Why Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance is worth listening to - William Cooper

Many people around the world won’t agree with some of Vance’s positions. But everyone should read his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy.

The book helps explain the Trump phenomenon - something people, of all political persuasions, often misunderstand.

Vance writes about how many people in the American heartland, states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, are angry. Much of this anger comes from globalisation, which created the international marketplace that allowed companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google to become trillion-dollar behemoths, and their largest shareholders to get really rich. Google’s founders, for example, are worth tens of billions of dollars.

But it also caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs. These are the people in towns like the one in Ohio that Vance grew up in.

Traditionally American-made products, like steel and electronics, are now produced overseas, in China and elsewhere, and imported at cheap prices. While this new system lowered prices for consumers generally, it also shattered vulnerable American families, bankrupted successful small businesses, and hollowed out proud communities.

These losses generate bitter resentment toward government elites - the architects of globalisation - especially on the right within the white working class. As Vance explains in the book: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day”.

Vance continued: “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: it’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”

This is the soil from which Donald Trump rose.

The wily opportunist and billionaire from New York fanned these flames during his 2016 presidential campaign.

“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” Trump said to cheering fans on the trail.

“We have a lot to overcome in our country,” he said at another campaign rally, “especially the fact that our jobs are being taken away from us and going to other places…In this new future,” with Trump at the helm, “millions of workers on the sidelines will return to the workforce.”

Trump’s 2016 electoral strategy of inflaming bitterness about America’s role in the global economic system worked. He won by promising to change things back to the way they were before, to “make America great again.”

Monday’s choice of Vance shows that this message still resonates with millions of Americans. And even those who oppose Trump should make the effort to understand why so many support him.

William Cooper is the author of the new book How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.