An Open Letter to JD Vance

Dear Senator Vance:

As Americans celebrate a unique national holiday, the origins of which remind us that our democracy is an experiment in ordered liberty “under God,” let me wish you and your family a happy and holy Thanksgiving.

You will soon take the oath of office as vice president of the United States. Several of your predecessors took a dim view of the vice presidency, as you surely know. The first vice president, John Adams, called it the “most insignificant office” ever devised by the mind of man. The somewhat saltier John Nance Garner is often quoted as describing it as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” (a bowdlerized version, I suspect, of what Cactus Jack actually said). Still, Adams noted, as vice president he was a “nothing” who might become “everything.” And given that the president-elect is seventy-eight and disinclined to dietary asceticism, you, too, may be “everything” within the next four years.

The thought of your being president first occurred to me eight years ago when I read your admirable book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. There, you displayed an insight and compassion that I thought would make you a fine public servant, if you chose that vocational path. And I use the word “vocational” deliberately because, in your memoir, you seemed a man who wanted to live purposefully and who understood that democratic self-governance is only possible when citizens possess the virtues that make living freedom nobly possible. For the “crisis” of your book’s subtitle struck me—as I think it struck you then—as a virtue-deficit crisis, in which living freedom self-destructively had led to personal and communal dysfunction.   

In recent years, however, much of your public rhetoric has been in sharp contrast to the themes and tone you struck in Hillbilly Elegy. At a time when our country badly needed a summons to live up to its highest aspirations, you, like so many others seeking public office, appealed to our baser instincts. And if I may speak candidly, I think you are far too intelligent to be yet another member of the Snark Squad.  

You are better than that. And the Catholic faith you take seriously calls you—and calls all Catholics in this troubled America—to be better than that. If our country is to experience a new birth of freedom rightly understood, it will be in part because our leaders remind us of what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature,” rather than salting the wounds of our animosities.

So I hope that what theologians, with respect to Church leadership, call the “grace of office” will shape your public leadership in the vice presidency.   

I would also like to ask you, as one Catholic and one patriot to another, to rethink your position on the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine.

It is unworthy of a serious American public official to say that he or she really doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. Why? Because crass indifference to injustice and suffering is ignoble. And because what happens in Ukraine is directly related to our national security and to world peace.

By formation and conviction, Vladimir Putin is a Chekist: a pathological autocrat whose warped worldview and homicidal treatment of political opponents were formed in the moral cesspool of the Soviet Union’s security services. He has openly declared his intention to reverse history’s verdict on the Soviet system. He is conducting a genocidal war in Ukraine to further that ambition. Like the aggressors of the 1930s, he will not stop until he is stopped.

So please take the time before your inauguration to meet with two men to discuss these matters. The first is a fellow Catholic, John J. Sullivan, whose memoir of his service as ambassador to Russia, Midnight in Moscow, includes both a penetrating portrait of Putin and sound policy recommendations. The second is Vladimir Kara-Murza, rescued from Putin’s clutches this past August in the prisoner exchange negotiated by the U.S. and German governments. Kara-Murza is the successor to Boris Nemtsov, murdered outside the Kremlin, and Alexei Navalny, murdered in an Arctic labor camp, as the leading voice of opposition to the Putin regime. He has survived two attempts to murder him by poison; he is a devout Christian; he is a man of remarkable courage, steady nerves, and sound judgment. 

These men are not advocates of “endless wars.” But they know that Ukraine is fighting for all of us and that if Ukraine loses, so do we—as does the world. 

Count on my prayers, as I hope to count on yours.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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Image by Gage Skidmore, from Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.