Grudge Juice

Vance, who at the time had not yet officially launched his 2022 Senate campaign, suggested that the country needed to "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad" -- before suggesting that individuals without children should be taxed at a higher rate than those with children. (ABC News)

“You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” asked Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, who has become the personification of the male-dominated “bro culture” that populates much of the Trump movement. “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron.” (NYTimes)

J.D. Vance as a child

I've had a grudge against J.D. Vance since 2016 when I first heard his name lifted up as the author of something called Hillbilly Elegy, which was getting praise all over the media but great condemnation among my friends and associates in the "Appalachian studies" movement, who had themselves unearthed and advanced (exponentially since the '60s and '70s) the real history of America's easternmost mountain range. Historians especially, the true elite of the academic world, were merciless in their dismantling of Vance's argument that -- bottomline -- the destitute poor of Appalachia are responsible for their own pain.

So I never read the book. I trusted the reviews of my friends, the way I'll decide which movie I might never go out of my way to see, because the reviewers I most respect said it stank. I was out of AppStudies, doing politics instead, retired already 16 years from editing The Appalachian Journal, and I had no particular business getting myself involved. I refused to watch the subsequent Ron Howard movie based on the book, which got an ever more vicious working over by many national critics. I had written a whole book on Hollywood's treatment of mountain people and actually find it easy to avoid the topic altogether when it comes to bad movies.

So J.D. Vance is having his day. But his history has found him, and I'm marveling at the extent of his weirdness. And hypocrisy.

J.D. Vance in 2016

This is just nuts:

Vance aides had no response to a proposal floated by Mr. Vance in 2021 to give parents more weight and a louder voice in American democracy by granting children the right to vote, with their votes controlled by their parents.

Vance's own reproductive performance -- he has three children -- has altered his brain chemistry, possibly, to explain his weird notions about fertility and performance. Every woman, apparently, has no choice but to produce children or suffer opprobrium:

His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Mr. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.

The weird twists to his clearly honest, spontaneous pronouncements ought to be a signal that maybe the "world" Vance saw in Hillbilly Elegy ain't the real world, nor certainly the total world of any contemporary culture.