Opinion | What J.D. Vance’s Transformation Tells Us About the Future of Democracy

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Ross is hot on having more kids.

Not more. We have just — we have just enough.

Just the correct number.

You have fielded your own basketball team, my friend.

That’s right.

That’s quite an accomplishment. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From “New York Times” Opinion, I’m Lydia Polgreen.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, guys. Today I want to tackle a theme that I see shaping elections around the world this year and most notably in the West. And that is a growing support for populism. We’ve seen its influence in messages about the economy and immigration, which have really become defining issues in our US election.

Those issues and how to address them are also playing a big role in upcoming elections in two of the most important countries in Europe — the UK, and with a surprising last minute twist, an election in France. So we’re going to spend this episode digging into why populism appeals to so many in this moment. We’re going to start in Europe, and then we’re going to look at the US. And we’re very lucky that “Matter of Opinion’s” very own Ross is back from parental leave.

Woo!

And we couldn’t talk about this subject without him because I know it’s one that’s very close to his heart and —

That’s right.

— that he follows very closely. So Ross, I’m hoping that you can explain to us how populism has been shaking up politics in Europe recently. Hopefully keep it pretty high level and simple for those falling along at home.

Yeah, for sure, Ross.

Well —

Remember who I am.

— first, it’s great to be back. My understanding is that you guys have gotten away with a lot of stuff in my absence —

[LAUGHS]:

— made a lot of points that perhaps needed to be rebutted and weren’t. So I’m back.

That’s another episode.

Those good times are over. And I’m very happy to talk about populism in Europe. But the important thing to say is that nobody completely understands what’s happening in French politics right now. But basically, Emmanuel Macron, the president, in the aftermath of elections to the European parliament, in which populist parties did quite well, he decided to call a snap election for, basically, the French legislature.

And what makes this decision very strange is that Macron’s own party, this sort of cobbled together centrist party that Macron himself invented, is extremely unpopular. And it’s unusual to call a snap election when you are extremely unpopular, right? And what everyone sort of expected to happen seems to be roughly what’s happening, which is that the populist right has consolidated a lot of support. And a coalition of left and far-left parties have consolidated a lot of support.

So you could say, in effect, you have two forms of populism pitted against a deeply unpopular center. And it’s not at all clear why Macron did this. Right? And the two working theories are, on the one hand, that France is in a bit of a fiscal mess. And —

Uh-oh.

— he basically wants to have divided government so that either the populists or the further left will get blamed for all the problems leading into the next presidential election. So that’s sort of three-dimensional chess of one sort.

The other theory is that Macron is just supremely arrogant and thought that when forced to a binary choice between him and the far-right, the French people, in their wisdom, would return to him. And I mean, the simplest upshot of all of this is that this longstanding attempt to keep the far-right out of power through any kind of coalition seems to be the point where it’s collapsing. That’s what people seem to think right now.

Yes, the French term for it is “cordon sanitaire,” right?

Which sounds better, yes. No, that’s — yeah.

Everything sounds better in French.

To kind of keep the populists right on sides and make sure that they can’t actually take power.

I guess I’m interested in — I mean, Ross mentioned the two possibilities in France, right, that either Macron is doing this bank shot where he’s trying to reveal the inadequacies of populism by kind of bringing them in, or he’s just supremely arrogant and thinks that a snap election when you’re unpopular is a good idea. It could be both, right? I think getting into those options says something about this question of what populism is, reveals a kind of nature of populism, right?

If there are people who think that — and this has been articulated in some parts of the European press, that the best thing you can do to temper populist forces is to bring them in and give them a taste of governing. That gets at the definition of populism, right? That populism thrives on its outsider status, on anti-elitism, anti-establishment, anti-pluralism, right? Claiming sole presentation of the people.

And if you bring them in, especially in some kind of coalitional or power sharing arrangement, it could either compel some moderation or reveal them as a shit show. I think the Trump presidency put the lie to that a little bit on this side of the Atlantic. But could it make sense in a sort of somewhat less tribal European setting?

Well, there are a lot of people who argue that the way to approach this is to have the far-right populist crash up against the reality of governing. I mean, that’s actually what people have been calling for in terms of having the more centrist parties reach out and kind of try and at least engage with this, right, Ross?

Yeah, I mean, I think we’re at a point where it’s sort of a mistake to talk about this in terms of like, do we welcome the populists or not? What you see in France is basically just proof of what I think is already obvious in the United States and will be obvious basically everywhere over the next 10 or 20 years, which is that conservative leaning populism just is one of the big coalitions in Western politics right now.

And they will be in government in some form. They have already been in government in Italy in various forms, going back to Silvio Berlusconi, Giorgia Meloni’s government. Meloni is someone who has connections to Italy’s fascist parties. And when she was elected, there was this similar sense of like, well, Italy is in fascist hands again and so on. But I think you can cite Meloni’s government as sort of partial evidence for the idea that populists in power tend to moderate to certain degrees.

Yep, yeah.

For sure.

But in the United Kingdom right now, what’s happening is that in effect, the Tories are poised for a historic election defeat because they haven’t figured out a way to come to terms with the power of populism in their own coalition.

But the basic reality is that you’re going to have right of center parties that are anti-immigration, more economically moderate in the sense of not wanting cuts to social programs that just sort of represent where right of center voters in these countries are going forward for a long time to come.

I mean, I think I just want to stay on the UK for a second because I think it’s actually a really interesting example of the kind of cyclical nature of these things. Brexit was a populist movement that was largely spurred on by anxieties about immigration. In the run-up to Brexit, the number one issue that people would identify to pollsters was immigration.

And Brexit happens. The Tories were already in power, but you start to see them kind of grow in power and influence. But as we go into the election now, you’re seeing that the people’s top concerns are things like health care, which is provided by the National Health Service and inflation and the economy, and immigration is actually number four. And what’s striking is that levels of immigration to the UK are actually still really high, in fact, you know, almost historically so.

And so I think that this is going to be a cyclical thing where populist parties come into power, they try to actually achieve things, they fail to deliver real gains in terms of standards of living improvements, and then they vote the bums out. That seems to be the cycle that we’re in the middle of right now.

I mean, I disagree on some details, but I do agree in the sense that I think Europe has a set of unsolvable problems that populism is a response to, but does not have adequate solutions for.

And you see this especially with Meloni and Italy. Like, Italy’s birthrate is headed in South Korean directions, which is to say that Italy seems destined for steep economic decline. Meloni and the right are willing to talk about that problem in a way that the respectable center is uncomfortable talking about it, but they don’t have any solutions for it.

But they don’t have to. It’s not just that populists offer particular policy programs on matters of trade or immigration. Their appeal depends on the belief that the regular party, the regular system, can’t deal with those problems effectively.

So populists don’t really have to offer detailed solutions as much as they have to argue that traditional elites don’t have a solution either. Right, and the problem is the establishment’s fault and that the populists alone can fix it. That’s the nature of the appeal of populism.

Well, I have a question about the gut level forces driving this. And one is, aside from particular policies or concerns, one of the things that, at least in Europe, I’m wondering if it’s at play, is that you have the question of particularism versus the EU goal of trying to help countries evolve beyond this. That was the whole thing, right? They were going to, you know, take this country and that country and mush them all together, and it was going to be like, you know, this great thing.

That’s exactly what actually the EU charter says.

Yes, I mean, it does use the —

But in German.

But it uses the phrase quish —

So the word “mush” has 27 syllables.

Yeah, so but that kind of then lends itself to a backlash when you feel like things aren’t going right. You’re just like, well, the real French culture or German culture are being kind of held captive or taken over by this kind of globalist perspective. And we need to get back to something where we’re taking care of our own, to some degree.

Yeah, I think both the Polgreen analysis and the Lozada analysis can be correct, right? It can both be true that populism as a force does not actually have solutions for some of the problems it describes in ways that lead populist movements to fail at governance and end up voted out of power in turn and so on.

And yet it’s also the case that the sort of institutionalists, sort of centrist, center left, and so on, that populism is arrayed against, don’t have solutions either. And take an issue like immigration, right? The populist perspective is these elites don’t know how to get British growth, let’s say. British growth has been stagnant for a long time. They don’t know how to get the British economy growing again.

So they just keep immigration rates rising, and they say, well, that way, we’ll always have workers to staff the NHS or something. But that’s not actually a strategy for permanent long-term growth because the immigrants themselves get older and need more workers to support them. And housing prices go up, and nobody’s building any housing and so on. There’s just a set of problems that the centrists also don’t know how to solve. And that’s why the populists come back.

So we’ve been talking about the appeal and limits of populism in Europe. But after the break, we’re going to cross the pond, and we will dive into an interview, a really fascinating conversation that you had, Ross, with an influential Republican lawmaker, who believes that populism holds a lot of promise for the United States in our election.

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So, Ross, you had a fascinating interview with JD Vance, a figure who has emerged in a very, very big way. He’s now on the Trump VP shortlist. He’s a junior senator from Ohio. He’s someone who I think has a very bright political future in the United States. Why did you want to talk to him? And what makes him so interesting in this particular moment, as we’re thinking about populism, both at home and abroad?

So this was my — I did not conduct the interview during paternity leave, but it published during my paternity leave. So I got a bunch of emails from people saying, did you abandon your baby to go interview the junior senator from Ohio? So I wanted to be sure —

We know where your true loyalties lie, Ross.

Wait a minute. They ask women that question all the time. I am delighted that they asked you that question.

No, I did — well, maybe it was just my wife asking me that while I was editing the interview.

You just felt like everybody?

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, I tried to have — I’ve known the senator since long before he was a senator. He’s first very culturally interesting because he’s someone who rose to prominence as a memoirist of working class life, white working class life, who was sort of taken up by the liberal intelligentsia in 2016, 2017, as someone who explained the pathologies and cultural disarray that led to Trumpism, but who then sort of became a leading Trumpist himself. That is, to begin with, a kind of fascinating transformation of his sort of place in American culture.

But then he’s also interesting because he is much more than most people, most Republican politicians, who have sort of adopted populism. He’s someone who’s really interested in the policy dilemmas around populism that we were talking about earlier, right, that show up in the United States, as well as Europe. The question of, can populism actually offer solutions to the mix of economic and cultural problems it’s interested in? So to the extent that there’s sort of a place where a populist agenda might come from in a second Trump term or over the next 10 or 15 years, it’s probably going to come from someone like Vance.

OK, so let’s dig into the interview a little more. What are the ideas that are driving Vance these days?

So I spent a lot of time talking to him about populist economic policy, which is the least sexy part of the interview, in certain ways, but from my perspective, a very important part, because the populist economic argument in the US with Trump, right, was that, OK, Republicans need to stop worrying all the time about cutting entitlements, leave Medicare and Social Security alone, and just try and restructure the American economy in ways that get, especially working class men, back into the workforce.

And this was basically the argument that Vance gave me when I asked for sort of a populist vision for the next 10 years. It was that we’re going to use industrial policy and tariffs and immigration restrictions to make it easier to get a job as a working class, native-born, blue collar American, and that there’s going to be a big economic dividend from both getting those workers back into the workforce, and also sort of forcing companies to innovate more rather than just relying on cheap labor. This was part of the senator’s argument.

What I was trying to push him on and which I think is going to be a problem for a second Trump administration’s economic policy, right, is that the right-wing populist coalition in American politics is basically built on saying, we’re not going to cut a lot of social spending on entitlements and so on, but we’re still in an alliance with the kind of, let’s say, rich wing of the Republican Party, right?

So we’re also not going to raise taxes that much or at all, but under conditions of inflation, which again, is also what the French populists are going to run into, right, you start facing hard choices really quickly. And if you’re a populist, and you can’t either cut spending or raise taxes, then you get inflation. And it’s not clear to me that a second Trump administration has a way out of that trap. But I think that part of the populist agenda is really important to focus on because it’s actually where populist governments are likely to succeed or fail.

I was fascinated by your interview with JD Vance, Ross, in part because I read it opposite my reading of “Hillbilly Elegy”—

Woo!

— the art of the deal of the future. And what was interesting to me is, he starts — I believe he’s — early on in the interview with you, he talks about this speech he was giving a long time ago at the Chamber of Commerce or something, somewhere. And he sat next to this CEO who was so dismissive of the working class. Like, they got to get off their asses and come into work, right? And he sets himself kind of opposite that worldview.

But in his book, he is no less dismissive of the white working class in his community than that CEO he decries, right? He talks about how in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, you couldn’t find a single person who was aware of his own laziness, that folks talk about work more than they actually work, that they live off the dole, they game the welfare system.

It was not that a series of economic policies were wrong. This was a culture in crisis. That’s how he depicted it. That was the subtitle of his book, right? And that’s part of why it was such a crossover hit, right? It confirmed liberal elites’ suspicions about the pathologies of the deplorable Trumpy voter, but also ratified the “lift yourself up by your bootstraps” ethos of mainstream conservative thought. That was why it was publishing genius. But he struck me a lot like this guy that he’s that he’s complaining about in the book. So people talk about his transformation from —

Well, I think — I mean, I think probably, the interview was extremely long by “Times” standards, but still left context on the cutting room floor, right? And I think the point he was making in that anecdote was acknowledging your point, right, which is to say he wrote a book that included a pretty sharp cultural critique of blue collar America and of white working class middle America.

And then he was sort of elevated up into the world of Sun Valley, Aspen Ideas Festival, all of these places, and found himself sitting around with rich people who were like, tell us more, JD Vance, about how these people won’t get off their asses and work and how they’re lazy. And they deserve to have immigrants come in and take their jobs. And at a certain point, he decided that his cultural critique had been appropriated by forces that he didn’t like and, in fact, disliked even more than he had disliked the pathologies of —

But let me just ask you one thing, one thing about that. Is he a true believer in this champion of the working class, or is he a convenient one?

Oh, I think he’s completely sincere, having known him a long time. And I think the psychology of it, which he himself says in the outset, sort of makes sense. It’s one thing to critique your own family, let’s say. It’s another thing to hear that critique offered back to you by some hotel chain magnate, right? Your perspective changes when you see your own critique taken up by people who are in a totally different realm of wealth and privilege than the people who he grew up with in Middletown.

Well, I mean —

I think that’s all sincere.

If you don’t want that to happen, then don’t write the book. You know what I mean? Don’t —

No, no, Ross is totally right.

Don’t write a bestseller. Don’t write a bestseller. I mean, you’re putting it into the world. People are going to interpret —

But that’s a common phenomenon, the whole —

Yeah. No, I get it. But it’s —

You grow up looking at certain pathologies, and you’re like, oh, this isn’t great. But then you wind up entering a different world and a different set of pathologies, and then you’re like, oh, my god, what have I thrown in with? I think that’s pretty common.

That’s interesting to me. His notion — I mean, people have made a lot of his transformation from Trump critic to hardcore Trump supporter. But this transformation is what I’m most interested in, right, from sort of cultural critic of his community to kind of their champion.

So one of the things — I have not known Vance for many years, but I’ve followed him on the trail, and I, too, have sat down with him to talk about his role in all of this. And I think it splits.

For me, he is very good at explaining the economic aspects of his populism, and I do genuinely — I agree with Ross. I think he is a genuine economic populist, kind of worries about these things, thinks about these things, with the other aspect of populism, the kind of “us versus them” demagoguing.

He’s much slipperier, less believable, and not so convincing when he tries to justify these pieces and what Trumpism has become, whether we’re talking about the great replacement theory that he flirts with or whether we’re talking about his just absurd justifications for trafficking and the Stop the Steal election nonsense.

So while I think he is very genuine in his economic populist leanings, I think he is really dishonest and slippery when it comes to trying to convince himself, much less anybody else, that it’s not going hand in hand with something that’s super dangerous, that he is aggressively playing along with.

Well, let’s back up, because I do want to think a little bit about the tradition in which these ideas sit, right? Populism was not invented by Donald Trump. it has been a strain of American politics for a very, very long time.

Huey Long, baby.

So, Carlos, maybe you could give us a little bit of a flavor of that history, just to situate us in it as we think about the figures that are emerging now?

Yeah, I mean, there’s a long history of American populism and the populist style in American politics. It’s as much a style as sort of a substantive policy program. But probably the first major standard bearer was William Jennings Bryan, chronic failed presidential candidate, Nebraska Democrat, anti-imperialist, anti-monopolist. Michelle mentioned Huey Long, right? Every man a king, anti-corporate, into wealth redistribution, super corrupt, right? Louisiana governor, US senator.

George Wallace painted himself as a champion of the common man, Alabama governor. Segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. Also chronic presidential candidate. But you see the mix of left and right in American populism. Ross Perot, another failed presidential candidate, but got, what, close to 19 percent of the vote. If you basically combine the beliefs of Ross Perot and the culture war vibe of Pat Buchanan, you get kind of proto Trumpism.

Occasionally, you have movement politics, right? Like Tea Party, which is a mix of race and economics, Occupy Wall Street from the left. But more often than not, it’s these very personalistic movements. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the most recent iterations of that. But what I find most interesting about Vance is that maybe I’m just letting Ross’s interview wield too much influence over my —

Well, it is the dispositive journalistic document of our time, so.

And I express my suspicions of Vance’s sort of true believer-ness here. But this feels more of a trying to put a substance around populism than you’ve had in many prior iterations. I don’t quite see enough to buy it yet, but that’s the tradition that this moment comes out of.

Well, I think the norm, though, in American history has been that you have sort of outsider figures, disreputable figures, weirdos, cranks, oddballs, and so on, who are the standard bearers of populist movements. And then you have establishment figures who succeed in taking parts of that outsider movement and bringing them into effective governance. Right?

And what is FDR’s relationship to Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, right, if not a sort of successful pulling of ideas from populism while marginalizing certain actual populists? I think you can say the same thing about Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan with populism on the right.

The challenge now is that there isn’t sort of — instead of having a kind of establishment figure who is sort of trying to channel populism, you have a figure like Trump, who is the outsider who’s sort of taken over. And then you have other figures, Vance, others, trying to make something out of populism in that shadow.

At his smartest, I think that’s what Biden also wanted to do, to draw some of the Trump energy on trade and national greatness and confronting China and create a center left governing strategy. That’s actually how populist eras turn into, sort of more, quote unquote, “normal eras.” But nobody’s figured out a way to do that.

But I mean, I think one of the reasons that these movements tend to be, if not fragile, then at least very fraught, is because central to them, you have to have kind of the policy elements or the delivery elements, but you also just almost always have to have this charismatic central figure. I mean, on our side of the pond, we have Trump, who I think fits that bill.

But my question still remains — what happens when he’s gone? Because figures like JD Vance don’t really have that sparkle. Now, maybe they’ll grow into it. Maybe somebody will emerge. I mean, but going back to Huey Long, who we were talking about, absolutely terrified FDR’s people. And he was the basis for Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the King’s Men.”

And Warren once noted of Long, he said, “Without this gift for attracting myth, he would not have been the power he was for good or evil.” And this gift was fused with a dramatic sense and ultimately with the atmosphere of violence that he generated.

I mean, this is Trump in a nutshell. I mean, he has got this huge myth surrounding him, which is really, really hard to do. I mean, he is a figure, a generational defining figure, that we’re not going to see again. And so, as far as the US goes, populism will be around. It will percolate. You will have people like Vance or whoever. But I just — post-Trump, if it hasn’t kind of dug in by then, it has missed its moment, I think, for this cycle.

Populism is always about possibilities more than realities, right? It’s about assigning blame, more than taking responsibility. That’s both the appeal, but that’s also its kind of built-in limitation. There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s a threat to democracy, whether populism is a threat to democracy.

I think that gets it backward. I think that the emergence in the resonance of populist forces is a signal that something is going wrong in the regular functioning of democracy already. And so, trying to navigate that distinction, I think, is what voters will help us decide.

Well, let’s leave it there. When we come back, Hot and Cold.

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OK, and finally, it’s time for Hot/Cold. And Ross, I understand that you’re going to be Hot/Colding for us this week in celebration of your return.

So, well, we’re recording during a heat wave, so I’m going to be hot about something. And certainly, I think one of the ways people always ask, how does having more kids change you, I think I’m becoming more optimistic about the United States of America as I get older.

But I’m particularly interested in a future America that’s pretty distant from me as a sort of old stock, New Englander living in Connecticut, which is the sort of Sun Belt America of Florida, Texas, the Southwest up into California. And lately, I think we could all stand to read more history about that zone of the United States.

So lately, I’ve been reading some books by a fascinating American journalist named TR Fehrenbach. Carlos, have you ever heard of TR Fehrenbach?

Mm-mm.

That must be a deep cut.

I have stumped —

Wow.

— Carlos Lozada.

Even Carlos has been stumped.

So he died in 2013, but he was a Texan writer. Not an academic historian, I don’t think, but a sort of writer of popular histories. And he wrote three of them that are all very long, but could be read together. One is a history of Texas called “Lone Star.” One is a history of Mexico called “Fire and Blood.” And one is a history of the Comanches that I think is just called “Comanches, The History of a People.” And these are sort of written in a kind of florid, sweeping generalization style.

Ooh, I like that. That’s my favorite style.

You love that, right?

I do.

But plenty of long passages that would not pass any kind of political correctness muster, but in a kind of omnidirectional way. He says things about Native Americans that you wouldn’t say today. And he also says things about the conquistadors that you might not say today. But I recommend these books.

I haven’t read every word of every one of them, but they’re a really interesting, sort of deep look at this kind of zone of the American landscape, its sort of prehistory, the prehistory of, let’s say, greater Texas or greater Arizona or something. And I think it’s going to be — is really important for the American future and especially interesting to Yankees like myself. So TR Fehrenbach.

I think that sounds totally fascinating. Perhaps some useful companion reading was a fascinating, very long piece that George Packer just published in “The Atlantic” about the water crisis in Arizona. It’s interesting that you identify these places as the future, because I think that they’re places that are also very much under environmental strain and —

Oh, yes.

— will require a great deal of innovation in order to remain large population centers.

Yes, and I mean, one of the, again, sort of uses of reading prehistories in a way of this modern civilization is seeing how these kind of resource constraints have always been part of that landscape. And no, I really enjoyed the Packer piece. It’s sort of this wide-ranging look that is, in certain ways, very pessimistic, but I appreciated at the end, he goes up into the southwestern wilderness at some point. He talks about how it’s nice to get out into the wilderness and away from all the populist fighting, right, to connect to our episode theme.

But at the end, he says, but now I realized that I was ready to go back. That was our civilization down in the valley, the only one we had. Better for it to be there than gone. And I want to endorse that sentiment.

Well, OK, then.

Yeah. Well, this has made me want to replan my entire summer and —

Beach trip.

— and go west.

Beach reading.

Go west.

Oh, I just thought you meant, like, replan your summer reading list —

No, that’s —

— which we have to do again. I want to know what everyone’s going to read this summer.

We’ll do the summer reading list. Mine is —

So many books.

Yeah, mine is very, very long. All right. Well, it’s great to be back with the whole crew at last.

It’s been a while.

It’s been a while.

It’s nice.

All right. Have a great weekend, guys. See you next week.

Bye, guys.

See you next week. Take care.

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