JD Vance still itches to get out of Appalachia

Cartoon by Jack Ohman

Sen. JD Vance didn’t drop his carpet bag in East Palestine, Ohio, long enough to make a difference before catching the first train to greater fame as Donald Trump’s running mate.

The 39-year-old Republican from Cincinnati has been in the Senate 18 months, just long enough to see the Railway Safety Act stall because Vance could not muster the Republican votes necessary to not let down East Palestine, which was doused by chemicals in a railroad accident. He co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in one of those moments when you thought that populists from right and left could come together and force us to listen to railway workers for once. We thought wrong.

Vance moved on. So much for Ohio. That’s his modus operandi. Get out of Appalachia while you still got your teeth and exploit it for a book, Hillbilly Elegy. He was some sort of rural sage who could read the minds of the disaffected White dirt-road culture. Except he got out the first chance he could, initially for the Marines as a writer and eventually Yale Law School, and then silk-stocking law and venture capital in San Francisco.

Silicon Valley is a long way from Paradise (Kentucky, that is).

Vance got wrapped up in the system that sucks the life out of East Palestine or Paradise. He was going to redirect capital back into the Heartland with Steve Case of AOL fame with the Rise of the Rest venture capital fund. Vance was supposed to be the one directing all that bicoastal capital back into rural America, undone by relentless consolidation and loss.

That was so yesterday.

Meantime, Vance found himself a wife, who just happened to have clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, out there in San Francisco. They decided to move with back to Ohio where he would found a charity, Our Ohio Renewal, that was supposed to take on the opioid epidemic. It didn’t do much before he shut it down in 2022 to run for the Senate.

Vance barely had time to light in the upper chamber before taking on the vice presidential nomination.

He has all these ideas about rural America. When the early whistle blows, he bails for the next big thing. He leaves East Palestine in the rearview mirror, if his past route charts his future course.

Vance has his sights on the White House a la Teddy Roosevelt. Be in the right place when the big man dies and you hit the jackpot.

“Who made that farmer president?”

The mayor of East Palestine, Trent Conway, at least got a trip to Milwaukee to speak at the Republican National Convention ahead of Vance. He gets his 15 minutes in the spotlight, the Mahoning Valley gets squat.

Vance just buzzes right past on his way up.

He made it out of Kentucky and a tough childhood to be reared by his grandparents in Middletown, Ohio. Paw Paw and Maw Maw made sure JD got a good education so he could make tracks and a name for himself.

Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India. He trades in anti-immigrant hogwash. The Mexicans did not destroy meatpacking unions, the Reagan Administration did. Vance would have you think that Whites are eager to cut the bung from a hog all day long, six days a week, if only the pay were better. Truth is, they won’t. Not in Storm Lake, which is majority immigrant because of meatpacking. It works well enough. It could be better if there were a union. It’s easier to attack immigrants than to stay and build a community with them.

I chose to stay in rural America despite the consolidation, the capital and brain drains to the big cities and the coasts, the pollution and, ultimately, the disdain that elites hold for us hayseeds. I love Iowa. I’m old-fashioned that way.

We can enjoy visiting friends and family who have moved onto greener pastures in the city. Nothing against them, best wishes to all. Few things leave me colder than somebody who flees Iowa and then pretends to know and tell me what life should be like in the old hometown. “Too bad about the Mexicans taking over,” they say, and I just shake my head.

It’s the consolidation, stupid. That’s why Youngstown got clobbered. It’s what killed the family farm. It keeps immigrants in fear. Consolidated industries, capital and power. Vance calls it out but revels in it with his phony populism that never actually upsets the railway’s order of business. Just like Trump.

So long, suckers.

Vance runs off for the gilded life, with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and all the others who think we can live on Mars or out in the sea when the waves take over San Francisco. Honestly, that’s what they talk about. Not about union stuff like better staffing of railcars with chemical hazards, or the consolidation of our food supply, or why battery plant workers in Ohio get paid less than union auto workers in Michigan. Those are uncomfortable questions in the house of golden toilet seats.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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