How to Understand J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy

On Monday, Donald Trump tapped freshman Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to be his vice presidential running mate and future political heir to his MAGA movement. Vance, 39, rose to fame on the strength of his best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Tonight he will introduce himself to a national television audience. In this review of Hillbilly Elegy, Ariana Orozco explores what makes Vance’s memoir both so compelling and dangerous at the same time. 

This article also appears at indypendent.org as “J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism”.

By Ariana Orozco

Donald Trump has named Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his 2024 running mate. Even moreso than former Vice President Mike Pence, the 39-year old endorses far-right political views including promoting conspiracies about the 2020 election, opposing abortion rights, and denying scientific consensus about human-related climate change. Vance was initially part of the “Never Trump'' movement in 2016 going so far as to call his now boss “America’s Hitler,” but went on to support Trump during his 2020 campaign. Vance and Trump became even closer in 2022 when Vance successfully courted Donald Trump’s endorsement during his Senate race. This cunning shift in opinion is not unexpcted. In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy:A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Vance outlines the only two principles he feels are important: get more money, get more power. This Wolf of Wall Street ambition mixed with unflinching portrayals of white Appalachian poverty make his cozying up to Trump not only expected, but ethical in J.D. Vance's world. 

Hillbilly Elegy is a personal account of Vance’s upbringing in Appalachia and offers his opinions on how rural America transitioned from a Democratic bloc to consistently Republican. He criticizes national policy that trapped already poor people into accumulating more debt like Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush’s perfunctory home-owning legislation. But, he spends the majority of his political tirades against individuals themselves describing how people become reliant on a welfare state and become lazy, self-hating, and apathetic as a result. These people are in contrast to him or his grandparents who inculcated him with an unflinching work ethic and desire to escape Ohio. It is Influencer Strategy 101: Act like me and have what I have. 

Part of the reason that Hillbilly Elegy has sold over 1.6 million copies is because Vance’s misanthropy is understandable. It is difficult to deny that Vance’s vignettes of his drug addicted mother, his alcoholic grandfather, and the realities of generational poverty are not a compelling strategy to establish his authority on issues of a broken America. In fact, many of his stories are in line with existing literature about poor white people. It is uncanny to compare the chapter in which Vance forgives his mother for her choices with a similar scene from Trash by Appalachian-author Dorothy Allison. In both, the writers buckle to the unbearable trauma caused by their mothers and mother-figures, while accepting that they must forgive them to move on with their lives. 

What sets Vance apart is not experiences, but rather his conclusions. Where Allison frees herself from hating her “white trash” upbringing, Vance’s book concludes more blistering than it begins. Vance sinks his teeth into identity politics claiming that people do not want him to succeed because he is a white man. Much of his rage towards immigrants and minorities comes from this likability quality he clearly feels he lacks. The populist reckoning he begs for is not against Peter Thiel, his billionaire backer, but as a vow to replace America’s hillbilly underbelly with a class of Black and Brown people he believes have received the benefits he deserves. 

There are many aspects of Hillbilly Elegy and J.D. Vance which will appeal to potential MAGA-supporters. Donald Trump cannot pretend to know what poverty feels like, and certainly not what it feels like to crawl out of it. J.D. Vance, on the other hand, provides proof that MAGA-Republicans can crossover to a white-picket fence lifestyle. Believe me, he tells the reader, I did it. 

Vance realizes that the way to escape poverty is to cause it, and gleefully explains how he managed to ruthlessly climb America’s economic ladder. He achieved his personal reckoning from transforming from the backwards hillbilly to the spry Silicon Valley tycoon. These men wear pink, date non-white women, and, like the Wolf of Wall Street, don’t want to be blamed for simply playing the game. Vance is a new type of masculine heroine that views his brain as his greatest asset and wants taxes to stop limiting his use of it. 

Vance straddles the line between red hot American and neo-conservative yuppie. Like Trump, his true nature is not nearly as important as his ability to dog whistle to various disgruntled groups. For an increasingly rage-driven political system, Vance is the heir apparent to Trump’s devoted MAGA following. 

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