Hillbilly Elegy: what can the book and movie tell us about JD Vance?
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly anointed 2024 running mate, was not selected for any legislative prowess. He is not even two years into his term as senator from Ohio, his first political office. What Vance does have, besides extreme Maga talking points, an apparent fealty to Trump and the ex-president’s affection for blue eyes, is a high profile and a jocular familiarity speaking with the mainstream media, honed from years of acting as a self-appointed interlocutor for white working class discontent. And that profile comes from Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling 2016 memoir that was adapted into a 2020 Netflix movie, directed by Ron Howard.
Related: Is there anything that JD Vance actually believes? | Moira Donegan
When the book, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, came out in 2016, it was inaccurately declared, depending on who was talking: a moving memoir about growing up in Appalachia, an instructive portrait of the plight of white working class Americans, a bright new voice from a forgotten community, and a skeleton key for understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Vance, a Yale Law School-educated ex-Marine from Middletown, Ohio, who chastised coastal liberal blindspots while authoring Atlantic articles calling Trump an “opioid of the masses”, emerged as an ideal messenger for a soothing, elucidative myth, one that simultaneously blamed the white working class for their problems while exculpating them from supporting an obvious bigot. According to Vance, the rise of Trump populism was the result of a cultural crisis – a failure of values, hard work, organized religion and masculinity – rather than racial animus, sexism, xenophobia or even concrete economic distress (and never mind rich, powerful voters who, in Trump, rightly saw tax breaks and influence).
In truth, the book spoke for Vance and Vance alone: his fond memories of visiting his extended “hillbilly” family in eastern Kentucky; his turbulent childhood in Middletown as his mother struggled with opioid addiction and a volatile roster of men; the stability he found in the home of his foul-mouthed, tough-love grandmother (called Mamaw); his time in the Marines, at Ohio State and as a “cultural alien” at Yale Law School; and his loosely sketched political and cultural extrapolations from these personal experiences, which basically amounted to sermons on one’s bootstraps. And the reaction to Hillbilly Elegy – the rapturous reception of the book and the development of the critically panned movie, among the most watched on Netflix all week – always said much more about the audience than Vance, or the book itself.
I grew up in Cincinnati, where Vance now lives with his wife and three children, and was a senior at Harvard when the book came out. I understood, to an extent, why the people around me lapped it up. The Middletown that Vance described in the book – one of old, crumbling mansions and closed stores looking at its steel-town glory days in the rearview – was familiar; my grandmother also grew up in Middletown and spoke in similarly nostalgic terms of her hometown. When we visited, Middletown felt much farther than the 40 minutes away from my tony suburb. Rereading the book now, it’s clear how Vance appealed to this murky, patronizing sense of separation. His book extended a long tradition of diagnosing and whitewashing Appalachia to the Rust Belt, and was rife with stereotypes and classic Republican talking points peddled under the guise of lived experience. If you didn’t know he appealed to outside readers, now you did.
This worked, in part, because Vance was right on two points: there is less opportunity for upward mobility in the Middletowns of America, though he is oblique on the real causes (among them: globalization, the hollowing out of the middle class, capitalist extraction and the ballooning costs of college); and places like Harvard and Yale do not admit many people from places like Middletown. And so a book that is mostly a personal history of a dysfunctional, at times violent, loving family in Rust Belt Ohio became a portrait of a region. The book isn’t even really about Appalachia, although that never stopped Vance from waxing poetic on “hillbilly justice” or his impression of the culture and mores of Appalachian Scots-Irish people. (Appalachia is racially diverse, though you wouldn’t know it from Vance’s book.)
Related: I’m from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn’t represent us – he only represents himself | Neema Avashia
Vance, who once famously called Trump “America’s Hitler,” has changed his talking points significantly since 2016. But as Appalachian writer Sarah Jones notes, Vance today is still the outlined in his book – a shapeshifter adept at appealing and adapting to power. Back in 2016, he aimed at the old-school elite. The book was alluring for its many colorful, sometimes genuinely enjoyable descriptions of his family, particularly the eccentric, idiosyncratic Mamaw, and digressions on the derailing effect of domestic instability that map onto our modern understanding of trauma. Within that, he blended amateur sociology with condescension and a free pass for elites; the limitations of class, he argued, were psychological. “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” he wrote. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” He wrote favorably of work by Charles Murray, author of specious studies on racial differences in IQ, arguing that welfare encouraged social decay.
In some sections, Vance outright diagnoses the white working class as beset by an emotional trap: “We choose to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance – the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.” Vance, a self-proclaimed outsider, was correct in understanding that most people vote emotionally, not rationally. But his sweeping diagnosis of “real America” was the thing that comes across throughout Hillbilly Elegy: personal grievance, not care.
Related: How Hillbilly Elegy tries and fails to show the ‘real’ America
Vance’s own worldview, from Hillbilly Elegy forward, seems to foreground this sense of grievance. Vance has since abandoned appeals to liberals – ironic, given how liberals, and especially Hollywood, formerly embraced him. It has been reported that his pivot to Maga was precipitated by the critical thrashing of the film, which Vance executive produced and which elided his politics into a boring, histrionic melodrama of dreadful caricatures and blatant Oscar bait. (Which worked – Glenn Close, playing Mamaw, was nominated for best supporting actress; Howard, a public Trump critic, said he was “surprised” by Vance’s support of Trump but that they “didn’t talk politics”.) Now intent on casting Trump’s Republican party as the party of the people, the blame Vance once castigated on the working class he long left behind in Hillbilly Elegy has now shapeshifted into a stance of pure victimhood; only Trump can provide opportunity now. “America’s ruling class wrote the checks, communities like mine paid the price,” he said in his RNC speech, never mind the fact that he’s been networking Trump with Silicon Valley investors and is backed by ultra-wealthy capitalists Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and longtime friend Peter Thiel.
Vance’s expression of politics has changed; his appeal to power, via a blurring of personal fact and political fiction, hasn’t. The target is just different now. At the end of the film, now a straight domestic drama serving as a vehicle for sympathy for someone who has called for a national abortion ban, Vance (Gabriel Basso) recalls in voiceover what Mamaw taught him: “That where we come from is who we are, but we choose every day who we become.” Vance has always been a sly, canny storyteller. And he is now choosing to use what was only ever a chip on his shoulder for authoritarianism.
