The Left Establishment will never forgive J.D. Vance forsaking it

This isn't just business. It's personal

Ben Domenech has a very interesting take on Vice President Vance in an essay on The Transom.

[T]he truth is: They hate him because they view him as a traitor to their class, after they welcomed him with open arms.

He recounts the rapturous response Hillbilly Elegy received upon publication and the instant celebrity conferred upon Vance, in so small part because it satisfied a need of “people on the center left trying to make some sense of (or offer some dismissive explanation for) the Trump phenomenon.”

Vance went all-in (something he has done as Trump’s number two as well):

He went on Charlie Rose to call himself as a “a Never Trump guy,” wrote a piece for the The New York Times calling Trump “unfit” for the presidency, and joined Terry Gross on NPR to call Trump “noxious” and warn that he “is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He even did the most humiliating thing you could do at that time in that position, which was cast a vote in 2016 for Evan McMullin. He’d proven which side he was on.

Domenech understands the potent social and economic lucre such a debut implies:

For someone without a sense of principle or political reality, all this would go to your head. You have the opportunity to be at the top echelon of elite voices, rake in the money on the speaking tours, and be a voice of constant Christian moralizing against the racist bigots from whence you came who just don’t know what’s good for them. Who would turn it down?

But as we all can see, Vance didn’t go for the immediate reward at hand. He saw Trump’s first term unfold and changed his mind about what works. Not just in public, but as someone drawn to politics.

The left hates this. They think insults matter more than policy, and that if you couldn’t stomach Trump’s tweets, it definitely makes you a hypocrite to say he’s doing good things, too. And deep down, they know Vance is really quite good at it. The vice president has an even better understanding of the elite world he had briefly navigated. Seeing its weak points fueled an even greater talent at making the case for the Trumpian policies he now supports. Today you’ll oftentimes find him arguing the case with those same media entities and figures who once welcomed him into the fold. His talent makes the shift all the more frustrating. So does his beard.

I have a longstanding belief that former lefties make for effective conservatives. They know the enemy, and they know why it is wrong. The late David Horowitz stands as a powerful example of someone who understood the evil the left does and effectively worked against it. The son of party member capital C Communists, he turned against the left when he experienced the ruthlessness of the Black Panthers, who murdered his friend because she knew too much. He got it: the Left is a racket.

I’ve known many other reformed leftist conservatives because I am one and we can usually spot each other.

I take it as a powerful sign that Vance went to Yale Law School, where he heard plenty of progressive political rhetoric, and when he got out into the real world, he saw that the theories didn’t work too well in practice. And he had the courage to admit he was wrong and and change his way of thinking, not to mention professional and social circles, and seek to help frustrate the aims of the world of the progressive intellectual, that he briefly inhabited.

Domenech concludes:

So when the left rails against Vance, understand that they do so from a position of deeply felt personal betrayal.

And the Left is now virtually feminized, as Helen Andrews reminds us, with consequent amplification of the impact of emotional betrayal.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.