THE NEXT President of the United States is 78, and has already been shot at once while under secret service protection. He happened to turn his head as the bullet flew past him, which almost certainly saved his life. What if the next assassination attempt is successful? The chances are small but, given American history, not that small. Seven of the 46 presidents to date (15 per cent) have been shot and 4 of those killed, which is just under 10 per cent.
What if Trump dies naturally, or is incapacitated, before he reaches 82? Given the pressures of the job he has just taken on, the chances of that cannot be too small either. In either case, the next US President would be JD Vance. And even if Vance does not inherit the job in abnormal circumstances, he might well win it on his own merits by normal democratic process four years hence. He is clearly a man to watch – but for some reason, no-one is watching.
Most of the public knows very little about the Vice-President-elect beyond the fact he was once poor and is now rich. Some are aware that he was saved from social degeneration by his grandmother who inculcated ambition in a young man suffering from a chaotic home life. She was incredibly proud when he managed to join the US Marines, which enabled him later to go to college. Subsequently, he went from Ohio State University, then to Yale Law School, where he met his future wife, Usha, the brainy daughter of equally ambitious immigrants from India, one of them a mechanical engineer and the other a molecular biologist.
Oh – and he wrote a book about who he was. It was a best seller but still Vance is ignored by the paperwork class. The day after the recent election result was announced, Deutsche Welle, the BBC of Germany, published an article entitled: “Who is Vice-Presendent-elect JD Vance, Trump’s heir apparent?” But it did not explain much.
So, let me try. Who, exactly, is this dude? As Mr Vance has never visited Great Todday, much less come into The Puffer in Snorvaig on a rainy Friday evening to chat for a while in the dry, I have had to rely on his candid and very readable book: Hillbilly Elegy: a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. I can also recommend the interesting interview he gave to Joe Rogan, broadcast ten days ago. For me, the keystone of the whole Trump-Vance arch is the statement Vance made at 1 hr 44 mins into that interview: “People are getting sick of being told what to think.” Amen to that, bro!
Sadly Scotland still limps along trying to tell the world what to think and how to behave. This nasty pharisaism is rapidly destroying the country’s future citizens. The empty-headed half-wittery of the over-fed duds in the Scottish air-quotes parliament has meant the last quarter century has seen the ruination of our education system in order to impose the sort of class division which Vance had to overcome in America. Scotland seems to want to prevent children achieving what the Vice-President-elect did. Left-brain politicians hate ambition, as it is the first step on the road to self-reliance and thereby freedom from their own power.
If there is one broad policy point that Vance makes in his book it is the importance of education to social mobility. If you want people to be able to rise up out of the ghetto mentality that rustbelt schools in America inadvertently promote, rather as state schools here do, you need quality teaching in an orderly atmosphere. Vance does not blame the teachers so much as the bureaucrats who prioritise their own policy virtue over the future lives of the children they have temporarily in their power. But he thinks parents are often to blame too: “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently: ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no-one wants to talk about the fact that many are raised by wolves.’” (p. 127)
The same applies to the inferiority complex that the current Scottish government wants to breed into schoolchildren in order to reinforce the class system they are creating. Vance was brought up by his maternal grandparents due to the emotional maladjustment of his rather tragic mother. His moral sheet anchor was his grandmother. She was a pistol-packing, Scots-Irish shit-kicker from the Appalachian hill country who taught him real values, like family loyalty and how to swear.
When the insane hard work and discipline of life training to be a US Marine—“If you’re not puking you’re lazy. Stop being fucking lazy!” (p. 177)—occasionally infected Vance’s letters home, she would write back to her beloved grandson: “You can do anything; don’t be like those fuckers who think the deck is stacked against them.” (p. 176)
That was good advice because Vance later says, “I left the Marine Corps [after four years, in which he rose to corporal] not just with a sense that I could do what I wanted but also with the capacity to plan.” (p. 181) That was the self-discipline part of his education, after which came college where a combination of the American government’s help for ex-servicemen (the GI Bill) and Ohio state’s assistance to students from the local area gave him the opportunity to get a first degree.
Vance knew this was make-or-break time so he worked as hard as he had been taught to in the Marines. He discovered a curious freedom about being an adult and taking responsibility for himself rather than relying on welfare. He stopped worrying about ending up on the scrapheap.
“I felt an incredible momentum,” Vance writes. “I knew the statistics. I had read the brochures in the social worker’s office when I was a kid. I had recognised the look of pity from the hygienist at the low-income dental clinic. I wasn’t supposed to make it, but I was doing just fine on my own.” (p. 183)
He did fine enough that he ended up going as a graduate law student to Yale. There he not only learned how to both dine and disagree with powerful and clever people, but also met his vegetarian wife to be, Usha Chilukuri, who was doing much the same thing. She went on to clerk for a year for John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States, which is about as high as you can go as an ambitious learner lawyer in America.
Unlike the English-haters and anti-Semites in the nationalist community in Scotland, Vance is self-evidently not a racist. And he certainly does not have a problem with people who have a different coloured skin, unlike some of the less attractive snouts that grunt and gobble in the Holyrood trough. Yet he is reviled by racists who pose self-righteously as the opposite. They want to tell him how to think, when in a healthier world it would be the other way round.
Does anyone remember the funny little high-heeler who used to give a daily “this is how to think” lecture about Covid a few years back? In fact, she was in government at the time and not amenable to criticism due to her exalted opinion of herself. On one occasion, she said of critics of one of her policies on something to do with something or other unclean—fortunately now long-forgotten—that the people who opposed her were “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”.
It takes a thief to spot one, so it will be no surprise to learn that the nastiest and least honest people trotting behind the Holyrood swill bucket are in fact the most misogynist, homophobic and racist in the place (and that takes some doing, given the smugly clannish exophobia which suffuses Scottish politics). JD Vance is not like that.
I hope that once he and Trump are in office they will have compassion on Scottish racists and try to teach them how to comport themselves more decorously in public. The unteachables among them might also benefit from hearing a few Scots-Irish home truths, the most important of which would be Vance’s point that “people are getting sick of being told what to think”. That cannot be repeated often enough.
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Hamish Gobson is the author of Living the Green Dream (forthcoming). He recommends a film about the ecological crisis which the pseudo-“green” regime in Edinburgh is inflicting on Kintyre by means of windmills. Views of them will soon pollute the whole peninsula. This is a looming tragedy of historic proportions. Gobson highly recommends a short new film on this subject: Hands off the Mull (of Kintyre).
Photo of US Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149633320
