“It’s astonishing to me — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — that Hillbilly Elegy managed to seduce as many liberals as it did given that Vance’s scorn for almost everyone in his poverty-stricken small Ohio town reverberates on every page. He doesn’t do a very good job of disguising it, but he does arguably try — he occasionally tells us he feels empathy, while rarely actually displaying any. Early on, he writes, “I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks.” This comes immediately after demonizing a co-worker he once had because he was consistently late or absent from work, and who seems to represent the larger ailment among “hillbillies” he claims to want to diagnose.
Though he seems to hate his community full of deadbeats, drug addicts, fat people, and “welfare queens,” we’re supposed to read his portrayal as enlightening and empathetic because he’s constantly feinting briefly toward gentleness. “There are no villains in this story,” he tells us early on; except Hillbilly Elegy is full of them. Throughout the book, he frequently makes assumptions about the motivations and life circumstances of the people around him and rails against them for what he sees as their lazy, unmotivated, or bizarre choices. Indeed, more sympathy does not seem to be his concern.
Even the book’s title is a manipulation. As many people have pointed out, Vance didn’t actually grow up as a fabled “hillbilly”; he merely spent some of his summers in Appalachia as a child. When he’s describing the small town of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up, the first thing he focuses on is the town’s socioeconomic decline, unlike his more affectionate descriptions of the topography of rural Kentucky and detailed character profiles of his family there. He’s at pains to make sure we understand how much he hated it there, and how much his heart truly belonged with his renegade redneck family across the Kentucky border.
In Middletown, his focus on the town’s economics, its rising “residential segregation” into concentrated areas of working-class poor, and the row of decaying mansions on Main Street, all reveal his obsession with class and upward mobility. It’s a fixation that underpins the book. “Looking back, I don’t know if the ‘really poor’ areas and my block were any different, or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor,” he admits.
In all of the many moments where he demonizes the poor people in his orbit, Vance fails to offer or even consider the broader context of what’s happening with his community that might drive people to lives of penury and misery. He rails against drug addicts and provides a close, painful look at his family’s own battle with addictions, particularly his mother — but he never mentions the opioid crisis or the role companies and policy played in ravaging rural communities.
“We created these problems, not the government, not a corporation,” he insists, despite having plenty of evidence to the contrary.”
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“Vance is, of course, a conservative, and the focus on individual failing rather than systemic failures is to be expected. But what’s striking about Hillbilly Elegy, especially in the context of his recent turn toward Trumpian populism, is its disdain for people.
Even as he’s trying to define himself as part of one in-group or another, be it the Scots-Irish or the “hillbillies,” he can’t stop shaming and distancing himself from the other people in it. His characterizations of his community and the people in it thrum with disgust and a deep sense of remove. As someone who grew up in a similar world, it would never even occur to me to feel for my own rural small Southern town the loathing Vance seems to feel for his, and the fact Vance never even second-guesses his own level of antipathy is one of the more chilling aspects of the book.”
“Vance’s commitment, though, to flipping the Republican Party’s class allegiances — and his prospects for doing so — have both been greatly exaggerated.
J.D. Vance’s economic outlook is distinct from the market fundamentalism of Ronald Reagan or Paul Ryan. Vance is skeptical of free trade and immigration, believing that both erode the bargaining power of native-born workers by providing corporations access to cheap labor at home and abroad. In his telling, were US employers forced to rely on a smaller labor pool, they would have no choice but to pay higher wages and invest more in productivity-enhancing technology.
Vance also supports state subsidies for the domestic production of cutting-edge products. As a Senate candidate, Vance voiced support for Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, which subsidizes semiconductor manufacturers who operate in the United States. Once in Congress, he co-authored bipartisan legislation that would require companies that develop new technologies with taxpayer support to manufacture the resulting products within the US.
He has also been willing to antagonize discrete segments of the capitalist class. With Elizabeth Warren, he cosponsored a bill that would claw back the pay of executives at large failed banks, a measure aimed at discouraging reckless risk-taking. And he has given rhetorical support to the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement.
Most heretically, Vance claims to support organized labor in theory, even if he’s less than enthusiastic about the trade union movement that actually exists. The senator has said that more American workers should be able to collectively bargain over pay and benefits but that the mainstream labor movement is “irreconcilably hostile to Republicans” and that left-wing unions like Starbucks Workers United deserve conservatives’ opposition.
Nevertheless, Vance’s ascension to the highest echelon of Republican politics is unlikely to transform the GOP into an effective steward of working-class interests. This is true for (at least) four reasons:
1) Where Vance’s ideas have broad Republican buy-in — as on trade and immigration — his policy preferences would be more likely to reduce native-born Americans’ living standards than increase them.
2) Vance’s concrete legislative proposals for increasing government intervention in the economy have tepid support from other Republicans and in any case would have only a marginal impact on US workers.
3) The Republican Party is structurally incapable of acting on Vance’s genuinely radical ideas about organized labor and the Ohio senator has done absolutely nothing to advance them.
4) The GOP has little incentive to betray the interests of its most well-heeled and organized constituencies for the sake of better serving working-class voters. After all, the party has already discovered that it can grow its support among blue-collar workers without making any significant concessions to their material interests.”
“Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Sunday launched their heaviest exchange of fire after months of strikes and counterstrikes that have raised fears of an all-out war.
By mid-morning, the exchange of fire had ended, with both sides saying they had only aimed at military targets. The Israeli strikes killed three militants in Lebanon, and Israel’s military said a soldier was killed by either an interceptor of incoming fire or shrapnel from one. But the situation remained tense.”
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“Israel said around 100 warplanes launched airstrikes targeting thousands of rocket launchers across southern Lebanon to thwart an imminent Hezbollah attack. Hezbollah said it launched hundreds of rockets and drones aimed at military bases and missile defense positions in northern Israel and the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
Hezbollah called the attack an initial response to the targeted killing of one of its founding members and top commanders, Fouad Shukur, in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut last month. It said its military operations for Sunday were concluded, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said they will “reserve the right to respond at a later time” if the results of Sunday’s attack aimed at a military intelligence base near Tel Aviv aren’t sufficient.
Israel’s military said its intelligence base near Tel Aviv wasn’t hit. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said an initial assessment showed “very little damage” in Israel.”
“In the months since President Joe Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he hoped and his critics feared.
The number of people asking for haven in the United States has dropped by 50% since June, according to new figures from the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents are operating more efficiently, administration officials say, and many of the hot spots along the border, like Eagle Pass, Texas, have calmed.”
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“Under the new rules, border agents are no longer required to ask migrants whether they fear for their lives if they are returned home. Unless the migrants raise such a fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation to their home countries.
It is difficult to know how many people with legitimate cases are turned back because they don’t know to “manifest fear,” as the practice is known. But critics of the new policy say it is deeply unfair to desperate people who have no idea how to seek help in America.”
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“The order mandates that only people who enter the country at an official port of entry with an appointment can be considered for asylum at the southern border, with only limited exceptions for unaccompanied children, victims of human trafficking and people facing serious medical emergencies or threats to their lives.
Before the new rules went into effect, migrants would cross the border illegally and seek out border agents to surrender, knowing that anyone who set foot on U.S. soil could ask for protection. Often, after an initial screening, they would be released into the United States to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to come up.
Biden’s order changed that. Now, the majority of migrants are turned back quickly.”
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“An administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the policy freely, said the new rules allow the agency to focus on migrants who are more likely to have legitimate claims. The person said more than 1,000 migrants a day can schedule an appointment to claim asylum at an official port of entry, so there is still a pathway for people seeking refuge.”
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“Biden’s executive order is not the only reason the numbers have dropped.
Mexico has ramped up enforcement, intercepting migrants en route to the border. And illegal crossings typically fall after a major policy change — only to rise again later — as migrants try to make sense of the new rules.
But it is clear that the restrictions are having a significant effect.
The number of people crossing into the United States has plummeted since Biden imposed the restrictions. In July, there were about 56,000 illegal crossings, the lowest monthly tally of the Biden administration. In December alone, that number was 250,000.
The number of people seeking asylum, in turn, also fell precipitously. Although the Department of Homeland Security did not give exact figures, the agency said in a court filing last week that asylum requests had dropped more than 50%.”
“Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.
In picking J.D. Vance as his vice president, he’s picked someone who will egg him on to go very far indeed.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.”
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“As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
That is: Vance urged that Trump radically remake the executive branch even if the Supreme Court said doing so was illegal.”
“The US is an exception in the rich world in that its population is projected to keep growing through the 21st century, reaching some 421 million by 2100. But that’s much less a function of fertility — US fertility has been below replacement level for years — than it is of the country’s openness to immigration. Recent census projections show that if immigration to the US stopped tomorrow, the US population would begin to fall immediately and hit just 226 million by 2100.”
“Transparency is the first step to a reformed Secret Service.
But what’s already known about the agency shows there’s plenty of room for improvement. John Koskinen, the former commissioner of the IRS who worked on the 2021 NAPA report on the Secret Service’s workforce, found that the agency needed more staffing.
“The place ran better if they had enough people, but they were chronically understaffed,” Koskinen said.
According to the report, employee turnover and a lack of sufficient hiring resulted in a staff that was less experienced, overworked, and stretched too thin. “The major finding was that as the staffing increased, employee satisfaction increased,” Koskinen said, meaning that more staffing would lead to less turnover as a result of burnout.
Koskinen believes Congress should focus on the lack of sufficient staffing, especially given the expanding scope of the Secret Service’s mission. The number of people it protects, for example, has grown, with requests like Trump’s for Secret Service protection for his adult children and top officials just before he left office.
It’s not clear, however, whether staffing problems had anything to do with the security lapses at Trump’s rally. The agency did hire over 600 new employees in 2023, and the Secret Service had recently bolstered security around the former president before the incident. That’s all the more reason for Congress to expand its investigation beyond what went wrong at Trump’s rally to get a full picture of how big of a problem staffing actually is — before committing more funding to the agency so that, if needed, the money can be properly directed.
One question that Congress should ask that could help address the Secret Service’s needs — from transparency to resources — is whether the Department of Homeland Security is where it should be housed. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Secret Service was part of the Treasury Department. But since it moved to Homeland Security in 2003, people have questioned whether it receives enough scrutiny or accountability, blending into a massive bureaucracy of over 250,000 employees.
“Are they given the right visibility in light of the importance of their job, or do they get lost day in and day out of that huge organization?” Koskinen said.
Now, with the Secret Service under renewed scrutiny, Congress has a chance to review the agency’s transparency, staffing problems, and the scope of its mission. And it might be time to rethink how the agency approaches all three.”
“The vice president was never in charge of the border. That job belongs to Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, and to Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services.
Still, a combination of right-wing spin, media fascination during Harris’s early tenure, miscommunication from the White House, and growing migrant surges during the Biden presidency have all made that label stick. Now, it stands as one of the more serious challenges Harris faces”
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“in March 2021, when Biden announced that he would be giving Harris essentially the same assignment he got during his own vice presidency: coordinating diplomatic relationships to address the “root causes” of migration into the United States.
“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden said during a White House meeting on migration on March 24, 2021.
The idea behind this approach is a long-term strategy: Border surges were just one symptom of deeper economic, diplomatic, and security problems these countries face that cause people to make the trek north. The assignment was a bit cursed from the start — a “politically treacherous job with little short-term payoff,” as it was described by the Los Angeles Times — because any benefits from addressing these root causes would obviously take time to appear. Meanwhile, the border saw more legal as well as illegal crossings every month.
Senior White House officials who briefed reporters before the announcement emphasized at the time that this was a diplomatic assignment: a two-pronged approach to build diplomatic ties with these countries and to oversee investment and implementation of foreign aid to these countries to address infrastructure, grow business, and strengthen civil society.”
“Beyond Trump worship, the RNC has been billed as proof that the populist takeover of the Republican Party is complete. On issues like trade, immigration, and foreign alliances, this analysis is surely correct; the Trumpian insurgency has gone head-to-head with the party old guard and defeated them.
Yet elements of the old Republican Party remain thoroughly in place.
Unlike Europe’s far-right populist parties, the GOP remains unyieldingly opposed to the welfare state and progressive taxation. It remains committed to banning abortion, an issue where its actions at the state level speak for themselves. It remains deeply hostile to unions; vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, allegedly the avatar of the party’s pro-worker populism, has a 0 percent score from the AFL-CIO. On foreign policy, it is by no means strictly isolationist: it seeks to ramp up military spending and aggressively confront China even as it tears down both military alliances and the American-led global trade regime.
Ideologically, the GOP is a mess, a political party constructed less out of one cogent worldview than an assemblage of different parts, a zombie given life by the lightning of Donald John Trump. It is Frankenstein’s party. And while Trump and his loyalists are clearly our Shelleyian monster’s head, they do not (yet) have full control over all its limbs.
The Trump coalition is so new that it has yet to produce an equilibrium, a stable set of policy commitments that will endure as long as it aligns. It basically works by Trump getting his way on issues he really cares about — like democracy, trade, and immigration — while others claim what they can when they can claim it. The monied class is still calling the shots on taxes and regulation; the social conservatives are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to issues like abortion and LGBT rights.”
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“Some of the most notable policies in them, like Project 2025’s proposal to end the Justice Department’s independence or the platform’s call for “the largest Deportation Program in history,” is pure Trump (right down to the random capitalization).
But in issue areas where other elements of the right prevail, things sound a bit more old Republican. Project 2025’s chapter on the EPA is about as old-school business friendly as it gets; the GOP platform promises to “slash Regulations” and “pursue additional Tax Cuts.” Project 2025 calls on the next president to “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
When there’s tension between Trump’s instincts and the old Republican agenda, the result is not always clear.
On trade, Trump has simply won; the issue is central enough to his political identity that his protectionism has become party orthodoxy. But on abortion, where Trump wants the party to moderate, signals are more mixed. He succeeded in, for example, taking a call for a national abortion ban out of the GOP platform — but banning abortion remains central to the party identity. Both Vance and Project 2025 support using an obscure 1873 law to ban the distribution of mifepristone, the abortion pill, by mail.
Partly, this confused state of affairs is a product of Trump’s own personality. The conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru argues, correctly, that he simply doesn’t have the character necessary to run a strict and doctrinal ideological movement.
“It’s not just that he lacks the discipline and focus to carry out an objective, although he does lack both, or that flatterers easily manipulate him, although they do. It’s also that his objectives are malleable to start with,” Ponnuru argues.
But partly, it’s a result of coalitional politics — how the American right has always worked.”
“Today, if you have money to throw around on vacation, you’re spoiled for choices that unlock shorter wait times or better, roomier plane seats. Meanwhile, if you’re on a tight budget, your vacation is likely to feel especially overpriced for how shabby the experience is.”