Usha Vance “hit piece”

“Vance lives, and is running, in the state of Ohio, where he grew up and went to college. I live in Ohio. Vance is running as a Republican and a supporter of Donald Trump, who has appeared on Vance’s behalf at recent campaign rallies.”

I grew up about 15 miles away from where he did and attended a high school split abut 50-50 between people from his world and people from mine (I was a small college town son of a professor at a “public ivy” university). I was back there to visit family just last month and take a pulse of the political scene in Ohio right now.

But, this backstory is missing some key points about him.

J.D. Vance made a name for himself writing the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” that tells the story of how he went beyond the roots of his Appalachian migrant to rust belt Ohio to work in manufacturing grandparents and messed up but economically functioning substance abusing parents, to spend time in the military to learn discipline, then to be a star older student at The Ohio State University after finishing military service, after which became a Yale Law School student. At Yale, he explains, he was out of his depth in terms of cultural capital, even though he was intellectually up to being a student at one of the top three or four law schools in the U.S. He relied upon his future wife, Usha, and one or two key faculty mentors who took an interest in and looked out for him, to bridge the gap between his “white trash” roots and his new elite upper middle class to upper class peers. There is great irony, that he reveals but understates in his memoir, in the fact that a woman with recent South Asian immigrant roots is more at home in the highest ranks of the American upper middle class and knows better how to behave there than he, a white man with American born ancestors going back for centuries does.

This life story gave him some distance and insight to reflect thoughtfully on social class divisions, and on the American subculture he grew up in. After starting out on the steps towards a top tier law career, he left law for a while, to be a San Francisco venture capitalist firmly on the Yale Law side of the social class divide in the U.S., but he has come back home to make his name at the pinnacle of American politics drawing on his humble roots.

One of the understatements that hides more than it reveals about him is a description of J.D. Vance as a “Trump supporter”. He made his name as an objective, thoughtful mainstream conservative who was a vehement and famous “never Trump” political figure in the U.S. center-right of politics. He was a rare politically moderate conservative in a politically divided country at a time that it has never been more polarized. This was the persona that made him attractive as a U.S. Senate candidate with potentially broad appeal.

But, in the run up to running for the U.S. Senate, he totally reimagined himself and changed himself (hypocritically) from being a dignified and civil conservative intellectual “never Trumper” to becoming a hard core Trump supporter and populist. He was personally endorsed by Trump (and his opponent in the U.S. Senate race has made a big point that Vance publicly showed no offense at being gratuitously and humiliatingly insulted by Trump in the same breath that Trump endorsed him). The new J.D. Vance is contemptuous not just of liberals (which you expect from a conservative politician), but of the very kind of thoughtful intellectual conservative that he himself was a celebrity among just a few years earlier. His marriage to Usha is reflective of the relatively cosmopolitan openness to people who are different from him that set him apart from other political leaders with his background and reflects the growth as a person that he developed in his international travel in the military and Yale Law School education.

Admittedly, he is, even now, not nearly as xenophobic and racist and anti-intellectual as a large share of his supporters and political allies (whom he understands because he came from their world culturally), and of a large share of Trump’s political movement in the U.S. more generally. But he also doesn’t hesitate to pander to their baser instincts in his campaign as one must to rise in Trump’s political movement. The public persona of the J.D. Vance of the campaign trail in Ohio is almost unrecognizable to people who knew him before he was running for public office.

So, he’s a very complicated celebrity public figure candidate and nobody who is really paying attention knows who the real J.D. Vance is behind the scenes.

I’m a Kamma. Kamma and Telugu Brahmins share surnames not because of emulating Brahmanical traditions but shared village origins in the Krishna Godavari Basin where both groups along with other dominant Telugu castes hail. Telugu surnames run on the “inti peru” system so it’s mostly village derived so multiple castes can share surnames. Kamma Nayakas were dominant in Southern Andhra and parts of Tamil Nadu but the ones who went to Sri Lanka were of Bailja origin; also Telugu but a different caste.