What Walz and Vance Get Wrong About Opportunity and Mobility
Over the last few days, Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz has repeatedly attacked his GOP opponent, J.D. Vance, for leaving home to attend Yale Law School:
“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale,” Walz said sarcastically at the rally…. Come on, that’s not what middle America is,” Walz continued.
The governor, in a recent interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, expanded on that point, saying, “None of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale, and none of them went on to be venture capitalists, or whatever….”
He made much the same point in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “I grew up in the small town of Butte, Nebraska, population 400. I had 24 kids in my high school class, And none of them went to Yale.”
There are many legitimate lines of attack against Vance, whom I am no fan of. But this isn’t one of them. There’s nothing wrong with leaving home in search of opportunity—including by attending an elite educational institution in another part of the country. America was built by people who “voted with their feet” for such opportunities, through both international migration and the internal kind. And such mobility doesn’t somehow become wrong when “hillbillies” do it. Ironically, among the speakers preceding Walz at the DNC was former President Bill Clinton, who grew up in a poor white family in Hope, Arkansas, and (like Vance) went on to attend Georgetown and Yale Law School. Does Walz mean to suggest Clinton should have stuck to his “hilbilly” origins and stayed in Arkansas?
I have to admit I take this kind of attack somewhat personally. I too went to Yale Law School, the first person in my family to attend college in the United States. My wife grew up in the quintessential working class city of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her parents (both public school teachers), and most of her other family members attended local colleges. But she chose to go to Dartmouth College, a more elite out-of-state institution that offered better opportunities. Doing that wasn’t wrong, and certainly wasn’t somehow a betrayal of her origins.
The real problem with Vance is not that he left home to go to Yale, but that he and Donald Trump support policies like severe
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