The Moronic Class Politics Of So-Called "Populist" J.D. Vance

As you might've heard, author J.D. Vance is running for Ohio's 2022 Senate seat as a Republican. He has not been doing hot lately, coming in fourth place in primary polling. This is in spite of such glowing endorsements from the likes of Peter "Actually A Vampire" Thiel, Tucker "The Metric System Is Communist" Carlson, and Josh "Storm The Capitol" Hawley. Vance is the kind of man the populist wing of the GOP backs, hoping to attract the working class with his substanceless culture war rhetoric. Little does he know that placing lipstick on an anti-working pig doesn't make it any more attractive, except to voters who still live in houses coated with lead paint.

Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling book that got everybody gawking at Vance for a few months, and lead to a forgettable film directed by Ron Howard, is a befuddling text in how its author suggests we take on class in America. Few issues bring such strong, passionate emotions to the surface as much as the delicate topic of class does in America. One who speaks uninformed or casually on the subject always runs the risk of causing offense to others and considering how many already hold strong convictions on how class struggles should be solved, there are very few opinions that are uncontroversial. Only the most sterile and generic of blanket statements shall please everybody. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance is hardly one of those rare uncontentious works.

Some have called the book an important insight into an overlooked, yet key, demographic that makes up America, indeed few titles focused upon the lives of lower-class Appalachians receive as much success as Vance’s autobiography has. Others call it a naïve volume that fails to understand the greater factors at play in the economic and cultural decline of the region. Such criticism is not dished out by just coastal elites, but as well by the very people Vance intended to portray so realistically with his memoir. 

Published in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy serves as an autobiography that details Vance’s upbringing in Central Appalachia, and how he went from a neglected life in poverty to a successful graduate at an ivy league school. The author has crammed his narrative full of colorful and opinionated commentary on American life, leading many to see Vance as having a valuable insight into his country’s fractured political landscape. It’s hard not to see why, his tale is the classically inspirational rags-to-riches story, the kind of thing normally reserved for mawkish Hollywood movie scripts. Yet there is also an accidentally cynical and dark tone to this true-life narrative. Vance might have made himself an honest success through his hard work ethic and admirable determination, but he does not seem to comprehend that most people don’t have the luck to reach the same heights he has in society. He additionally has been accused by his critics of not understanding why the disease of poverty continues to exist throughout American communities.

Multiple times throughout the book, we witness Vance openly blaming the poor for their supposed abuse of the nation’s social programs. This is a rehashing of the Reaganian moral panic against “welfare queens”, a common boogeyman for rightwing commentators. “We spend our way to the poorhouse,” Vance writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.” While such attacks on the avarice of toxic unchecked consumerism can seem fair on a surface level, they do little beyond reaffirming our surmises and classist misconceptions. Vance reduces the problem of American inequality to the fact that we just can’t stop spending things, implying that such disparities would magically vanish if we stopped visiting Best Buy so much. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the following excerpt:

“One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she’d blather on about the importance of industriousness. “So many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need,” she’d say. This was the construct she’d built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she—despite never having worked in her life—was an obvious exception.”

An article penned by Bob Hutton called “Hillbilly Elitism” published in Jacobin magazine observes the glowing praise the title has received from various conservative publications. Hutton notes that at its core, Hillbilly Elegy does not assail the corporate economic system that created the very world that Vance so harshly criticizes. To Vance, the true factor in Rust Belt decline originates in the culture of the working class, not the system that assigned them their roles in life. The book has countless anecdotes that are inserted for the purpose of promoting the stereotype of the white blue-collar worker being a vulgar creature, an animal who lives in a habitat of boundless broken families and reckless drug abuse. Hutton decries this writing style as promoting the mythology of the “white ghetto”, and says that Vance rarely misses the chance through his narration to scoff at some aspect or another of the lowly poverty-stricken world that he was raised in. Hutton also highlights the recorded history of the affluent taking advantage of the poor in impoverished Kentucky, a trend that continues to this day. Vance, on the other hand, overlooks any suggestion of the wealthy and their aim of capital being responsible for this penury in America’s backwaters. This may not be a deliberate omission on his part but is notable nonetheless.

Hutton furthermore observes that Hillbilly Elegy does not endorse once-radical solutions to class issues that have now become part of the political mainstream. Nowhere in Vance’s book do we see him suggest ideas like a higher minimum wage or a bigger, reformed healthcare system as answers that would ease the aching pains of common Appalachian sorrows. In fact, Vance outright states that “There is no government that can fix these problems for us… it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Such a statement rings hollow when one takes into consideration that many issues described in Hillbilly Elegy, such as opioid abuse and the mental illness crisis, could very much be remedied by reformed government programs. A larger safety net is simply off the table for Vance, who would no doubt decry it was more parasitic “mooching”.

The theory of a “culture of poverty” that Hillbilly Elegy advances is nothing new in literature, with numerous writers claiming that it as a hypothesis to explain the continued existence of poverty in a country that has tried so hard to rid itself of it. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who devoted much of his career to researching this alleged phenomenon wrote: “The subculture develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it, especially because of what happens to the worldview, aspirations, and character of the children who grow up in it.” In other words, the poor exist in a culture in which they do not desire to see economic success. The many leftwing opponents to this theory proclaim that such theories have not been soundly researched and that they reek of a poisonous mentality of victim-blaming. Writing for The New Republic, Sarah Jones found Vance’s ideas on class to be in the tradition of Lewis’ writings, describing his book as being “little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.” Jones stated that Hillbilly Elegy would do little more than reaffirm harmful stereotypes that audiences might host towards their fellow Americans. “If the system worked for you, you’re not likely to blame it for the plight of poor whites,” she writes, “Far easier instead to believe that poor whites are poor because they deserve to be.” It brings to mind sinister notions of cutthroat social Darwinism, implying that the weak deserve their lot in this chaotic, unbalanced life.

Political commentator Jared Yates Sexton outright described Hillbilly Elegy as a work that would grossly hurt the same very people it sets out to inspire, with Vance’s promotion of conservative economics being read as a sign for politicians to continue steering rightward. Indeed, there is an arresting similarity between Vance venomously bashing welfare recipients and standard Republican Party talking points. Utahan congressman Jason Chaffetz would even employ the same comparison of the public buying “useless phones” when he defended proposed cuts to Obamacare, stating that the poor had a responsibility to save their money to pay for overbearing six-digit healthcare costs. One can picture Chaffetz melodramatically recoiling when reading the following Vance quote: “They’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.” To Vance, gaming the system when you’re poor is something to be angry about, while the rich behaving improper is hardly noteworthy. He does not consider such behaviors like that described above a demonstration of the desperate things people must do to get by in a turmoiled life. To him, they are thieves, plain and simple, who have nobody to blame but themselves. Sexton, who grew up poor, refers to Vance as a “Hillbilly Sellout”; Jones called him a “False Prophet”. Clearly, feelings run high in regards to this book, and if Vance aimed to write a text that could unite multiple ideologies towards a common cause, he did not succeed in that.

Many will doubtlessly be touched by the story of a man who started from lowly beginnings reaching everything he ever dreamt of. But a reader should always, like all books, examine it with a questioning eye and not merely thoughtlessly digest it. They should ask themselves if the solutions Vance proposes are ones that would truly fix the problems of class in America. Does the perspective that he offers acknowledge the real problems that got us into this economic mess, or does it place the fault on the shoulders of largely innocent parties? There is no doubt that fixing the shattered fabric of America begins with us, the people, but does it start with us blaming ourselves and each other in a self-loathing fashion, or by coming together to change the very system that made us so impecunious in the first place? Perhaps Vance has devoted so much of his time singing a requiem for the dying American Dream that he ignored that what ails our bleak future can be fixed with hard work of a different kind.

Bibliography:

Hutton, Bob (October 1, 2016). “Hillbilly Elitism”. Jacobin. url: https://jacobinmag.com/2016/10/hillbilly-elegy-review-jd-vance-national-review-white-working-class-appalachia/

Jones, Sarah (November 17, 2016). "J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America". The New Republic. URL: https://newrepublic.com/article/138717/jd-vance-false-prophet-blue-america

Sexton, Jared Yates (March 11, 2017). "Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" are already being used to gut the working poor". Salon. url: https://www.salon.com/control/2017/03/11/hillbilly-sellout-the-politics-of-j-d-vances-hillbilly-elegy-are-already-being-used-to-gut-the-working-poor/

Vance J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins Publishers. 2016.