JOHN IVISON

Published Jul 18, 2024

J.D. Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was as comforting and familiar as chicken soup for many Canadians.

Donald Trump’s new running mate touched on many of the same notes that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been hitting: championing the working class, domestic production and legal immigration; maligning elites, wasteful spending, unaffordable housing and unfair Chinese trading practices.

It was an impressive introduction to a national audience and suggests the MAGA project has a clear heir to Trump, who is intent on building a durable, mainstream coalition.

But there were plenty of warning signs, too, that their America First agenda may not be good news for the rest of the world. Canada, in particular, which could become collateral damage if Trump and Vance live up to their campaign rhetoric on trade and security.

“Together, we will make sure that our allies share in the burden of securing world peace,” Vance said in his speech Wednesday. “There will be no more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer.”

Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives Speaker, singled out Canada for “riding on America’s coattails” last week.

The Trudeau government said it plans to hit NATO’s spending target of two per cent of GDP in 2032 — eight years from now. But provincial premiers meeting in Halifax urged the prime minister to cut that timeline in half to ward off a backlash from a presidential candidate who has said retribution will be a hallmark of his administration if he’s re-elected.

“Canada needs a plan to get that two per cent in the first four-year term. Otherwise, it’s going to be a trade irritant,” Manitoba’s NDP premier, Wab Kinew, told Politico.

Vance’s folksy style befits his status of the author of the bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, and over the course of 37 minutes, he appeared to win over the bulk of the crowd.

He was deferential if not borderline fawning toward Trump, who sat watching, his ear in a bandage.

Vance revisited his hardscrabble history as the son of an addicted mother in rustbelt Middletown, Ohio, raised by his strong-willed grandmother, before joining the Marines and ending up at Yale Law School.

The speech displayed none of the swivel-eyed agitation present in the one given Wednesday by Trump’s former economic adviser, Peter Navarro, who was released from federal prison in Miami earlier in the day, after serving time for criminal contempt of Congress. “The D.C. swamp convicted me … I went to prison so that you won’t have to,” he said, like some would-be messiah.

Navarro did not seem to get the new memo about toning down the political rhetoric, suggesting President Joe Biden “threw down the woke blue carpet to let in murderers and rapists, drug cartels, human traffickers, Chinese spies, terrorists and a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens to steal the jobs of Black, white and brown Americans.”

Vance’s speech was absent much of the vitriol and calls for retribution that have become MAGA staples. One Canadian in the audience wrote to say that at times he sounded like a traditional rustbelt Democrat.

He blamed Biden’s support for the passage of NAFTA, “a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico”; the entry of China to the World Trade Organization, “a sweetheart deal that destroyed even more good American manufacturing jobs”; and the invasion of Iraq. (The signing of NAFTA and the Iraqi invasion both happened under Republican presidents).

“At each step, of the way in small towns like mine in Ohio, next door in Pennsylvania, and in Michigan, jobs were sent overseas and children sent to war,” he said. “We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business and who answers to the working man, union and non-union alike.”

He returned time and again to the divide between “the few with comfort and power in Washington and the rest of us.”

“From Iraq and Afghanistan; from the financial crisis and the great recession; from open borders and stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again,” he said.

Nowhere is this failure more apparent, he said, than in the “absurd” cost of housing, the consequence of Wall Street “crashing the economy” and putting builders out of business, as well as the Democrats allowing the country to be “flooded” with illegal aliens.

The solution is to stop “sacrificing” supply chains to global trade, he said. “We’re going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label: Made in the United States of America,” he said. “We’ll protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.”

By the time he had pledged to Americans of all parties that he will give all he has to serve them — “to make this country a place where every dream you have for yourself, your family and your country will be possible again” — even his harshest critics in the room had laid down their swords.

But America First promises to be less benign than it sounds for the rest of the world.

Neo-mercantilist trade and an isolationist foreign policy will leave a mark.

In an opinion column for the New York Times this year titled The Math Doesn’t Add Up, Vance said he opposed the $60-billion aid package to Ukraine and remains opposed to “virtually any proposal for the U.S. to continue funding the war.” His argument is that the U.S. doesn’t have the capacity to manufacture the weapons Ukraine needs, particularly artillery shells, where Russia has five times the amount.

But it is an argument that ignores the contribution from EU countries, which is growing, and discounts the problems that Russia is having trying to maintain its war effort. The Economist noted this week that Russia’s vast stocks of Soviet-era weaponry are running out and it faces shortages in everything from tanks to artillery barrels. Two experts quoted suggest Russia will reach “a critical point of exhaustion” next year.

Vance’s logic would apply equally to any future adventurism by Vladimir Putin in the Baltic state or Poland, and his indifference to Ukraine’s fate seems to reflect a similar disinterest in the future of Eastern Europe.

Would a Trump/Vance Administration reaffirm its commitment to NATO’s Article 5 collective-defence principle, or would it accept the establishment of Russian satellite governments in Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and even Warsaw?

That was left unsaid in Vance’s speech, but no amount of chicken soup can make that prospect comforting.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

In this article first published in November 2020, former National Post columnist, now Conservative MP, Jamil Jivani describes his close friendship with J.D. Vance. On Monday July 15, Vance was named as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate for the 2024 American election.

If you had told me 10 years ago that my best friend from law school would be a self-described hillbilly, I’d have laughed in your face. But you’d have been right.

I first met J.D. Vance during our law school orientation at Yale University a decade ago. We attended a wine-and-cheese reception. I didn’t know so many different kinds of cheese existed. And I had never tasted wine before. Needless to say, I felt out of place. Across the room stood a fellow student who seemed equally unfamiliar with wine and cheese.

We went on to develop a strong friendship, forged through moments of shared discomfort over the course of our three years in the Ivy League. We were by one another’s side for awkward interactions with professors and classmates, life-changing job interviews, and hundreds of hours of studying. We became such good friends that I eventually performed the Bible reading at his wedding.

We became such good friends that I eventually performed the Bible reading at his wedding

Growing up in the Toronto area, I never met a person who’d call himself a hillbilly. Most of my neighbours were the children of middle- and working-class immigrants, and we understood terms like hillbilly to carry negative, even comedic connotations. Like Cletus from The Simpsons. But my friendship with J.D. taught me that his Appalachian family and friends aren’t so different from my own. The challenges that many Appalachians experience — poverty, addiction, fatherlessness, inadequate health care — are challenges seen and felt by my loved ones, too. And the positive qualities possessed by many Appalachians — loyalty, resilience, striving — are qualities we also hold dear.

Since being published in 2016, J.D.’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, has had a similar, humanizing effect for many others. His definition of hillbilly is fairly specific: you know you’re a hillbilly when “you love (Appalachia), you love the people who live there … it’s about loving the rural lifestyle and having some connection to it, familial or otherwise,” J.D. explained to the American Enterprise Institute. But the experiences of hillbillies transcend geography. My friend Lianne Bell shared on my talk radio show last week that reading Hillbilly Elegy made her feel like she wasn’t alone for the first time. She saw her community in Greenbush, Ont., reflected in the pages of J.D.’s book. Further, as the Brookings Institution has outlined, there are striking similarities between J.D.’s account of Appalachia’s white working class and observations of urban America’s Black working class made by Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson.

J.D.’s book resonated with so many that it has been adapted into a Netflix movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams. The movie’s release this week marks another opportunity for J.D.’s story to humanize the hillbilly to an even bigger audience. J.D.’s grandmother (Close) shows the kind of tough love to her grandson that many who survive adversity need from their parental figures. And J.D.’s mom (Adams) brings to life the ups and downs of addiction and single motherhood that exhaust children growing up in broken families. Surely, there will be many more Lianne Bells who see their own communities reflected on their screens, and William Julius Wilsons who connect lived experiences across racial and cultural differences.

Unfortunately, the potential of Hillbilly Elegy to build bridges has been overlooked, if not entirely downplayed, by commentators and film critics who appear more interested in politics than the stories on screen. The Atlantic’s David Sims complains “the film’s ambitions simply aren’t that serious” and it lacks “sociopolitical analysis.” Stephanie Zacharek, writing for Time, thinks it’s a knock against director Ron Howard that he “framed Hillbilly Elegy as a purely personal, rather than overtly political, story.”

During a time when it feels like partisanship has overtaken so many parts of our lives, is it actually a bad thing for a movie to be more personal than political? Howard made a deliberate artistic choice. “I didn’t view this as any kind of polemic or societal overview … I wanted to understand everything through these very rich and yet very relatable characters,” he said in a magazine interview last month. I’d argue Howard’s approach helps to further humanize the communities that J.D. writes about. It’s a lot easier to identify with people than political commentary.

Not everyone will have the chance to become good friends with a self-described hillbilly. Through Hillbilly Elegy, though, more people will come to learn that they’re more like hillbillies than they thought. And inspiring empathy is a laudable goal in and of itself.