Veep show: America meets J.D. Vance

This episode explores J.D. Vance's introduction as a vice-presidential candidate, focusing on his background, political stance, and public presentation.

1. J.D. Vance's rapid political ascent highlights his potential influence within the Republican Party.
2. His speech aimed to introduce himself to voters, blending personal stories with political critique.
3. Vance is positioned as a populist, critiquing both the elite and mainstream Republican policies.
4. The episode underscores Vance's potential role in shaping a new direction for the GOP, focusing on more populist and isolationist policies.
5. His candidacy is seen as part of a broader strategy to rejuvenate the Republican Party by aligning with Trump's vision and appealing to a broader base.

1. Introduction to J.D. Vance

A detailed overview of J.D. Vance's background, emphasizing his journey from a troubled youth to a vice-presidential candidate. Adam O'Neill: "JD Vance very much grew up in the poor white working class."

2. Speech at the Republican National Convention

Analysis of Vance's speech where he links personal experiences with broader political implications. JD Vance: "Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico."

3. Political Implications of Vance's Candidacy

Discusses the potential impact of Vance's vice-presidential candidacy and his alignment with Trump's policies. Adam O'Neill: "He has well-formed and thought-out ideas, and he wants to build a new kind of GOP coalition."

1. Understand the impact of personal background on political ideologies.
2. Recognize the significance of populism in modern American politics.
3. Evaluate how personal narratives can shape public policy perspectives.
4. Consider the implications of political endorsements and their influence on election outcomes.
5. Reflect on the importance of ideological alignment in political partnerships.

J.D. Vance was largely unknown in American politics until Donald Trump picked him as his running-mate for vice-president. Last night he gave his first speech to the Republican National Convention. Why is trade so sluggish within Latin America (11:34)? And forget management books: literature offers the best lessons in leadership (20:14).

People

J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, Joe Biden

Companies

None

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

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The economist
The economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello, and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The economist
Latin America is the world's pipsqueak when it comes to trade, both within the region and exporting outside it. We look at the myriad of reasons behind its underperformance, from politics to plain old topography. And have you got a pile of unread management books beside your bed? It might be time to concede defeat. For the best advice on how to lead, our correspondent recommends some notable works of fiction.

Rosie Blore
But first.

Adam O'Neill
I'm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the Republican National Convention, and it's Wednesday night. It's almost 11:00 p.m. jD Vance just finished his first big address as the vice presidential candidate. Adam O'Neill is Washington correspondent for the Economist. When he came out, it was not the kind of pandemonium that we're going to be expecting from Donald Trump.

JD Vance
Thank you. Thank you. But clearly, people were excited. They were chanting. The Ohio delegation got a little bit rowdy.

Adam O'Neill
JD Vance, of course, is a senator from Ohio and being sort of quick on his feet, said, oh, calm down, Ohio. We also have to win Michigan. We're gonna chill with the Ohio love. We gotta win Michigan, too here. So.

There is a big rivalry between those two states. And so it was sort of a light moment to start off the speech, and he kind of just went from there. Tonight is a night of hope, a celebration of what America once was, and with God's grace, what it will soon be again. A CNN poll last month showed that 56% of Americans don't even know who JD Vance is. So this was JD Vance's real first opportunity to say, hey, this is who I am.

This is my story. This is how I think about the world, and this is why I support Donald Trump and why I'm running for vice president. So, Adam, do tell us, who is JD Vance, and what did we find out about him in his speech? JD Vance very much grew up in the poor white working class. His mother was struggling with drugs.

He was raised by his grandmother. He joined the Marines. He served in Iraq. After he got out of the Marines, he went to the Ohio state, graduated early, went to Yale Law School, where he met his wife. And in 2016, he wrote a bestselling and very well reviewed memoir about growing up and telling this life story.

And that had made him a bit of a mini celebrity. Eight years ago, he starts getting booked on cable news. He's writing for the Atlantic NPR listeners are very interested in what he has to say. And after Donald Trump wins, he becomes even more famous as someone who can accept explain the white working class and why they would vote for a guy like Donald Trump. And at the time, he was deeply skeptical of Trump.

He called him cultural heroine. In a private message, he compared him to Hitler. And over the course of Donald Trump's first term, JD Vance starts to soften. He becomes very much a Trump fan just defending Trump in basically every context. And once he'd made that transformation from critic to super fan, when did Vance get more formally involved in politics and run for office?

In 2022, he decided to run for the open US Senate seat in Ohio. Moderate Republican Rob Portman had been retiring, and he barely squeaked through in the primary because of Donald Trump's endorsement. And he won in November, and he's been in the Senate ever since. Just a short 18 months ago, he arrived, and now he is the vice presidential nominee. And if he wins, he'll be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Rosie Blore
That's an astonishingly rapid rise, which, as you say, means that most people don't know him. So if the goal of his speech on Wednesday evening was to introduce himself to voters, what did he have to say? He told his life story while sort of interweaving it with policy. I grew up in Middletown, Ohio.

Kenneth Cukier
A. Small town where people spoke their minds built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with their whole hearts. He talked about how Joe Biden had voted for NAFTA and had sent jobs to Mexico. When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico. And later, Joe Biden.

Adam O'Neill
He had voted in favor of the Iraq war, where he was deployed. When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq. And at each step, and all of these different policy conversations were sort of mixed up with his own life, the community he grew up in, and how it was devastated by the elites, as he describes them. This is not a typical republican speech. This wasn't Paul Ryan at the 2012 convention, speaking about supply side economics, JD Vance was focused on criticizing the ruling class, calling out Wall street, even using the word big business as a pejorative.

JD Vance
Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price. And how well do you think that message landed? Politics is unpredictable, so we'll have to see, right? But we can note a few basic things. One is that JD is not a very natural, charismatic speaker in the way that Donald Trump is.

Adam O'Neill
At one point, everybody in the convention hall, we could hear them chanting, Joe must go over and over and sort of flatly, JD Vance just says, I agree. I don't want to sell him entirely short. There were some really heartwarming moments when he spoke about his grandmother. It was genuinely funny. Mamal was, in so many ways, a woman of contradiction.

JD Vance
She loved the Lord, ladies and gentlemen. She was a woman of very deep christian faith, but she also loved the f word.

I'm not kidding. And at one point, he introduced his mother, who was there. The movement is about single moms like mine, and I'm proud to say that tonight, my mom is here. Ten years clean and sober. I love you, mom.

Adam O'Neill
It was almost an electric feeling, and people started to chant, you know, JD's mom.

It was the kind of made for tv moment you've come to expect at these sort of conventions. Given his inexperience, why do you think Donald Trump picked Vance for vice president? Donald Trump liked JD. He often hires people who he would see on tv and thought were effective. And in the end, it came down to really two choices.

The governor of North Dakota, Doug Bergam, and JD Vance. And at the last minute, Donald Trump's oldest sons, as far as I understand, stepped in and said, you know, dad, you got to go with JD. That makes me think that we don't really know what sort of a VP Vance might make. Well, JD Vance has a pretty thin record, right? He's been in elected office for 18 months.

He's only 39 years old. But we know that he's much more economically populist than even Donald Trump. And he's much more isolationist than even Donald Trump. But looking beyond Trump, and let's say they win in November, which appears increasingly likely, JD will be the immediate 2028 front runner. And he's someone who took MAGA as an idea, as an ideology, and tried to lay an intellectual foundation for it.

Donald Trump kind of goes by instinct and gut. Some people say he's often persuaded by the last person he talked to. JD Vance is very different. He has well formed and thought out ideas, and he wants to build a new kind of GOP coalition, one that's more friendly, friendly to unions, one that's more skeptical of Wall street, one that's not necessarily isolationist, but certainly very skeptical of american involvement in the world in a way that the GOP wasn't in the past. If everything happens the way he would like it to he'll be influencing the party for decades to come.

Rosie Blore
You mentioned the coming decades, but of course, turning back to the events of this week, the choice of VP happened just days after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. How do you think that might have affected the VP pick or the convention more broadly? I think that most folks fully expect Donald Trump to survive if he wins and to be around for beyond his four years in office. But when a bullet passes just a few millimeters from your brain, it really highlights the importance of having a vice presidential choice who, one, is ready to be president and two, who they trust ideologically to be true to Donald Trump and his vision of politics and policy. And my colleague Stevie Hertz spoke to a few different people around the convention about this subject.

Stevie Hertz
JD Vance became the obvious choice after what happened Saturday. Why do you say that? Because JD is what I would call pure MAGA, and Trump needed a strong ally on this ticket, especially now. He's going to do very well to propel the republican party forward in the next generation, which is my generation. He's just a little younger than me.

Rosie Blore
You've described in JD Vance quite a conservative figure, and Trump could have picked a moderate, particularly after the assassination attempt. Trump said that he would try to strike a more unifying message. Did we see any of that in Vance's speech? JD Vance has been a pretty divisive figure in the party and in the country leading up to his nomination. But he struck a more unifying tone in his speech, saying that we're not going to agree on everything but the party's a big tent.

Adam O'Neill
And actually disagreement is good and healthy, and we're waiting for the big event, which is Donald Trump's speech on Thursday. And he's hinted that he's also going to have a more unifying message, and they'll be talking about that on our podcast about us politics, checks and balance. We've concentrated here on the Republicans, but obviously it's been a really hectic couple of weeks in the campaign for both parties. And I'm thinking particularly here, of the discussion among Democrats about whether Biden should still be a nominee after his disastrous debate performance a couple of weeks ago. How do you think that has affected the republican convention?

There's so much chaos that Biden has Covid, for example, the republican convention. They've been knocking Joe Biden the whole time, but it's entirely possible that a month from now they'll have been knocking the wrong guy. It'll be interesting to see how they have to adjust their message, given how all of the chaos on the democratic side plays out. Adam, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Rosie.

Rosie Blore
Don't forget to listen to the third episode of our new podcast series out today. Boom. The generation that blew up american politics traces how the cohort born in the 1940s was shaped by the events of their day and how they came to define american politics. You need to be a subscriber to listen search for Economist podcast Plus for the best offer.

Kinley Salmon
I recently traveled to the border between Argentina and Chile, right high up in the Andes. Kinley Salmon is a Latin America correspondent for the Economist. I was there to sort of look at trade within Latin America and what might be holding it back. And those problems just from driving up were pretty clear. This crossing is the busiest trade crossing between the two countries.

Creaking down the road as I drove up were lorries full of cars, almost certainly made in Brazil, that were trying to get through Argentina and into Chile. There were hairpin bend after hairpin bend four times. All these lorries grind to a halt and theres workers trying to repair the road, which gets sort of badly bashed up with snow and ice and rock falls, and the delays are super long. Drivers just hop out and have a smoke while they're waiting to try and get across this pass. I later chatted with an argentine truck driver up in the top of the pass at the chilean customs facility, and he told me that delays in customs on the argentine side in particular, can be very, very lengthy.

I was there just before the worst of winter hit. But in winter, things get tougher still. Snowfall, ice and rocks make the crossing so dangerous that it only operates for 12 hours a day and actually for about 40 days of the year, the crossing just shuts all together.

This, in a way, captures one of the striking things about trade in Latin America, that there's just far less trade between countries in Latin America than one would expect. And there are lots of reasons, not just that perilous crossing. So when you say that there is less trade than you would expect, let's put some numbers to it. The outlier, of course, is Mexico, which trades a lot with the US. But if you strip that out, the rest of the region does particularly poorly.

Looking at South America, for example, if you look at exports plus imports as a measure of trade, that's only worth about 30% of GDP, and in other emerging markets, that number is about 50%. Trade within the region from one country in Latin America to another is even worse. Really? Strikingly so. Only about 14% of Latin America's trade in goods occurs within the region.

That's the lowest figure for any region in the world. Lower even than sub saharan Africa, for example, which is much poorer. And all this kind of matters. Low trade in general is a problem. Richer places tend to trade.

More trade helps to boost economic development. Not everyone is as worried about low levels of trade within the region, but I think there really are some reasons to be concerned about that. So before we get to the reasons, then let's look at the mechanism behind this. Why is the regional trade so low? In recent years, there's been just a really big focus on selling into China and further north in Latin America, into the United States.

But the risk here is that if demand in China slows, or indeed, if tensions between China and the United States increase, Latin American risk either having weaker trade with those big partners, or even losing one of them altogether if they're forced to choose. And so boosting regional trade would be an alternative to being sort of exposed to those geopolitical machinations. And then there's a second issue as well, which gets to Latin America's economic development. Latin America's exports at the moment are heavily commodity based things like copper, for example. But if Latin America could trade a bit more within the region, it might be able to combine goods and parts from different countries in Latin America, create what they call regional value chains.

And the products that you can do that way are often more competitive or higher value products. Purely hypothetically, think of some dried bananas for sale, if you produce the banana most cheaply in one country, but the packaging or the labels coming from somewhere else might be cheaper. And combine all that and export it globally, and you'd do better than if you try to do it all in one country. So all of that makes tons of intuitive sense. It makes you wonder why that isn't already happening.

Then there are three big reasons that you can see for why this isn't happening. One of them is what they might call structural. One of the issues is just that Latin America wants to consume sophisticated products. They want televisions and computers, and they don't really produce those, so they end up having to get them from outside of the region rather than buying them from each other. Another structural issue, in a way, is that lots of countries just produce and export the same things.

I mean, both Chile and neighbouring Peru's biggest export is copper. And so it's pretty unlikely that Chile is ever going to sell copper to Peru. And then the last thing is just the geography of the place. South America, for example, is four times the size of the European Union and has the world's longest mountain range and the largest tropical forest right in the middle of it. And the infrastructure isn't good enough, really, to deal with that geography.

The IMF reckons, albeit in a fairly rough model, that reducing the gap between infrastructure in Latin America and the quality of infrastructure in rich countries by about half could lift exports by as much as 30%. Okay, so that's the structural stuff. But what about the policy end of things that you mentioned? At first glance, the sort of policy doesn't look too bad. You know, about 90% of venture regional trade is tariff free.

But this hides some of the bigger issues. It hides, for example, the trade that isn't happening in the first place because of those remaining tariffs. There's also some sort of big misses. There's no proper preferential trade agreement between some of the region's biggest economies, like Mexico and Brazil, for example. And then a lot of this trade is based on bilateral agreements between one country and just one other country.

And so that makes it, again, harder to source the parts for your product from the cheapest countries possible. One estimate suggests that this, in a way, is equivalent to about a 15% tariff. And then, you know, it should be said that in South America, there's just quite a bit of appetite for protectionism. Argentina, for example, taxes, exports, a rarity these days in rich countries. There are some blocs that have attempted to solve this.

One, called Mercosur, is meant to be a customs union between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But that hasn't worked very well either. It did briefly boost trade between its members, but that's now fallen back to those similarly low levels as the rest of the region. And in fact, trade between Merkelsaw and the rest of Latin America is particularly. Poor and quite apart from the policy.

The economist
What about the regional politics? Well, unfortunately, that complicates things, too. Another attempt at a regional trade bloc was the Pacific alliance. That's a deal between Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. It was launched back in 2011, and it was meant to be a model, really for how this regional integration could both boost trade between those countries, but also make them more competitive in what they export globally.

Kinley Salmon
Since that was introduced, there have been changes in elections in those countries. The new leaders, in many cases are less keen on the deal and perhaps on free trade in general. And just straight up political spats have gotten the way, too. Mexico refused to hand over the presidency of the alliance to the president of Peru, claiming she wasn't fully legitimate after a bunch of political machinations in Peru put that all together, and the Pacific alliance is probably at its lowest point since it was founded. So having gone through all of this, the odds seem to be really strongly stacked against there being more regional trade.

The economist
Is there anything that can turn all of this around? There are ways to overcome some of these problems, and plenty of those ways are certainly easier than trying to move the Andes. The part of global trade that's actually expanding fastest is services, and that's much less hit by Latin America's geographic issues. You can fly over the Amazon in a plane and go and sell consulting services in Brazil if you're from Chile without too much difficulty and some of the overlap in goods. We talked about how Peru and Chile both produce copper and export it.

Kinley Salmon
Well. That can even be an advantage in services trade if you're a chilean mining engineering firm, the fact that Peru has also got copper mines is a great opportunity rather than a problem. For now, intraregional trade and services is still pretty low, but it is growing. In Chile, for example, last year, services exports by about 50%, mostly within Latin America. And so I think there is not just for Chile, but for the whole region, really big potential to be realized still.

The economist
Kinley, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you.

He inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. Nothing. He could keep the routine going, that's all.

Kenneth Cukier
As a description of a typical middle manager, it is hard to surpass Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness, where the narrator Marlowe gives his view of the boss of Central Station. Kenneth Cukier is the deputy executive editor of the Economist. What he sees is that the whole place is, in comparison, complete disarray. There's literally no order and no true integrity of management. Everyone is out for themselves, and everyone is incredibly inept.

And I have to wonder, isn't this like what it's like in a typical business in which a very good manager and leader walks in and says, what in the world is going on here, guys? Who's doing the work?

Business books are a dime a dozen, and a lot of them hit the bestseller list for lots of managers who want to get better at leading, at motivating others, of navigating the intricacies of their field. But they're really rather dreary.

And if you wanted to really understand the human condition and how you need to act to either do a good job or avoid being a bad boss, you'd be far better to go to the classic works of literature, plays and novels, whether it's Shakespeare or Goethe or Milton, to understand just how petty business can be, but also how glorious it can be when you do it well. The great books teach us not only characteristics that we can all appreciate, like honesty and empathy and maybe commercial acumen, but also things that we look away from but are actually a part of business life, like the vanity and the pettiness and the greed of our colleagues, as well as their rivalry, an ambition that might actually be our undoing.

So if you think of what leadership entails, the first thing that a great leader leads is a good mentor. And is there any better than Virgil and Dante's Inferno? He guides the main character, Dante, through hell. In purgatory, he points out the dangers. He gives advice, he rebukes him on occasion, but finally withdraws when his charge is ready to ascend to the highest rungs of the immortal world.

Now the next essential quality for management is motivating others. And truly the best and most emblematic is Tom Sawyer. When hes forced to whitewash a fence rather than play with his friends, hes so dispirited. But then he realizes he can manipulate them, and he concocts a way to get everyone so excited, all the other local kids, to do it, that they end up paying him for the privilege of painting the fence, and he can just watch it from under the shade of a tree. Yes, it is manipulation, but b schools call it psychic rewards.

Many aspects of office life are captured in great books. For navigating HR, pick up Joseph Heller's catch 22 on dealing with the finance department. What's better than Franz Kafka's the trial? Pick up Goethe's Faust on the need to read the contract terms for holding meetings. Crack open William Golden's Lord of the Flies, and for it support Beckett's waiting for Godot.

Now the frenzy of business is often simply a comedy, and sometimes, sadly, it's a tragedy. And Shakespeare is a font of wisdom in Richard III and Macbeth. They're terrible leaders. One is hubristic, the other one is murderously ambitious. That said, Shakespeare can be usefully read in a different way.

For example, Lady Macbeth has lots to teach us on how a non executive director can work the system. King Lear stresses the importance of succession planning. Hamlet reminds us to make decisions quickly. Now, Othello might remind executives to choose their personal assistants carefully, though. Conversely, his aide Iago brilliantly instructs how to deceive, manipulate, and dispatch the boss.

Heart of Darkness not only depicts bad management, it's more effective at teaching leadership skills than the classic business book canon. Like start with why never eat alone? Or who moved my cheese. The horror. The horror.

Rosie Blore
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcasteconomist.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.