By William Cooper, Guest Columnist
Donald Trump announced two weeks ago that his vice presidential pick is J.D. Vance. The Ohio senator is a controversial figure.
He has, for example, criticized how then-Vice President Mike Pence certified the 2020 presidential election results in favor of Joe Biden.
“If I had been vice president,” Vance explained, “I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”
Despite his sometimes contentious positions, everyone should read Vance’s 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy. The book helps explain the root cause of the Trump phenomenon – something people (of all political persuasions) often misunderstand.
Vance writes about how many people in the American heartland (states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) are angry. Much of this anger comes from globalization, which created the international marketplace that allowed companies like Apple, Amazon and Google to become trillion-dollar behemoths, and their largest shareholders to get really rich. Google’s founders, are worth tens of billions of dollars.
But globalization also caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs. These are the people in towns like the one in Ohio that Vance grew up in.
Traditionally American-made products, like steel and electronics, are now produced overseas, and imported at cheap prices. While this new system lowered prices for consumers generally, it also shattered vulnerable American families, bankrupted successful small businesses and hollowed out proud communities.
These losses generate bitter resentment toward government elites – the architects of globalization – especially on the right within the white working class.
As Vance explains in the book: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
Vance continued: “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: it’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
This is the soil from which Donald Trump rose.
The wily opportunist (and billionaire) from New York fanned these flames during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” Trump said on the trail.
“We have a lot to overcome in our country,” he said at another campaign rally, “especially the fact that our jobs are being taken away from us and going to other places … In this new future,” with Trump at the helm, “millions of workers on the sidelines will return to the workforce.”
Trump’s 2016 electoral strategy of inflaming bitterness about America’s role in the global economic system worked. He won by promising to change things back to the way they were before, to “make America great again.”
Monday’s choice of Vance shows that this message still resonates with millions of Americans. Even those who oppose Trump should make the effort to understand why so many support him.
Reading Hillbilly Elegy is a good place to start.
William Cooper is the author of How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.