J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s new 2024 presidential nominee, wasn’t chosen for his legislative ability. He is a senator from Ohio, and it’s been less than two years since he was elected to his first political office. What Vance does have, apart from his extreme MAGA talking points, is his clear loyalty to Trump and the Republican Party. The former president’s love for blue eyeshas the name recognition and humorous accessibility to speak to mainstream media that comes from years of presenting himself as a voice for white working-class grievances, and his profile comes from his best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was made into a Netflix film in 2020 by director Ron Howard.
When the book, subtitled “A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis,” was published in 2016, depending on who was telling the story, it was inaccurately described as a moving memoir of growing up in Appalachia; a cautionary tale of the plight of white working-class Americans; a bright new voice from a forgotten community; or a key to understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Vance, a Middletown, Ohio native and former Marine who studied at Yale Law School, blames coastal liberals for their blind spots, but also calls Trump “a scientist who is a … “Drug of the masses”emerged as the ideal messenger, delivering a soothing, accessible myth that blamed working-class white people for their problems while at the same time absolving them of supporting an obvious bigot. According to Vance, the rise of Trump populism is the result not of racial animus, sexism, xenophobia, or even specific economic hardship (not to mention the wealthy and powerful voters who rightly saw tax cuts and influence in Trump), but of a cultural crisis: a failure of values, hard work, organized religion, and masculinity.
In truth, the book was a voice for Vance himself: fond memories of visiting his extended “redneck” family in eastern Kentucky; a tumultuous childhood in Middletown where his mother struggled with opioid addiction and unstable men; the stability he found in the home of his foul-mouthed, doting grandmother (whom he called Mamaw); life as a “cultural outsider” in the Marines, at Ohio State University, and at Yale Law School; and loosely drawn political and cultural speculations that amounted to essentially self-made sermons drawn from these personal experiences. And the reaction to Hillbilly Elegy — the rapturous reception of the book and the film’s unfolding, which was panned by critics but became one of Netflix’s most-watched films of the week — always said more about the audience than it did about Vance or the book itself.
I grew up in Cincinnati. Vance now lives there with his wife and three children. I was a senior at Harvard when the book was published. To some extent, I understood why the book was greeted so enthusiastically by those around me. Vance’s portrayal of Middletown in the book—a town of old, crumbling mansions and closed stores harking back to the glory days of steel manufacturing—was familiar. My grandmother grew up in Middletown, too, and spoke of her hometown with the same nostalgia. When we visited, Middletown felt much farther away than the 40-minute distance from my upscale neighborhood. Rereading the book now, it’s easy to see how Vance appealed to this vague, condescending sense of remoteness. His book extended a long tradition of diagnosing and romanticizing Appalachia into the Rust Belt, full of stereotypes and typical Republican talking points disguised as lived experience. If I didn’t know he was appealing to an outside audience, now I do.
This works, in part, because Vance is right on two counts: opportunities for upward mobility are scarce in Middletown, USA, but he’s vague about the real causes (globalization, hollowing out of the middle class, capitalist exploitation, the rising cost of college, etc.); and schools like Harvard and Yale don’t often accept people from places like Middletown. Thus a book that is mostly a personal history of a dysfunctional, sometimes violent, loving family in Ohio’s Rust Belt becomes a portrait of a region. The book isn’t actually about Appalachia, but Vance never stops waxing poetic about “country justice” or offering his impressions of the culture and customs of Appalachian Scots-Irish people. (Appalachia is racially diverse, but you’d never know it from Vance’s book.)
Vance, who once famously called Trump “the American Hitler,” has significantly shifted his talking points since 2016. But Appalachian author Sarah Jones said: NoteVance remains today a shape-shifter adept at adapting to power, as outlined in his book. In 2016, he was targeting the old elite. The book was fascinating for its colorful, sometimes genuinely entertaining portrayal of his family, especially the eccentric and idiosyncratic Mamaw, and for its digressions about the derailing effects of domestic instability that fit with modern understandings of trauma. In it, he blends amateur sociology with patronizing and exonerating the elite, arguing that class limitations are psychological. “In a place like Middletown, people talk about hard work all the time,” he writes. “You walk through a town where 30 percent of young men work fewer than 20 hours a week, and not a single person is aware of their own laziness.” He argues that welfare has fostered social decline, and writes favorably of the work of Charles Murray, author of a dubious study of racial differences in IQ.
In several chapters, Vance offers a stark diagnosis of the emotional traps of the white working class: “We choose to work when we should be looking for work. Sometimes we get a job, but we don’t last long. We get fired for being late, for stealing items to sell on eBay, for customers complaining that we smell alcohol on our breath, for taking five 30-minute bathroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work, but then we convince ourselves that we’re not working because we feel it’s unfair, like Obama closed the mines or the Chinese took all our jobs. These are lies we tell ourselves to resolve cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between the world we see and the values we preach.” A self-described outsider, Vance understood that most people vote with emotion, not reason, but his sweeping diagnosis of “the real America” is one that carries throughout Hillbilly Elegy: personal grievances, not caring.
Vance’s own worldview, since Hillbilly Elegy, seems to have brought this dissatisfaction to the forefront: he has since abandoned his appeal to liberals, an irony given that liberals, especially Hollywood, had once welcomed him. report His turn to MAGA came after the critically panned film, which Vance also executive produced, reduced his politics to crass caricature and blatant Oscar-bait boring, theatrical melodrama (which paid off, earning Glenn Close a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as Mamaw). Trump critics,He said “surprised” Vance says he supports Trump but “didn’t talk politics.” Keen to portray Trump’s Republican Party as the party of the people, Vance, who once railed against the working class he left behind in “Hillbilly Elegy,” has now morphed into a posture of pure victimhood. Now only Trump can offer an opportunity. “The American ruling class wrote the check. Communities like mine paid the price,” he said in his Republican National Convention speech. Trump’s network with Silicon Valley investors It is backed by ultra-wealthy financiers Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as longtime friend Peter Thiel.
Vance’s political rhetoric has changed, but so has his appeal to power by blurring personal fact and political fiction, and his target has changed: By the film’s end, it’s now purely a domestic drama, a means to elicit sympathy for a character. Called for a nationwide ban on abortionVance (Gabriel Basso) recalls in a voice-over that Mamaw taught him: “Where we come from defines us, but we choose every day who we become.” Vance has always been a sly, canny storyteller, and now he chooses to capitalize solely on his frustration with authoritarianism.
