What do JD Vance and Dave Chappelle Have in Common?

The other day, somebody wrote to me that “Trump supporters all have an IQ or either 50 or 150.” The statement struck me as fundamentally correct; Dems may be loathe to admit it, but there are many fantastically smart people who support with full-throat a man whose own IQ is probably closer to the lower end of that spectrum than the higher.

JD Vance is one such person. Vance, as you know is the junior senator from Ohio and author of the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy, which catapulted Vance from unknown Yalie to literary superstar, the man who could translate the frustrations of the white, rural working class into high-minded prose libs could love.  

Vance has since turned his back on the audience for that book, telling Ross Douthat in an interview published in today’s New York Times:

I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand, but some people didn’t. And the more that I felt like, not an explainer and a defender, but part of what I thought was wrong about the liberal establishment, the more that I felt this need to go very strongly away from it.

I’m about to make a comparison that you might find absurd but stick with me: when Dave Chapelle fled his eponymous television show (I always wanted to use the word “eponymous” in a sentence and if you’re thinking that’s the primary reason I wrote this piece, you’re wrong. It’s only the secondary reason), people thought he’d gone nuts. Maybe, they thought, it was too much money, too much pressure, too much everything - prompting Chappelle to flee to South Africa while the show was at its height and, not incidentally, currently in production.

While shooting a new sketch about a Black pixie… The black pixie—played by Chappelle—wears blackface and tries to convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping, one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he wondered if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing them. “When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable,” says Chappelle. “As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f______ time out after this.” Because my head almost exploded.

For both men, continuously playing to the same audience that raised them to unimaginable heights began to feel false. The public, they felt, were taking the “wrong” message from their work. Both pin the blame on the same cause: people enjoying their work without taking the next step the work implies. For Vance, that meant white liberals unwilling to rethink basic assumptions about their liberalism. For Chapelle, it was a public willing to laugh at him about painful racial issues without considering their own culpability in perpetuating those issues.

There’s also a traditionally conservative streak in both men. For Vance, that obviously means becoming a Republican (he was also wooed by Democrats after the book’s release) and supporting the GOP agenda, such as it is. For Chappelle, it meant retreating from the media power centers of NY and Hollywood and buying a farm in rural Ohio less than an hour’s drive from where Hillbilly Elegy is set. It also means attacking the familiar conservative bogeymen, transsexuals, which he has done in special after special.

(I will take a moment to jokingly recognize the exclusionary term “bogeymen.” It really should be “bogeypeople.”)

To my mind, there’s also something disingenuous about both men. Vance, champion of the white working underclass, has now tied his fortunes to a man who spent a lifetime belittling and screwing over those with fewer resources than himself. For Chappelle, it means retreating to an increasingly defensive posture about his own treatment of a marginalized community.

Both have also faced intense backlash. In his interview with Douthat, Vance refers more than once to the people who “hate” him. Chappelle, too, has gone after his own haters, seemingly bewildered that anybody would object to his material after a lifetime of being called a genius. Ironically, both men have apparently fallen victim to the same criticisms they once leveled at their audiences: in pivoting to new directions, both seem to have failed (at least publicly) to heed their own advice about rethinking old positions, seeing blind spots, and recognizing that they have their own work to do.

Trump may very well select Vance as his running mate, although I doubt it, especially if Vance doesn’t quit wearing guyliner. If Trump does pick him, Vance will have completed his metamorphosis from populist explainer to populist exploiter. The policies that he has championed – raising wages from the bottom up and boosting American manufacturing – which Trump did nothing to achieve, have all been Biden priorities and Biden successes.

The problem with very smart people is that, because they often really are the smartest people in the room, they’re able to marshal arguments that wind up disguising emotional turmoil as principled positioning. For Chappelle, that meant turning his back on the people who worked on his show and the audience who loved it. For Vance, it means embracing somebody who doesn’t give a shit about the people Vance claims to care the most about.

Chappelle is certainly correct that people are not caricatures. We’re nuanced, contradictory, and maddening to others and, often, to ourselves. All of us have to figure out how to navigate our own hypocritical impulses. It's a tough thing to wrap your head around, so I’ll leave you with this Dave Chappelle quote regarding advice his grandmother one gave to him: “She told me to be truthful at all costs. Which is a tall order, but which was really good advice. Otherwise you’re going to run into one embarrassing situation after another.”