A review of J.D. Vance's book "Communion"

Excerpts from the London Review of Books:

Almost no politician​ writes his own books, and few people actually read them. J.D. Vance is different. Trump’s vice president was a writer before he was a politician, and brought a writer’s vices with him: a titanic but fragile ego, limitless self-interest and thirst for adulation, an unsleeping vigilance for any slight. Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s first book, published in 2016, described his childhood poverty and rise out of it, and made him the liberal media’s favourite hick-whisperer. Communion (Collins, £20), its sequel, purports to be a memoir of Vance’s disillusionment with a series of creeds – evangelical fundamentalism, Randian libertarianism, chattering-class liberalism – and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism in 2019. It is an obvious, if nebulous, manifesto for a presidential run. His publishers assure us that he wrote it himself.

Communion is a bad book. It is sloppy, unfocused, stylistically uneven, ethically vacuous, intellectually tendentious and politically cynical. Hillbilly Elegy indicted an Appalachian culture degraded through addiction, indolence and despair. Communion mounts a much wider and more diffuse attack on the values and motivations of liberal and professional America, represented by Yale University and the media. That Vance’s critique proceeds by caricature and supposition does not make it worthless, though he is hardly the first person to discover that members of the elite are inward-looking or self-congratulatory...

Political lying degrades both individual and system. Perhaps this accounts for Communion’s acreage of strawmen. During the 2024 campaign Vance peddled the racist lie that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Confronted, he admitted to ‘creating stories’ to advance his cause. He also likes a conspiracy theory, claiming that a 2024 aid package for Ukraine contained ‘a hidden impeachment clause’ against Trump. In January this year, after an ICE agent shot the protester Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis, Vance called her ‘brainwashed’, a ‘deranged leftist’ complicit in ‘a tragedy of her own making’. When ICE agents shot the ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the same city later that month, Vance claimed it was the result of ‘engineered chaos’ in local authorities compromised by the far left...

The chief emotion of Communion, however, is fear. Vance fears he will jeopardise his relationship with his wife, Usha (whom he met at Yale), because his parents’ relationship imploded. When his first son was born, he writes, ‘I felt one emotion above all others: fear.’ His fear is both personal, that he will fail as a father, and social, that his country will fail his son. Vance is not alone in this feeling. Fear – of pollution, invasion, the enemy within, modernity – is endemic in the ultra-traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church and across a swathe of the US, bristling and vigilant behind its guns. Both desire their institutions to become punitive monocultures, bulwarks against the outside world...

Why would anyone buy this? Vance has been a willing participant in a squalid government sunk in graft which has gutted the agencies that might restrain or regulate private avarice. The labour share of income is at a historic low. The most obvious question is not whether Vance believes what he claims to believe, but why, if he believes it, he acts as he does. Halfway through Communion he quotes, without irony, a recovering addict who passed on some homely advice: show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future. Perhaps Vance has forgotten who he’s been hanging out with...

Communion’s characteristic error is clearest when Vance dismisses criticisms that mass deportations are ‘too tough’, but thanks the Church for forcing a consideration of the ‘moral trade-offs’. Abstract strictness of policy is not the issue here, but wanton cruelty: the families fed maggot-infested food, the cells flooded with sewage, those beaten or asphyxiated by guards, or handed off to foreign torturers. Vance may desire ‘a more Christian economy’, but it is one ringed with razor wire...