J.D. Vance keeps selling his soul. He’s got plenty of buyers

Ed Simon

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honor.”

That brand of striving, so strong that it compels Faustus to sell what is most essential to him, must lie somewhere in the makeup of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who on Monday was offered and accepted the invitation to be Donald Trump’s running mate. What he has renounced in the process is in the public record for all to see.

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Vance wrote that Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

After Monday’s announcement, of course, Vance distanced himself from those comments. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.

Certainly, all politicians are ambitious — and many of them are cynical. But there is something particularly noxious about Vance’s posturing, which exceeds the run-of-the-mill Machiavellian self-interestedness that characterizes politics. The Faustian contract seems to have already been drawn up and signed.

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.

For many tastemakers, Vance’s reputation as a thoughtful intellectual had been secured with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”

An account of his journey from a hardscrabble childhood in Middletown, Ohio, to his graduation from Yale Law School, “Hillbilly Elegy” was often portrayed by critics and interpreted by readers as an explanation of rural Appalachia’s embrace of Trumpism. Praised from the Upper West Side to New Haven, Capitol Hill to Cambridge, Vance was posited as an Appalachia-whisperer, the sort of respectable conservative worth listening to.

Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform. It’s hard to imagine that without “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president. His book and film contracts have proven Faustian in the sense that they may place him a heartbeat from the Oval Office.

Vance is more a product of the Upper West Side and New Haven, Capitol Hill and Cambridge, than of the Appalachian hollers. “Hillbilly Elegy” owed much of its critical and commercial success to how it flattered its audience about their own meritocratic superiority over the people whom Vance was supposedly championing, and reaffirming some of the most pernicious stereotypes about the residents of Appalachia. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives,” Vance wrote. In his telling, those who fell into poverty, unemployment or substance abuse hadn’t dreamed big enough.

Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author.

There have been potent critiques of Vance’s writing. “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia,” by the historian Elizabeth Catte, and the anthology “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’” edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, are two examples. Vance, critics from the region noted, depicted the poverty in his childhood community much the way conservatives historically stereotyped minority communities. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he offered rugged individualism and bootstrapping as cures for systemic economic inequities, blaming the “culture” of Appalachia for what ails it instead of free market policies.

As my colleague Jody DiPerna of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism put it, Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.” Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold.

There is a lesson for Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil. In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.

That is perhaps what’s most Faustian about Vance — and by proxy Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you. Mephistopheles certainly understood that the house always wins, however, since the Faustian contract always appeals to the worst in the person signing on the dotted line.

As Vance noted in a Time magazine interview in 2016, Trump’s greatest failure as a political leader is that “he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.” That’s turning out to be true of Vance, too.