In Defense of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”

But Not in Defense of J.D. Vance

Zadie Smith, from her 2018 essay collection, Feel Free

Thirty-nine-year-old J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, has become yet again an instant bestseller and a #1 Netflix hit (the book was made into a film in 2020) recently after Vance was picked as Trump’s VP running mate for the 2024 presidential run.

Let me be clear right off the bat: I am not a Vance fan, at least not in 2024. Many reasons for this, but two main ones:

1.    He is profoundly anti-abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Only when the mother’s life is threatened does he budge here.

2.    In 2020 he made false claims about election fraud, along with Trump, about the cleanest election in U.S. history.

As is expected in our intense, tribal, polarized moment, many on the left have pounced on Vance, and specifically on his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

I read the memoir for the first time in 2022, when I was caretaking for my father during his terminal cancer. At the time I lived with my parents temporarily, downstairs in their beautiful Santa Barbara home up in the hills with a view of the whole town and the ocean. At the time, the book struck a deep nerve. I’d never read anything like it. Especially during our time of identity politics—on both political sides—it was interesting to read a white man’s account of poverty.

The memoir is about Vance’s upbringing in a poor white family in Eastern Kentucky—Appalachia—and then in Ohio, in the “industrial Northwest.” Vance was born in 1984. (I was born on the last day of 1982, so we’re peers.) He writes about the incredible poverty around him growing up in a bucolic mountain town filled with welfare, section 8, food stamps, drug addiction, violence, fatherless homes, too many kids to take care of, foster care, you name it. Like many low-income Black and Hispanic kids, Vance, and many whites in his milieu, was largely raised by his grandparents. His father split and his mother was a drug addict in and out of rehab and jail.

Eventually, Vance finally gets three years of peace and quiet—away from his toxic mother’s constantly moving wheel of new boyfriends and husbands—living with his beloved grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw. He starts going back to high school classes, does well, and gets into Ohio State for college. (The only one in his family to go to college.) From there he works hard and makes it—unbelievably—into Yale Law School¸ replete with huge doses of financial aid. (He claims it’s actually “cheaper” to go to the Ivy League schools than state schools for poor kids due to massive aid packages.)

Two days ago, thinking about Trump and therefore Vance—the first millennial VP—I decided I needed to reread Hillbilly Elegy. A day and a half later I’d consumed it, complete with new marginalia and highlighting. It’s a fun, solid, easy and enlightening read. I highly recommend it.

What hit me the hardest was the ironic similarities between Vance’s description of poor whites and those of urban Blacks living in inner cities. Ditto Hispanic, Asian, etc. I’ve always felt more on the Bernie Sanders circa 2016 side of things: Towards social class and away from identity politics. As Vance expertly points out: The working-classes of all races and genders have much more in common than people of the “same race” within different classes.

I have found this deeply true personally. I guess it’s fair to say I’m a bit of a class warrior of sorts. I grew up upper-middle-class and white; privileged. I’m much more interested when I encounter someone of roughly my class, regardless of race or gender, than I am of someone who happens to be white but they’re not in my class, roughly speaking. In other words: I am much happier to dialogue about philosophy or literature with a Black writer than, say, someone I consider to be “white trash.” This has always felt naturally obvious and true for me.

There are a lot of crucial messages in Vance’s memoir. When Trump came to power in 2016 many on the left—AOC I’m looking at you—claimed the reason was obvious and simple: White anti-Black racism. This isn’t surprising, of course: We live in the of time of Twitter (X) and TikTok: We like the grotesquely binary and simple versus the human, messy and complex, the nuanced and deeper truths.

Trump-hater as I was back then—and still am—I never bought this argument. As a group the white working-class in the swing states had overwhelmingly voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Trump came to power in 2016 for several different reasons:

1.    Democrats had, for the past few decades, started to shift further and further away from the working class of America. Vance tells us in his memoir that for generations his family and Appalachian families like his had voted Democratic. This started to shift in the 1990s and early 00s, when steel mills and coal towns downsized and fled overseas and became taken over by AI. Add to that the Democrats’ well-intentioned but paternalistic need to hand out free money to poor people in the form of Welfare—often disincentivizing people from working and keeping them poor and addicted to drugs—and that was enough to switch teams.

2.    Democrats have become more and more over the years the party of “Elites,” run by D.C., NYC, Portland, Seattle, LA, S.F., etc. Journalism morphed from a working-class trade to a rich white trust-fund elite NYC experience where you had to have a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism and believe full-throatedly in leftist identity politics.

3.    Democrats ran, of all people, the elite, snobbish Hillary Clinton, who was completely unrelatable to America’s working classes. She had a terrible message, a bad campaign, and she spent either no or very little time in swing states before the 2016 election. She thought she had it in the bag.

Now, the more complex truth, of course, is that Democrats weren’t the only ones to fail the working class. Truth was both parties failed. And it wasn’t one party but rather American Progress—ironically—that was hollowing out the industrialized northwest. Both political sides had played a role here for decades. Bigger forces were at work. Globalization was largely to blame: Jobs moving overseas to central and south America and Asia where products were produced for pennies on the dollar and child labor was the norm. AI was on the rise. America hadn’t created a solid social safety net after World War II like the European Union had. Instead it was much more “every man for himself” and “pull yourself up by your boot straps.”