The Moment I Saw Through Vance: Housing, Talking Points, and the Great Man Myth

I remember the moment when I saw through J.D. Vance. It was during the V.P. debate.

He said, “You have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

Millions of immigrants are not the reason housing is unaffordable.

What Vance is Right About

First, I want to take Vance’s argument at face value.

“It’s just simple supply and demand,” Vance has often said when continuing this point.

When there’s more demand to live somewhere, people compete for homes. That competition increases the price.

There is research to defend his point. High levels of immigration increase housing costs in the areas where people immigrate.

He’s right that immigration puts a strain on our system. That’s true for housing, healthcare, and schooling.

These legit concerns are not what he says here.

To Blame The Housing Crisis on Immigrants is Just a Talking Point

Vance has chosen, repeatedly, to take one factor that contributes to the problem and make it seem like it’s the bulk of the whole problem.

He does not talk about the bigger factors. He never mentions that zoning regulations make it illegal to build apartments, duplexes, or even modest multi-family homes in most parts of most U.S. cities. He does not talk about how expensive it is to build.

I use these two factors because they do not require government spending. They are, I would think, something Republicans would support.

In the debate, he did mention that we need to build more homes. But he said that the U.S. should sell federal lands to do so. This ignores that most people want to live where there are jobs, schools, and things to do, not on cheap land far from everything.

I knew then that he was not serious about solving problems. He was trying to get across his anti-immigrant talking point.

After all, if it were about housing costs, school resources, or healthcare costs, he would talk about improving those issues.

If it were about housing, schools, and healthcare, why did they send $29B to ICE instead of to housing, schools, and healthcare?

When Politics Gets Messy, I Turn to What I Know

Ask me about Mamdani, and you won’t hear my thoughts on free childcare. I don’t have many. I will likely steer the conversation to how he can make the buses faster, without Albany. I look at what politicians have to say on what I understand: climate, transportation, housing. (Needless to say, Vance didn’t even attempt to give a clear argument on climate or transportation, so I heard him out on housing.)

There is a George Orwell line from 1984 going around right now, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I’ve written for years about how Orwell inspired me to examine propaganda. I thought of Orwell during Vance’s press conference after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good. He said that her actions were “an act of domestic terrorism.” The phrase reminded me of my very first newsletter from 2022 on the ladder of abstraction.

I found myself with the same reaction watching the press conference as I did during the debate. I thought, “Well, that’s obviously a bad-faith argument.”

Much of Politics We Can’t See

It is spliced and spun. The pundits ring in our ears as they establish the talking points before we get a chance to think for ourselves.

I often find myself as confused as anybody. To make sense of it, I turn to what I know.

I use a politician’s ideas around transportation as my second set of eyes and ears.

This is Not About Vance or Trump

I wrote about Vance today because his recent press conference showed a more obvious version of what I saw in the VP debate in 2024.

I saw that he’s willing to dig his nails into a certain view by drawing a logical argument from a starting point that’s at best, narrow, and at worst, pure misinformation.

I also wanted to write about Vance and not Trump, because I’ve been thinking a lot about a quote from a book I read last year.

In City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and The Making of Modern New York, Mason B. Williams writes, “Historians have long since debunked the old ‘great man’ theory of political development.” He continues, “Politicians make decisions that matter, and they do so by responding to forces and constraints—ideas, ideologies, cultures, contending parties and interest groups, social movements, institutional structures—which are themselves of interest.”

He makes clear that although the book is about FDR and LaGuardia, it’s the story about everyone.

This idea of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is easy to dismiss. Yet, I think there is a key truth to it that Trump’s critics miss.

When Trump is gone, the key players like Vance and Miller will be here. The white supremacist ideology on full display today is not going anywhere. The institutions, ranging from ICE to the Heritage Foundation, both here long before Trump, will continue. (ICE, I hope, will be erased into oblivion shortly after Trump’s exit.)

To me, these other players and factors are more important to examine. Yet we’re conditioned by the “great man” theory of history to ignore them and focus on the leader.