resources you and your family already depend on— because if rehab isn’t free, someone has to pay. There’s also just the stress and trauma of batshit crazy shit that addicts do all the time and that the whole family will get dragged into because of various confrontations, whether with the police, neighbors, business owners, or anyone else who interacts with the addict. There’s also the constant worry that because addiction is a problem in your family, you could wind up the same way (I did, on the alcohol front; this is why I quit drinking in 2002).

Again, I don’t have visibility into every dark corner of the Bush, Romney, Trump or Clinton family histories (though I do commend Trump for having decided not to drink, since he saw what happened to his brother— he has at least some experience here), but of the people nominated for President or Vice President in my lifetime, only Vance to my knowledge has personal experience of growing up in the shadow of opiate or opioid addiction. Believe it or not, that matters to me. I may not agree with where he comes down on policy relating to the issue, but I think it’s actually important experience and knowledge given how vast and sprawling the opioid crisis has now become in America. (Candidly, I would argue the same is true if we’re talking about potential candidates for, say, Scotland’s First Minister. The addiction problems that ravage Appalachia and were very present growing up in Seattle are exceedingly common also in Scotland, especially in the Glasgow area).

Vance also has the experience of being the smart kid who by virtue of his intelligence and work ethic and yes, support from key family members, had the ability to go further in life than anyone else in his family (and clearly, further than me, lowly political consultant that I am). He joined the military, went to THE Ohio State University (joke inserted for the benefit of my VP, Dan), and then went to Yale law school. I got the grades and SAT scores needed to gain admission to the University of St Andrews (sort of a lesser Ivy corollary in the UK). Luckily, because when my grandmother died, she left money for my education, I also was able to afford to attend. In hindsight, I can see plenty of areas where I could have worked harder and done more, but at the end of the day, I banked a respectable 2:1 degree in one of the toughest degrees at the university, having also spent my third year at arguably the toughest political science institute in the world (Sciences Po in Paris) doing everything in French and gaining a certificate there.

Like Vance, I went on to law school. Ultimately, I practiced for a few years in an area where I largely worked on private equity deals; he instead went into private equity. There is, in short a lot of commonality here, too.

Here’s another thing: Vance and I are both converts to Catholicism. I don’t know much about Vance’s religious upbringing, or lack thereof, but I didn’t have any that was specific. As I say, my maternal grandmother was raised Mormon, so I had plenty of exposure to Mormonism, but largely through a cultural, not theological, lens (pharmaceuticals: Bad; vaccinations: Questionable; naturopaths: Good; chiropractor: Essential; canning lots of food: Done). My paternal grandmother was an Anglican (I know, shock, horror, I didn’t convert to Catholicism until long after she was dead and hadn’t started thinking about theology until around when she died anyway). No one else had any discernible religious beliefs. My Dad and stepmother were from about my middle school years part of a Sikh-led group that practiced meditation. Sometimes my Dad also went to church (he had been raised by Church of Scotland Scots, although they ultimately ditched the church following an excommunication over a racial segregation issue). Without ever having spoken to Vance, I suspect a lot of my conversion experience was similar to his. We’re told that in a country that separates church and state, that should not impact one’s thinking on politics and policy, but of course it does and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

This is all what I was getting at with my retort to Vance about “these people.” He and I are not literally the same. He doesn’t walk around daily feeling that people view him as anything less than 100 percent American (I do, always have, probably always will, and I am a US-UK dual national and just as proud to be British as I am American, and very culturally divided in my tastes and preferences). He doesn’t joke to people that he’s 1/4 Mormon, or have to explain to his kid when they visit ancestors’ old houses why there was one house for “Big Grandma” and one for “Little Grandma” (because “Grandpa” was a Mormon polygamist). But on a bunch of other levels, he and I are very similar. I imagine our read on the challenges of lower middle class Americans rising up the socio-economic ladder are very similar, even though his old policy prescriptions for addressing that look a lot more like mine than his current iteration does.

So let’s talk about that: Vance and policy. The 2016-ish era Vance was a lot closer to libertarian Liz that the Vance of 2024. In 2016, we were both Never Trumpers. We were both rather pro-immigration (at least on my read of his stances). There were plenty of other similarities, too. The 2024 edition is basically Trump, but younger, smarter, and I would argue better and more roundly educated (state university and military service, neither of which feature on Trump’s CV). Also probably more legitimately conservative and concerned about economic issues as opposed to "the nefariousness of “foreign people and things” (Trump’s only real philosophical instinct).

For example, Vance has expressed support for a crackdown on Big Tech. Done via antitrust law, I think this could actually harm consumers— including today’s version of his and my families growing up— by taking free or cheap products and services off the market. Done via Section 230 reform, I think this could undermine free speech principles (the Constitution does not, on my read, protect anyone’s ability to mouth off on Twitter; it does, however, protect Twitter’s right to not associate with anyone it doesn’t want to for optics, advertising revenue, or any other reasons). Vance’s support for the FTC and more aggressive antitrust enforcement also implies support for the FTC’s focus on pharmaceutical benefit managers. While I get why independent pharmacies are none too pleased about certain actors’ behavior in this space, I think going after the entire class of PBMs is wrong-headed and too “big government”— at the end of the day, the fundamental business model is focused on saving consumers money (which, yes, does rub up against the interests of some pharmacies and pharmacists). Vance is also a lot more favorable to keeping aspects of the ACA and opposing entitlement reform than big name conservatives in the Reagan-to-Tea Party nexus within the party with whom I usually agree (though I would argue that it is in the current political environment a complete political non-starter to roll back the ACA’s Medicaid provisions, or look at serious entitlement reform, and if I were in office, that’s not where I would spend my time). I do disagree with Vance’s apparent opposition to holding corporate tax rates down where they are; I definitely do not agree with his overall tariff-friendly outlook, though I can also say I haven’t been on the same page as Republicans from Ohio on trade since basically forever, so that’s not news.

If that sounds like a laundry list, well, maybe it is. But I would note that while I don’t agree with Vance about Ukraine policy, specifically, foreign policy is one area where I haven’t disagreed with the Trump faction as much as people might assume. I studied International Relations at St. Andrews. I don’t write about it much, because I hold a very minority viewpoint on it within today’s political space that is probably best described as selectively hawkish-realist. I was never with the Bush guys on foreign policy. I also am not with liberals. I’m not with Ron or Rand Paul, either. Wearing my British citizen hat, I am cognizant that there are things Trump did on foreign policy that were not beneficial to my family, specifically. But I’m not one of the neoconnish hawks you’ll find bemoaning Trump’s every move on foreign policy on Twitter, and I suspect that Vance and I might have some overlap here, even if I think he’s wrong on Ukraine, specifically. I think in general it is good to have people in the Presidency or Vice Presidency who have served in the military— contrary to most people, I firmly believe that makes them less likely to want to send American troops into wars, and I think that is a good thing. Vance and I probably align there at least a little bit, whereas Trump’s lack of military service always worried me. Does he understand the true cost of things? Does he understand why people fight and serve and how that should impact his decision making as Commander-in-Chief? I suspect Vance might think about these things more the way I would prefer (though I do think he should revisit his thinking on Ukraine). By the way, I’m not convinced despite the extent to which Biden leans on reverence of his son, Beau, that he or Harris totally gets this, either. It’s different to have had family that served than to have served yourself (trust me: My husband comes from a family that has been serving in the British Army since 1715, but he and I did not serve).

Also, and perhaps most notably, I have to give Vance credit for where he has moved the party on abortion— and I really do credit him with it. While abortion is not a top voting issue for me, I have long held the unpopular view that Roe was wrongly decided but that states individually should keep abortion legal in the first trimester, with an exception thereafter where the life of the mother is at risk, and that the GOP does not benefit politically from arguing for abortion restrictions that are tighter than that.

Vance has made more or less that argument very powerfully, and he (and Trump) have taken a lot of shit for staking out the position they have. However, with it being noted that my read of Vance’s position is that he is for allowing abortion to stay legal in all circumstances for longer than I would be, I think it’s worth crediting him with taking a really hard position within the party, but the right one having regard to general elections— and legally and philosophically— and apparently having shifted the party in that direction. I don’t normally treat shifts in party platform language as significant, but what occurred this year was, in view especially of Trump apparently having drafted a bunch of it himself. We may yet find it hurts the GOP; I worry it could (though then again, as things stand, I’m not voting for either party ticket— I live in Connecticut, why bother?). But ultimately, the shift does reflect my views. I have to give people like Trump, but more particularly Vance because he has better articulated the rationale for the shift and what the party’s policy should be, credit here.

Finally, you may ask what of Vance cuddling up to Trump so hard about the 2020 election and January 6? To state the obvious, I don’t love it. Again, this is another big disagreement I have with both of them. However, I will say that as a Republican, I have found reports like this extremely disturbing and while I’m not going “both sides it” on the subject of democracy, quite, I will say I think the vast distinctions and differences that Biden-Harris backers want to pretend exist between their friends and allies and those of Trump and Vance are on my read smaller than they pretend. I also do think that there has been weaponization of government for partisan and personal ends under Biden. Also, as someone married to a tax adviser, I have a lot of questions about how Hunter Biden’s alleged tax evasion was handled as a prosecutorial matter, because pretty clearly, it doesn’t align with standard practice there. I guess I worry that whoever is running the government over the next four years (unless Biden is subbed out and dependent on who is subbed in), we are going to see a lot of what I would call authoritarian drift. It is priced into my thinking, for better or for worse.

Progressives will joke about Republicans finding ways to get ourselves comfortable-ish with a Trump-Vance White House— or even literal Hitler running the show— on the basis of tax cuts because ultimately, all the matters to us is money, money, money. But the truth is, the tax cuts that occurred under Trump and will probably be renewed under a second Trump administration matter, and they matter to the less well-off a great deal.

I’m an employer. I run payroll. I know that when that tax cut package went through, it benefited my lowest-paid employee— and it benefited her a lot. It wasn't all tax cuts for the rich; and even if it was, progressives’ definition of who is “rich” tends to hammer people who may not be in the economic position that Vance and I are in now, but who are in the position we were in as we were finally starting to reach a place where we would feel financially secure, and clearly upper middle class.

I imagine when Vance and I look around, we both see a lot of historically rather wealthy progressives who purport to care for the poor, but tend to express that care by supporting bad government programs that don’t actually lift people out of poverty (or lower-middle-class status) where as a slightly- to very-right-leaning economic policy would do more. For my part, that is one of the lessons I learned from watching Thatcherism play out in the UK. Vance and I would undoubtedly set different specific tax rates. We would undoubtedly have different ideas about how the tax system should address the issue of child care. I’m sure I’ll have plenty negative to say when he is VP (because at the rate we’re going, I don’t see Democrats winning the White House again this year). But I see a lot in his background that can usefully inform this and other debates that again, I just don’t think the Bushes, or Romney, or Trump had. At least Clinton got sort of close, I guess?

Bottom line: I have policy beefs with Vance. But in terms of his background and experiences he will bring to the table, I think there is a lot that is of value. I do hope that over time, he continues to assess and re-assess and take positions that I would perceive as better for the country writ large— especially because he could very well wind up in one of the top two offices now through 2037. But his life experience does ensure that he will be focused on things that I think most presidents do not have top of mind because they are who they are, and their experiences have tended to be pretty far removed from his or mine, and he will bring a personal impetus to solving problems within that general sphere.

I’ll take your hate mail now.