Trump and Vance Are Having a Jacksonian Moment

J.D. Vance’s rise to the vice-presidential nomination is a watershed moment in American politics. For young conservatives like myself, the moment feels like a triumph, the culmination of curiosity and organization. For the country, the moment offers the first uncompromising choice for change in a generation. The moment calls for a reflection on how we arrived here and the choice before us. Will middle America forge a new consensus, achieved with echoes of the Jacksonian age? Alternatively, will the great city-states of the Democratic Party stymie the tide of discontent and preserve the neoliberal status quo?

By the time I cracked open J.D Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy in late 2016, I was already converted to the loose association of alternative ideas popping up in the conservative movement. Those were strange years to be a young conservative. In Texas, successive generations of conservatives had been influenced by a succession of immiscible ideologies, from Bushism to the Ron Paul revolution.

Defining yourself in the early Trump-era could be a precarious task in Texas. This was before Tucker Carlson was on air at Fox News. This was before Yoram Hazony organized the first National Conservatism Conference. Kevin Roberts was an outsider in Austin, chipping away at the still-potent Bush consensus in the Texas Legislature. This magazine and its founders, Senator Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, and a disparate few gave us frames of reference. The largely older, grassroots crowds agreed with us in spirit but lacked the vernacular to articulate their views. The politicians and their staff were generally hostile, viewing the burgeoning populist movement as another headache inflicted on them by Donald Trump. Libertarian economics were to be the consensus, no matter what GOP primary voters articulated with their votes.

This was the context that thousands of young conservatives read Hillbilly Elegy for the first time in. The book electrified the body politic, rising to become a New York Times bestseller. For young conservatives, it connected to our generation’s innate feeling that we were confronting a society in crisis. For young millennials and older Gen Zers, our formational memories were formed with 9/11 and the subsequent wars and the financial crisis. For the majority of Gen Z, Trump and Covid-19 have been the seminal public events of their lifetimes. Vance’s account of Appalachia wasn’t just a recounting of his time in the hollers; it was the first time someone powerfully addressed the anecdotal realities of American decline.

The book’s success was Vance’s introduction to public life. It came with the trappings of a NYT bestseller, media appearances and all. During this period, Vance eloquently explained the customs of “forgotten America” to talking heads who looked on Trump’s voters in middle America like zoo animals that had run amok. He was also harshly critical of Trump, calling  the President “reprehensible,” among other things. I’m positive the media will spend a disproportionate amount of time asking about Vance’s change in personal feelings about Trump, but whatever the compromising nature of Vance’s comments about electoral politics, he remained steadfast in defense of the values of his people—and by extension Trump’s voters.

Whatever Vance’s intentions at the time, the media had their own agenda for Vance. Vance was to be a token commentator who could explain hillbillies to appalled observers on the coasts. It was only at the moment Vance suggested constructive policy changes that might benefit Trump’s doomed voters that the campaign of character assassination against him began.

Mitt Romney’s attitudes towards Vance, in particular, would smack of disdain for someone who dared to rise above his station. Vance’s memoir was a visceral account of the consequences of Romney’s time at Bain Capital and the neoliberal policies he supported in public office. Romney attacked Vance in his book after Vance’s conversion to Trumpian politics. Romney asked, “How can you go over a line so stark as that—and for what? It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator.” Perhaps Romney’s suspicions were more revealing of his motives than Vance’s. Probably, his suspicions were revealing of the  attitudes of the defeated establishment Romney and his family once represented.

The media’s campaign of libel against Vance included the usual accusations: white supremacy, grievance politics, fraud. The Republican establishment, led by Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, sought to stamp him out as he ran for Senate in Ohio. No Republican Senator faced down an uglier primary and general campaign than J.D Vance in 2022. The Washington Post succinctly described their city’s soured view of Vance: “As he runs for the Senate, the ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author has gone from media darling to establishment pariah.”

The criticism was too little, too late. In his victorious campaign, Vance transformed into an unapologetic advocate for his people and region’s attitudes, and he did so because he feels that his people and region’s attitudes are righteous. So they are. He’s been whimsical on occasion, but there is little doubt that the day he arrived at the U.S Senate he became the most powerful and knowledgeable advocate for Donald Trump’s electoral coalition in both houses of congress.

Vance joined a Republican Senate Conference that was changing. By 2023, identifying oneself in Texas became fairly straightforward. Even if still controversial, a cadre of young, nationalist-minded senators provided a simple frame of reference for young conservatives. Tucker Carlson had spent six years atop the cable news industry, National Conservatism Conferences had a wealth of information and speeches on YouTube, and Kevin Roberts was at the helm of the Heritage Foundation. By 2023 and early 2024, it was clear that national conservatism, broadly defined, was a force with staying power in American politics.

This week, Vance the class crusader joined Donald Trump the class traitor at the top of the 2024 Republican ticket. Vance’s ascendancy has cemented the new right’s seat at the American political table for the next decade or more. In important ways, TAC’s readers can feel assured that our movement will outlive Donald Trump and this magazine’s founders. For young conservatives, we can point to the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee as our champion. For the American people, however, Vance’s ascendancy presents something simple but powerful: choice.

With Vance on the ticket, voters can choose to rebuild our country’s social cohesion on center-right terms. Voters can commit to a generation of re-shoring and make a conscious decision to pursue a broadly realist foreign policy. Voters can choose to reorient American economic incentive structures to revitalize rural and interior America.

Voters, as of this writing, can still choose to vote for Joe Biden. Biden is a physical manifestation of a decaying, defiant neoliberalism that has defined the political generations that directly preceded Vance. Biden is seemingly as old as the ideology itself. In France, voters banded together to deny Marine Le Pen’s party power. Vance is hardly comparable to Le Pen, but the left’s attack lines on each bear a broad resemblance.  It is entirely plausible that the city-states that have dominated our institutions and benefited from neoliberalism have retained enough political capital to defeat the Trump-Vance ticket.  Phoenix, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit, among other cities, remain formidable political strongholds for the American left and their supporting interests. Can they join Paris in victory?

Political prognostications will be made until November, but Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket underscores that American democracy has returned to an era of choice. Whatever the outcome of the 2024 election, the era of uniparty hegemony is over.

In this, 2024’s election harks back to the election of 1828. Infuriated by “the corrupt bargain” in 1824, which was viewed as a naked usurpation of power by an entrenched East Coast elite, the broad American middle repudiated John Quincy Adams. In that victory, Jackson shattered the political consensus that had dominated the previous generation. He set about consolidating his victory by sacking what had grown to be a like-minded, corrupt, and entrenched bureaucracy. He replaced them with functionaries from Tennessee and other frontier states. Many American textbooks, written to defame Jackson for his affronts to Washington, decry this process as the “spoils system.” But this was the process of meaningfully enfranchising large swaths of the nation.

By following through on their promises, Trump and Vance can follow in Jackson’s footsteps and re-enfranchise middle America by injecting middle American values, skill, and talent into decaying public institutions. If done sufficiently, Trump-Vance can shatter the neoliberal political consensus of the previous generation in the same way Jackson shattered the Democratic-Republican consensus.

Andrew Jackson ascended at a time in American history when what we now colloquially refer to the Midwest and the South were loosely politically united. Later fractured by slavery, both regions remained loosely united around yeoman values and interests in the 1820s. Rather than “North” and “South,” both regions remained ‘frontier.’ While fractures with Calhoun and the south would emerge later in Jackson’s presidency, Jackson was able to broadly impose an economic and political consensus that rewarded the interior of the country, rather than further enriching the merchant ports of the East Coast.

Here, too, Trump and Vance have the opportunity to leave a similar and lasting economic and social legacy. Both men can follow in Jackson’s footsteps by reorient our economy from financialization to rewarding the industrious. In this, they can follow in Jackson’s footsteps by uniting the Midwest and the South, two historically fractious regional blocs, into a lasting and electorally unassailable political coalition built on mutual yeoman values. In the same way Jackson was followed by Polk and Houston, Vance has the opportunity to carry Trump’s movement forward.

Claiming that Vance’s presence on the ticket could enable such a coalition is a bold assertion. But Vance’s rise is uniquely linked to the Scots-Irish people, an extensive culture that spans swaths of the country, particularly the swaths of that county that command key votes in the electoral college. Vance is from Kentucky, a state that is simultaneously midwestern and southern. In many ways, the Scots-Irish culture depicted by Vance’s memoir is my own culture. West Texas was heavily settled by the Scots-Irish in post-war years. My own people came from Tennessee to Texas during those years, having lost my great-grandfather at Murfreesboro. Much of the culture, even linguistically, remains similar.

Swaths of rural parts of Texas, like swaths of every Scots-Irish region, face the decay described in Hillbilly Elegy. More than half of Texas’s 254 counties shrank in the 2020 census. Shattered towns line the highways of Texas outside of the high-flying “Texas triangle.” Politicians in Austin preach about the “Texas miracle,” but the core of the Texas Republican Party’s base resides in areas that have too often been ignored by the politicians that rely on their votes. When Vance speaks for hillbillies, he speaks for a great deal of ignored people across many states and cities.

Vance, though, is not entirely a hillbilly. He’s not just a Buckeye and former U.S Marine. It’s a shame, but it is true he graduated from Yale Law. It’s a shame, but it is true that he served in the United States Senate. Both institutions have covered themselves in disrepute. But this story is also universal. As Americans have moved from factory and farm to the cubicle, they’ve retained their values even amid hostile workplaces and the onset of woke capital.

Fort Worth has retained a uniquely Texan identity in a fast-changing metro, largely due to the large numbers of internal migrants from central and West Texas. Now, with Dallas’s Jerome Powell at the Fed and BlackRock opening a stock exchange in Dallas–Fort Worth, the inherent tension between woke capital and the region’s natives will increase. Vance’s experience navigating elite institutions while retaining his values presents as a uniquely relevant skill set to the job he is going to undertake and at once relatable to millions of Americans under the ever-watchful surveillance of their Human Resources departments.

So, no, Vance isn’t a truck-driving union worker. He’s even taken on some cosmopolitan habits over the years. But so have millions of Americans who have settled into the demands of modern suburban and urban life. To describe it with a Texan-ism, I’d say he’s comfortable in wing-tips and boots. As any president ought to be.

It’s precisely this—Vance’s familiarity and care for all of the American people—that represents his political strength. Like Donald Trump, he is comfortable at the job site and in the c-suite. Like Trump, he’s comfortable with both his heritage American values and the positive inputs of his immigrant family. Both, like Andrew Jackson before them, represent the broad consensus of the American middle.

There will be sufficient carping about Vance in the coming days. The credit card president and his allies, left and right, will assail Vance personally and repeatedly. Fox News’ Brit Hume, who without irony works for Paul Ryan, thought Vance too young to be on the ticket. But that’s the tone-deaf analysis that brought us here, isn’t it? Hume will be joined by a cacophony of elite pressure groups expressing their grievances, from Ukraine to the hedge funds. The president of the Teamsters appearing on Fox News to praise a Republican will ruffle plenty of feathers alone. But for the media critics, federal bureaucrats, and corporate executives who have benefitted from a generation of neoliberalism without regard for consequence, there is no escape from this moment.

Two hundred years on, through strife and danger, America is finally having its Jacksonian moment.

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