Three years and one hundred miles south along the eastern coastline. That’s how long and how far it’s been since I last wrote about James David Vance, Ohio senator, best-selling memoirist, working-class Rust Belter, former cherub-faced-victim-turned venture-capitalist, voice for left-behind, herald of post-liberalism, soldier, scholar, harbinger of America’s future, and, now, vice presidential candidate.
In my last dispatch, which was partially composed during my kids’ naptime along the Delaware shore, Vance was that most craven creature: a political commentator trying to fashion his opinionating into a political career. *Gagggg.*
Shows what my wisdom of repugnance knows. Vance, somehow, defied his station and actually won a seat once held by realist luminaries like Robert Taft and Warren Harding. Now, as I draft this column a block back from the steadily scalloped New Jersey tide, Vance is seeking even higher office. In spite of likening Donald Trump to der Führer, in spite of his professed pro-life stance in a party that’s adopted agnosticism on baby-sacrifice, in spite of basically all prudent advice to not hitch your political wagon to aging goods, the Ohioan is all in again, accepting the slot of being one heartbeat away from a president who miraculously survived a bullet to the outer lobe.
Hillbilly elegy? Try culchie clairvoyance.
Who says you the American Dream is dead? J.D. Vance actually, who rails against Washington’s way of strip-mining mining towns of talent and hope. Regardless of his anti-rich-rage rhetoric, Vance really does embody the old aspirational America: a mediocre kid rising out of opioid-racked slough of grey gridded sidewalks to the commanding heights of corporate-political power. *Hurrah, hurrah!* Up from Xbox addicts! The suburban Uncle Sam! Hope for public school louts!
The stakes are set and the contest decided, with a contrast sharper than the candidates’ skin tones. J.D. Vance, millennial of a split household, versus Kamala Harris, daughter of wealthy immigrants. Let’s get ready for the undercard rumble…
*STOP.* *Buuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.* *Serious news anchor voice.* We interrupt this regularly scheduled column for a breaking bulletin: President Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. I repeat: President Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. *End broadcast.*
Bah! Well, there goes that column. *Highlights the preceding screed. Right index finger moves perilously towards the “delete” button.* Wait! A penny just dropped. This doesn’t have to be a veepstakes column about the class-clash between Vance and promoted-prez-candidate Harris, and why the former is so vociferously disregarded in DC for being above his raising. I can go deeper, more distinct, and darker with this dispatch. And more white boy summer. *Cracks open a Twisted Tea.*
Vance isn’t just a picaresque striver who, through hard work, pluck, a little luck, and sucking up, finds himself as heir apparent to one of America’s prime political parties. He’s a millennial who has actually lived a very, very typical life—far more typical than his Washington peers, who often decamp to the Beltway fresh from stable, well-off families, day schools and private universities, with paid-off cars and dad picking up the first year’s rent. His army-college-law-school-company-public-office success sequence is American in its trajectory, even Lincoln-esque. But its replicability among Vance’s age-bracket and those younger is waning, with social mobility stagnating, even pitching downward.
The Vance antitype is a suburban white stripling from the same Rust Belt region the VP nominee calls home. Both Vance and his variant achieved fame through politics, but with far different means and vastly different consequences. One resulted in a propulsive career; the other in premature death.
The photonegative of Vance’s meritocratic ascent: Thomas Matthew Crooks, otherwise known as the Trump ear piercer, who brushed dangerously close to achieving Oswald-level infamy and plunging our curdling country into violent strife.
Crooks is what happens when the forgotten children of Boomer America find little to orient their talents towards other than exaggerated online fame. A quiet and newly graduated community college student who worked part-time as “dietary aide” (read: food service drudge), Crooks’s motives aren’t yet fully understood. His political leanings were, like many restless young men, protean and tending toward rabble-rousing. He was a registered Republican, Democratic donor, and purported Trump despiser who considered MAGA supporters “stupid.” In other words, Crooks was confused, or what psephologists label “independent,” or what those versed in internet call a “troll.”
He was also a loser, which I’m not using in the thin, rote language of condemnation for his failed assassination essay, but in guidance-counselor argot. One of Crooks’s classmates claimed he was “bullied almost every day”—which, based off Crooks’s looks, isn’t surprising. His school photos show the kind of bespectacled, tin-grinned, marshmallow-fluff-skinned, pustule-dotted teen who, even once he reaches enlistment age, can hardly be said to resemble a man. Crooks’s posthumous reputation as waster isn’t helped by the fact that he previewed his abortive killshot on a video game message board.
This election season isn’t just providing two differing visions for America’s future—it’s putting into relief the forked path for the country’s coming-of-age males. J.D. Vance epitomizes upper-mobility in a dynamic liberal society. Thomas Matthew Crooks represents the acute sense of failure and angst that comes with being unable to traverse the shifting steps of the digitized knowledge economy.
What Vance and Crooks really shared, besides the same class, geographic, and racial stock, is that old foe of American boys everywhere: insecurity. How they dealt with that nagging monkey on their back determined their courses in life, as it does for us all.
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