In any sane or moral universe, a boy from a poor rural background and a broken family who serves his country, proceeds to go to a state school and then an Ivy law school, works in venture capital before winning a tough senatorial race, and is finally nominated as to run for the vice presidency, would be the symbol of a kid who beat all odds and made it. J.D. Vance’s saga is an American success story, one that would have gotten several movies during the 80s to show to those pesky Soviets how you don’t need daddy government to succeed. 

Not this time. From Democrat congresswomen to the Democrats’ VP nominee, “America’s dad” Tim Walz, it has become a standard attack line to point out that Vance went to Yale. It is not just envy, although Vance is much more successful than Walz, whose main accomplishment is running his entire state to the ground. Just why should anyone tout that not a single male or female in his family made it to the Ivies is beyond me. I would not be proud to talk in such terms about the implied intelligence of my immediate family. 

But, if it is mystifying at the personal level, it makes contextual sense. Vance—just like Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson before him—is an apostate and a class traitor. He made it big with grit and hard work. He defeated the systemic challenges due to sheer talent and will, without blaming the system. He understood the chief causes of social failures, fatherlessness, addiction, talent and opportunity disparity, are as much a cause of personal failure as trade and foreign policy that privileges internationalism over nationals; he then made the case with his own life. He is by far a better speaker than Walz, but he doesn’t talk like an elite. 

Vance is therefore a living rebuttal to everything the left in this country stands for. That makes him an enemy of the elite ideology. 

The saying goes that the left has supplied the need for religion with politics. Perhaps so, but apostasy is still a greater sin than heresy for them.