← The Rest Is Politics
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- [00:01]
Alastair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com if Donald Trump dropped dead, this guy is automatically president. How he has become what he's become from this background.
- [00:23]
James O'Brien
I'm sitting in the back of this police cruiser. They've just arrested my mom. The relief of having survived another day.
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Rory Stewart
This is a story about something which we don't often talk about in America, which is class.
- [00:33]
James O'Brien
I came from a southern Ohio steel town and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways. Trump, I think that he's leading the white working class to a very dark place. I'm a never Trump guy. I never liked him.
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Rory Stewart
But in the end, the main thing you need to understand about J.D. barns is given the choice between his intellectual statements and power. He chooses power every time.
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James O'Brien
I was wrong about Donald Trump.
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Alastair Campbell
Senator, this is an evolution. Past comments that you've made. You've said idiot, if you voted for might be America's Hitler.
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Rory Stewart
This is where this other side of his personality comes through. He's reverting to blame anger.
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James O'Brien
We're seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats.
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Rory Stewart
They're eating the dogs.
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James O'Brien
I think the election was stolen from Trump. We're effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies.
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Rory Stewart
He needs to prove absolute loyalty.
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James O'Brien
And what I worry about is the threat from within. Have you said thank you once you.
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Alastair Campbell
Are part of the JD bank story.
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Rory Stewart
A Twitter beef I didn't expect to see this week.
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Alastair Campbell
Rory Stewart, not as clever as he thinks, says J.D.
- [01:39]
Rory Stewart
Vance. This was the final destruction of the centrist dads because J.D. vance had lost me. But there's a bigger story, which is the story about this whole alt right movement. Vance does not exist really without Thiel, either financially or politically because this guy.
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Alastair Campbell
Believes that America should be led by a monarch, which of course Trump believes as well. He sees him frankly as a future king because he says Vance can tell the story of America.
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Rory Stewart
And in doing so, he crosses the cusp into a whole new vision of the world at the center of which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian, the monarch.
- [02:31]
Alastair Campbell
Hi there, Alastair here. Now, as we said in yesterday's Question Time episode, we are doing finally our first ever miniseries for members of the Rest is Politics plus and it's all about da da JD Vance.
- [02:45]
Rory Stewart
That's Right. And it's really great stuff. I really enjoyed putting it together. It's almost us making a sort of mini documentary on J.D. vance. If you'd like to hear the first episode right now, just head to theresters politics.com to join. The rest is politics plus, where you'll find our cheapest rates. New episodes of our series will be dropping every Friday morning for for members.
- [03:04]
Alastair Campbell
We really enjoyed recording the series. It charts JD Vance's very humble beginnings in the Appalachians, tracks his career and his influences all the way up to his role as vice president, where he calls out European leaders in Munich and chastises Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and tries to work out how to stay in with Donald Trump. Here's a clip. Hope you enjoy.
- [03:31]
Rory Stewart
Vance is many things, many, many things for which we will be profoundly critical. But he's also smart. I mean, he's a very clever person and he writes very elegantly. We'll get onto that. And he has these very interesting ideas. And for British listeners, there's some interesting parallels. He's got some echoes with figures like Dominic Cummings and other people actually within the New Right movement, the Conservative Party, that we can talk about a little bit later in American politics. As you've said, he's part of this amazing development of, on the one hand, conservative Catholicism. He calls himself a baby Catholic. He's born again Catholic.
- [04:15]
James O'Brien
And I recognize very much that I am a baby Catholic, that there are things about the faith that I don't know.
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Rory Stewart
But he's also got this whole other thing, a whole economic theory of the world, whole political theory of the world. And he spouts it out with the most incredible, again, a bit like Donna Khan's most unbelievable intellectual references. He's like referring to St. Augustine. He's reading relatively obscure hackers and coders from Silicon Valley. He worships a man called Peter Thiel. So it's a really good route at a moment where liberal democracy, the sort of centrist politics that you and I believe in and grew up in, is cracking. Here is somebody suggesting what some of the alternative ideas out there might be and we'll get a chance to look into whether they actually stack up, how much they contradict.
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Alastair Campbell
And also he's having to ride this Trumpian horse and stay close to him. So he is, on lots of levels, a very interesting character. So let's go right back to the beginning. He was born August 2, 1984. His name was James Donald Bowman. And I'm not sure how much I trust somebody who changes their name quite as regularly as this guy does. But there are reasons why he changes his name and that that relates to his mother who gets through men at a very, very, very, very speedy rate. I think she has five marriages, plenty of blokes in between. And he says that he, he actually there's one very moving part of the book where he says that, you know, I hated school, but I ha. More. And the worst thing about it was this revolving door of so called father.
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Rory Stewart
Figures on this for a second. There are many different things you can talk about in J.D. vance's background and we'll get on to talk about what it means to be Scott Irish, what Ohio and Kentucky were like, what the opioid crisis was like. But let's start just with what you've said with the mother and the different men and her drug addiction. One thing that people have said about hillbilly allergy when they're being critical is that it plays a little bit too much to stereotypes about what in the US would be called welfare queens. So some American commentators reading this says this basically portrays a world of every conservative prejudice about people living on welfare, single parent families, drug abuse, unemployment, multiple parents, poor educational performance, and a community that's often seems to be in the book kind of almost opting out. I mean, how did you read, how did he analyze this kind of poverty, this kind of world?
- [06:48]
Alastair Campbell
Well, it's of course now that he is what he's become, it's kind of hard to genuinely to work through it without knowing him really well, which neither of us do. I mean he wrote this book when he was 31, so at that stage, not even in politics. But you read it now that he is a politician, you kind of think, oh, I can see why he wrote this book. But very few publishers are going to take a memoir from a 31 year old who hasn't done much. It had to be very well written, which it is. It had to be a really interesting story, which it is. And it had to say something deeper about America, which it does. I have a very Strong Sense page 146 to page 148. It's almost like you lot deserve the life you've got for the choices that you make.
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Rory Stewart
So in that part of the book he's almost saying, and this is quite important for his politics. And he makes this point at other points in his life that there are two ways of looking at the community he grew up in. One of them is the conservative view, which is it's their fault because they don't pull themselves out by their bootstraps, they need to get on their bikes. And then there's the liberal view, which is that they're completely victims of their economic and social circumstances. And he sometimes says he doesn't like either view, but give us a bit of a reading.
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Alastair Campbell
I think he's very much of that form worldview. So he talks about living in a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads, our children wear nice clothes thanks to high interest credit cards. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for spending money, then declare bankruptcy, leaving the houses full of garbage. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we're upper class. And when the dust clears, when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity, there's nothing left over. Nothing for tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy day fund. We know we shouldn't spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up. We do it anyway. And then he goes on and he goes on and on and on like this. Eventually he says we talk about the value of hard work, but we tell ourselves the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness. Obama shut down the coal mines or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance, the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. Now that is diametrically opposed to what he's saying now. This is sort of Trump, you know, blame the Chinese, blame Clinton, blame Obama, blame globalization, et cetera. And there's a lot of that in the book.
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Rory Stewart
Well, so let's just sit with it for a second. So what actually is your sense of his background? I mean, we've interviewed Angela Rayner, the British deputy Prime Minister, who comes from a very, very extreme example of deprivation.
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Alastair Campbell
I'd say it's on a level okay. At least. At least.
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Rory Stewart
Okay. And just to remind us, Nsantra Raver, that's, that's a mother who had serious learning difficulties, struggling to get food on.
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Alastair Campbell
The table, not having a bath for a week.
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Rory Stewart
Lots, lots of unemployment to different generations in the family, traveling families.
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Alastair Campbell
Ye I would say that as it comes over in the book and you know, query whether he's exaggerated. That has been said. I've got no idea of knowing. But what comes over the book is a level of dysfunction and violence. And you almost, I mean, you have to hand it to him, how he has become what he's become coming from this background. So just to go back to his name, he starts off with one name, James Donald. The Bowman name then goes. Because when his mum remarries, his dad is her second husband. The third husband, when she marries him, they change their name. So he becomes John David Hamill because she didn't want Donald. This is quite ironic given the importance of Donald in his life now. But Donald was the name of his real dad and she didn't want any reference to him at all.
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Rory Stewart
And Donald's the name of his real dad. That's quite interesting too. I don't know.
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Alastair Campbell
There we go. There we go. So Don Bowman, he disappears and gives him up for adoption. His real dad, he later forms a relationship with him, which is really interesting. And it sort of upsets the mum a bit. That's the second name. And then the third, what happens is that she becomes so troubled, so violent, so unpredictable.
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Rory Stewart
And she almost kills him in a car, doesn't she?
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Alastair Campbell
Almost kills herself. She almost kills him. So she tries to kill him, right. He goes into this complete stranger's house, sort of screaming, help me, help me. My mum's trying to kill me.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah.
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Alastair Campbell
And she calls the police. And she also calls what we.
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Rory Stewart
The stranger calls the police.
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Alastair Campbell
The stranger calls the place. Then what happens is Mama and papa is what he calls his grandparents. They basically take him over.
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Rory Stewart
Mamorith is the. Is the woman that he describes as having a Bible and whatever it is, 24 guns in the house. Right.
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Alastair Campbell
She carries a gun.
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Rory Stewart
Right.
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Alastair Campbell
She. She has shot people. The dad is a alcoholic. The grandfather's an alcoholic, I think. Eventually stops drinking. Quite violent again.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah.
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Alastair Campbell
There's a lot of violence in the book. There's one scene where he's describing being in the car with his mother, his sister and his grandmother. And the mother is driving while she's basically hitting the kids.
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Rory Stewart
Right.
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Alastair Campbell
Because of something that's done to certain. And then the mother, the grandmother is hitting her.
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Rory Stewart
Right.
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Alastair Campbell
So you have this sense of real violence. The other thing that's really interesting about the thing about when his mum tried to kill him in a car.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah.
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Alastair Campbell
And he got out and run off is that he then is very, very open about the fact that he lied in court to protect his mother. To protect his mother. And actually dotted through the book, there's quite a lot of, you know, I told this, I said this when it wasn't true. I lied about this, I lied about that. But it's a level of dysfunction that is. Yeah. I mean, you will certainly know people through Your constituency work. And, you know, I've met people who. But this is on a scale. And of course, what he says is this was not abnormal.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah.
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Alastair Campbell
There were worse off families, there were poorer families, there were more dysfunctional families. And actually, when he did have his settled time with his grandparents.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah.
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Alastair Campbell
And particularly the mama or the grandmother, he sort of. That's when he settled down a bit.
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Rory Stewart
Well, here's a couple of points that we can move on to here. One of them is to remind people at a moment where we're all obsessed with American growth. Mario Draghi has just written a European Union report. What can we learn from the us? All my friends who work in business and finance are pointing out that the European Union economy was the same size as the US economy 10 years ago. Now the US economy is 50% bigger that the US is a quarter of the world economy. It's got the most productive, innovative firms in the world. Its productivity is unbelievable. And yes, it's got this going on, I would argue much, much more of this type of extreme rural dysfunction and poverty than anything that we have in the United Kingdom.
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Alastair Campbell
And unfortunately, partly because of the scale.
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Rory Stewart
Part scale. Partly also, there's not a proper welfare state, there's not proper health provision. And that leads me on my second point, which is his mother is partly caught up in drugs and like many, many people in rural communities in the United States, caught up in opioids. And this matters again, because you know what Trump's doing on tariffs, he's talking about fentanyl, and fentanyl is one of these opioids. So that's a story. Maybe we can get into it a little bit, because this is maybe the most dramatic example. There's a wonderful, wonderful book on this whole subject which really brings these communities to light. It's, of course, this incredible book by Anne Case and the wonderful Scottish academic Angus Deaton, and Deaths of Despair. This book really looks at the way in which life expectancy is dropping in the most astonishing way. Health indicators are dropping in a way that just doesn't make any sense in the modern world because of this incredible combination, combination of unemployment, opioid crisis and hopelessness. Both the criminal conspiracy by the manufacturers and the sellers of these opioids.
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Alastair Campbell
The sector family.
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Rory Stewart
Yeah, exactly. And the doctors who work with them, but also the impact on these communities. And it doesn't happen in Britain. I mean, it's very interesting because that is to do with. And sometimes politics matters, and it really matters with things like an opioid crisis. Legislation is different in Britain. What doctors can do in different, what insurance does is different in Britain. The NHS is different in Britain. And all of that means that we don't have anything like this scale.
- [14:50]
Alastair Campbell
But I think part of the scale. So he comes from this part that's sort of known as Appalachia, which is sort of, you know, Georgia and Alabama in the south, right up as far as little bits of New York. And a big part of the industrial success story of America down the years, but then really badly hit by globalization and loads and loads of factories shutting down, factories moving in, then shutting down, jobs going to China. And the point he makes is that it became very, very, very difficult for working class people to find work. And the only way you could really find work is to get a college degree. And the education system wasn't working. So I think you're right that the American system did not lend itself to helping these people recover from these global shocks. I mean, the scale of the drug stuff is just, you know, the way he writes about it just, he just takes it for granted that everybody's pretty much at it. And by the way, by the end of it, she, I think now is 10 years sober, but she was on heroin for quite a while. The other thing that comes through, I'd love to know and to talk to him about his relationship with his understanding of addiction. He obviously had to live with it, but my sense is that he finds it. He talks at some point about, you know, I've read all these garbage books about addiction and I think even there he's got a little bit of, you know, it's a little bit of pull yourself together.
- [16:12]
Rory Stewart
To hear the full episode, just go to therestispolitics.com.