Vice President-elect JD Vance has been known for his humble beginnings, even before he ran for public office. "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" was published 2016, and the movie adaptation came out in 2020. His background has helped him relate to voters, especially in the Midwest. However, in a post from Sunday, Current Affairs, a leftist magazine, tried to claim that Vance and President-elect Donald Trump are part of "right-wing populism," and thus "born to immense privilege and went to elite schools."
"Right-wing populism usually consists of men who were born to immense privilege and went to elite schools railing against people who are, in fact, many times less powerful and influential than they are," the post claims. There's an arrow pointing to Vance indicating he's an "Ivy Educated Venture Capitalist," while Trump is shown as an "Ivy Educated Real Estate Developer."
The article that the post links to is not even current. It's actually from April 29, 2022, just a few weeks after Trump endorsed Vance in the crowded Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race. The Current Affairs' X account is likely boosting an article that's close to three years old because Trump and Vance are about to be inaugurated.
Right-wing populism usually consists of men who were born to immense privilege and went to elite schools railing against people who are, in fact, many times less powerful and influential than they are. https://t.co/XIhmb6RjLo
— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) December 30, 2024
The post currently has close to 2,000 replies. Sam J. at our sister site of Twitchy highlighted some of the best responses. As many pointed out, Vance was born to a drug-addicted mother, grew up in poverty and attended schools, and was raised by his grandparents. Vance's mother, Bev Vance, has since gotten clean from drugs and was at the RNC. Yes, Vance did go to Yale, but it was after he served in the U.S. Marine Corps right after high school, and after he went to Ohio State University, where he attended using the GI bill.
When it comes to the actual text of the article, the subheadline is rather laughable, especially for its focus on an Ivy League education. "Yes, too many Democratic politicians are Ivy-educated lawyers. But right-wing populism is a sham led by real estate developers and venture capitalists. Nothing could be more elitist than the Republican antagonism toward democracy," it claimed. There's also a letter from Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand from 1958 referenced at the top.
Trump is mentioned in the second paragraph, Vance in the third, and the article as a whole rants and raves about plenty of other Republican elected officials and commentators by name. There's only mention of "Hillbilly Elegy" to try to rebut Vance, by reminding that he had the help of his Yale professors for such a book. There's no mention of how Vance's early life involved poverty or drug addiction from family members.
The article concludes exactly as you'd expect, with warnings about how dangerous Republicans supposedly are [Emphasis added]:
...The right is full of Social Darwinist justifications for the wealthy having their wealth, and uses downright Hitlerian arguments to rationalize social inequalities. Donald Trump is now stumping for a candidate who appears to believe quite openly in dictatorship, and Trump himself has made it clear that he will not accept the outcome of any election he does not win. We cannot allow Republicans to get away with pushing the absurd narrative that they stand for The People, when what they quite clearly stand for is the dictatorship of private capital.
The problem with many Republican charges against the Democrats (out of touch, useless, snobby) is that they have a great deal of truth to them. But the Republican agenda is absolutely terrifying and authoritarian, and we must push harder than ever for a genuine alternative to the present leadership of both parties. The solution, as always, is a genuine democracy where the government is composed of a cross-section of the population, not a narrow group of venture capitalists and lawyers whose idea of speaking for “the people” is to demagogue about trans people. Coming up with true democracy is going to be a fiendishly difficult task that will take a very long time, but the first step we must take is to be able to think clearly and make sure that “right-wing populism” continues to be exposed as a ludicrous form of fraud, beneath which lies a clear belief that the rich ought to continue to rule.
It's all a farce. Vance not only won that primary, he kept the seat held by retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) by beating Democrat Tim Ryan. He did a particularly admirable job on the campaign trail, unlike Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), and wiped the floor with him during the October vice presidential debate, a little more than a month before he and Trump won the 2024 election.
The articles goes after Democrats for also being elitist, beyond that subheadline, with mentions of their wealth and Ivy League education. As a sign of how out of date such an article is, though, it seems that Democrats now are dismissive of aspirations to get into an Ivy League school.
Walz mocked Vance from the start for going to Yale, and further did so at the DNC, as he shared how none of the students in his high school graduating class went to Yale. He also bizarrely criticized Vance's job as a venture capitalist, claiming he doesn't even understand what such a role entails most of the time.
This is hardly the only time that the left has gone after Vance for his background while neglecting to mention his humble beginnings. Upon Vance being selected as Trump's running mate during the RNC in July, the Ohio Democratic Party put out a statement that began by claiming, " J.D. Vance is an out-of-touch millionaire who launched his political career by taking advantage of Ohio's opioid crisis and has spent his time in the Senate humiliating himself in the service of a convicted felon instead of working to improve the quality of life for Ohioans."
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