JD Vance is not a big fan of the political Left, despite his humble background. In the view of the Catholic politician that everyone is now talking about after Donald Trump nominated Vance as his running mate for the 2024 US presidential election, the political Left’s approach to poor, working-class communities like the one Vance grew up in is, in his words, “like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I have no use for it”.
Vance’s attempts to understand the self-destructive behavioural patterns that he witnessed in such communities have partly been informed by his study of French Catholic philosopher René Girard (1923-2015), to whose work Vance was introduced by billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Vance has credited this exposure to Girard as a major impetus for his conversion to Catholicism.
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