All hail JD Vance!

The US vice-president delivered a richly-deserved rebuke to tin-eared global leaders

Every now and then a political speech will be delivered that comes eventually to be looked upon as seminal. Invariably these speeches achieve such status not because they managed to unite everyone in agreement at the time, but because they challenged the prevailing establishment orthodoxy and showed the speaker to be prescient in identifying an incipient societal shift that the ruling elites had failed to spot (or, more likely, tried their damnedest to resist).

Contingent upon how things play out over the next few years, US vice-president JD Vance’s straight-from-the-shoulder address last week to international movers and shakers at the Munich security conference may well, for these very reasons, end up assuming a prominent place in the history books.

Vance himself has a compelling backstory. The product of a broken home, his upbringing was marked by impoverishment and violence. He enlisted in the military, serving in a non-combat role in Iraq, before graduating from law school and then dabbling in the world of finance. His 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a film.

Vance’s politics are the product of his working-class roots and Catholic faith. He has written and spoken, in a way that few political leaders can, of the sense of alienation and abandonment felt by working-class communities buffeted by the unforgiving winds of globalisation.

If he were British, Vance might well be a leading light in Blue Labour: indeed, he sent a copy of Hillbilly Elegy to the group’s founder, Maurice Glasman, and arranged for him to attend his inauguration in January. In return, Glasman has spoken approvingly of the vice-president.