The Legend of Beggar Vance
An Elegiac Hillbilly’s Search for Identity
He was born to a catless child lady in Middleton, Ohio on August 2, 1984. He was raised by his grandparents, who stayed married despite a relationship charitably described as combative. They were the kind of people who interpreted “until death do us part” as a competition.
Young JD Vance begged for a better life and found one. He escaped his turbulent upbringing. He served in the Marines, graduated from college with help from the G.I. Bill, and earned a law degree from Yale. But something was missing. He escaped his childhood environment, but didn’t know who he was. Tell me who I am, he beseeched the universe. I beg you.
Revelation In a Darkened Theater
While young JD Vance searched for a new identity, he found one to dispose of. Writing in a blog as “JD Hamel,” he related a road-to-Damascus experience that was more a road-to-popcorn moment. He was inspired by Zach Braff’s “Garden State.”
“Garden State.” is a pleasant enough movie, but seems as likely to trigger enlightenment as a Three Stooges movie to inspire ballroom dancing. To young JD, begging for enlightenment, it brought revelation.
“I couldn’t watch Garden State,” he wrote, before describing it in detail. “New Jersey’s landscape is so much like Ohio’s, the music is so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc. made me want to tear up.”
He added, “The comment he (the Zach Braff character) makes about realizing that the place he grew up isn’t really home anymore, and his theory that people settle down because when you lose your home you want to make a new one really resonates with me right now.” JD Vance had become a human etch-a-sketch. Shake me up, he begged. Make me into a new picture.
The Coming of the Savior
Then a savior appeared. Peter Thiel.
JD was in law school when the tech billionaire spoke on campus. To the hillbilly pupa, unable to imagine the butterfly within, Thiel’s words changed his life. “Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” he wrote in a post for The Lamp Magazine. “I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.”
“I began immediately planning for a career outside the law,” he wrote, “which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney.”
Vance had long disparaged Christianity, but Peter Thiel challenged that belief as well. Thiel “was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met,” he recalled, “but he was also a Christian.” How could he reconcile his personal beliefs with “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met?” He begged for enlightenment and found it in the words of a Stanford scholar who had influenced Thiel: René Girard.
JD’s Enlightenment
“One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a ‘scapegoat myth,’ wrote Vance “—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.”
He adopted Girard’s theory that Jesus Christ was the ultimate “scapegoat.” “In the Christian telling,” he stated, “the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him.”
JD Vance had a new mission: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.” How did that work out?
People react to religious experiences differently. Some dedicate their life to helping others. Some become philosophical. Some beg for forgiveness. JD chose a different path. He didn’t follow Jesus. He followed Peter Thiel. He followed the money.
Vance abandoned the practice of law and entered the world of tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. He joined a firm co-founded by Thiel in 2015. Then he wrote “Hillbilly Elegy” and became famous. Thiel and his associates pounced. Peter Thiel became a mentor and benefactor, underwriting Vance’s nascent venture capitalism and his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
“One person who socialized with Thiel’s circle said Vance made no effort to get to know people with similar backgrounds,” wrote The Washington Post, “gravitating instead toward influential people who could help his career.”
The “influential people” shook the etch-a-sketch and redesigned the former hillbilly. “By the time he announced his U.S. Senate run in 2021,” wrote the Post, “Vance had transformed from Never Trump into a MAGA Republican — the result of years of conversations with Thiel, (Blake) Masters, and others.”
About That Scapegoating Thing…
When Vance wrote, “It was time to stop scapegoating,” how did he follow it up? Spoiler alert: he didn’t stop. Instead, he made scapegoating the foundation of his campaign for Vice-President.
As Jessica Winter writes in The New Yorker, “It was immediately apparent that, for Vance, fertility is a Republican. He lamented the ‘childless left,’ who have no ‘physical commitment to the future of this country.’ In conversation with Tucker Carlson, he despaired that the U.S. was run by ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.’”
Recently, on Fox News, Vance accused “the left” of being anti-family, telling host Trey Gowdy, “The left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family.” He characterized his words as “a criticism of the increasingly anti-parent and anti-child attitude of the left.”
Did JD Vance follow the teachings of Girard and stop scapegoating?
If he says yes, I beg to differ.