During the vice presidential debate earlier this month, J.D. Vance waxed poetic about “peace through strength,” and how through him and former President Donald Trump, “the American dream is attainable.” Throughout his debate against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the junior U.S. senator from Ohio prescribed national pride, business onshoring, and mass deportation as his recipe for that American dream.
This rhetoric showcased Vance’s reliance on the cultural grievances of the White ethnonationalist movement that he and Trump have courted, legitimizing them as inherent American values that must be championed, preserved, and ultimately expanded.
These talking points and equivocation tactics did not emerge in a vacuum, but in the elite spaces of media and academia in which he claims to be an outsider.
The intellectual genealogy of his xenophobia can be traced back to Amy Chua, his centrist mentor from his days as a law student. As Vance competes for a job that is a heartbeat away from the presidency, it’s worth tracing how the Yale Law School professor’s ideology shaped Vance’s own.
Best known outside politics for his 2016 bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance got his literary break five years prior with an email to Chua, then his contract law professor. They had an instant connection, and Chua eventually introduced Vance to her book agent who went on to represent him as well. Chua took him under her wing and advocated tirelessly on his behalf, believing that he “had a book in [him].” Her prediction eventually came to fruition.
Chua, a “celebrity professor,” is best known for her controversial parenting memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” The generalization-ridden 2011 book was a cultural sensation, and Chua nabbed a huge amount of publicity and cache, such as being named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.
“Battle Hymn” is ostensibly about Chua’s personal journey with her daughters. However, the text is explicitly political from the get-go and aimed at establishing her story as palatable to White Western readers: “Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting….”
According to race and education scholar OiYan Poon, this framing only serves to segment out Chinese American behavior as non-Western, relegated permanently into some category of foreign unknowable conduct. Vance similarly paints Appalachia as “not fundamentally part of the United States” with a distinctly “mysterious” culture ridden with “shacks” and “people barefoot, dirty and covered in coal dust.”
This angst-ridden and reductive strategy argues Appalachian historian Elizabeth Catte, is a “trademark of J.D. Vance’s engagement as a pundit and political up-and-comer.”
By chronicling his family story of drug addiction and poverty in Appalachia, he was able to parlay this origin story into a career identity as a folk hero of midwestern White working-class people while grossly simplifying the life and politics of the region.
It is far easier to downplay the scale of the problem of White nationalism and label it as politics as usual by isolating its extremist elements from the broader picture of bigotry.
He refined these tactics under Chua’s tutelage who has been consistently comfortable with throwing other Asian Americans under the bus in the service of sounding more objective about race and ethnicity to White readers. She characterizes herself as not being afraid to go where more politically correct commenters may avoid.
In 2014, Chua teamed up with her husband Jeb Rubenfeld to write “The Triple Package,” a book that one review says “pays lip service to debunking the model minority myth while continuing to capitalize on cultural stereotypes.” Drawing on her authority as a known “cultural spokesperson” and scholar, Chua once again pushes dangerous racial stereotypes to build her own brand.
During a 2018 joint appearance promoting “Political Tribes,” Vance and Chua reconnected and discussed their specific theories as to why Trump got into office and controlled the White House. At this point in time, Vance had not yet completed his embrace of Donald Trump, self-identifying to Charlie Rose as a “never-Trump guy” and “not seeing [Trump] offering many solutions” when speaking to ABC.
In “Political Tribes,” Chua theorizes that America is home to two different White tribes separated by class and laments that “It is simply a fact that the ‘diversity’ policies at the most selective American universities and in some sectors of the economy have had a disparate adverse impact on Whites.” On campus culture itself, she complains that college campuses aim to “expose the American dream as a sham. But for working-class Americans, they love the American dream. They don’t hate capitalism. Most people who want socialism and want redistribution tend to be privileged Ivy League kids.”
During the aforementioned 2018 book discussion, Chua once again showcased her sleight-of-hand politics in describing the “privilege” of “coastal elites” to launder racist White hatred as a run-of-the-mill grievance of a tribal group under attack. She widens the common definition of elites to not only encompass the economically privileged and racial majorities but also carves out metrics for education as a privilege that outweighs ethnicity and class. Without any mention of the scale, scope, and institutional power wielded by specific groups, Chua simply concludes that “every group feels attacked…. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition — pure political tribalism.”
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While Chua takes great care in “Political Tribes” to distance herself from engaging with the rhetoric of the right or left, her conclusion on American tribalism effectively sketched out a Trumpist blueprint that frames White nationalism as justified anxiety over changing demographics and diversity. Within the book, Chua makes the farcical comparison of police brutality to seeing Beyoncé in a Black Panther costume at the Super Bowl. One has fatal consequences, the other is a televised NFL game/concert, and she acts as if both perform the same level of cultural harm. This juxtaposition portrays forced diversity as a sorrowful diagnosis, rather than a driver for White nationalist violence.
“Anyone who doesn’t swallow the antioppression [sic] orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker—anyone who doesn’t acknowledge ‘white supremacy’ — is a racist.’” Chua writes, painting a picture of the embattled conservative White minority on campus.
All this hand-wringing over the simple discomfort at being designated racist, and a loss of belonging in elite cultural spaces. Indeed, it is far easier to downplay the scale of the problem of White nationalism and label it as politics as usual by isolating its extremist elements from the broader picture of bigotry. In her “Political Tribes” commentary on White nationalism in America, Chua found it “absurd to attribute Spencer’s white nationalist views to the half of American voters who supported Donald Trump … White nationalism of this kind would require expelling or exterminating between a third and half of America’s population, and to suggest that 62 million Americans endorse this is preposterous — just more partisan vitriol.”
This victimization and just-so story of the tragic White American, doomed to become a minority, would come to form the foundation of the ideological platform on which Vance rose to power. Certainly, intellectual peers like Chua could concur that Trump’s supporters were unfairly maligned as ethnonationalists.
Vance’s friends suggested that his changed politics were “a gradual shift” that, according to one, “was really triggered by the media and the left’s overreaction to Trump.” A more likely explanation than Vance’s supposed indignation over rightful alarm over MAGA is that he saw a greater opportunity in embracing MAGA, a bet that paid off when Trump endorsed Vance when he ran for the junior Senate seat for Ohio. “Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades,” Trump said in 2022, recommending a man that once called him “noxious” in the 2016 race. Just as Vance had taken a leaf out of Chua’s book to sell his story, co-opting the grievance against the media and left privilege had politically rewarded him.
By the time he was angling to be Trump’s running mate, Vance was arguing on behalf of Trump to the detriment of the man who previously held his would-be post. “I’m extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger,” he said, adding that “the idea that Donald Trump endangered anyone’s lives when he told them to protest peacefully, it’s just absurd,” said Vance, speaking to CNN in May 2024. Trump named him as his running mate one month later.
Fast forward to the 2024 debate stage, and Vance parrots Chua’s narratives on White grievance by dismissing Trump’s culpability in fanning racial division and nationalist anger, and framing immigrants as an aggressor tribe that was buying up real estate, trafficking drugs, and stealing pets for consumption.
Despite ample evidence that Vance’s arguments have no factual basis, their appeal is clear. Xenophobic imagination and the functional framework of legitimizing White anxiety, long peddled by Chua and Vance, is the default viewpoint for many Americans in power and the general public. As both Chua and Vance reaped the benefits of exploiting harmful cultural stereotypes and racist generalizations, they both shed their “squeamishness” over using them over time. For Vance, this meant fully embracing far-right White-centric politics, going as far as putting his own constituents in harm’s way, when he spread lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
When the Financial Times’ Edward Luce interviewed Chua in 2021, they asked her about Vance’s eager embrace of Trumpism. She simply replied, “I never turn on my students.” While Chua has not publicly commented on Vance’s politics since, we can assume her feelings have not changed, especially since her former pupil is poised to gain even more power.
As Vance continues to frame Trump and himself as the sole inheritors of the American dream, his aim, as he was taught by the Tiger Mother, was to aim for ever-higher political rewards. Trump, as much as he commands the spotlight, may simply be a means to an end in the eyes of his ever-ambitious running mate.
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