Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance are uniting to introduce legislation announced Thursday to reduce the risks of large bank failures.
The Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act would propose harsher penalties for failed bank executives, which serves as a bipartisan response to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in early March, according to Warren’s office. The proposed legislation would require the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to recover some or all of executive payments from the three years prior to their bank’s failure, covering larger banks with more than $10 billion in assets.
Liz Warren, JD Vance join forces to punish execs of failed banks
It is not an accident that these two are leading the charge on this. Elizabeth Warren and J.D. Vance are, IMHO, the two most vociferous Scots-Irish populists on Capitol Hill. They’re on opposite ends of the political spectrum, to be sure, but ideology has never superseded resentment-based populism in Scots-Irish culture, it just took a catastrophe to bring it back into fashion. In that respect Warren and Vance are the heirs of people like Wright Patman, Carter Glass and Huey Long.
I’ve commented on this before. First, Elizabeth Warren:
Warren’s ancestors harboured a great deal of resentment towards those above them and shaped a great deal of public policy as a consequence of that resentment. That’s what it’s going to take to get the kinds of policies passed the Democratic Socialists want, not the reality-obscuring intersectionality that dominates leftist rhetoric. Whether they’re ready to appeal to a mentality that resents Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as much as it resents the Kochs remains to be seen. Whether the Democrats are ready to embrace someone like Elizabeth Warren also remains to be seen.
Elizabeth Warren and the Resentful Scots-Irish
And J.D. Vance:
But he’s also right about the oligarchic nature of American elites and their idea of staying in power. (Just check out our Gini coefficient…) So how to square the two? A simple approach would be to take a class-based approach.
JD Vance Can’t Handle the Truth. Or Can He?
If Elizabeth Warren–and others on the left–can get past the “faculty lounge” issues that dominate their discussion, and J.D. Vance–and others on the right–can get past the Reaganite “upward mobility” issues that dominate their memory, our politics will be upended once again by those notorious interlopers of our history, the Scots-Irish.
Positive Infinity 
Wow, it’s wildly inaccurate, unfair, and irresponsible to call millions of American citizens “interlopers” based on their ethnic background. Wikipedia lists 20 different US Presidents with Scots-Irish ancestors, so it’s not exactly like they are aliens to US history. More to the point their politics range from Jackson to Grant to Wilson to Teddy Roosevelt to Nixon to Carter to both Bushes to Clinton to Obama. Any one who thinks those leaders share some ethnic political orientation is missing the huge range of values and policies those Presidents embraced. It goes the other way too. If there were no Scots-Irish there would still be massive American antipathy for bankers who profit before creating huge losses for taxpayers. It’s not like English, Japanese, or Mexican taxpayers love bank failures.
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Given the fact that I have lived in Appalachia most of my adult life and have numerous Scots-Irish ancestors (my mother was from Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s state) I think I can speak with some authority–and impunity–on this subject.
All that shows is that they’re good politicians, which is undeniable. And variations in politics is part of the point of this post: the two protagonists are from opposite sides of the aisle in an age when cooperation of this kind is deeply unfashionable.
If you had read my piece on Claude Reese and the real estate deal he brokered that brought a major Jewish presence into Palm Beach, you would understand what I am talking about. To the present, J.D. Vance has already joined forced with Sherrod Brown re the East Palestine rail crash, and now he’s working with Elizabeth Warren. Good or bad, if that’s not interloping, I don’t know what is.
Most cultures express discontent in collectivistic/ideological ways. Traditionally Scots-Irish culture did neither. It was driven by resentment: “They got it/I don’t/It ain’t right” mentality. That’s how we got Glass-Stegall and high marginal tax rates; none of them would have passed without support from Southern legislators.
If we would face the real nature of Scots-Irish culture, we could show that any kind of “white supremacy” or “white privilege” is factually false. To do so would be the beginning of the end of both CRT and white supremacy, and perhaps then we could turn to our most pressing problems of survival.
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I appreciate that you didn’t delete my comment but offered a thoughtful response. It’s refreshing in 2023 to find somewhere online where sensitive topics around ethnicity can be discussed openly. So thanks.
And I recognize that most political discourse these days comes down to appeals to speaker authenticity and credibility, but for a moment let’s set aside Aristotelian ethos for logos to get down to ideas.
I would say it seems like you have a theory of Scots-Irish people and their culture, and you use that theory to explain the politics and behavior of current people of Scots-Irish descent. If I recall, Collin Woodard’s _American Nations_ characterizes the Scots-Irish as having a do it yourself honor culture that fears outside meddling from big central governments and is individualistic, pretty much the American inverse of Puritan communitarianism. I’m not sure exactly what your image of Scots-Irish culture is, but I’m guessing that it’s along those lines and includes resentment of wealth. You hold that these cultural attitudes are deeper than party affiliation and can be expressed in different ways across time and party. But you still seem to think that there’s something invariant about Scots-Irish culture with explanatory power today. If you thought that Scots-Irish ethnicity/culture is a meaningless construct, I can’t imagine you’d be writing about it.
My point is that there aren’t deep Scots-Irish political invariances across Scots-Irish US Presidents. McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, Obama–these are not small government individualists especially Wilson and LBJ. Grant, Truman, and Nixon aren’t really either, and I don’t really know what some of the Gilded Age guys were about. As for populist resentment, Jackson definitely fits the bill. Polk was a Jackson disciple from TN, but he ended up becoming a low land slave plantation owner who like Buchanan was sympathetic to Big Slavery (contra the Appalachians). Grant was a major figure behind Reconstruction so the opposite of a populist. And he saved Robert E. Lee’s life by threatening to resign if Andrew Johnson tried him for treason, so I would say Grant was pretty far from resentment too. Again I’m weak on what some of the Gilded Age Presidents were up to, but McKinley was an Ohio moderate on capital and labor. T. Roosevelt was an individualist who took down trusts, but he was a big believer in active central government, and in his wealth and enormous confidence, he never struck me as some kind of hard scrabble populist full of resentment. Taft was a Skull and Bones guy who sided with Big Business and so were the Bushes–definitely not populists resenters. Wilson’s interesting because he went after trusts and did have more than a little Southern striver in him, but he was (a) an academic utopian (b) coming out of NJ when it was unbelievably corrupt and enough to make anyone resentful and (c) coming out of Princeton, which was founded by Scots-Irish but by then a rich gentleman’s finishing school. I’ll give you Wilson but on the condition that his resentment has more elements than just ethnicity. And I’ll also grant you LBJ and especially Nixon as members of camp resentment, but with the understanding that LBJ unlike Wilson and Nixon was unwilling to kick African-Americans around to secure lower-class whites economically or politically. I don’t really know what’s in Jimmy Carter’s heart. That dude was to the left economically, but he seems like a pretty forgiving guy in a period where the underclass hadn’t yet realized that it was about to be screwed. And again the Bushes are absolutely not made of populist resentment. Clinton maybe has a little bit of that, but mostly he seems like a proud meritocrat who triangulated the white working class under the bus on his way to cocktails at Martha’s Vineyard with Obama (actually I think that they probably resent each other more than the rich or anyone else).
In other words, Scots-Irish ethnicity is a pretty bad predictor of politics at the party level but also deeply on the sorts of things that Scots-Irish ethnicity is supposed to predict. One can find a bunch of examples to support Scots-Irish stereotypes, but we’re both better at statistics than to fall for that. I suppose one might object by saying that leaders like Teddy Roosevelt and the Bushes aren’t really Scots-Irish, but to my ear, that talk sounds very Old South as if one is trying to break ethnicity down into absurd sub-divisions in order to excuse a favorite servant (“one of the good ones, only an octoroon.”) It’s better to say that there are a huge range of factors that go into a leader’s politics. Ethnicity might be one, but the demands and circumstances of the moment play a much bigger role.
Interlope means to “traffic without a license” or “to meddle where one doesn’t belong.” Scots-Irish American citizens are Americans! They have every political and economic right including mediating deals between different parties, selling real estate, etc. Rich white people in Palm Beach or Beacon Hill or wherever don’t own the country, don’t you agree?
I agree with you that CRT in trying to build a racial hierarchy with bad rich white oppressors at the bottom misses class, ethnic, and regional divisions in white America. But I get the feeling that you’ve been into Scots-Irish analysis for longer than CRT has around. I don’t know why that is, but I get how moving from Palm Beach to Appalachia might be eye opening. (I’ve lived across the US too in the North, South, and West.)
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My mother introduced me to Grady McWhiney’s “Celtic South” hypothesis in 1980. She was keenly aware of some of the deficiencies in the culture. It’s the only rational explanation for a lot of what goes on in these parts. It also sends to the bottom a lot of self-serving Southern white supremacy BS, a fact which few people connect the dots about when discussing McWhiney. A people group which has made some of the claims this one has wouldn’t have left a region in poverty and emigration (black and white) for a century. Probably the best widely available expression of his idea is Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
There are several Presidents that I don’t see as Scots-Irish. Topping the list are the Bushes, even though they migrated to Texas. Prescott Bush (G.H.W.’s father) was a Senator from Connecticut. The Roosevelts are in the same boat. I doubt that McKinley or Taft were either, although Ohio is complicated (they did sent J.D. Vance to the Senate.)
Bill Clinton was the quintessential Scots-Irish politician: charming, mendacious, sexually profligate and utterly unprincipled. When Hillarycare and the 1994 election nearly sent him to the bottom, he turned a volte-face and we got welfare reform and trashed feminism. He damaged his own party in ways that are only now being appreciated.
I still think it’s wild that a cracker like Claude Reese could deal with two opposing groups of (mostly) Northerners and, in a sense, beat both at their own game. And Reese was successful for many years; it’s only been in the last ten years that his firm has closed for good.
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There are a lot of people of Scots-Irish ancestry who don’t fit the stereotype. George H.W. Bush personally registered the family in the East Tennessee Historical Society’s listing of first families of TN. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/bush-s-roots-traced-to-antrim-1.1121193 Granted the Bushes have many Yankee roots (although they made their money in Ohio), but that’s how it works over time–people of Scots-Irish ancestry intermarried with a bunch of other groups.
Consider for a second who the Scotch-Irish were. They weren’t really a nationality or a race. They were a sub-group of white Brits, a folkway, living on the violent borderlands between England and Scotland who were mostly lower class Protestants who then moved to Northern Ireland. Because they didn’t get much support from London, and they weren’t on great land, they developed an individualistic culture with a lot of livestock herders. Then in the 1700’s, i.e. hundreds and hundreds of years ago they moved to America. A lot of them moved to Appalachia, but many didn’t. Over time, they spread out over the country. Some extended into Arkansas and Texas. Some went North. And they intermarried. Some got rich. Almost all of them left herding. And lately, a big chunk of them left Protestantism. One of them got elected President and tried to implement socialized medicine, then mixed up his politics based on the circumstances of the time, and sent his daughter to Stanford.
Appalachia at the same time was changing. A ton of non-Scots-Irish people moved in over time and picked up the accent. (I have a branch of my family in western NC who are super leave-us-alone-individualists politically but are heavily German and Puritan by ancestry.) They all got stomped during the Civil War despite not being that loyal to the Confederacy or in many cases opposed. Did the people of Appalachia have some bad instincts on economic development? Probably. But they also didn’t have good farmland when that mattered in the 19th century. And they didn’t get electricity until the TVA came along. And guess what, thanks to TVA and being net beneficiaries of government spending, Appalachians are still individualists who don’t like central government… except for TVA, Social Security, Medicare, and state support for East TN car factories. Times change. People change.
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So what did they become? Certainly not Roman Catholics. I got into another food fight with a commenter years ago who told me that the Scots-Irish are predominantly Presbyterian. That simply isn’t true, not in this part of the country at least.
I probably know more about that than you do. But Arkansas at least was congenial territory for those who liked mountain surroundings, esp. in the northern and western parts of the state.
Southern congressmen and senators routinely voted for this kind of thing. I always felt that this culture, under the individualism, had a socialistic streak to it, but it never expressed that in terms of left-wing politics. A friend of mine who became a Catholic priest said that the socialists who came to the South were atheists, and the locals didn’t take to that. (My mother ditched an English boyfriend for that reason.) That’s certainly a large part of the explanation, but the aversion to classical ideological socialism is an important distinctive of Scots-Irish politics that has frustrated the left in this country for many years.
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The ex-Protestants became unaffiliated secular nones like everyone else. I think I saw somewhere that even Kentucky is over 20% secular now.
I remember how in my grandparents’ small town twenty years ago there were still all these minor snobberies and jokes between the Methodists and the Baptists or whoever. But my kids aren’t going to be judged like that. I mean even today if you roll into Google, no one’s going to know what the mainline is or Scots-Irish or your golf handicap or whatever. You’ll be judged based on where you went to college, can you claim victimhood, (surreptitiously) the average credit score of your followers on Twitter, how much organic food you ate last weekend, where you stay in Vegas, etc.
I’m not trying to pound you on a bunch of details about Arkansas. Sorry, if it came across that way. So let’s change gears and pick another ethnicity. One could tell a story about Italian-Americans that’s defined by a psychological prototype of working-class goombah’s who are Catholic, love Frank Sinatra and spaghetti, live in NY or NJ, and are prone to violence. There would be some truth there, but the second one crosses into saying that’s the essence of Italian-Americans, that essence is what explains how they operate, then I hold that’s when one crosses into the form of thinking that underlies racism of the CRT or KKK variety. Italian-American essentialism isn’t as historically ugly or damaging as anti-black racism, but it’s still snobbish at best and has had some nasty moments. I’m partly Italian-American, that’s why I’ve picked one of my ethnicities as an example. Personally, I’m not crazy bothered by anti-Italian prejudice but I don’t love it either. There’s always going to be that middle class Italian-American kid in California who likes surfing and doesn’t speak Italian. The same is true for everyone else. I’m guessing you’re not thrilled when the Chinese or Taliban say Americans are all the same, explicable by a handful of traits. That’s why I’m pounding my drum on this. Let’s move beyond essentialism. As you wisely say, we have more pressing problems of survival.
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The transformation from the “booze belt” to the “Bible belt” was one of the unnoticed epics of American history. The church (loosely defined) has been a civilising influence in Scots-Irish culture, something that none other than J.D. Vance noted in Hillbilly Elegy. Reversion to the former state will prove disastrous, especially when the opioid of choice these days has changed from alcohol to fentanyl.
One reason why the Scots-Irish are good politicians is that they have, to use their expression, a “good jaw,” and this recent post is an example of that.
Maybe a little Italian pride is in order here.
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Hey, thanks. But was trying to use my own group to argue against essentialism.
Italian culture is pretty amazing. But it’s not like I take indirect credit for the Sistine Chapel.
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