At the beginning of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “the Snow Queen”, a hobgoblin creates a terrible mirror that magnifies all the world’s faults and distorts all that which is good. When one looks through it, all they can see is the worst in others. After having used the mirror to torment mortals, the hobgoblin’s minions try to fly the mirror to heaven so as to wield it against the angels. During their ascent, they drop the mirror and it smashes into billions of invisibly small pieces that float around on the wind, each shard having the same horrible properties as the original mirror. Every so often, a piece of the mirror’s glass gets stuck in someone’s eye and makes it so that they see only the bad in everything. Rarer still, a shard sometimes gets lodged in someone’s heart, producing an icy bitterness.
In Andersen’s telling, the shards fall on victims at random, not through any act or thought of their own. In our own world, people have more agency than that. Here, some people choose to ignore the virtues in others and focus only on their faults. It is only when that mentality has become a habit that the mirror shards invade the eyes and heart, hardening and exacerbating the habit. J.D. Vance has some of that glass in his eyes, and worse still, he thinks his path to power is to use resentment politics to put that evil glass in as many eyes as possible.
Resentment Politics
Resentment Populists start by identifying grievances: sometimes legitimate, sometimes not. Then, their focus is not so much on addressing underlying problems or building a political coalition to forge a compromise but rather is centered upon validating the feelings associated with that grievance. The point isn’t to fix anything. The point is to feel justified in continually stewing in outrage. The resentment politician says: “They hurt you. They are bad. I will get revenge for you.” Their followers learn to see the political world through this toxic lens but then that toxic lens becomes an emotional addiction. Daydreaming about revenge activates the same neural pathways as narcotics. Just as people can become addicted to drugs or alcohol, people can become addicted to imagining revenge against their perceived enemies. In this way, resentment politics is both a symptom of that evil glass in the eye and a justification for it.
Vance wants Ohio voters to think of politics not as an exercise in compromise-oriented problem solving but as an exercise in cathartic revenge. What he wants voters to think is not “something is going less well in my life than I’d like it to, what policies do I think will alleviate that problem?” but instead think “I’ve been cheated- who cheated me and how do I get my vengeance?” That second mental pathway leads one to ignore all the mitigating factors or alternative explanations. The “I’ve been cheated” part absolves the citizen of any agency. It’s a total abdication of personal responsibility. Perhaps ironically, this is almost perfectly opposite to many of the tough-love passages in Hillbilly Elegy. One of the strengths of Hillbilly Elegy is that while it has some sympathy for its characters, it does not pretend that they are powerless victims. Vance has apparently forgotten his own writings.
Vance’s resentment politics is also actively, self-consciously anti-pluralist. It seeks to obliterate cross-cutting cleavages. Vance does not want people to do grocery story politics where they choose a policy here they like, a policy there they like, ignore the rest, and figure out which party will give them more of their favored policies. Such a politics is not especially adversarial. It is not a Kumbaya circle but neither does it generate daydreams of revenge. That kind of politics could be good for rural America. Unfortunately, it is not what is on offer from Vance.
A Re-Interpretation of Forrest Gump
The movie Forrest Gump is sometimes derided as fan fiction for conservative Baby Boomers, a sort of airbrushed collage of moments they remember. That’s a shallow interpretation of that movie. As a native of Alabama, my preferred interpretation of Forrest Gump is of a place getting less cruel and less insular, as seen by the vulnerable but proud. The Alabama Forrest grows up in is one where Forrest’s mother must give away her dignity to get her child a place in a normal school, where Jenny suffers sexual abuse at the hands of her father, where Forrest has rocks thrown at him because of his leg braces. It is a place where petty tyrants are seemingly everywhere.
At no point does Forrest ever get any of that Snow Queen Mirror glass in his eye though. When sent into the hellishness of Vietnam, his dominant emotion is dedication to Bubba. There is real friendship and brotherly love between them. Not only does he save Lieutenant Dan’s life, his ability to see through Dan’s bitterness and to sincerely care about him despite that bitterness helps to save Dan’s soul. Jenny, whose childhood was so horribly defined by a total lack of real love, is loved by Forrest and she loves him back. Their child will never know the fear Jenny did. Forrest Jr. watches Bert and Ernie. He doesn’t need to pray to be made a bird to fly far, far away. Forrest and Jenny’s goodness has stopped the cycle of abuse.
All along the way, Forrest has traveled widely and met all kinds of people. The message of the movie is that wherever we are and whoever we are, we can be the better, more worldly versions of ourselves. And there’s the problem with J.D. Vance. He believes that his ticket to the Senate is to convince Ohio voters to be as narrow, as churlish, and resentment driven as possible. He promises voters lots of revenge but little in the way of material assistance. He wants to whip them into a mob and stand at the head of it. That evil glass in his eye has totally poisoned his moral sensibility in a way that it never did to Forrest. In some very important respects then, Forrest Gump is far wiser than J.D. Vance.
No One’s Enemy
The evil glass doesn’t just hurt the individual personally, it also leads to aggressive, reactionary politics. If all you can see is the worst in everyone, it naturally leads to seeing government as a weapon with which to smash your enemies. Holding more charitable views more naturally leads to an easygoing live-and-let-live sensibility. If all you can see is the worst in every change, it is easy to miss just how much better and kinder the world is than it used to be.
J.D. Vance wants Ohio voters to think everyone is in some sense their enemy. He wants them to think that assistance to Ukraine in its hour of greatest need is in some sense stealing from them. He wants them to think that professors like me “are the enemy.” Vance would have Ohio voters believe that every professor they haven’t met is a snobby elitist making fun of them from some plush faculty lounge. But I am not his enemy. I am no one’s enemy, and certainly not an enemy to the kinds of working-class people Vance claims to champion. Until I was 11, I lived in this mobile home in rural Alabama. My first job was as a farmhand. My father worked in a steel plant for 30 years. I have every bit the blue collar credentials Vance has.
I had a very bad stutter that it took years of speech therapy to get rid of and was the first in my family to go to college. I work with first-generation college students today because I have a responsibility to pay it forward. For working-class students, college- and particularly the first year or two- can be filled with all kinds of social class-based challenges that others from more affluent backgrounds simply don’t have. It’s like everyone else got some secret manual at orientation that we didn’t get. It can be frustrating, but there is also a special pride that comes from persevering through that. For more affluent students, graduating from college is the expectation. For working-class students, graduating from college is the culmination of generations of work and sacrifice. When I graduated, I thought not just of my own efforts, but of my father’s long hours in the steel mill he worked in. For working class students, that degree is not just the next step in a career, it’s a symbolic fulfillment of generations of dreams. There is something very special in that.
I research international political economy because that is how we create shared prosperity and how we create the conditions that allow people to lift themselves up. I am by no means perfect, but I try to do right by my fellow citizen just as I try to do right by my students. I find that it is far more productive and far kinder to spend your days helping people succeed rather than telling them who to resent; in internalizing that lesson from Forrest Gump that wherever we are and whoever we are, we can be the better, more worldly versions of ourselves; in teaching people that within a liberal democracy there may be challenges and there may be opponents, but there need be no enemies. Truth is I’m not even J.D. Vance’s enemy, I really am rooting for him to get that glass out of his eye. He, and Ohio, would be better off for it.
-GW