AThe heart of this strange, perhaps rather poignant book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the crude sense of securing a place in heaven, but as an urgent challenge to the entire stock of destructive assumptions and habits espoused by the majority culture. Vance’s famous first book, Hillbilly Elegy, describes, among other things, the impact of substance abuse on generations of the rural poor. It’s not too hard to see this book as a look at the modern West through the lens of addiction and its generational effects. Except that, this time, it is the norms and expectations of elite modernity that are as lethal to ambitious young professionals as fentanyl is to the less privileged.
Vance offers a diagnosis that is not particularly original, but derives its power from the intensity of the personal inquiry he undertakes to reach it. The American Vice President vividly describes the widespread mechanisms in education and in the professional and political worlds that lead us to want what others want – not what we consider naturally desirable. Most of us innately desire emotional security, meaningful work, and, perhaps most of all, hope and happiness in nurturing the next generation, introducing them to a world of value and promise. One of the most notable moments in the book is the painful confusion of the brilliantly successful young Vance when faced with the challenge of becoming a parent: “I knew exactly how to help my child get into a good college but I was much less prepared to make him a good human being.”
Wanting what others want enslaves us to work patterns that are inhumanely feverish and that destroy family life. They also corrupt our intellectual life, leading to over-anxious conformity to moral opinion. Vance cites his experience at Yale Law School, where, he says, progressive conservatives had a strong hold; To express doubt about the absolute moral clarity of a pro-choice position was to invite immediate exclusion from the elected person’s inner circle. And this type of exclusion was practiced by left and right alike: for both, the ultimate goal was simply to assimilate as completely as possible into an administrative elite that allowed you maximum personal freedom – which was conceived as maximum individual income and status.
Vance’s return to Christianity was shaped by two basic insights. First he expresses this provocatively in the statement, “I found freedom in guilt”. We need the language (and a ritual) of repentance and renewal to be both honest and compassionate. What particularly attracted Vance to Catholic identity is the need to repeatedly absorb and assimilate grace over a long history of learning and growing – in contrast to the quick spiritual fixes in the evangelical world of his childhood. The beginning of Christian wisdom is possible only through candor about one’s own failures and the ability to respond to the failures of others, not with complicit tolerance, but with compassion and hope.
The Catholic perspective is also compelling because its history of social analysis goes beyond the narrow polarization of modern politics. The social vision classically expressed by Pope Leo XIII in the late 19th century emphasizes that economic life should enable a sense of meaningful ownership regarding one’s labor and its conditions, rather than destroying the dignity of individuals and families – and that association provides a powerful basis for activism and the demand for fair wages. Vance gives a sharp account of a conversation he had with a critic of the US administration’s immigration policy, who argued that abundant migrant labor frees employers from paying higher wages to US citizens and therefore guarantees better profits. We are brought back into the emptiness and toxicity of the addictive cycle of profit- and status-driven activity that Vance has already depicted.
Despite the very loose structure of the book, this seems to be the thread of the argument. It in some ways rehearses the approach to modernity – and American modernity in particular – that has been presented in more detail in the works of a range of American scholars and commentators, from Robert Bellah to David Brooks. It is a perspective that focuses on the anxiety and alienation generated by individualistic hopes and desires, expresses a new concern for “character”, and urges the rediscovery of the resources that enable us to raise the next generation to a good life. This is not far from the backdrop of “Blue Labour” and “Red Toryism” on this side of the Atlantic. The importance of the Christian approach here is not so much as a system of specific moral absolutes – although they are undoubtedly there – as an approach that allows us to accept failure without despair, approach one another with generosity, and ultimately know that our deepest desires point to being at home with what is most real: the unconditional love that created us.
And so this is the looming question the book leaves us with: What does this have to do with the administration of which J.D. Vance is a key member? And perhaps the subsidiary question is who its audience is: this is not a book designed to appeal to MAGA fanatics; Nor is it going to win praise from the technophile billionaires who control the digital world, about whom Vance has harsh things to say (despite a wry tribute to Elon Musk as the creator of American jobs), or from traditional free-market capitalists. Also, the left is unlikely to win any friends. Although his treatment of the abortion issue is more nuanced and sensitive than much conservative writing on the subject, this alone will leave him vulnerable as far as most progressives are concerned.
What he doesn’t tell us (despite suggesting at some points that he was going to do so) is why he was willing to stop his car for Trump’s cause. He dismisses much of the early criticism of Trump as merely a typical narrow-mindedness about the president’s “style”, and he emphasizes the “success” of the first Trump administration, without doing much to connect it with the values underlying these pages. But how can we take seriously a book that ignores the rampant corruption of the Trumpian ruling class, the abusive verbal bullying that has become normalized in the president’s online and offline attacks, the recklessly arbitrary foreign policies (Vance’s carefully expressed reservations about funding military support for Ukraine would apply with far greater force to the Iran war fiasco), and the murderous cruelty of the implementation of new immigration controls?
The book has already been discussed because of its author rather than its content. That material is actually by no means as meaningless or evil as some have assumed – although there are some nasty moments of shaky logic about traditional gender roles, or the “increasing racial conflict and gender divide” that are a direct result of de-Christianization (quite hard to compare with the record of Christian nationalism in America’s past and present). But it does nothing to solve the mystery of what troubles the Vice President. At one point, he approvingly quotes a priest saying to a jailed drug addict, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” Well, yes: back to the initial question of what you must do to be saved. “Look at the company you keep” might be a start.
