The Veep’s Progress

By Barton Swaim

Communion

By JD Vance

Harper, 304 pages, $35

JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.

These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race. Mr. Vance’s second mem oir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the half --hearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.

Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “ humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.

You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “ living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them.

Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes. If he wins the presidency, one hopes he can take his own counsel to practice humility in the face of difficult questions. But by then, he may have a different set of views.

Mr. Swaim writes the Journal’s Unruly Republic column.