The knock on theAlanis MorissettesongIronicis the title misrepresents the song. The lyrics are not ironies—the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning—but largely examples of unfortunate coincidental events.
J.D. Vance’sfamous, and sole, literary workHillbilly Elegyis not an elegy—a reflective song or poem typically about death. It’s a memoir about Vance’s tumultuous childhood that attempts to draw lessons about the plight of poor Appalachians and, more broadly, the white working-class.
Lest you think I’m being excessively nitpicky about a case of creative license, note that the one use of the word “elegy” in the book’s text is also misused.
After describing two sociological books Vance read to help him understand the nature of poverty, he said “no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.” Swapping in “elegy” for “plight” is a stretch, even if superficially it sounds more poetic.
The errant use of vocabulary in the title is representative of the entire book. Upon closer inspection, and with the advantage of hindsight, the book is not what it appears to be.
The same is true of the author, as I explore inmy columntoday.
What is so jarring is how the basic themes of the book—the book that made Vance famous—and the themes he promotes today, just eight years later, are so different.
What happened in those eight years?
I’ll do my best to explain. But first, here’s what’s leading theWashington Monthlywebsite:
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When Vance Told Appalachians to Leave Appalachia: My look back at Vance’s prescriptions for the white w0rking-class in the previous decade, and how they compare to today.Click here for the full story.
Trump’s Slur of Harris—“Is She Indian or Is She Black?”—Echoes a Creepy Episode From His Past:James D. Zirin, a former prosecutor, revisits whenDonald Trumpdisparaged Native Americans as he tried to protect his casinos from competition.Click here for the full story.
:Legal Affairs EditorGarrett Eppssees a potential screenplay in theRobert F. Kennedy, Jr.Central Park bear incident.Click here for the full story.
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As I show in today’s column, Vance’s writingprior to the Trump presidency, both in the conservativeNational Reviewand inHillbilly Elegy, is far more critical about Appalachian culture, the modern conservative movement, and the white working-class than he is today as politician.
You likely already know that Vance used to be disparaging of Trump before running for office and becoming a Trump loyalist. Vance began his 2022 Senate campaign, in July 2021 with ahard pivot, “I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president.”
But once you readHillbilly Elegy, published just five years before his campaign launched, you see how insufficient that is to explain what happened to Vance.
The book has no mention of Trump. Yet it was a surprise bestseller in the thick of the 2016 campaign as it became marketed as a way for confused big-city liberals to understand the mindset of white working-class MAGA fanatics, with Vance embracing the role of Trump voter whisperer.
If not for Trump, you would have never heard of Vance.
The book is personal memoir far more than a policy paper, but the policy views expressed are heterodox.
The primary theme is libertarian: that white working-class people should “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” But he also allows that government policies can “put our thumb on that all-important scale,” and notes he was buoyed by Pell grants, subsidized student loans and his grandmother’s old-age benefits.
Most striking is Vance’s searing criticism of “a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government.” He scolds, “The message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
Vance inHillbilly Elegyalso laments how these movement members buy into online conspiracy theories including those aboutBarack Obama‘sbirthplace as well as who orchestrated 9/11 and the Sandy Hook school massacre. He name-checksAlex Jonesas part of “an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy.”
Vance’s drift towards Trump, between 2017 and 2021, is traceable and almost justifiable. Like Vance, Trump’s populist-ish conservatism is more accepting of social safety net programs that benefit the working-class thanAyn Rand.
In 2016, Vance saw Trump as a grifter who would let his fellow hillbillies down, though Vance’s own hillbilly claim was tenuous. He largely grew up outside Appalachia, graduated from Yale Law School, and was working in corporate law and venture capitalism.
Soon after Trump won, Vance softened.
And then he got weird.
In February 2017 he toldVoxthat he worried about “learned helplessness” among the white working-class in his book, but, “It is fascinating to think of Donald Trump as a sort of clarion call against that self-defeatism. And yeah, there’s something powerful about feeling a little hopeless and a little powerless in your own life but then seeing this political figure who explains why you feel hopeless and powerless but is so powerful in his own right.” He also toldVogue, “Trump talks in a way that’s relatable” and “that tonal element of Trump’s is attractive.”
That summer he considered running for Senate in Ohio. He passed, but it he signaled he was thinking about maintaining his viability in Trump’s GOP.
One year later he told theFinancial Times, Trump “is one of the few political leaders in America that recognizes the frustration that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky.” Looking back the campaign, he said, “I wasn’t as critical of my party in 2016 as I was the person. But when I look at tax reform, when I look at healthcare reform, I see Trump as the least worrisome part of the Republican party’s problem … We are constantly trying to resurrect domestic policies from the 1980s.”
By 2019, in apodcast interview,he was praising the Republican Party for becoming “more working-class and more disconnected from … the elite Fortune 100 companies that really govern the economy.” Asked what prompted the realignment, Vance replied, “the easy answer is the catalyst for the realignment was Donald Trump” but “it really predates 2016” and “we shouldn’t go back” to the GOP of old.
Vance’s scorn for “elite Fortune 100 companies that really govern the economy” is a complete reversal from his message to the white working-class inHillbilly Elegythree years earlier: “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” That wasn’t a throwaway line. It was the bottom line, printed on the penultimate page.
By 2021, as a Senate candidate talking to a private conservative gathering, he wasembracing that purveyor of idiocy Alex Jonesas he urged the working-class to blame an oligarchal conspiracy: “if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”
In his book, Vance lamented how the white working-class so readily bought into conspiracies. Five years later, he said at this conference, “Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine.”
Changing one’s mind about a politician can be justifiable. But Vance has done far more than that. He has abandoned the fundamental messages of his famous work, without any attempt at justification, just a few years after publication.
Hillbilly Elegywasn’t written by a hillbilly, isn’t an elegy, and espouses views shed by the author as soon as they became politically inexpedient.
Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
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Best,
Bill Scher,Washington Postpolitics editor
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