In 2016, the well-meaning liberals who would later display in-this-house signs on their lawns were in the market for a certain kind of book. They needed a primer on that enigma, the White working class, but the guidebook they envisioned was subject to several requirements. For one thing, it had to make them feel magnanimous and broad-minded for even bothering with the demographic they held accountable for the stunning political success of Donald Trump; for another, it had to be conspicuously folksy, a reflection of their romantic preconceptions about shotguns and twangy accents in the sticks. Above all, this book could not demand too much. It could not contain political theory or, God forbid, economics. At its most intellectually ambitious, it could venture some light psychologizing, perhaps a few simple statistics, but it could never stray far from the safe and sentimental territory of the emotional appeal. In short, right-thinking liberals wanted an emissary from the heartland to assure them that Trump did not oblige them to change their lives or reexamine their politics.
Enter J.D. Vance, a recent Yale Law School graduate and self-proclaimed hillbilly with a knack for telling liberals what they wanted to hear. Vance hailed from the rapidly deindustrializing city of Middletown, Ohio, and he presented himself as a seasoned MAGA whisperer. Although he was critical of Trump’s crass nativism — he was in the liberal-placation business, after all — he billed himself as an interpreter of rural languages that cosmopolitans did not speak. In his best-selling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” he explained that “Mamaw” was his affectionate moniker for his grandmother and that “holler” is the regional term for a hollow between the hills.
“Hillbilly Elegy” was a sensation, less because of its alleged merits than because it appeared at an auspicious moment. It occasioned a number of excellent critiques — including rebuttals in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and the Guardian — but for the most part, it was beloved. In nearly all the legacy media outlets, including this one, it was hailed as an eloquent and nuanced explanation for Trump’s otherwise baffling allure. The Wall Street Journal described it as “a beautiful memoir” that doubled as a work of “cultural criticism about white working-class America.” The Economist raved: “You will not read a more important book about America this year.” In the New York Times, where it was allotted two glowing reviews, it was tellingly celebrated as “a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election.”
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Eight years later, Vance has grown uncivilized, our electoral politics more uncivilized still. The writer Irving Kristol famously characterized a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality”; Vance is a liberal-pleaser who has been mugged by the prospect of power. In 2016, he was calling Trump “America’s Hitler” in private messages to a friend; now he is the former president’s running mate and most sycophantic defender. But the signs of his eventual pivot were legible all along, at least to those who cared to read them.
In some ways, the liberal fixation on the White working class — and thus on hillbillies and their elegies — was always misguided. Trump was not elected exclusively by poor White Appalachians. As Sarah Jones pointed out in the New Republic, wealthy enclaves also played an outsize role in his victory, but these locales commanded far less media fanfare, probably because they were less of a curiosity to the urban elite. Still, Appalachians have weathered their fair share of injustices, and the impulse to understand their plight was (and is) admirable.
The problem, then, was not that liberals hoped to learn about hardship in the holler but the way they went about it. There can be no single emissary for the more than 80 million people who make up “the White working class” nationwide (not all of whom have ties to Appalachia, itself a wildly heterogenous region). Force of personality — or in Vance’s case, rustic kitsch — is no substitute for research. In his recent book “Elite Capture,” the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo warns of the eponymous phenomenon, whereby privileged members of oppressed groups become spokespeople for those groups — and, in so doing, co-opt them. For instance, the members of the “black bourgeoisie” who are so often the face of movements for racial justice emphatically do not speak for the majority of Black Americans. In Taiwo’s words:
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[Those with] power over and access to the resources that get used to describe, define, and create political realities — in other words, elites — are substantively different from the total set of people affected by the decisions they make … As the part of the group closest to power and resources, they are typically the part whose interests overlap with the total group’s the least.
This is one problem with identity politics, with its mania for electing envoys: The members of a marginalized group who enjoy enough of a public platform to speak on its behalf are often not representative. Vance, who went on to land a lucrative job at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm after law school, is hardly a typical hillbilly, and there is no guarantee that he has the interests of his less fortunate peers at heart.
But in 2016, he had no compunction about generalizing quite ungenerously from his limited experiences. Because he observed acquaintances using cellphones that he believed they could not afford, he concluded that many working-class Appalachians habitually spend beyond their means; because one of his neighbors in Middletown chose not to work, then took to Facebook to complain about President Barack Obama’s economic policies, he asserted that many hillbillies are jobless out of laziness. There are several academic disciplines dedicated to gathering reliable data about why people are in fact jobless, but Vance was disdainful of attempts at more rigorous study. He preferred to gesture sheepishly at what struck him as common sense, insisting that he knew what’s what “not because some Harvard psychologist says so but because I felt it.” At least the Harvard psychologist might have conducted a poll. No wonder there is an entire genre of articles — and indeed, several entire books — dedicated to demonstrating that Vance does not speak for all Appalachians.
“Hillbilly Elegy,” then, was never a good-faith sociological foray. It was always a performance, a conspicuous display of homey authenticity. In her incisive corrective “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia,” the historian (and fellow hillbilly) Elizabeth Catte described Vance as “someone with tired ideas about race and culture [getting] famous by selling cheap stereotypes about the region.” The gun-toting characters in “Hillbilly Elegy” are cartoonish, and so, too, is the prose. Take, for instance, the first line. “My name is J.D. Vance,” the memoir begins, “and I think I should start with a confession: I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd.” It is this aw-shucks affectation — not Vance’s wispy arguments — that was the source of readers’ initial fascination.
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After all, the contents of “Hillbilly Elegy” are not much to write home about. The book is a mush of reminiscence and ill-founded speculation about a part of the country that “has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope” for decades. Vance’s family is from Jackson, Ky., a town whose inhabitants “say hello to everyone, willingly skip their favorite pastimes to dig a stranger’s car out of the snow, and — without exception — stop their cars, get out, and stand at attention every time a funeral motorcade drives past.” Despite Jackson’s small-town charms, Vance’s grandparents, the fiery but lovable Mamaw and Pawpaw, moved to Middletown, where Pawpaw secured a lucrative job at Armco, a steel company.
Though the pair eventually managed to muster some measure of stability, Vance’s mother, Bev, did not. During a short-lived stint as a nurse, she became one of the many Americans in her cohort to get hooked on prescription opioids. Father figures paraded in and out of Vance’s youth and adolescence as Bev spiraled, sometimes violently. Her deterioration mirrored Middletown’s: As Armco shrunk, a once-bustling downtown dwindled into a block of fast-food restaurants and pawnshops. Vance tries his darnedest to sound humble about prevailing against the odds. He recounts how he joined the Marines, hauled himself up by his bootstraps, excelled in college and got into Yale Law School.
“Hillbilly Elegy” is an entry in the pantheon of uplift narratives, a kind of appendage to the self-help genre, and it is characteristically cheesy. Vance goes so far as to admit to a “corny” love of America, the “greatest country on earth,” and he tells us that “every time I learned to do something I thought impossible … I came a little closer to believing in myself.”
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There is no greater vindication of the suspicion that poor taste is a form of moral deficiency than the initial reception that greeted “Hillbilly Elegy.” So eager were critics and pundits to find an apologist for the White working class who was not blatantly racist that they overlooked Vance’s fatuousness, his willingness to play up his hokeyness for the benefit of his liberal audience and the ultimate banality of his message.
For at its core, his was a standard-issue conservative screed, riddled with the familiar contradictions. Vance acknowledged that jobs in Middletown were in short supply, but he ascribed the Appalachian predicament to a culture of “learned helplessness” and insisted that many of the city’s residents “choose not to work.” He claimed that “our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave” just pages after noting that fast food is the only fare available in many Appalachian towns. When the poor took out “high-interest credit cards and payday loans,” he faulted them for engaging in “irrational behavior” without sparing any scorn for predatory financial institutions. He even debated whether his mother was responsible for her addiction — and determined that no one’s circumstances give “him or her a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card” — but made no mention of the pharmaceutical giants that deliberately flooded the region with painkillers.
For the Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy,” baseless claims were yet another means of evading responsibility. “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateways to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs,” he mocked. “You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.” Instead, he counseled hillbillies to pull their pants up and apply for the jobs that did not exist.
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It certainly seems, on the face of it, as though Vance has changed his tune. The evening news, the politicians and the universities are precisely the villains he has since made a career of reviling — and not very subtly at that. (“The Universities Are the Enemy” is the title of a speech he delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021.)
At points, “Hillbilly Elegy” reads like an artifact of merely archaeological interest. In a 2016 so remote that I can barely recall it, Vance lamented the “bizarre sexism” of “hillbilly culture”; five years later, he went on Tucker Carlson’s show to call the Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” The Mamaw of “Hillbilly Elegy” practiced a “deeply personal (albeit quirky) faith” and could not speak of “organized religion” “without contempt”; as of last week, when Vance eulogized her onstage at the Republican National Convention, she had morphed posthumously into “a woman of very deep Christian faith.”
Perhaps most importantly, Vance was once a proponent of old-fashioned, laissez-faire conservatism of the Cato Institute variety. In 2016, conservative blogger Rod Dreher wrote that “one of the most important contributions Vance makes to our understanding of American poverty is how little public policy can affect the cultural habits that keep people poor.” Now, Vance has embraced the MAGA movement’s nationalistic populism, which paints poverty as the product of open borders and globalist scheming.
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Maybe Vance’s transformation is genuine; maybe it is calculated. It is certainly convenient that his ideological trajectory aligns so closely with that of the Republican Party. As journalist Simon van Zuylen-Wood remarked in a prescient piece in this paper in 2022, the GOP has long been creeping toward “post-liberalism,” a political orientation that is “anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.” (Dreher, for his part, has become such a fervent champion of strongman Orbán’s interventionist tactics that he immigrated to Hungary.)
Post-liberalism seeks to rewrite not just the law but the whole of American ethical life, and in some ways it is a natural extension of the pessimism about political solutions that pervaded “Hillbilly Elegy” (and the corresponding libertarianism that dominated the GOP not so long ago). If culture is to blame for Appalachia’s decline, you might conclude that politics, as traditionally understood, cannot fix what ails us. Alternatively, you might conclude, as Vance apparently has, that the usual political remedies are not intrusive or authoritarian enough.
“Hillbilly Elegy” anticipated the self-effacing tone that Vance would take when he concluded his Faustian bargain. From the first, he was practicing the art of having it both ways: In 2016, he pronounced himself an everyman, even though the existence of the very book in which he feigned modesty belied his pretensions. Now that he is a politician tasked with charming a crowd that loathes politicians, his strategy is much the same. He goes on claiming outsider status by making a spectacle of his chumminess, even as he becomes more and more of an insider. This, too, is a performance, one that rivals and perhaps surpasses his performance of homespun simplicity in “Hillbilly Elegy.”
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“I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” Vance assured the audience at the Republican National Convention. They erupted into cheers. I wonder how those followers will cope when they realize that it is precisely by winning that he and they have lost. The cost of their electoral success is that they have become what they most despise: They are the establishment now.
Hillbilly Elegy
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By J.D. Vance
Harper. 272 pp. $18.99, paper
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