By A.O. Scott
“I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,” JD Vance wrote on the first page of “Hillbilly Elegy,” by way of establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016, when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with “a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively dogs.” His memoir reads a little differently now.
This is partly because Vance is, in fact, a senator, and also, as of Monday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Much has been made of his political evolution over the past eight years, from never-Trump conservative to MAGA loyalist, from analyzing right-wing populism to embodying it. While Vance’s critics view this as brazen opportunism, he has explained his ideological shifts (including in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times) as a result of a twofold intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse.
This turnabout is notable because part of the legend of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that liberals were its intended audience and biggest fans. Published by a major trade house, respectfully (if at times skeptically) reviewed and widely discussed, it was both a message to the establishment and an application for membership.
The book tells the story of two migrations. One is the large-scale movement of poor whites, among them the author’s maternal grandparents, from rural Appalachia to the cities and towns of the Rust Belt. The other is Vance’s path from one of those places — Middletown, Ohio — to the geographic and demographic precincts of the ruling class: New Haven, Connecticut; Silicon Valley; Washington, D.C.
To the extent that “Hillbilly Elegy” is a bootstrap narrative — the chronicle of a young person’s rise in the face of adversity — it can be read as a vindication of the status quo. An imaginary reader, comfortably ensconced in the seat of relative privilege, will be gratified to learn that this ambitious Ohioan has pulled up a neighboring chair, and fascinated by the story of how he got there. The tale is painful but also inspiring. Vance’s childhood was shadowed by his mother’s struggle with opioid addiction, but he was saved by his loving grandparents, in particular by his salty, tenacious grandmother, Mamaw, whose portrait is the book’s most memorable literary achievement.
Mamaw, the Marine Corps and Ohio State lifted young JD out of Middletown and helped give him the confidence and the skills to write “Hillbilly Elegy.” (Yale did its part to supply him with connections, most consequentially his mentor and contracts professor Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” among other books.)
Part of the message of this kind of memoir is humble and aspirational: If I can make it, the writer suggests, anybody can. But that encouraging moral is accompanied by the somber acknowledgment that many people don’t. The plucky, lucky protagonist is at once representative and exceptional, a paradox that gives personal reflection the weight of social criticism. What’s stopping everyone else? Why do so many of Vance’s peers seem destined for joblessness and underemployment, substance abuse and domestic chaos, poverty and despair?
Often, in the autobiographical genre to which “Hillbilly Elegy” belongs — a genre whose shelves are full of books by Black, Indigenous and immigrant writers — the answers are systemic. What the author has overcome is injustice, prejudice, a fundamental unfairness in the way the world is organized. The implicit political claim is usually more reformist than radical: We need to fix things so that more kids like this can make it, by removing barriers and expanding opportunities.
Vance’s argument is emphatically not that. If the Americans he calls hillbillies — a somewhat elastic category that can be regional (Appalachian), ethnic (Scots-Irish) or sociological (white working class) — are falling or stuck, it’s largely their own fault.
The same cultural traits that make Mamaw and her kin such vivid presences on the page and in Vance’s life — love of fighting, clannishness, hatred of authority — have trapped them in poverty and dysfunction. “Working class” may be a misnomer: “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” Vance writes. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
The harshness of this judgment — and the cultural determinism underpinning it — drew some criticism, including from writers with backgrounds like Vance’s. At the same time, the idea that members of a marginal or disadvantaged group have caused their own misfortune is music to the ears of those in power. If those people are just that way — lazy, uncooperative, sexually promiscuous — then any policy designed to help them is useless.
That kind of argument has long been marshaled by conservatives against social programs aimed at African Americans, Latinos and the urban poor. Vance was not the first writer on the right to wield it against rural and proletarian whites. Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” published in 2012, anticipates some of the themes of “Hillbilly Elegy.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, Kevin D. Williamson published a series of caustic essays in National Review linking the rise of Trump with the decline of the white working class, concluding that the woebegone citizens of places like Middletown had “failed themselves.” “Nothing happened to them,” Williamson wrote. “There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation.”
In the years since, it’s safe to say that this perspective hasn’t found much purchase on the intellectual right, which is now less interested in diagnosing Trumpism than in writing its playbook. Vance has been part of both projects, which has involved a change in tone and orientation, and not only with respect to Trump himself.
There is a tension in “Hillbilly Elegy,” a dissonance between the way Vance celebrates his family and the way he sells them out, othering them in the service of a dubious argument. I say dubious because it’s clear now that he doubts the thesis that the American working class is to blame for its own troubles, or at least doubts the political utility of saying as much. He is more apt to blame China, NAFTA, Mexico and certain corporations, and also the political and cultural establishment that he was once determined to join. In other words: He has turned against the most devoted readers of his book.
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