Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made JD Vance

I’m no fan of Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but when I picked up the book it’s based on recently, in light of rumors that its author, J.D. Vance, would be Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, I expected it to feel more substantive than its screen adaptation. At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad. Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian. That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book. Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets. Why it was deceptively easy to buy Vance as an objective voice for Trump’s America When Hillbilly Elegy was released in the summer of 2016, Vance was a complete unknown, a Yale Law grad working for Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco. Panic over a potential Trump presidency was flourishing, and the culture was awash in works purporting to explain to an alarmed public how exactly we arrived at a moment that for many had seemed unthinkable. Hillbilly Elegy was one of several books that appeared on the scene around the same time that gained praise for its insights into Trump voters and the psychology of non-coastal, working-class whites. Elegy won fans for Vance’s engaging storytelling and what many people saw as a window into a different world, though it also drew skepticism for allegedly fabricated anecdotes and broad generalizations about the rural poor. It’s astonishing to me — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — that Hillbilly Elegy managed to seduce as many liberals as it did given that Vance’s scorn for almost everyone in his poverty-stricken small Ohio town reverberates on every page. He doesn’t do a very good job of disguising it, but he does arguably try — he occasionally tells us he feels empathy, while rarely actually displaying any. Early on, he writes, “I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks.” This comes immediately after demonizing a co-worker he once had because he was consistently late or absent from work, and who seems to represent the larger ailment among “hillbillies” he claims to want to diagnose. Though he seems to hate his community full of deadbeats, drug addicts, fat people, and “welfare queens,” we’re supposed to read his portrayal as enlightening and empathetic because he’s constantly feinting briefly toward gentleness. “There are no villains in this story,” he tells us early on; except Hillbilly Elegy is full of them. Throughout the book, he frequently makes assumptions about the motivations and life circumstances of the people around him and rails against them for what he sees as their lazy, unmotivated, or bizarre choices. Indeed, more sympathy does not seem to be his concern. Even the book’s title is a manipulation. As many people have pointed out, Vance didn’t actually grow up as a fabled “hillbilly”; he merely spent some of his summers in Appalachia as a child. When he’s describing the small town of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up, the first thing he focuses on is the town’s socioeconomic decline, unlike his more affectionate descriptions of the topography of rural Kentucky and detailed character profiles of his family there. He’s at pains to make sure we understand how much he hated it there, and how much his heart truly belonged with his renegade redneck family across the Kentucky border. In Middletown, his focus on the town’s economics, its rising “residential segregation” into concentrated areas of working-class poor, and the row of decaying mansions on Main Street, all reveal his obsession with class and upward mobility. It’s a fixation that underpins the book. “Looking back, I don’t know if the ‘really poor’ areas and my block were any different, or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor,” he admits. In all of the many moments where he demonizes the poor people in his orbit, Vance fails to offer or even consider the broader context of what’s happening with his community that might drive people to lives of penury and misery. He rails against drug addicts and provides a close, painful look at his family’s own battle with addictions, particularly his mother — but he never mentions the opioid crisis or the role companies and policy played in ravaging rural communities. “We created these problems, not the government, not a corporation,” he insists, despite having plenty of evidence to the contrary. Vance’s contempt for other people becomes Hillbilly Elegy’s refrain Vance is, of course, a conservative, and the focus on individual failing rather than systemic failures is to be expected. But what’s striking about Hillbilly Elegy, especially in the context of his recent turn toward Trumpian populism, is its disdain for people. Even as he’s trying to define himself as part of one in-group or another, be it the Scots-Irish or the “hillbillies,” he can’t stop shaming and distancing himself from the other people in it. His characterizations of his community and the people in it thrum with disgust and a deep sense of remove. As someone who grew up in a similar world, it would never even occur to me to feel for my own rural small Southern town the loathing Vance seems to feel for his, and the fact Vance never even second-guesses his own level of antipathy is one of the more chilling aspects of the book. He simultaneously praises his family for saving him from his town and himself while constantly repudiating them and everything they represent. His grandparents, whom he credits with essentially elevating his life and teaching him wholesome values, were both left-leaning, compassionate folk (his grandfather was a lifelong Democrat and union man, his grandmother “a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat depending on her mood”) who advocated standing up for the little guy. Yet Vance almost never actively empathizes with anyone else in the book. At one point he gets into a schoolyard fight on behalf of a weaker student, but seems more excited by the fighting than the prospect of justice itself. For everyone beyond his grandparents, his older sister, and then, later, a couple of women at Yale, Vance’s contempt is more overt. The book drips with open disgust for his neighbors, his town, his government and its representatives, and frequently, his mother. It’s full of casual fat-shaming for the bodies around him as well as his own, and constant complaints that no one around him wants to work hard enough to earn a better life for themselves. At the same time, he also distances himself from the upper class. He seems determined to convince us that he’s superior and detached from the higher social strata into which he’s been inducted. Even after he’s ensconced in law school, he claims to mistrust the people around him, including the dean of his college and random people who enter his life. In one truly bizarre anecdote, he has an anxiety-induced fantasy about a random woman at a gas pump, and how she and her nephew, who attends Yale like Vance, must be sitting around mocking all of the hillbillies in his town. There’s zero basis for this bout of paranoia; like most of the book, it seems predicated on assumptions that seem reasonable and normal in Vance’s own head, but which feel baffling and unfounded — and often blatantly classist — when he lays them out for us. To account for his mistrust, he makes confident blanket assertions that Scots-Irish people — yes, all of us — “do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk.” While sentiments like these emphasize his theme of being unified with the underclass, they also differentiate himself and “his people” within that class based on their whiteness. This view seems much darker in retrospect, given where Vance and the Republican Party are in 2024. Vance acknowledges that both he and his sister still grapple with trust issues as adults due to their childhood experiences of violence, addiction, and abandonment; yet something about the mistrust he displays in Elegy seems consciously deployed. “There were two kinds of people,” he confesses at one point. “[T]hose whom I’d behave around because I wanted to impress them and those whom I’d behave around to avoid embarrassing myself. The latter people were outsiders.” In all this posturing and misdirection, there are, however, two moments in the book when he potentially gives himself away — by which I mean, he may be offering us a glimpse of the man whom Sen. Mitt Romney has claimed to despise because of his perceived ability to shapeshift into an entirely new person when it’s convenient. The first is during a job interview, when, momentarily thrown by the question, “Why do you want to work at a law firm?” Vance blurts out, “I don’t really know, but the pay isn’t bad! Ha ha!” This wouldn’t seem so revealing, except that Vance tells us repeatedly that he often did things in law school just because they were expected of him — because this was how one gained impressive resume points or networked or got ahead. When he desperately tries to win a job as a clerk for a prominent judge, he tells us, “I didn’t know why I was doing it. Maybe, with my Southern drawl and lack of a family pedigree, I felt like I needed proof that I belonged at Yale Law. Or maybe I was just following the herd. Regardless of the reason, I needed to have this credential.” At that point, a law school professor seems to see right through him. “I don’t think you’re doing this for the right reasons. I think you’re doing this for the credential,” she tells him. His self-interest and careerism are clear even in a place where self-interest and careerism are the order of the day. Though he listens to her and drops pursuit of the job, mainly because it would require that much time away from his girlfriend (who he later married), he later resumes his job search; his mentor’s advice ultimately didn’t sway him from taking the path toward prestige. All of this creates the picture of a man who wants to be seen as a populist hero, a common man risen from the working class into a fairy tale story of success. But throughout Elegy, he unwittingly shows us how much he’s motivated not by empathy or love but by naked ambition and a desperation to be anywhere but here — “here” usually meaning around other people. This might be the real takeaway from Hillbilly Elegy — not that Vance is an anti-elitist, but that he is, to his core, anti-humanist. He may be saying the right words, intermittently pointing the reader toward signs of his compassion for the heartland. Yet when you disregard his misdirections and look closer, what emerges from his self-portrait is that he doesn’t just mistrust other people. He mistrusts core human values like compassion, patience, kindness without self-interest, inherent respect for the dignity of other people, and true empathy — in other words, for the principles that make his community, any community, worth fighting for. Vance may wield heroic words, but he is ultimately a weak warrior.