NERMEEN SHAIKH: On Wednesday night, Ohio Senator JD Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination, two days after he was picked by Donald Trump, the man Vance once described as “America’s Hitler.” Prior to his embrace of the MAGA movement, Vance was a vocal critic of Trump. He once described Trump as “reprehensible,” “an idiot” and “noxious.” But in recent years he shifted to become a leading supporter of Trump.

JD Vance first gained fame as the author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis about growing up in Appalachia. The book was also made into a movie.

Vance is a graduate of Yale Law School who served in the Marines and became a venture capitalist. He won a close Republican Senate race in 2022 in part thanks to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who spent a record-breaking $10 million to support Vance’s campaign.

On Wednesday night, Vance was introduced by his wife, Usha Vance, a lawyer who once clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a federal judge. This is part of JD Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night.

SEN. JD VANCE: Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I’d be standing here tonight. I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands and loved their god, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts. But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington. …

When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico. When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs. When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq. And at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio or or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan and states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war. And —

CONVENTION ATTENDEES: Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go!

AMY GOODMAN: Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, addressing the Republican National Convention. He has been nominated as the official vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket along with President Donald Trump.

We’re joined right now by two guests. Here in Milwaukee as we cover the RNC is Chris Lehmann, the D.C. bureau chief of The Nation. His new piece is just out today. It’s headlined “J.D. Vance’s Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled.” He also wrote a recent profile headlined “American Hell-egy: Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, is the perfect soulless vessel for the future of the MAGA-fied Republican Party.”

Joining us in Atlanta is independent journalist Zaid Jilani, who has a very different view on Vance. He has written for The Intercept, ThinkProgress, NewsNation and more. His new piece for Compact magazine is headlined “Why the Left Gets J.D. Vance Wrong.”

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Chris, we’re going to begin with you here in Milwaukee. Can you respond to Vance’s address last night and who Vance is?

CHRIS LEHMANN: Well, how much time do you have? Yes, you know, Vance was a known sort of media quantity because of the wild success of his memoir, which was trotted out in 2016 largely by liberals trying to understand the Trump phenomenon after the election. And Vance, you know, very cannily, leveraged his life story into this sort of political parable where the noble heartland working class was betrayed by faithless leaders in Washington. It’s a narrative that is, in many ways, valid and true.

But what Vance continues to do — and we saw it in the speech last night — he has the locution “the Washington ruling class,” which — you know, I’m from Washington, and I certainly do not think highly of the leaders there, but they are not in fact the ruling class. The ruling class are the owners of capital. They are people like Peter Thiel, Vance’s Big Tech sponsor, and Vance himself — right? — who has worked as a venture capitalist. So, there is very adroit sort of pea-going-under-the-shell moment when he talks about the ruling class in Washington.

He also, you know, declared from the podium that the GOP is going to be the party of the workers, both union and nonunion, which is a very important disclaimer, because the Republican Party is not pro-union. They’re trying to posture as the party of the forgotten men and women who are suffering under Biden’s economic policies, but in point of fact, they are the party of the owners. They are the party of the bosses. So, there’s this cultural populism that Vance very effectively embodies that pushes all of those issues to the side and makes the question, you know: Are you sort of vibes-aligned with the working class? And that spares you the need of having to do much in terms of concrete policy to actually materially improve their lives.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Zaid Jilani, if you could talk about your assessment of Vance and his — this cultural populism that Chris just mentioned? What does that cultural populism actually consist in? And why does it have the kind of appeal it does?

ZAID JILANI: So, I think much of what Chris said was true, in terms of describing the broader Republican Party. At least since Ronald Reagan, and probably a little before Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been the party largely siding with the, as he said, owners, bosses, capital.

I think a lot of what’s happened, though, in recent years is a little bit of a door has creaked open a little bit — right? — toward something else. I’ll give you one example. I think when Donald Trump ran in 2016, he spent a lot of time criticizing American trade policy. I think much of the left responded to that saying, “Dude, this guy outsources everything that he owns. He doesn’t care about unions. He’s a fat cat. What is he going to do?” But when Trump came into office, he appointed Robert Lighthizer. He renegotiated NAFTA, made it actually considerably more pro-worker. He pulled the United States out of Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now, the other 95% of the stuff that he did, I think, would have been exactly the same as what Jeb Bush would have done or any number of sort of neoliberal Reaganite Republicans, so I don’t want to exaggerate the nature of Trump sort of opening the door to populism in the Republican Party.

And as Chris said, much of it is cultural, as well, right? The Republicans won working-class voters by about four points in 2020. If you believe the latest New York Times/CNN poll, they’re going to win the working class by about 23 points in 2024, right? And I think, you know, part of that is a backlash to what happened with inflation, which is not entirely Biden’s fault, but it happened to occur under him. But also, I think it’s sort of in alignment with cultural values, right? Working-class people tend to be more skeptical towards immigration. I think they’re a little bit more skeptical towards some of the cultural turns in the country on issues like transgender rights.

And, you know, I think, really, the main cultural issue where the Democrats have the advantage now is abortion. And I think it was notable last night that JD Vance, despite being very pro-life and suggesting prior that he wanted to ban abortion nationally, never brought the issue up, which is part of the compromises that Vance himself, I think, will have to make, now that he’s joining a Republican Party led by Donald Trump, right? He’s no longer Senator Vance now; he will be vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

But, you know, I think that where I disagree with Chris is that I think we have a cognitive bias — it’s called out-group homogeneity bias — where we tend to see our side as different, diverse: We have many factions, we have many different types of people on our side, but the other side is all the same. And it’s a cognitive bias that takes place in politics, in social issues, in culture, in race.

And I think the difference with Vance is that I think Vance’s view actually has evolved, either for opportunistic reasons or for sincerity reasons, or probably a mix of both, to where he does see the Republican Party as misguided in many directions. I mean, last night was probably the first vice-presidential speech in 40 years in the Republican Party where he never talked about shrinking the size of government, he never talked about cutting taxes, and he never talked about reducing government spending. That is remarkable, right? Vice President Mike Pence would have never given a speech like what JD Vance said last night.

And, you know, I’m sitting here in Georgia. JD Vance is on a bill with my senator, Senator Warnock, to lower the price of insulin, right? He’s on bills to claw back excess bank CEO compensation. He’s on bills to fight credit card monopolization. He’s on bills that deal with issues like railway safety, with Sherrod Brown. He has, I think, carved out sort of a third way between Reaganism and progressivism, right? He’s not a progressive Democrat. He’s never someone who’s going to sponsor Medicare for All. He’s never going to call for massive tax increases on the rich, because I don’t think he believes in that kind of redistribution. But I do think that he has started to go from sort of a personal sort of responsibility point of view, which was in Hillbilly Elegy, which I think, honestly, was probably the consequence of his trauma of his childhood — right? — he was letting out a lot of his frustrations with his family and his community — to a more sociological analysis, which says, “Why are all these people addicted to drugs? Why are all these people sort of shifting around without jobs?” Because the jobs don’t exist, right? And I think that he has sort of moved more in that direction.

The question is: Can he move the entire Republican Party in that direction? I don’t think he can right now, because the vice president isn’t that powerful of a position. But I do think the door is continuing to creak open a little bit, and the Republican Party may moderate a little bit more on some of these worker and family issues and step a little bit further away from Reaganism.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Chris, if you could respond to what Zaid said? And then, I want to comment — just quote from Vance himself, writing in 2016 in The Atlantic, just kind of describing, as Zaid mentioned, the circumstances in which he grew up and what he sees as the common thread running through communities who support Trump, what he calls “Trump’s faithful.” In the article — this is 2016 — in The Atlantic, he wrote — it was headlined “Opioid of the Masses.” Vance wrote, “[A] common thread among Trump’s faithful, even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities.” And, overall, in this piece, I should say, he kind of denounced Trump’s campaign. So, if you could talk about that, the kind of support base of Trump, what its origins are, what binds those people, and then also respond to what Zaid’s comments were?

CHRIS LEHMANN: Yeah. This may be distressing to you, but I don’t actually disagree that much with what Zaid just said. I do think — I wrote earlier this week that Vance represents a potential future shift in the Republican Party, and, you know, Trump’s selection of him is significant in all sorts of ways. It’s a way of — you know, the party has been flailing for a while, trying to figure out what the next post-Trump phase of its evolution is going to be. And Trump himself, which is kind of contrary to his character, has settled on Vance as a partial answer to that question. And Zaid is right that he does represent — you know, it was striking there was, not only opportunistically, no mention of abortion in his speech, but all of these other sort of callouts to what government should be doing on the part of workers. That is remarkable to hear in the setting of a Republican convention.

As to what Vance wrote in 2016, I don’t want to go into confessional JD Vance mode myself, but I am also from a dying Rust Belt city, Davenport, Iowa, that used to be the farm implement manufacturing capital of the world. It’s now the riverboat gambling capital of the Upper Midwest. And I’ve seen the fallout from the broken communities, that Vance has described in his own work, from my hometown. And it is a real thing. You know, the last time I was in Davenport, it was during the holidays. I drove by a billboard sign that said, “Need Christmas cash? Turn in a drug dealer.” So, those dynamics are real. And, you know, the Democratic Party does bear a not inconsequential responsibility via, you know, the neoliberal romance with free trade, the kind of BS line that, you know, manufacturing workers who are out of a job can just learn to code and adapt to the new information economy.

So, the problem, again — and this is probably where Zaid and I differ a little more — is I don’t see the Republican Party, at the end of the day, moving toward these, what he was describing as redistributive policies. I don’t see them really significantly backing the priorities of unionized workers. You know, I’m very skeptical. And, you know, we also saw, very immediately — like, at one point, Vance had a line in his speech that, you know, “We in America welcome newcomers, but on our terms.” So, the question is: What are those terms? And the answer was furnished by lots of Proud Boy placards in the hall last night that read “mass deportations now.” Right now the Trump pivot on immigration that happened in 2016 is what’s driving most of this, what I call pseudo-populist rhetoric.

And again, not to get too geeky or anything, but the historical populists are well worth studying, because everyone is talking about populism as a sort of errant force on the right. And the original populists were redistributionists — sorry. And they created a new model for the American currency system that would reward productive labor and punish monopoly capitalists. It’s all there in the historical record. Somehow, in all our discussions of, you know, latter-day populism, we never go back to the origins and look at what was really the last significant mass movement to create economic democracy in this country. And the fact that we’re now using that term to describe whatever it is that JD Vance is turning into — and as you noted, he’s a shapeshifter. He uses his personal life story as a launching pad for all sorts of other narratives about the future of the country and the plight of the forgotten working class. But at the end of the day, the forgotten working class is going to stay forgotten, in my view.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to get a response from Zaid Jilani. Yesterday, just looking at some of the tweets, progressive Texas Congressmember Greg Casar challenged his Republican counterparts to prove their commitment to workers by backing the union-boosting legislation, the PRO Act. In a social media post, Casar wrote, “If Republicans wanna talk like they’re pro-worker, then let’s have a vote on the PRO Act next week. Let’s see which politicians are for unions and which ones are all talk.” If you can talk about JD Vance, when it comes to this kind of legislation?

ZAID JILANI: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great question. And it makes a lot of sense that Congressman Casar is doing that, because that’s, I would say, probably the highest national priority for labor unions right now, is passing that bill. It would help weaken right-to-work. It would help strengthen, I think, labor organizing and protections across the United States.

But, you know, I think the reason why you’re not going to see Republicans supporting something like that is because it would basically be going from zero to a hundred, right? The national Republican Party has been extremely hostile to organized labor and to unions, like I said, probably the past 40 years, maybe a little bit longer than that, right? And I think stuff like what Teamsters Union’s Sean O’Brien is trying to do is try to creak that door open, try to build that relationship, so that maybe he won’t go zero to a hundred, but he might go zero to 10, right?

JD Vance and Senator Josh Hawley, who’s probably the leader of the Senate populists — I’d say he’s more populist than Vance for a number of reasons — both supported the UAW strike — right? — the strike against the Big Three. Marco Rubio supported unionizing Amazon workers in their warehouses in the South, in the region where I live. I mean, these are not endorsing the PRO Act, but they are steps in that right direction, right? Josh Hawley was only Republican who voted with the Democrats to defend the NLRB’s so-called joint employer rule, and they would have succeeded, had Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin and, I believe, Angus King broken ranks with the Democratic Caucus and supported the pro-big business position in that, in that particular dispute. Josh Hawley finally came out against right-to-work late last year, after defending it for, I think, five of the first six years of his Senate tenure.

I mean, political change happens very, very slowly. Think about how long it took for gay rights activists to convince the Democratic Party to endorse gay marriage. I mean, Barack Obama didn’t even support it during his first term. He was, quote-unquote, “evolving” on that topic, right? I mean, probably he never had that position for real to begin with, but he had to deal with politics like everyone else.

And so, I think what’s happening here is that labor is starting to try to influence the Republican Party, because they’re starting from so far behind in a party that’s so dominated by capital, by big business, by the bosses. They have to kind of get their foot in the door and see where they can go from there. I mean, I don’t think that the Republicans are going to become more pro-labor than Democrats anytime soon — you know, 10, 15 years maybe, but not now. But I do think that working people can’t really win if they only influence one political party in the United States, right? Think about every other big interest in the United States — Wall Street, the big banks, pharmaceutical industry, AIPAC. All of them court members in both parties, right? And it took them a long time to build that level of influence. And it’s not a matter of, you know, every member is with them 100%, but they’re all trying to get their foot in the door and to push them. And I think that’s kind of what’s happening with labor and the Republican Party right now.

And, look, if I was the Republicans, I would think about it this way. On one hand, yes, you have a ton of cash from the Chamber of Commerce, from the Club for Growth, which spent $5 million to try to keep JD Vance out of the Senate, because big business actually does fear Vance to some extent. I mean, that’s why Ken Griffin and Rupert Murdoch were lobbying Trump not to pick him. But at the same time, OK, you have all this money on one side, but, look, your voting base is becoming more working-class. You won the working-class vote in 2020, right? Maybe you can win a few more people in the rich suburbs of Atlanta or Milwaukee or so on and so forth, or you can actually start to lean in to these workers and to start building out your base that way. The most underrepresented segment of Americans are Americans who are socially conservative, kind of skeptical of immigration but maybe not hardcore anti-immigrant, kind of skeptical about some of the social and cultural turns on the left, but who actually want more policy that supports workers and families.

And I think that’s the argument that Vance is going to have to make within the Republican Party. He’s going to be surrounded by Reaganites. He’s going to be surrounded by big donors. He’s going to have John Thune and Mitch McConnell in the Senate trying to block anything that’s populist. But he’s going to have to make that argument to Trump, like, “Look, sir, if we want to be a working-class party, you have to be a working-class party. You can’t just be working-class with your talk. You have to be working-class with your walk, as well.” And I think that would be a real political opportunity for them. But then, again, it means having to shake off 40 years of inertia of the Republican Party being the exact opposite direction of all these things.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go back to JD Vance’s RNC speech last night here in Milwaukee.

SEN. JD VANCE: Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parent’s generation, the Baby Boomers, could afford to buy a home when they first entered the workforce. “But I don’t know,” this person observed, “if I’ll ever be able to afford a home.” The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington.

I can tell you exactly how it happened. Wall Street barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages. And then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete with people who shouldn’t even be here for precious housing.

Joe Biden’s inflation crisis, my friends, is really an affordability crisis. And many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent. And that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s economy has given them. So, prices soared, dreams were shattered, and China and the cartels sent fentanyl across the border, adding addiction to the heartache.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Chris, that’s JD Vance speaking last night. Your comments on what he said?

CHRIS LEHMANN: Well, again, it’s a narrative that is in many ways true and compelling, but, again, note the abrupt pivot to the idea that immigrants are driving up the cost of housing. You know, what’s driving up the cost of housing is the cost of credit. And not to sound like a, you know, historical materialist broken record here, but that is determined by the Federal Reserve. That is determined, actually, by the donor base of the Republican Party.

So, this is — you know, and again, when I think back on my own Rust Belt childhood, the people I grew up with were not bone-deep racists or xenophobes. And what’s really dangerous about this political moment in a lot of ways is that, you know, for the last nine years we’ve had a Republican Party saying, “You’re in distress. You’re suffering. Your jobs have been shipped overseas. Blame people who have come to this country by other than legal means. They are the cause.” And that, again, is both a cultural pivot and a way to kind of say, “Don’t look at the men behind the curtain,” that, you know, it is ludicrous to claim that undocumented immigrants, who are also members of the working class — right? — are somehow driving up the cost of housing. It’s an obvious sort of [inaudible].

You know, I think Zaid’s analysis is largely right, but I think, you know, at some point, to really solve the problems of the working class, you, first of all, have to let the working class organize itself as a political force, and you have to acknowledge that, you know, immigrants are significant contributors to the health of the economy. You know, it’s the reason that America hasn’t had the post-COVID depression that other Western countries have, is because of the immigrant workforce was able to pivot and, you know, fill the demand once the worst of the COVID pandemic was over. So, you know, my view is we should embrace those workers. We should welcome their contributions. We should allow them to unionize. We should have them as full participants in American productive life and political life.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, Zaid Jilani, if you can talk about the historical precedents of both economic populism and extreme nationalism, as this coining of the term “the new right” with the rise of JD Vance is being thrown around right now? And also, remember, he’s the vice-presidential nominee. And who actually is going to determine policy? Today, of course, President Trump, also hoping to be not just 45, but the 47th president, will be speaking. And how much power will JD Vance have in shaping policy?

ZAID JILANI: Yes. Both those are great questions. First, to get to the historical parallels, look, I’m sitting here in Georgia, in Atlanta. One of our most enigmatic historical figures was Thomas Watson, right? Thomas Watson was a populist leader who, at the beginning of his life, believed very strongly in multiracial coalitions, right? He even organized bands of Georgian men to protect African Americans from lynchings, right? I mean, he was a powerful multiracial populist. But towards the end of his life, he became a white supremacist, became very anti-Black, anti-Jewish, you know, Klan-aligned. And that sort of tracks a trajectory of what populism can be, right? Populism is often people versus the power, people versus the machine. But sometimes it has a hard edge, where I think, you know, you start to make it group versus group, you start to make it sectarian, right?

And so, you know, the question for, I think, the populist movement on the right is — you know, you want to be aligned with the working class. I think these people genuinely do. You know, I know JD Vance’s chief of staff. I met him when I was in D.C. And I think he sincerely believes in his religious convictions, in particular. He’s a Jewish American. He believes in the Old Testament Scriptures, what they say about greed and exploitation. And I think he brought that to Josh Hawley’s office when he worked for Hawley, now that he works for Vance.

But the question is, like, you know: Do all these things apply to non-Americans? Right? And I do think that this populist right movement is very nationalistic in its orientation, in a way that the populists on the Democratic side are not. And I think that that often can come at the expense, I think, of the human rights of people outside the United States, whether they be migrants or they be people in other parts of the world. I mean, I think Vance has spoken a little bit about how he’s worried Israel may repeat some of the mistakes that we made after 9/11, just like Biden did. But he hasn’t said that we should, you know, restrict our aid or condition our weapons sales or anything else that could actually help the Palestinian people, right? And we are largely, unfortunately, responsible for the situation in Gaza now. So, I do think that is a real, you know, sort of shortcoming of the populist movement on the right, at least from the point of view of someone maybe who’s not on the right. Maybe people on the right don’t see it as a shortcoming.

As to your second question, I think that’s a very important question. Look, some vice presidents have a very subtle impact on the presidency. I mean, you might think about Dan Quayle like that. You might think of Kamala Harris like that, right? I don’t think that either of them were particularly guiding policy in the administration. Others — like, Dick Cheney basically wrote the foreign policy for George W. Bush. So, it’s a little bit of a wildcard.

And like I said, I think that a lot of the people around Trump will be people that donors want to put in there. I think a lot of the business elite within the Republican Party really do not like Vance. They do not like his staff and who he is as a person. And they fear that he may go in a more populist direction. They’ll probably try to install their people around. You know, Trump has — reportedly wants Jamie Dimon to be treasury secretary, who he also wanted in 2016 but wasn’t able to get, right? You know, Jamie Dimon, I don’t think is aligned with Vance on any issue, from banking policy to worker and family policy to immigration policy. You know, Jamie Dimon is a full-on — you know, like most business elites, he wants as many immigrants as possible. You know, that’s a way to reduce wages and save him money.

So, you know, I think that this will be a real question for Vance. You know, how does he navigate sort of not getting kicked out of the Republican Party with his views, but also influencing them in his direction? Because the reality is, if Trump was elected and things went well, Vance would probably lead the party by 2028. He will be the front-runner for the presidency, and then he would have total control over the administrative state, over the executive branch and over the direction of the political party. But for now, he may have to suck it up somewhat and compromise, when Republicans are doing things like installing people who are anti-labor across the government, when they are putting judges all over the country that are shutting down laws that are beneficial to workers and families. I mean, it is a tough compromise for him to make.

And I think, actually — I want to close with this — the line that he told, that you all quoted, about “America’s Hitler,” actually is slightly different than what’s being quoted in the media. This was actually sent to my college classmate, Josh McLaurin, who’s now a Georgia state Representative. I knew him when we both attended the University of Georgia. And what he told Josh was that he worried that Trump would either be America’s Hitler — which he didn’t like, obviously; no one likes Hitler — or a Nixon that could be sort of useful. And I think that Vance kind of came to the conclusion that Trump is sort of a Nixon figure who could be sort of useful. But he picked Nixon, I think, for a reason, because he knows Trump has all kinds of flaws and that there are a lot of problematic aspects of him, as well. And so, I think Vance is sucking it up and compromising a lot on some of his values and some of his views on Trump, in particular, to do this. Whether it pans out for him, I think, is a big question. And whether it pans out for the country is an even bigger question.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. This is very interesting. And, of course, it’s just the beginning of the discussion. Zaid Jilani, independent journalist, we’ll link to your piece in Compact magazine, “Why the Left Gets J.D. Vance Wrong.” And Chris Lehmann, thank you so much. We’ll link to your piece — you’re The Nation's D.C. bureau chief — your piece out this morning, “J.D. Vance's Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled.”

Coming up, we look at JD Vance’s views on foreign policy with Matt Duss. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, with Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the group’s founders. She’s passed away at the age of 81.