Why liberals envy JD Vance He's the most masterful self-creation in American politics

Of course, they had every right to take offence. But there is no contradiction between treating trans people with kindness, protectiveness and respect and opposing transgender treatment for children. Except in the mind of the New York Times, whose grim, sanctimonious and lucrative prosecution of MeToo, the 1619 Project, the trans revolution, and its stigmatising of everything from a Confederate statue in the middle of nowhere to gas stoves and gas-powered cars had as much to do with Trump’s resurrection as anything else.

After falling all over itself in 2016 to display its fair-mindedness and embracing Vance’s bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, as a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass”, the once prestigious liberal flagship now portrays Vance as a second-rate student at an Ivy enclave ingratiating himself with one powerful figure after another.

And this, then, according to the newspaper of record, is what really made Vance the success he is today. It is the truly revealing part of the article: one of his professors, Amy Chua, herself a bestselling author, arranged a meeting for him: “Then she introduced him to her literary agent, Tina Bennett. He was off.” In other words, for the NYT, it is not Vance’s resilience, literary talent, intelligence, political instincts or his book itself that made him a political success. It was his agent, the ultra-powerful and highly effective Tina Bennett.

For the success and status-obsessed Times, the success and high status of people who don’t share its moral framework can only be the result of obsession with status and success, not the consequence of any admirable human quality. Even Trump’s raised fist after the attempt on his life was, as one of its Times’ cultural interpreters pretentiously put it, a carefully calculated suck-up of world-historical proportions: “The force of the photographs, in other words, rests not in what they depict politically but what they convey about political depiction… Mr. Trump had the instinct, amid mortal danger, to consider how everything would look.”

There is another way to look at Trump’s raised fist. It was the reflexive motion of a man with failing mental faculties whose default response is the single obsession that is the glue keeping his mentality intact: the banal raised fist that is his ego’s doppelgänger.

Rest assured: what the liberal media commentators ruminating on Trump’s reaction were really thinking was: “I went to Andover and Harvard and followed all the rules. So why don’t I have Secret Service protection instead of this jerk from Queens?” As for their response to Vance, who dared attend Yale, it’s not: Here is a true Right-wing danger to the republic. It’s: “How can I meet Tina Bennett?”

But America is faced with a true slouching beast in Vance. He is smart, shrewd, intelligent, literary, young and not un-pretty to look at. And he plays with his cards exceedingly close to his chest. Vance is the most cunning politician in America. I cannot think of another recent politician with his national ambitions who published a bestseller with true literary qualities that then set him on a trajectory to the White House. Hillbilly Elegy was Vance’s Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy’s 1956 bestseller that also nearly made him the vice-presidential pick that year — he decided he didn’t want it in the end — and put him on the path to the presidency. And unlike Profiles in Courage, now generally agreed to have been mostly written by Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, Vance seems to have composed his book by himself.

For Vance is no blustering Trump, who perhaps is bumbling his way, yet again, to the most powerful position in the world. Trump is, unquestioningly, a master of self-presentation who at the same time undercuts his political skills with a seemingly uncontrollable temperament, only to right himself again. Vance, on the other hand, is the most masterful self-creation in modern politics, from his book to his beard. Especially The Beard, which did not appear until 2022, when he ran for the senate seat in Ohio. Its effect goes far beyond the immediate one of hiding a baby face.

No one has had a full beard in American politics since the late 19th century. The last time facial hair was an issue in that realm was in 1968, when allies of Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy urged his hippie supporters to “get clean for Gene” and trim their hirsute display of defiance, in order to try to appeal to the calls for law and order from the other side.

Vance’s beard is a whole other level of symbolic meaning. It makes him look, above all, like a Civil War general — from either side — right out of one of Matthew Brady’s famous photographs. Or it could be the beard of a pre-modern American president, presiding over America at a time when Christianity and traditional mores held sway. Or is it a hint of the countercultural type, a hippie for all seasons, after all?

It has, simultaneously, a masculine working-class quality and a hint of insulated privilege affected by millennials devoted to a permanent dark stubble. Take a look beneath that. The Beard also could be the result of some sort of acedia, the medieval term for spiritual apathy, or depression as we would call it: that would put him in the ranks of so many working-class white Americans who turn to opioids for relief. But hold on. The Beard could well be the bohemian affectation of a literary man, meant to signify immersion in a world of mental work so thorough it leaves no time to shave.

From here, The Beard’s levels of expression move faster than the wildest cable-channel surfer Defiance of norms? Perhaps. Subtle defiance of Trump, beneath Vance’s fealty to him, who reportedly dislikes facial hair? Perhaps. Dangerous mountain man right out of Deliverance? Or valiant vanquisher of same? — remember that Jon Voight, the effete urban professional in that movie, had to grow a beard before extinguishing the Appalachian menace. And perhaps there are also meanings behind the Beard that Vance does not wish to project; perhaps it hints at a dark psychic wound. After all, growing up amid the savage dysfunction Vance sugarcoats in his book surely could have the same warping effect, or worse, as passing through the liberal mandarin pipeline of privilege and entitlement.

Or does The Beard say to increasingly hysterical liberals, who are already speculating about Vance refusing to certify the 2028 election, “Don’t worry. If I can change my appearance on a dime, I can change my politics on a dime, too.”

Whatever The Beard really means, beyond the guileful self-adjustment of a man who, for all his gifts, may well be a cipher, it represents what the liberals have long whined was absent in Trump: studied, calculated, reasoned, cosmopolitan, educated, disciplined self-presentation. Make no mistake about it. They hate Trump. They envy Vance.