Vance, the racist populist veep candidate, has blended working-class resentment and white racial grievance.
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When JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he lauded the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. Though it’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, he said, its residents are “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He then added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.”
Privileged? Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain and moved on to talk about “American greatness.” But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to a demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years.
During his convention speech, Vance repeated the message that has led the political press to label him a populist: The ruling elites have screwed over Middle America by pushing economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (His support for Donald Trump, who implemented a tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy, has not undercut his standing as a populist.) But Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.
Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.
Vance has blended working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. According to Vance, these powerful interests deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face. This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:
Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people.
