Next week we’ll have what looks to be the last debate between the two major party tickets in this Presidential election cycle: the Vice Presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. It’s easy to dismiss it but in this case it has some special interest, as both parties have nominated interesting running mates, to say the least.
Tim Walz, the Democrats’ Vice-Presidential nominee, can’t get over the fact that his direct opponent, Republican J.D. Vance, is an Ivy Leaguer. How could he be, coming from his Scots-Irish start? (I’ll bet he never asked that question about Bill Clinton, and he was a Scots-Irish politician to the core, including the womanising.) That in turn introduces another issue: why is it that the Democrats have skipped nominating Ivy Leaguers while the Republicans, supposedly the party of the ignorant and uneducated, have two on the ticket? It’s worth noting that the Democrats have done this two times in a row; Joe Biden was the first non-Ivy Leaguer President (Republican or Democrat, again including Bill Clinton) since Ronald Reagan.
I’ll get to that but Walz’ remarks–even being proud of his students never making the Ivy League when Vance did–remind me of something that happened very early in my time in my family business when I went to see a Midwestern distributor. We were driving down the road when I mentioned that I went to Texas A&M, the undergraduate school I picked in bypassing the Ivy League. (I got a lot of flak for that, where was Walz when I needed him?)
He cut me off in mid-sentence. “I went to the school of hard knocks,” and that was the end of that discussion. It never occurred to him that, in the early years of a very Midwestern Vulcan Iron Works and Warrington family, most of those who designed this durable piece of equipment had some kind of technical education. (That never occurred to some inside of Vulcan, either.) I always value people’s ideas no matter where they’re coming from but the concept of “the less education the better” has really grated and, ultimately, cost my family a lot of money.
I’ve never been an advocate of the idea that those who “run the show” in our country should only come from one small set of schools. But why has this concept been abandoned –at least at the top–by the Democrats first, supposedly the party of the college educated? I think there are two reasons for this.
The first is that the Democrats really don’t need a leader to run the show. Biden and Harris are effectively fronts for what their moneyed masters tell them to do. The United States has become like a church that’s run by the “big bucks” and the last thing same big bucks need is a strong leader who might turn on them. That’s created many of the tensions that have made this race a contest; the Democrat party, supposedly the party of unified intersectionality, has to deal with Muslim (and their deluded allies) vs. Jew, trade union vs. environmentalists, immigrant vs. native born (and many immigrants who went through the system.) The Republicans continue to nominate Ivy Leaguers because they are still the party of the aspirational, who think that they can move up too. In that respect J.D. Vance, the product of (by his own admission) a highly regressive culture, is the perfect representation of this ethic.
The second is that, with the above step in place, they realise they need to try to connect with the people. Joe Biden is the representative of this, with his “kitchen table” appeal. This explains why it took the Democrats so long (and a disastrous debate to push them to a decision) to ditch Biden. Harris, in spite of her mantra that she was raised in the middle class, isn’t quite as convincing in this role. Walz is another ball game altogether; he is the representative of what I call Midwestern resentment.
I’ve spent a good deal of time with Scots-Irish resentment, as I did in my piece Elizabeth Warren and the Resentful Scots-Irish. The Democrats never connected with that, which is why Warren represents Massachusetts and not Oklahoma (and can’t get past first base to become President.) But Walz is likewise a product of a culture with its own form of resentment, which principally comes out in trade unions (like the UAW) and other ways. I can remember sitting in meetings with our major foundries in Ohio and other places and looking around the room to see the “Florida retirement look” staring back at me.
Scots-Irish and German-English cultures are two which mix like oil and water in the Midwest. Walz cannot believe that the former could produce anyone of worth, and that’s an attitude that’s more common that anyone might care to admit. The Vance-Walz debate will be an exhibit of that on stage, and I am sure that Walz thinks he will romp to victory over someone he thinks just fell off of the turnip truck.
But he needs to be careful. True to his origins, Vance has a “good jaw.” If he can get past the irritating habit of Republican politicians to simply regurgitate talking points and speak directly to the suffering that the inept policies of the current administration have wrought on the people, Walz–and everyone else–will discover why Vance made the Ivy League and he did not.
Positive Infinity 
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