Trauma was the nominal subject of Vance’s gauzy 2016 memoir about bootstrapping his way out of an Ohio steel town, published before he famously became radicalized — reversing himself on Trump and auditioning for the position of new standard-bearer on the fascist right. And yet what links Vance the memoirist and Vance the politician is a continuous (if escalating) policy of nearly absolute nonconfrontation with what made him who he is — the nature of the trauma that he pantomimes exploring in his book. It’s quite the irony for a man elevated to fame as a soul-baring autobiographer. This also links him to Trump, the least introspective person who ever lived, and a politician with whom Vance shares a profound contempt toward the people for whom he imagines himself the spokesperson. Vance seems not to know that the feeling he conveys for the working-class world out of which he sprang is scorn. As his book communicates at great length, he remains a cipher to himself, and, like Trump, Vance’s transgressions clearly do some kind of libidinal work for him, expressing a need — a psychic void — that cannot be satisfied.

Normally, I would hesitate to psychologize to this degree. But Vance is himself the king of pop psychologists, and his whole self-presentation is built on the notions of willpower and self-discipline that are the heart of the pop-psych and self-help genres. There is no way to engage the problem he represents while refraining from entering this field. The mechanism of Vance’s interior contradiction is important to understand — not to argue the case against him, for which sufficient evidence was long ago accumulated, but to extract some meaning about the forces that animate and enable his ideology.

We are not without resources for such an approach. James Baldwin gets him almost dead to rights in The Fire Next Time, twenty-one years before Vance was born:

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents — or, anyway, mothers — know about their children, and that they often regard white Americans that way. . . . One felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he.