J.D. Vance and Betahood

A peculiar man on the ticket

There’s a growing consensus, on both the left and right, that Donald Trump made a mistake in picking J.D. Vance as his running mate. This has little to do, initially at least, with his politics. Most Republicans hold social views that are far to the right of the median American; it’s why Trump, for all his faults, forced the Republicans to engineer their most socially liberal party platform in many decades, effectively abandoning, for now at least, their crusades for a national abortion ban and a return to the pre-2015 status quo on same-sex marriage. The catch, as always, is that there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who would support a 50-state abortion ban and not allowing any exceptions for rape and incest. They may get their shot one day. But for now, it’s Trump’s party, and Trump is a thrice-married philanderer who will appoint all the right-wing judges the Christian nationalists demand but won’t jeopardize his election running on whatever Franklin Graham or Bob Vander Plaats truly desire.

Vance now resides in this camp: a Republican whose views on gender and sexuality could cost Trump in the fall. This wholly negates how Vance has been able to triangulate Democrats, from the left, on economics, delivering a convention speech that echoed Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown on the need to check corporate power in America. Vance, theoretically, was Trump’s best pick for vice president because he’s a cunning 39-year-old who grasps why right-populist parties across the world have found so much success. You demonize immigrants while embracing left-wing economics; you protect the social safety net while braying about blood and soil. You kill Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek for good. It’s not much more complicated than that.

But Trump, and the Republicans, have a problem. J.D. Vance is, very clearly, a beta.