J.D. Vance’s Fairy Tale

“How many Texans must freeze and broil, ‘fore they know that science is real?” — my respectfully submitted addition to Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s questions “blowin’ in the wind.”

Last night I witnessed an extraordinary spectacle. It was a longish fairy tale. Usually, adults tell fairy tales to children. But this time, the younger told it to the old.

J.D. Vance, age 39, told it to a estimated crowd of some 50,000 Republicans. As far as I could tell from what I could see on my TV screen, his audience’s median age was about 55. A proud father of three young children, Vance told his tale mostly to people who could be his kids’ grandparents.

It was a fine and comforting fairy tale. If only we elect Donald J. Trump as president again, with Vance as VP, we can all go back to living in nineteenth-century small-town America. We can all know, love and respect each other. We can live our lives in peaceful certitude. We need stand and fight only when foreign hordes surge over the very hills behind our homes.

When we die, we can be buried in the old town cemetery on the hill, along with seven generations of our forebears. And while we live, we can “Drill, Baby, Drill!” We can stay energy independent, strong and wealthy by supplying ourselves and the world with the fossil fuels that, even now, are making our planet uninhabitable.

Vance himself didn’t start that chant. His audience did. But he egged his audience on with not-so-subtle references to energy independence and trusted sources of power. His elders picked up the cue. Like children recalling an oft-told tale heard many times before, they began the chant in unison, “Drill, baby, drill!”

As a whole, Vance’s fairly tale went right to our biological evolutionary roots. We self-described Homo sapiens evolved in small clans of some thirty individuals. We all knew each other and, to some extent, loved each other. We tolerated the clan bully and the clan idiot because we had known them from birth.

This model of life is in our DNA. So it has an attraction—a psychic “pull”—that’s hard to resist. Vance exploited this evolutionary reality brilliantly. With his handsome if bearded face, his simple language, his slow pacing, and his joyous response to his audience’s spontaneous chants, he resembled nothing so much as a loving camp counselor speaking by an outdoor fire at a children’s summer camp.

Some darker aspecs of Vance’s speech recalled the Nazis’ call to “blood and soil,” But as Vance told the tale, it was not a call to social dominance, far less ethnic purity. Vance himself touted equal treatment of all. No matter that his audience was almost entirely white and old. He said the right words, and the cameras found the few Black, brown and Asian faces in the audience.

But we don’t live in small towns of thirty anymore. We live in great nations of hundreds of millions or billions of people. As desirable as it may be, it’s physically and practically impossible for us to get to know, let alone love, each other. So we need rules, customs, norms and, yes, traditions. We need abstractions that we all honor and respect. Some call this “law.”

Yet Vance told us, early on, that “we don’t fight for abstractions.” Instead, he wants us to vote for a man whose abstract thinking is totally focused on how to help himself.

In 1992, Bill Clinton toppled a competent sitting president, who had been Vice President, Director of the CIA, and Ambassador the UN. In comparison, Clinton had had only two terms as governor of Arkansas—hardly our most populous, richest, or most productive state. When later asked how this unexpected loss had come about, the Senior Bush cited “that vision thing.”

His son, George W. Bush, avoided the same mistake. With the Supreme Court’s help, he beat Al Gore, a much more experienced and smarter pol, with a grand vision for America. As I pointed out in an essay published later, Dubya’ vision was never realized, and anyway he didn’t have much of a plan to make it real. The conclusion I reached is that, in presidential elections, vision matters more than reality, even more than competence.

Is Vance’s fairy tale that kind of vision? Is the slogan on all those annoying red hats, “Make America Great Again”? Does Joe Biden—for all his competence, empathy for the underdog and solid accomplishments during his presidency and his long political career, have a competing vision? If not, can Biden win?

The answers, my friend, are blowin’ in the wind, precisely as Dylan sung.



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