The world is mesmerized by the evolving drama that is the U.S. presidential contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Both of these coastal top-of-the-ticket candidates plucked white Midwestern elected officials as running mates, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in a bid to appeal to the oft-neglected white working-class voters in the former factory towns and rural reaches of America — and particularly the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and my home of Michigan.
Walz and Vance are truly of the heartland, with life experiences that help them understand the hopes, fears, anxieties and aspirations of small-town America — attitudes that are often informed by worries over dwindling job opportunities, the hollowing-out of communities and a potential disappearance of a cherished way of life. Both Walz and Vance represent a populist appeal to middle America.
But Walz and Vance offer very different recipes for improving the lives of the heartland working class. Walz offers a self-described joyful populism — similar to “I know you. I know what you need to make your life and your families’ lives better (a good job, health care, child care). We will deliver that for you.” Vance offers a darker vision that comes across as “your disappearing small-town way of life and sense of diminished possibilities for you and your kids is the result of a country overrun by immigrant hordes, ruled by woke-elite and childless cat ladies.”
Vance’s message is an echo of top-of-the ticket Trump’s and is more dangerous, and to me, disappointing. Vance is a true product of the white working class who, fleeing Appalachia and other rural hinterlands, found for a time a good life in the industrial Midwest — places such as Middletown Ohio, his hometown. This better life in the industrial heartland was available for a generation or two until it degenerated into shuttered factories, lost jobs, run-down communities, drugs and family pathologies. Even as Vance escaped this life via the military, Yale University and Silicon Valley, he does understand the people where he came from. (Statements such as that of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear during his VP audition, that Vance “ain’t from here,” just don’t ring true.)
In fact, Vance eloquently articulated what was behind the kind of “culture of despair” felt in parts of America in his book “Hillbilly Elegy.” Back then Vance did not fault an immigrant invasion, globalists or woke-elite culture warriors for the plight of former factory-town residents. He laid blame squarely on the members of the distressed white working class, their personal inertia and victim mentality. He potentially could have been an authentic and eloquent ambassador for what the residents of the Middletown, Ohios, of the world, really want and need to regain optimism and economic opportunity.
Instead, in order to gain political power, he has done a 180-degree spin, feeding white working-class resentment by urging them to blame someone else.
In contrast, Walz presents himself as an authentic-seeming regular guy from small-town America. A fellow who could have been (and was) your neighbor, coach and geography teacher. Someone, similar to Vance, who not only understands your life in heartland America but also has lived the same life. While Vance chose to come to power by making a Faustian bargain with Trump, Walz came to power by proposing and delivering solutions for working people and families. He did so first as a congressman delivering much-needed better health services for veterans and then as Minnesota’s governor, running the table on a left-wing populist solutions agenda — feeding schoolkids and providing family medical leave, reproductive freedom, and a clean environment and energy.
Wildly contrasting visions and polar-opposed populist variants are not confined to the vice presidential candidates or even to the U.S. Populism of what is often termed the left-wing variant — as represented, for example, by Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France — speaks to the same anxieties as right-wing populists such as Trump or Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally party: “You and people like you are getting screwed and deserve a break.”
The difference is left-wing populists here and in other democracies offer a policy solution. Soak the rich fat cats to deliver free health care, better pensions, college, good jobs and a minimum wage. Right-wing populists peddle culture wars, white nationalism and resentment. Right-wing populists also are more likely to offer an authoritarian “I alone can fix it” message.
Left-wing populists offer support for working families and try to rebuild local economies and retain national democracies — a constructive rather than rhetorical response to working families’ legitimate frustrations and anxieties. Meanwhile, right-wing populists don’t try to deliver anything. They fuel anger and disaffection. They blame. They pledge to bring back the past and protect voters from change. They encourage blowing up the system.
So similar conditions of worries about the future and a perceived unraveling of a special way of heartland life can lead to responsiveness to two very different “solutions.” Franklin D. Roosevelt understood these dynamics. At the height of the Great Depression, he said: “My firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Then he enacted a New Deal that brought unemployment insurance and Social Security and put people to work.
But people who are anxious about their own futures and the future of their communities can be equally open to the resentment-driven political solution. Blame someone else for your lack of opportunity, degradation of community and perceived assault on your identity — versus a policy program that actually fixes economic problems.
Vance and Walz are not likely themselves to determine the outcome of the election. But the kind of places they are from will. As will the degree of appeal of the very different visions of how to deliver — for my home state of Michigan and the rest of heartland America — offered by the Trump and Harris tickets.
I hope my neighbors choose joy and hope over blame and fear. I know I will.
John Austin is a former president of the Michigan State Board of Education and a faculty member at the University of Michigan.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.