I knew very little about him so it's nice to learn about him in a non-partisan way. The thing about reading being 'gay' reminds me of the Bill Hicks routine when the waitress asks him 'Why are you reading?' Not what, but why?
Hahaha I hadn’t watched it, just pulled it up. Spot on. Who knows what I’d be doing now if I’d been born a boy… probably they definitely would have thought I was gay. Sharing for anyone else reading these comments and in need of a laugh. https://youtu.be/BwkdGr9JYmE?si=lazUjq6q8AxrAyph
Good piece, Charlotte. Thanks for sharing this with me.
I never read Hillbilly Elegy, though I had hoped to at one point. I appreciate your take on Vance. I find him objectionable, at least this current incarnation of his persona. But I agree that people are complicated, and I don't know what's in his heart or mind. I'm opposed to the MAGA agenda, so his alignment with Donald Trump is disqualifying.
But I believe your critique of the book and your essay compels me to read it. We need to keep our minds open; you do an excellent job here. Thanks for making me think. And thanks for linking this to Shelby's photography. From the Heads of the Hollers is an incredible book. Shelby's story is similar: he grew up in Appalachia and now lives on the East Coast.
I look forward to reading more of your essays. Will we see your memoir published anytime soon?
Thank you! And thanks for the tip on the new Shelby Lee Adam’s book, I just ordered it! Didn’t even know he had a new one out.
Not so sure on the memoir, if anything, I’m going in the opposite direction, taking out all commentary and fictionalizing the story, publishing it as fiction instead. Though not sure I’ll even do that. The whole experience with the publishers was pretty brutal and made me tired of the book.
I read his book as soon as it came out in 2016 and absolutely loved it. I had a lot of respect for Vance after I finished it. I'm not a Republican and don't really agree with any of his (or Trump's) political views enough to vote that ticket, but I, too, find myself wanting to defend him from all the haters. I'm not even from Appalachia (although many older relatives were; we're also Scots-Irish) — I grew up in Minneapolis. Working class, raised by a single mom, but our life was stable in comparison to his, for sure. But still, I could relate enough and I have a soft spot for him, regardless of how angry he's made me with some of the things he's said lately.
Same. I’m politically homeless, and definitely not on board fully with either party. I wish there were no parties. No parties and no super PACs please.
What do you think makes you want to also defend him? Just the book itself? Or the onslaught of intense online hatred?
Mostly his seeming sincerity. Like you said, he's actually really thoughtful about what he talked about in the book, and even his evolution away from some of it. While that was disappointing, I can at least appreciate how he openly described the steps it took to get there.
During the beginning of the couch meme, I went on Facebook to announce that, as apparently the sole person in my social circles who actually read this book, he did not, in fact, fuck the couch (at least, he didn't admit to it in the book, lol) and for he next few days I just saw more of the memes, only now they were captioned "idgaf if it's true. He sucks." I was clearly being subtweeted by my elder Millennial liberal and anarchist pals on Facebook 😂 Like, okay, he does kinda suck in many ways, you are correct, but literally he didn't fuck the couch. I just double-checked. Nope, not in there.
Constantly being a shameless pedant about this sort of thing may have helped accelerate my own entrance into the Politically Homeless club around the same time I first read his book, looking back. I felt the same need to defend Richard Spencer, whom I disagreed with on nearly every issue but I also obsessively hate-listened to his podcast, so I knew what everyone kept getting wrong when they'd criticize him. I don't remember what any of that was anymore since I stopped paying attention to him sometime around 2017, but I'm just annoying like that and apparently refuse to stop.
Though likely true of all politicians. He’s just maybe not as good at hiding it because he’s younger and therefore way more “recorded” on video and in digital correspondences. I suspect this will become an issue for all candidates moving forward.
One of my earliest memories was using an outhouse behind a coal mining shack in Shinnston WV. A couple years later I was acquired by a different aunt who had moved "up town" to a hill-billy haven across the Ohio River. I understand Appalachian Evangelical mentality well. Interestingly, In that small industrial Ohio town, the education was surprisingly good (compared to the San Diego high school I went to in my senior year, after running away at age 15). I didn't really keep touch with my classmates after that escape, but I do know at least three who went on to "Ivy League" schools (plus me, if you consider Stanford-to-Wellesley "Ivy"). I remember periodically visiting my paternal Grampa in Buckhannon WV. He was always so proud that West Virginia Wesleyan College was in the town. My problem with Vance's book was that he painted "hill-billies" with a broad broken brush, and emphasized a failure of personal responsibility, when in fact most are both driven by the beliefs & customs of their ancestors, and most also do take personal responsibility in the face of enormous obstacles. He should have taken more time to address the cultural & systemic problems at the heart of their apparent "failure". The problem I have with Vance now is that his "success" in venture capital is not based on merit or achievement, it's a product of being used by others to achieve their own objectives. And instead of working in the Senate to propose (or even endorse) legislation that would alleviate some of the problems of Appalachia, he did not. And now he has become someone else's puppet - the men behind 2025 and Trump, spouting the same lies and insults that they do.
That’s great that you had three classmates that made it to the Ivy Leagues! Didn’t know you were from the regions. Did you read the book recently? I hear this criticism often, but having just read it, I found the book quite balanced between personal responsibility and systemic responsibility, in fact I think it leans towards blaming the government and not the people.
Admittedly, I don’t know as much about his actual senate performance so far.
Yes! It’s definitely one of the more controversial books of my lifetime. Hard to think of many that caused more stir. Three Cups of Tea and A Million Little Pieces come to mind, but they were controversial for being faked. His is just plain controversial.
This is an unusually even handed and fair review. I'm not too sure about JD's latest incarnation, but I read and enjoyed his book. However, the best book, in my opinion in the Scot's Irish/hillbilly genre is Jim Webb's Born Fighting.
I appreciate your detailed essay on JD Vance and his book. I haven’t read his book and maybe I will. Although I’m pretty disgusted with his comments and his luck of kindness and compassion for anybody that is not ‘like him’- It has been difficult for me to wrap my head around his ‘transformation’ . However, I’m not sure if whoever he is today wasn’t always a part of him that he had conveniently hidden..
Today I listened to ‘the daily’ from the NYT and I would recommend it. It is a conversation between the NYT and Sofia Nelson that used to be her friend … and their email exchange that she has just made public. Let me know what you think.
I will listen! He’s definitely a shape shifter, or at best someone with many sides and he uses the sides to his benefit. A chameleon. But I also think people just evolve. I’ve seen a lot of men and even women in my family and friend’s circles drift right in recent years.
Had a conversation recently with someone who voted for Hilary and she said now she wants to vote for Kamala, wants a female president, but just can’t trust the democrats—so she’s voting for either RFK or Trump.
Re-reading this now, in light of RFK’s abdication, I guess we know how she is voting. But not trusting the democrats yet trusting Trump just confounds me. I think the Dems are pretty up front with who they are and what they support, as are the Republicans. So are they actually listening to those messages? Because I don’t see any confusion if you are a woman, around where you will stand going forward.
I feel you. I was at first shocked that RFK endorsed Trump, but then again, he’s a Hollywood conspiracy theorist rich white guy, so actually, it makes perfect sense.
Let me start by saying I have not read his book although I did watch the movie. I also used his book as a keyword / comp to sell my own memoir, No Rules, and made a number of sales that way.
However, that was Vance then and this is Vance now. High intelligence can also increase someone’s ability to manipulate others, and based on his background, he an experienced manipulator. He is now in the perfect position to manipulate those he grew up around as he knows them well.
I find his extreme misogyny frightening. At a time when women’s rights need defending more than ever in the last 50 years, he has abandoned and denounced them. He has insulted his own wife by suggesting a need to justify why he married a woman of color. And in his questioning of why the people of Appalachia are so poor, has he ever questioned how they have been taken advantage of? How keeping them poor made them just the right workers for the steel companies and coal mining, dangerous and unhealthy work for hard-working people who grew up seeing no other choices. Companies that little by little paid people less and less until they had barely anything left. It’s such a lesson in successful Capitalistic greed. Follow that up with companies peddling massive amounts of oxycodone through those states and the Appalachian area. Desperate people looking to take away their pain.
Some people may be strong enough, insightful enough, or have just enough vision to get themselves free. But then you must question: who made it so difficult for them? While personal responsibility matters, how about the responsibility of those getting wealthy by taking advantage of them? I don’t see Vance acknowledging that responsibility in his current message. I think the bigger risk from him is that he takes all his success as a sign that he deserves it, and others do not. That he alone earned it and others haven’t. Because as difficult as it was for him, how much more difficult would it have been if he was a woman? If his skin was black? Would he have been granted the opportunities he had in those circumstances?
Perhaps he will eventually come around to understand this. In the meantime, an intelligent man who will do the bidding of those who hold his future in their hands is far more dangerous than an ignorant one. At a time when corporations have more money and control than ever, who are willing to do less for employees since probably the 1920s, when there is no balance of power between workers and employers, this is a bad time for someone to be in power who believes it is all the fault of the powerless workers. Someone who believes that allocating more power and control to corporations will fix everything if people just shut up and behave, that women must abdicate their power to husbands. I think he took the pill that promised him unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Because he feels he deserves it.
So fascinating that you used him as a comp/keyword! Didn’t know that. I can see why your book would appeal to the same audience though. He definitely goes over the points you mentioned in the book, and discusses drugs, big pharma etc, which continues to be one of his biggest talking points, though he’s shifted it to fentanyl and the border. The movie was all personal story but the book is more like 50% or more social analysis and commentary mixed with the personal story.
Agree on the misogyny. Agree also on the ability of the highly intelligent to use their gifts for good and for evil. You could be so right about your last sentence too, though I really hope not, but love the way you phrased that! Amazing comment in general! “I think he took the pill that promised him unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Because he feels he deserves it.” WOW! Def like 90% of the men I know from the region my age are pretty darned entitled, and most are racist, most are sexist to the core, so you may be correct.
Of course he has shifted it to fentanyl and the border, because that is the party line. He no longer speaks about how that all began. How people got addicted because of big pharma. Now it's all about blaming desperately poor brown people trying to survive instead of a big corporation falsifying data. He can twist the message just a little, just enough so he may even believe it himself.
Agreed, and I believe he really believes we need more border control. Another book Amy Chua wrote, which Vance interviewed her about and seemed to agree on, was called “Political Tribes” and dealt in part with the idea that too much immigration is destabilizing to democracy because ethnicities in mass tend to cloister and not mix and this exacerbates cultural divisions and challenges democracies.
I can see that. The only problem is it ignores the root cause of immigration. People don't want to leave their homes. Its a last resort. But between climate change, exploitation of the people and resources in other countries, and constant war and power struggles in countries, too many people are in search of a stable place to live. So its going to get worse. I think Europe has it even worse than here. Its very complicated. So much damage done in the past, and even now. The US is getting its karma back. I don't know how you fix this. But stablizing climate and empowering women would be a huge step in the right direction. When women are empowered and not forced to bear children, population stablizes. And increasing heat, fires, floods, and growing deserts make it worse.
Totally agree. I’m more pro-open borders than most, and I think we need to make legal immigration way faster and easier. It’s ridiculously slow and inefficient.
I remember seeing that in Finland (I think) , all immigrants had to go through training classes to learn the language and to learn about their culture and way of life, as well as how to apply for jobs, etc. Something like this would be helpful and beneficial to everyone.
While I share a lot of the concerns about Vance here (especially around his stance on abortions), I’m chastened by the failure of my state of California to alleviate human suffering and I have seen the direct causation between progressive policies I supported actually leading to worse outcomes, increased violence and insecurity for the most vulnerable populations around me. The city of Oakland could be its own case study of how the crash of liberal values, venture capitalist money and activism have spelled disaster for many of the families and small buisnesses attempting to survive there.
I find Trump a troubling figure but I have a lot of sympathy for people turning away from the politics that have enabled the problems I see around me in the Bay Area. My hope is that as a man who has actually survived some of this devastation and thought deeply about it, Vance is working in his own way to get the country to a better place. My fear is that, like many survivors of poverty, he’s looking to his own generational wealth rather than the solving of our entrenched problems.
I just wanted to add, I really love your excellent, thoughtful and provoking writing in this article and I hope I get a chance to read your book. From this article, it seems like it would be terrific!
Thank you for this. I have been finding Hillbilly Elegy criticism far out of scope of the actual book and a debates about Vance's Hillbilly Eligibility to be crass partisan cultural war nonsense.
I'm also not fond of his politics or policies and not interested in seeing him develop a political career. These are different things.
Looking to Hillbilly Elegy to divine appropriate policy remedies for the Appalachian region strikes me as looking to Tara Westover to reform public education because of her memoir Educated. It doesn't make sense. Both memoirs give us a ground-level view of the abject situation many Americans find themselves in, opening the door for empathy and understanding for readers who struggle to imagine that the poverty they see in the evening news comes from some other circumstances than moral choice. Both writers discover the astounding different parallel worlds between the impoverished and those networked into mainstream American wealth, but neither memoirs claim to know how to bridge them. You can learn a lot from these books but they don't give you answers.
And that was the first criticism I ever heard of Hillbilly Elegy, back in 2016, when my cousin and I first read it. She said, "I was disappointed because I expected it to offer some solutions." I don't think it would have been a good book if it did.
The book is a victim of its own success, coming out right as a self-flagellating media was bemoaning "we need to listen to the rural Americans!" Then they never really did, tokenizing Vance and others as Hillbilly Whisperers rather than considering what to do about the problems they were describing.
I don't think Vance has the right answers to how to help others of his peer group avoid his fate, but I do think he'd have far better answers if people were spending more time letting him guide them through the problems than whipping him for his ambitions.
Now that I've read the essay, Vance literally had/has the author of Tiger Mother in his corner. 😂 That proved to be a handy connection.
Not being American, I have no interest in reading the book, so your thoughts and emotional connections gave me much to contemplate.
I've seen the film, which I deduce is condensed, leaving out a lot of the book's contents. I do admire his efforts to lead a better life, he's done that, and then some. All credit to him.
You paint an admiring picture of Vance's few brief years in the tech industry. He dabbled, he didn't charge anything, didn't design anything, and was small fry, so he looked for another option, which turned out to be politics.
He's a player.
If all goes well, he'll be Trump's natural successor as a poisonous and divisive influence over the Republican party. Trump won't ever annoint Vance as such, because Trump doesn't annoint anyone but himself, however, when Trump loses for a second time, even the snivelling Republicans will stop listening to him, and will likely see Vance as a good replacement, at least for a while.
I knew very little about him so it's nice to learn about him in a non-partisan way. The thing about reading being 'gay' reminds me of the Bill Hicks routine when the waitress asks him 'Why are you reading?' Not what, but why?
Hahaha I hadn’t watched it, just pulled it up. Spot on. Who knows what I’d be doing now if I’d been born a boy… probably they definitely would have thought I was gay. Sharing for anyone else reading these comments and in need of a laugh. https://youtu.be/BwkdGr9JYmE?si=lazUjq6q8AxrAyph
Good piece, Charlotte. Thanks for sharing this with me.
I never read Hillbilly Elegy, though I had hoped to at one point. I appreciate your take on Vance. I find him objectionable, at least this current incarnation of his persona. But I agree that people are complicated, and I don't know what's in his heart or mind. I'm opposed to the MAGA agenda, so his alignment with Donald Trump is disqualifying.
But I believe your critique of the book and your essay compels me to read it. We need to keep our minds open; you do an excellent job here. Thanks for making me think. And thanks for linking this to Shelby's photography. From the Heads of the Hollers is an incredible book. Shelby's story is similar: he grew up in Appalachia and now lives on the East Coast.
I look forward to reading more of your essays. Will we see your memoir published anytime soon?
Thank you! And thanks for the tip on the new Shelby Lee Adam’s book, I just ordered it! Didn’t even know he had a new one out.
Not so sure on the memoir, if anything, I’m going in the opposite direction, taking out all commentary and fictionalizing the story, publishing it as fiction instead. Though not sure I’ll even do that. The whole experience with the publishers was pretty brutal and made me tired of the book.
Would you consider serializing it here on Substack?
Had not considered that! Maybe… idk.
I read his book as soon as it came out in 2016 and absolutely loved it. I had a lot of respect for Vance after I finished it. I'm not a Republican and don't really agree with any of his (or Trump's) political views enough to vote that ticket, but I, too, find myself wanting to defend him from all the haters. I'm not even from Appalachia (although many older relatives were; we're also Scots-Irish) — I grew up in Minneapolis. Working class, raised by a single mom, but our life was stable in comparison to his, for sure. But still, I could relate enough and I have a soft spot for him, regardless of how angry he's made me with some of the things he's said lately.
Great piece teasing it all out!
Same. I’m politically homeless, and definitely not on board fully with either party. I wish there were no parties. No parties and no super PACs please.
What do you think makes you want to also defend him? Just the book itself? Or the onslaught of intense online hatred?
Mostly his seeming sincerity. Like you said, he's actually really thoughtful about what he talked about in the book, and even his evolution away from some of it. While that was disappointing, I can at least appreciate how he openly described the steps it took to get there.
During the beginning of the couch meme, I went on Facebook to announce that, as apparently the sole person in my social circles who actually read this book, he did not, in fact, fuck the couch (at least, he didn't admit to it in the book, lol) and for he next few days I just saw more of the memes, only now they were captioned "idgaf if it's true. He sucks." I was clearly being subtweeted by my elder Millennial liberal and anarchist pals on Facebook 😂 Like, okay, he does kinda suck in many ways, you are correct, but literally he didn't fuck the couch. I just double-checked. Nope, not in there.
Constantly being a shameless pedant about this sort of thing may have helped accelerate my own entrance into the Politically Homeless club around the same time I first read his book, looking back. I felt the same need to defend Richard Spencer, whom I disagreed with on nearly every issue but I also obsessively hate-listened to his podcast, so I knew what everyone kept getting wrong when they'd criticize him. I don't remember what any of that was anymore since I stopped paying attention to him sometime around 2017, but I'm just annoying like that and apparently refuse to stop.
Haha welcome to the club. I feel the same on his sincerity.
Putinist Fascism is tempting for you then?
Welcome to the discussion. Please elaborate on your thinking so we can fully understand your viewpoint.
I have come to believe that he’s an extremely skilled manipulator…
Though likely true of all politicians. He’s just maybe not as good at hiding it because he’s younger and therefore way more “recorded” on video and in digital correspondences. I suspect this will become an issue for all candidates moving forward.
One of my earliest memories was using an outhouse behind a coal mining shack in Shinnston WV. A couple years later I was acquired by a different aunt who had moved "up town" to a hill-billy haven across the Ohio River. I understand Appalachian Evangelical mentality well. Interestingly, In that small industrial Ohio town, the education was surprisingly good (compared to the San Diego high school I went to in my senior year, after running away at age 15). I didn't really keep touch with my classmates after that escape, but I do know at least three who went on to "Ivy League" schools (plus me, if you consider Stanford-to-Wellesley "Ivy"). I remember periodically visiting my paternal Grampa in Buckhannon WV. He was always so proud that West Virginia Wesleyan College was in the town. My problem with Vance's book was that he painted "hill-billies" with a broad broken brush, and emphasized a failure of personal responsibility, when in fact most are both driven by the beliefs & customs of their ancestors, and most also do take personal responsibility in the face of enormous obstacles. He should have taken more time to address the cultural & systemic problems at the heart of their apparent "failure". The problem I have with Vance now is that his "success" in venture capital is not based on merit or achievement, it's a product of being used by others to achieve their own objectives. And instead of working in the Senate to propose (or even endorse) legislation that would alleviate some of the problems of Appalachia, he did not. And now he has become someone else's puppet - the men behind 2025 and Trump, spouting the same lies and insults that they do.
That’s great that you had three classmates that made it to the Ivy Leagues! Didn’t know you were from the regions. Did you read the book recently? I hear this criticism often, but having just read it, I found the book quite balanced between personal responsibility and systemic responsibility, in fact I think it leans towards blaming the government and not the people.
Admittedly, I don’t know as much about his actual senate performance so far.
I read it when it first came out. I know a few people who live in various parts of Appalachia, and they're not too pleased with that book.
Yes! It’s definitely one of the more controversial books of my lifetime. Hard to think of many that caused more stir. Three Cups of Tea and A Million Little Pieces come to mind, but they were controversial for being faked. His is just plain controversial.
This is an unusually even handed and fair review. I'm not too sure about JD's latest incarnation, but I read and enjoyed his book. However, the best book, in my opinion in the Scot's Irish/hillbilly genre is Jim Webb's Born Fighting.
Thank you! I haven't read Born Fighting. I'll look into that!
Hello
I appreciate your detailed essay on JD Vance and his book. I haven’t read his book and maybe I will. Although I’m pretty disgusted with his comments and his luck of kindness and compassion for anybody that is not ‘like him’- It has been difficult for me to wrap my head around his ‘transformation’ . However, I’m not sure if whoever he is today wasn’t always a part of him that he had conveniently hidden..
Today I listened to ‘the daily’ from the NYT and I would recommend it. It is a conversation between the NYT and Sofia Nelson that used to be her friend … and their email exchange that she has just made public. Let me know what you think.
I will listen! He’s definitely a shape shifter, or at best someone with many sides and he uses the sides to his benefit. A chameleon. But I also think people just evolve. I’ve seen a lot of men and even women in my family and friend’s circles drift right in recent years.
Had a conversation recently with someone who voted for Hilary and she said now she wants to vote for Kamala, wants a female president, but just can’t trust the democrats—so she’s voting for either RFK or Trump.
Re-reading this now, in light of RFK’s abdication, I guess we know how she is voting. But not trusting the democrats yet trusting Trump just confounds me. I think the Dems are pretty up front with who they are and what they support, as are the Republicans. So are they actually listening to those messages? Because I don’t see any confusion if you are a woman, around where you will stand going forward.
I feel you. I was at first shocked that RFK endorsed Trump, but then again, he’s a Hollywood conspiracy theorist rich white guy, so actually, it makes perfect sense.
Let me start by saying I have not read his book although I did watch the movie. I also used his book as a keyword / comp to sell my own memoir, No Rules, and made a number of sales that way.
However, that was Vance then and this is Vance now. High intelligence can also increase someone’s ability to manipulate others, and based on his background, he an experienced manipulator. He is now in the perfect position to manipulate those he grew up around as he knows them well.
I find his extreme misogyny frightening. At a time when women’s rights need defending more than ever in the last 50 years, he has abandoned and denounced them. He has insulted his own wife by suggesting a need to justify why he married a woman of color. And in his questioning of why the people of Appalachia are so poor, has he ever questioned how they have been taken advantage of? How keeping them poor made them just the right workers for the steel companies and coal mining, dangerous and unhealthy work for hard-working people who grew up seeing no other choices. Companies that little by little paid people less and less until they had barely anything left. It’s such a lesson in successful Capitalistic greed. Follow that up with companies peddling massive amounts of oxycodone through those states and the Appalachian area. Desperate people looking to take away their pain.
Some people may be strong enough, insightful enough, or have just enough vision to get themselves free. But then you must question: who made it so difficult for them? While personal responsibility matters, how about the responsibility of those getting wealthy by taking advantage of them? I don’t see Vance acknowledging that responsibility in his current message. I think the bigger risk from him is that he takes all his success as a sign that he deserves it, and others do not. That he alone earned it and others haven’t. Because as difficult as it was for him, how much more difficult would it have been if he was a woman? If his skin was black? Would he have been granted the opportunities he had in those circumstances?
Perhaps he will eventually come around to understand this. In the meantime, an intelligent man who will do the bidding of those who hold his future in their hands is far more dangerous than an ignorant one. At a time when corporations have more money and control than ever, who are willing to do less for employees since probably the 1920s, when there is no balance of power between workers and employers, this is a bad time for someone to be in power who believes it is all the fault of the powerless workers. Someone who believes that allocating more power and control to corporations will fix everything if people just shut up and behave, that women must abdicate their power to husbands. I think he took the pill that promised him unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Because he feels he deserves it.
So fascinating that you used him as a comp/keyword! Didn’t know that. I can see why your book would appeal to the same audience though. He definitely goes over the points you mentioned in the book, and discusses drugs, big pharma etc, which continues to be one of his biggest talking points, though he’s shifted it to fentanyl and the border. The movie was all personal story but the book is more like 50% or more social analysis and commentary mixed with the personal story.
Agree on the misogyny. Agree also on the ability of the highly intelligent to use their gifts for good and for evil. You could be so right about your last sentence too, though I really hope not, but love the way you phrased that! Amazing comment in general! “I think he took the pill that promised him unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Because he feels he deserves it.” WOW! Def like 90% of the men I know from the region my age are pretty darned entitled, and most are racist, most are sexist to the core, so you may be correct.
Of course he has shifted it to fentanyl and the border, because that is the party line. He no longer speaks about how that all began. How people got addicted because of big pharma. Now it's all about blaming desperately poor brown people trying to survive instead of a big corporation falsifying data. He can twist the message just a little, just enough so he may even believe it himself.
Agreed, and I believe he really believes we need more border control. Another book Amy Chua wrote, which Vance interviewed her about and seemed to agree on, was called “Political Tribes” and dealt in part with the idea that too much immigration is destabilizing to democracy because ethnicities in mass tend to cloister and not mix and this exacerbates cultural divisions and challenges democracies.
I can see that. The only problem is it ignores the root cause of immigration. People don't want to leave their homes. Its a last resort. But between climate change, exploitation of the people and resources in other countries, and constant war and power struggles in countries, too many people are in search of a stable place to live. So its going to get worse. I think Europe has it even worse than here. Its very complicated. So much damage done in the past, and even now. The US is getting its karma back. I don't know how you fix this. But stablizing climate and empowering women would be a huge step in the right direction. When women are empowered and not forced to bear children, population stablizes. And increasing heat, fires, floods, and growing deserts make it worse.
Totally agree. I’m more pro-open borders than most, and I think we need to make legal immigration way faster and easier. It’s ridiculously slow and inefficient.
I remember seeing that in Finland (I think) , all immigrants had to go through training classes to learn the language and to learn about their culture and way of life, as well as how to apply for jobs, etc. Something like this would be helpful and beneficial to everyone.
While I share a lot of the concerns about Vance here (especially around his stance on abortions), I’m chastened by the failure of my state of California to alleviate human suffering and I have seen the direct causation between progressive policies I supported actually leading to worse outcomes, increased violence and insecurity for the most vulnerable populations around me. The city of Oakland could be its own case study of how the crash of liberal values, venture capitalist money and activism have spelled disaster for many of the families and small buisnesses attempting to survive there.
I find Trump a troubling figure but I have a lot of sympathy for people turning away from the politics that have enabled the problems I see around me in the Bay Area. My hope is that as a man who has actually survived some of this devastation and thought deeply about it, Vance is working in his own way to get the country to a better place. My fear is that, like many survivors of poverty, he’s looking to his own generational wealth rather than the solving of our entrenched problems.
I just wanted to add, I really love your excellent, thoughtful and provoking writing in this article and I hope I get a chance to read your book. From this article, it seems like it would be terrific!
VERY well said, Sharon!
Thank you for this. I have been finding Hillbilly Elegy criticism far out of scope of the actual book and a debates about Vance's Hillbilly Eligibility to be crass partisan cultural war nonsense.
I'm also not fond of his politics or policies and not interested in seeing him develop a political career. These are different things.
Looking to Hillbilly Elegy to divine appropriate policy remedies for the Appalachian region strikes me as looking to Tara Westover to reform public education because of her memoir Educated. It doesn't make sense. Both memoirs give us a ground-level view of the abject situation many Americans find themselves in, opening the door for empathy and understanding for readers who struggle to imagine that the poverty they see in the evening news comes from some other circumstances than moral choice. Both writers discover the astounding different parallel worlds between the impoverished and those networked into mainstream American wealth, but neither memoirs claim to know how to bridge them. You can learn a lot from these books but they don't give you answers.
And that was the first criticism I ever heard of Hillbilly Elegy, back in 2016, when my cousin and I first read it. She said, "I was disappointed because I expected it to offer some solutions." I don't think it would have been a good book if it did.
The book is a victim of its own success, coming out right as a self-flagellating media was bemoaning "we need to listen to the rural Americans!" Then they never really did, tokenizing Vance and others as Hillbilly Whisperers rather than considering what to do about the problems they were describing.
I don't think Vance has the right answers to how to help others of his peer group avoid his fate, but I do think he'd have far better answers if people were spending more time letting him guide them through the problems than whipping him for his ambitions.
Now that I've read the essay, Vance literally had/has the author of Tiger Mother in his corner. 😂 That proved to be a handy connection.
Not being American, I have no interest in reading the book, so your thoughts and emotional connections gave me much to contemplate.
I've seen the film, which I deduce is condensed, leaving out a lot of the book's contents. I do admire his efforts to lead a better life, he's done that, and then some. All credit to him.
You paint an admiring picture of Vance's few brief years in the tech industry. He dabbled, he didn't charge anything, didn't design anything, and was small fry, so he looked for another option, which turned out to be politics.
He's a player.
If all goes well, he'll be Trump's natural successor as a poisonous and divisive influence over the Republican party. Trump won't ever annoint Vance as such, because Trump doesn't annoint anyone but himself, however, when Trump loses for a second time, even the snivelling Republicans will stop listening to him, and will likely see Vance as a good replacement, at least for a while.