When JD Vance re-introduced himself to the country and accepted the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination on Wednesday night, the Ohio senator’s speech made no direct mention of the best-selling autobiography that powered his rise to national fame in 2016 and has dominated Amazon’s bestseller list since Tuesday.
It’s not hard to see why. To reread “Hillbilly Elegy” now, as I did this week, is to feel a sense of disorientation. JD Vance the author sounds a lot different than JD Vance the politician. His book describes a tumultuous upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, where he was raised by an extended family of “hillbillies” who had migrated to the region from rural Appalachia. It’s a story about how he overcame a dysfunctional and broken home life and ascended into the ranks of America’s elite. And Vance the author takes a relatively unforgiving view of the pathologies of his white working class family and neighbors, illustrating the “world of truly irrational behavior” that he argued was the biggest impediment to his community’s economic mobility.
“It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible,” Vance wrote at the time. “It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”
Vance’s first act as a national figure was to be a kind of “hillbilly” whisperer for bewildered liberals in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election. A “Never Trumper” who described Trump as “cultural heroin,” Vance could explain his community in a way that reaffirmed many of his elite audience’s pre-conceived notions. Personally, I first read “Hillbilly Elegy” in college, in an earnest if somewhat contrived attempt to better understand communities unlike mine. The copy that I borrowed this week, signed by the future senator himself in 2017, belongs to a friend who now works in Democratic politics.
Much of Vance’s former persona obviously conflicts with the senator who I’ve closely covered as a Capitol Hill reporter over the course of his mere 18-month tenure. Today, he’s one of the country’s most skilled purveyors of Trumpian identity politics, someone who’s openly skeptical of liberal democracy and, as he once told me himself, “plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures.” In his book, he decries the “learned helplessness” of his community. On Wednesday night, he described Middletown as “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
Yet for all of the unflattering cultural diagnoses that the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” seems to have cast aside, the book remains an important window into the Ohio senator’s backstory and personal psychology, and it contains important clues about the man who could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, and the Republican Party’s standard bearer in a matter of four years. In fact, there’s a certain continuity between the Vance who grew up in an environment beset by disorder and occasional violence and the politician who says that the right is “going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there” to counteract what he sees as the decline of American empire.
“For those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to haunt us,” he wrote.
‘Hillbilly justice’
While Vance didn’t mention the book itself, his Wednesday night speech at the Republican National Convention was peppered with references to the book’s main characters. Most prominent was his grandmother, his “Mamaw,” who he describes as “a woman of very deep Christian faith” who “also loved the F word.” On stage, he recounted a story that also appears in “Hillbilly Elegy,” where Mamaw bluntly threatens violence against one of Vance’s friends.
“She once told me, when she found out that I was spending too much time with a local kid who was known for dealing drugs, that if I ever hung out with that kid again, she would run him over with her car,” said Vance. “And she said ‘JD, no one will ever find out about it.’”
The crowd erupted responded with nearly 20 seconds of chants of “Mamaw! Mamaw!”
Violence was a ubiquitous presence in Vance’s youth. At times, his Mamaw encouraged him to practice it himself, including against a school bully. “Sometimes, honey, you have to fight, even when you’re not defending yourself,” she tells him. “Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.” Violence was a source of disorder when his mother threatened to crash a car with both of them inside of it. But it was also a guarantor of stability when his Mamaw responded to the incident by taking unofficial custody of Vance, a move that would prove pivotal to his development.
“Mamaw told me that if Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun,” Vance wrote. “This was hillbilly justice, and it didn’t fail me.”
In a way, Vance has returned to the logic of “hillbilly justice” as a political figure, arguing that sometimes the established rules of America’s constitutional system are insufficient to meet the moment. His most notable encroachment into this terrain is his argument that Trump should openly defy the Supreme Court if it declares that he cannot fire vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy upon taking elected office. It’s a logic he’s ascribed to the political left in reference to the 2018 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. “There’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power,” he recently told The New York Times’s Ross Douthat.
There’s also the simple fact that Vance, even today, is a bit of a shape-shifter. When he’s in campaign mode, he frequently refers to the mainstream press as “vultures.” His 2022 Senate bid was rife with instances of casualty cruelty and a lack of empathy, whether it was his declaration that he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” or polling his X followers on whether the “disgusting and violent” conditions of New York City are “like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”
Yet he gets along just fine with the “vultures” inside the Capitol complex and on mainstream news shows. In our interactions, Vance has been unfailingly polite, slickly explaining away Trump’s latest transgression or translating the id of the GOP base into talking points that make sense to reporters. There are hints of this in “Hillbilly Elegy” as well: He served as a public affairs Marine, where he was trained in the art of media relations, including “how stay on message.”
Vance presents his political ideology today as being left-leaning on economics and hard-right on culture. It’s not far from the worldview held by his Mamaw, which he describes as an oscillation between “a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat.”
“I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy ad politics, I might as well close my ear,” he wrote. “Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom.”
“I began to see the world as Mamaw did,” he continued. “I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing.”
An ‘outsider in Middletown’ no more
Those who focus on Vance’s transformation, particularly the “Never Trumpers” who were once his friends, have often assumed that the views he held in 2016 represented the real JD Vance, and that what’s taken place in the eight years since then is merely a calculated repositioning.
Yet there are signs in “Hillbilly Elegy” that the conclusions reached by the author were unsatisfying, and that he had made an unstable compromise with the elite milieu he now inhabited. Something would eventually have to give.
The last 60 or so pages of the book, covering his acceptance and adjustment to Yale Law School and the rat-race of elite meritocracy, feel disjointed from the rest of the story. He suddenly feels an immense optimism about his future, which he says made him feel like an “outsider in Middletown.” His life as an aspiring lawyer comes with frequent hiccups and second-guesses, resulting in occasional outbursts that strain his relationship with his future wife, Usha. He labels himself a “cultural alien” who’s been uprooted by the forces of social mobility. He laments the “discomfort” that people like him “feel at leaving behind much of their identity.” He remarks, in the closing pages of his book, that he’s “uneasy” with his new life.
“Hillbilly Elegy” ultimately arrives at a bit of a dead end. Vance offers only vague gestures at potential policy solutions to his community’s woes, such as broadening how state laws define family units to account for the role that grandparents and extended family members play in the rearing of children like him. He ultimately declares that “there is no government that can fix these problems for us” and that “we hillbillies must wake the hell up.” It’s a little bit phoned in.
Vance has since rejected that worldview, embracing an ideology that could prove to be a dead end as well. But Trumpian nationalism feels like a tighter fit for Vance than the warmed-over, libertarian-lite conservative ideology that he’d embraced by 2016.
He no longer has to scold his family for viewing themselves as the victims: He now declares that they are.
His skepticism of addiction as a disease, which comes through when he describes his mother’s initial foray into sobriety, is now beside the point: Vance has identified a clear enemy in Chinese-manufactured fentanyl and the Mexican drug cartels that peddle it.
If he was once “worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends,” he need not be any more: The last bill he introduced before being selected as Trump’s running mate was a bill to “prevent racism in the federal government” by eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Though he remains an elite by any definition — a wealthy former venture capitalist, a US Senator, and now the vice presidential nominee for a major party — Vance has found his way back home to the identity he knows best.
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