By the time (JD) Vance has moved from rags to riches, something has shifted. As he grows richer, he seems to find more flaws in his fellow citizens.
Douglas Dowland| Guest Columnist
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Douglas Dowland is a professor of English atOhio Northern University, and the recent author of"We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump."
Ohio senator and vice-presidential pick JD Vance has joined the inner circle of the nation’s political elite.
But for some time, he has been a member of another select group, of authors who wrote of their quest to live by and embody the nation’s ideals. In his memoir"Hillbilly Elegy," Vance writes passionately about his transformation from a kid who spent his summers in the holler to championing the campus of Yale Law School; an American story of moving from rags to riches.
The rags-to-riches story has a particularly American appeal, a story we tell ourselves whether we know it or not.
It is a story in which a person of poverty, through hard work and perseverance, overcomes obstacles, often set in place by a rival who comes from a wealth they have not earned.
Vance didn't tell Appalachia's story: Papaw played banjo in the holler. I know hillbillies. Vance didn't tell Appalachia's story.
It’s a classic American story, one with heroes and villains, one in which the victor has not only demonstrated their exceptional merit, but in remembering his own obstacles, charitably embraces those in need.
JD Vance's world of endless resentment
It’s a powerful story — and in the hands of JD Vance, a limited one. For him, it is a kind of gateway drug. His memoir lacks the charitable embrace of those in need. Instead, Vance uses his rags-to-riches story to write an America of "us" versus "them," a world of endless resentment.
In his younger years, Vance was well aware of the power of resentment. He writes that he “nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me.” Yet as the memoir unfolds, the danger of resentment is something that he gradually forgets.
In one of his first jobs, he comes to see fellow co-workers as “immune to hard work.” And as he slowly moves from rags to riches himself, his resentment only multiplies.
Working at a local store, Vance is infuriated that his boss prefers customers who drive Cadillacs and finds his own anger directed toward a local drug addict who buys T-bone steaks.
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Late in the book, Vance engages in a rhetorical pointing of the finger toward all Americans, complaining of how suburban America buys too many giant TVs and iPads, and of how those in the middle-class “purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake.”
By the time Vance has moved from rags to riches, something has shifted. As he grows richer, he seems to find more flaws in his fellow citizens.
The end of the American story
Late in the book, he writes that the goal of American policy should be to “create a space for the JD’s” of his youth, the young men who are seeking advancement and purpose. But Vance never outlines how that might occur. In our nation’s factories, or in its schools? Through service to community and country?
Having reached the riches of the American story, he cannot see a way, in part, because his resentful vision of America as nation of "us" versus "them" makes it impossible for him to extend a hand, to help another up the ladder.
One suspects that Vance is so fascinated by identifying foes that he is uninterested in finding friends.
He instead peddles gambits of gratuitous generalization, such as his saying on Fox News in 2022 that now-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and others are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
Vance attacked my fellow cat ladies: JD Vance thinks my vote should count less. He should listen to Jennifer Aniston.
"Hillbilly Elegy"was the prelude to this. It shows the limits of an American story. And, worryingly, that story, as it is shaped and resentfully reshaped by the hands of the now-candidate for vice president, may very well be the prelude to the end of the American story.
Douglas Dowland is a professor of English atOhio Northern University, and the recent author of"We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump."
