J.D. Vance’s Senate hopes reveal the problem with performative populism

J.D. Vance’s Senate hopes reveal the problem with performative populism

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

March 19, 2021 at 11:57 p.m. GMT+9

(Astrid Riecken/Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post)

For some time now, sympathizers with the “conservative populist” worldview have searched for standard bearers to test its electoral viability. The latest Great Populist Hope to swagger into camera view is J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame, who might run for Senate from Ohio.

But Vance’s biggest early statement about one of our most urgent issues should give potential backers serious pause. It’s almost entirely performative and wholly devoid of real argument. That’s not a real way to test the viability of this new politics.

Vance might run for retiring Republican Rob Portman’s seat. A pro-Vance super PAC has sprung up, backed by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel.

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Now Vance is out with a new piece about the terrible situation at the border. It reads like a first-sketch blueprint for a candidacy. But at bottom, it’s little more than conservative populist theater.

Vance’s piece recounts a dinner with corporate leaders who supposedly “loathed Donald Trump” due to immigration restrictions denying them cheap labor. Vance claims that under President Biden, the southern border has “exploded into crisis,” and declares that “Republicans are right to oppose this madness.”

Vance then insists we are “inviting thousands of people to come in the midst of a global pandemic,” and “promising amnesty for millions.” Vance asks why, then answers his own question: “The answer is what I saw at that dinner: It’s about money.”

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After declaring that elites are yukking it up over new influxes of cheap labor under Biden, Vance then says that “it’s not racist to want a secure border.”

Here’s the thing: There is an actual situation unfolding at the border. It poses hard dilemmas that will have real-world consequences for enormous numbers of people. This debate matters. Vance distorts and elides all of it.

Are we “inviting thousands” of migrants? Actually, the border is mostly closed to asylum-seeking now: The vast majority of adult asylum seekers currently get turned away with no hearings at all under a public health rule. The administration is allowing unaccompanied children and teens to enter. Trump did not.

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I say those children and teens shouldn’t be turned back into Mexico. Does Vance think they should be? He doesn’t really say. Instead we get phony sanctimony in anticipation of being victimized by charges of racism, which relieves any responsibility to engage such complexities.

Letting the kids in — the right thing to do — is largely what’s causing terrible overcrowding in detention facilities. This creates a difficult problem: We must ensure that those facilities are more humane and that kids are more rapidly transferred to relatives or guardians here.

Soon enough, once coronavirus recedes, adult migrants will be allowed to apply for asylum again. Why? Because the law requires it: They have the legal right to present their case under U.S. law and our international human rights commitments.

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What’s Vance’s answer to all this? He vaguely endorses the GOP position. But that position is largely that Trump’s policies to deter as many as possible from even applying for asylum were good, and that Biden’s reversal of them caused the current influx, which is bad.

But that’s a terrible position: Those policies caused extreme humanitarian violations. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program exposed migrants to violence, kidnapping and refugee camp conditions. Another policy forcing migrants through international legal hurdles denied many their legal rights and/or exposed them to dangerous, degrading conditions.

I say it’s not acceptable to employ the threat of such cruel outcomes to deter desperate people from exercising their legal right to apply for asylum. Vance doesn’t engage the question at all.

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Vance suggests Biden’s stance — ultimately allowing people to apply for asylum and creating protections for undocumented immigrants already here — is the draw causing the influx. But that’s a huge oversimplification: Violence and instability in home countries are the primary causes. Even if people recognize that under Biden they will be able to apply for asylum without facing cruelty and human rights violations, that’s good, not bad.

Yes, allowing that creates difficult problems. We’ll have to speed up and improve legal processes so asylum seekers do not wait endlessly for hearings in the interior, and to ensure that the system fairly distinguishes those who qualify to remain from those who don’t.

There are ways to solve those management problems. We should try them. If Vance favors closing the borders permanently to asylum-seeking, and removing millions of undocumented immigrants already here, he should say so.

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But those aren’t solutions: Underlying horrors driving these migrations will remain, and mass removal would both be impractical and an atrocity.

I say it’s better to invest in Central American countries — and to create pathways to apply from afar — to discourage treks to the border, as Biden wants to do. As for the claim that immigration drives down native wages, it’s false, as Noah Smith’s review of the literature shows.

There are things to like about conservative populism, such as its effort to reduce the grip of plutocratic strains of libertarianism on conservative ideology. Vance speaks as if he takes this seriously.

But as a self-appointed spokesman for White working-class Appalachians, Vance’s right-wing populism is replete with weak arguments about culture being responsible for poverty and bereft of any serious vision of how government can alleviate their economic plight.

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As for immigration, the idea that those who want to tackle these problems are doing the bidding of a “corporate oligarchy” seeking cheap labor is not working-class straight talk, it’s insulting nonsense.

These are challenging moral and policy dilemmas. Those who want real representation for conservative populism in the Senate deserve someone who will take them seriously, not hide behind phony anti-woke posturing to elide them.

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