The American Exceptionalism That Made Usha Vance and Me

My mother’s name is Usha, and for years, when I told non-South Asian people her name, I’d squint, trying to picture the spelling. But these days, it clicks immediately: Usha, like Usha Chilukuri Vance, the Second Lady of the United States. When people make the connection, I want to add that my family and I have nothing in common with the “Other Usha," the lawyer-turned-enigmatic political wife who stands by her man—the vice president—as he denigrates immigrants and women alike.

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But, in fact, I share a great deal with the Other Usha, whose life is, in some ways, a doppelganger of mine. We both come from academically-oriented Indian American families; our paternal grandfathers were both scientist-professors, as are our fathers, who are both named Krish. We are both Yale-educated, ambitious millennial women: she graduated from Yale Law School the same year I finished undergrad; if I ever brushed past Vance on campus, we would not have taken note of one another—two among many hardworking desi women, living the immigrant dream, hoping to have it all.

Our shared touchstones might seem superficial, but as the country increasingly seems split into two separate Americas, each one unable to speak to the other, I’ve found myself obsessing over the things I, a progressive, have in common with Vance and her conservative ilk. Because our similarities reveal an uncomfortable truth: The country that formed Usha Vance and her husband also formed me, and its mythologies are also mine.

Specifically, Vance embodies twin figures in the American imagination of meritocracy: the high-achieving child of immigrants, and the high-achieving woman—both near-mythic creatures who appear to prove that anyone can make it here, if they work hard enough, and lean in far enough. For many years, both liberal and conservative Americans celebrated these “bootstrapper” characters. When I was younger, I bought into this story of America, too; I believed that my second-generation work ethic and fierce feminist ambition could grant me access to the American dream.

As the leftist writer Naomi Klein has written about her own right-wing doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, we all have twins on the other side of the aisle. I consider Vance my mirror image—a crucial reminder that liberal and conservative America share a great deal. It may be uncomfortable for Democrats to admit what they have in common with their right-wing rivals, but it is worth trying to see ourselves in the Other Side’s world. Only then can we finally abandon the flawed mythologies that brought us to this place.

Read More: Who Is Usha Vance, J.D. Vance’s Wife?

Since she is the child of immigrants, Vance’s ascent into the highest echelons of American society—Yale, the Supreme Court, the inauguration stage, and perhaps, one day, the East Wing of the White House—might be read as confirmation that America is a true land of opportunity: If you work hard, you can make it here, identity be damned. Indeed, some political observers spun this story about her last year, when J.D. Vance was named the Republican vice-presidential nominee: an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled “J.D. Vance and the Indian-American Dream” extolled Vance as an example of “breathtaking” achievements of Indian Americans; a piece in The Times of India declared, “Usha is living her parents’ American dream.”

I recognize myself in this story. Many Indian Americans cast our community’s collective success as affirmation of American meritocracy. In doing so, we pit ourselves against other minorities who conservatives would have us believe are asking for handouts—affirmative action, asylum. This is a dishonest story of our diaspora: as the journalist Arun Venugopal has written in The Atlantic, the Indian American diaspora was formed through complex feats of “social engineering.” Like many desis whose families arrived in the U.S. after 1965, Vance and I are both dominant-caste Hindus, children of intellectually elite Indians—yes, our parents worked hard to get here and worked hard once they arrived, but we were also beneficiaries of generations of privilege well before we were admitted to the ranks of the American cultural elite.

This more precise explanation of Indian America helps answer the questions I heard many liberals ask when Usha Vance shot into the national conversation last summer: “How did this daughter of immigrants justify her husband spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets?” “Didn’t she instinctively sympathize with other newcomers to America?” “Surely she was secretly a liberal”—she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016—"just keeping her opinions to herself?” (People asked similar questions of pro-choice immigrant Melania Trump.)

But those questions feel naïve. A standard-issue conservative peeks through Vance’s demureness: In 2024, she described her parents’ immigration story to Fox and Friends, responding delicately to a question from anchor Ainsley Earhardt about how the Vances each exemplify distinct aspects of the American dream—JD climbing the class ladder; Usha the immigrant one. Vance described her parents as coming “from a different country”—never saying “India”—arriving “legally” and “with this intention of belonging.” It was the classic, selective story many Indian Americans have learned to tell about ourselves, and which we in turn train Americans to tell about us: We are the model minorities who promise to put our heads down and assimilate; others are the “bad” kind.

Vance isn’t just an example of the immigrant dream. Just a few years ago, she exemplified the 2010s Sheryl Sandbergian dream: the woman who leaned into her career at all the right moments. When she became a mother, she did not take “her foot off the gas pedal,” as Sandberg warned women not to do: instead, Vance began clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts seven weeks after giving birth. The Vances were living apart at the time, so J.D.Vance—a man who, in October 2024, made the blunder of saying “my wife has three children”—did not step in as the primary caregiver. Even after resigning from her law firm in 2024 to become a full-time political wife, she remained conspicuously brainy, toting around The Iliad on the campaign trail and leaving her Goodreads page public. The charm offensive worked: the media fawned over her reading diet, her pink cashmere inauguration coat, her elegant gray hair. The knock-on effect is that Vance—who initially said she would stay out of the limelight on the campaign trail before taking on a more vocal role after J.D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” among other things—helps soften her husband’s image. This is where the American meritocracy too often leads women: to the top of corporate and political ladders, where we legitimize terrible people—often men.

Read More: The Reinvention of J.D. Vance

I recognize this version of Vance, too, because I am a variation on the theme: an ambitious millennial woman, raised to take herself seriously. Like some millennial women, I once considered the feminist battle generally won; our foremothers had gotten us the vote, our own credit cards, IUDs, all so we could be less hung up on our own womanhood. This attitude led me, at times, to a dangerously flexible politics, not unlike Vance’s. While she was clerking for conservative judges Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, I was working for a man whose politics sometimes gave me pause. I took the job because it seemed prestigious, and because, like many Ivy Leaguers, I found power magnetic. In reality, I, like Vance, was settling into a world in which I could afford to treat political differences as superficial. I leaned in—right into complacency.

Vance’s life proves that leaning in makes for a Pyrrhic feminist victory when not accompanied by substantive work on behalf of all women. Indeed, Vance is now actively facilitating a political agenda that will make it nearly impossible for people, including and especially working parents, to have it all, as she once did: Vance defended her husband after he mocked people without children, claiming that he was simply saying it was “hard to be a parent in this country,” never mind that he has called universal day care “class war against normal people.” Vance is a case study in what feminism of the Lean In era got wrong about the American dream: It promised access to the elite, to meritocracy. It has only delivered for a select few.

Usha Vance scares and fascinates so many liberals, especially women and Indian Americans. How did she transform from one of us into one of them?

But on closer inspection, there may not have been much of a transformation at all. So-called “model minorities” have a history of xenophobia, and individualistic, achievement-oriented women often teeter dangerously close to justifying societal misogyny. And the proximity between these worldviews matters, because many of us—including liberals—too easily accept the myths of American exceptionalism.

If we want to challenge those people, we need to confront ourselves in the mirror first.