Opinion of jd vance and trump- jordan peterson

"My HONEST Opinion Of JD Vance" - Jordan Peterson

Intellected
 #jdvance #jordanpeterson #intellected
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The ‘hillbilly honour code’ that explains why JD Vance lashed out at Zelensky Opinion by Ed Cumming
Yury Slobodenuk
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You
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Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, ended up becoming a handbook for American government
Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, ended up becoming a handbook for American government
Many have been shocked by JD Vance’s conduct since he became the US vice-president in January. In particular, his belligerent address to Nato in Munich last month and his hostility towards Volodymyr Zelensky during the Ukrainian president’s disastrous visit to the White House. At Munich, Vance told a stunned audience of European leaders that Trump was the “new sheriff in town” and accused them of having failed to heed their voters on migration and free speech.
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“If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people,” he said, articulating how America First might look in diplomatic terms.
In the Oval Office days later, Vance dressed down Zelensky for being “disrespectful” and ungrateful for US support. He has written angry, sometimes sarcastic social media posts in which he engages directly with his critics, including the historian Sir Niall Ferguson. If you have not paid attention to Vance’s rise, it is startling to see a man inhabit the vice presidency, often thought of as a toothless role, so vigorously.
JD Vance, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky during their confrontational meeting in the Oval Office last month - Getty
JD Vance, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky during their confrontational meeting in the Oval Office last month - Getty
Those who have read Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, may be less surprised. Before Vance became Trump’s gimlet-eyed enforcer, he was a bestselling author. The book is an account of his difficult rust-belt upbringing in Ohio, and the rural Kentucky Appalachian “hillbilly” values he inherited from his family against a backdrop of industrial decline and social fragmentation.
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Vance grew up with what he calls the “Appalachian honour code”, a set of rules about keeping your pride intact and defending your family’s honour. Fighting was part of life, especially if someone insulted your mother.
[”O]ur unspoken honour code made it easy to fight, even when you’re not defending yourself,” he writes. “Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.”
One night Vance heard his new stepbrother calling his mother a “b****”. “I made it abundantly clear that I meant to beat my new stepbrother to within an inch of his life,” he writes, adding “I wasn’t even particularly angry. My desire to fight arose more out of a sense of duty.” Zelensky might argue that Vance sees his new mothers as Donald Trump and the United States.
 Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and popularised by an interview the future vice-president gave in magazine The American Conservative, the book reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Four years later, it was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
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The book paints a vivid and often depressing picture of a corner of American society that feels forsaken, condemned to unemployment, crime, and opioid dependency while the coastal elites grow richer than ever. Vance’s politics make more sense in the light of the book. He believes stable families are important because he has seen first-hand the effects of unstable ones. He is indifferent to Europe because why should America look after the world when it cannot even look after Americans?
Owen Asztalos as JD Vance and Glenn Close as Mamaw in the 2020 film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy - Netflix
Owen Asztalos as JD Vance and Glenn Close as Mamaw in the 2020 film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy - Netflix
When Trump won his first presidential election five months after its publication, critics offered it up as testimony about the kinds of people who were voting for him. The New York Times called the book a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion.”
Few readers suspected the book would end up becoming a handbook for American government, but in Hillbilly Elegy’s celebration of self-reliance, family values and social mobility are the inklings of the defiantly bold politics of Trump’s White House. If Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from my Father presented a hopeful liberal vision of American mobility, Hillbilly Elegy is its bleaker cousin, less about the audacity of hope than the reality of hopelessness.
One recent reader is Jeremy Hunt, the former UK chancellor. “Lots of people were very offended by the exchange between Vance and Zelensky,” he says. “I think we need to understand this person better, because he is going to wield a lot of power. Not just in the next four years, but because he’s the likely Maga successor to Trump, potentially for a lot longer.
“When you read Hillbilly Elegy, you get a real insight as to where Vance is coming from, and I think in particular the anger that comes from the extraordinarily poor background and that feeling of being left behind,” he adds. “I found it very insightful and I came away, perhaps to my surprise, with a lot of respect for him.”
The book begins with an apology of sorts. Vance (then 31 years old) explains that he has not done anything especially noteworthy. But given his upbringing, his degree from Yale Law School and job in venture capital mark him out as exceptional. “I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary,” he writes. “I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.” At heart, he is a “Scots-Irish hillbilly”, a pessimistic bunch for whom “poverty is the family tradition.” It was not enough to blame the alienation of the white working class on the declining industrial sector; Vance had also grown up in a “culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” where people were conditioned to blame the government or society for their problems rather than their own decisions. He took umbrage at what he saw as a growing Right-wing orthodoxy that discouraged self-reliance.
“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
Although Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, he thought of his great-grandmother’s house in Jackson, a tiny coal-mining town in Kentucky, as home. The people around him were proud and loyal but prone to violence, infidelity, substance abuse and idleness. His parents divorced when he was very young; his mother, Bev, struggled with drug abuse. Vance and his sister were mostly raised by his maternal grandparents, Bonnie and Jim, known as Mamaw and Papaw. They ran away from Jackson to Middletown when Bonnie fell pregnant at just 13, fearing reprisals from her family. Jim was a “violent drunk”, Bonnie a violent non-drunk. He credits this move to the city with changing the family’s trajectory.
“Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America,” he writes. “I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.”
Christianity was not merely a matter of faith, it was a proxy for wider success: “Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.” (He converted to Catholicism later.)
Against the odds, he writes, he acquired the self-discipline and determination to make something of himself. “despite all the environmental pressures from my neighbourhood and community, I received a different message at home.”
Vance joined the Marines in 2003 on the advice of a cousin, who said the training would “whip [his] ass into shape.” Besides, he adds, “I reminded myself that my country needed me, and that I’d always regret not participating in America’s newest war.”
In the Marines, he worked as a military journalist and served on a tour of Iraq. Although he does not express a view on the justness or otherwise of that war, he says his colleagues espoused the full spectrum of opinion.
By the time Vance left the military, he knew “exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there.” College followed, at Ohio State and Yale Law School, where he met his wife, Usha, a lawyer, with whom he has three children. One of JD and Usha’s teachers was Amy Chua, an academic who had a bestseller of her own, 2011’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
In these new rarefied surroundings, Vance was made aware of the gulf in social capital between him and some of his peers. In one memorable scene, he calls Usha from the bathroom at a dinner to ask how to navigate the unfamiliar array of cutlery.
“[Reading that passage] you realise that someone who went to one of the top universities in the world came from a background that was about as alien as possible to that gilded life,” says Hunt. “You begin to see why he has a very different perspective to normal politicians.”
Vance is the ‘likely Maga successor to Trump, potentially for a lot longer’ - The Washington Post
Vance is the ‘likely Maga successor to Trump, potentially for a lot longer’ - The Washington Post
At Yale, Vance met the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel when he came to give a talk. Thiel got Vance a job in venture capital, the role he had when Hillbilly Elegy was published.
If some of Vance’s preoccupations as vice-president are sketched out in Hillbilly Elegy, his persona in the book is more liberal and considered than the figure who supported a nationwide abortion ban, spread nonsensical rumours about immigrants eating pets, and dressed down Zelensky so brusquely in the Oval Office. His political evolution has been notable. In 2016, Vance described himself as a “never-Trump guy,” and even said he could be “America’s Hitler.” In one interview he said: “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
Vance had changed his tune by 2022, when he ran to be a Republican senator in Ohio. Realising the power of Trump’s endorsement, he praised his presidency and deleted critical social media posts. It worked. Trump endorsed him, he won, and since then, he has been a staunch supporter; loyalty that was rewarded when Trump picked him as his running mate.
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance refers to an academic study from 2000 on hillbillies, which suggests that “hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.”
As the shocked Nato top brass in Munich, Zelensky, Democrats, Sir Niall and millions of voters will attest, Vance has learned not to shirk uncomfortable truths. In doing so, he has become the obvious heir to Trump’s Maga faction. Hillbilly Elegy could be required reading for many years to come.


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