In 2016, a certain kind of mostly well-meaning liberal was trying to get anyone with a pulse to read Hillbilly Elegy, the ridiculous tome by Down Home Investment Banker JD Vance.
As you probably know, Vance’s tale of growing up with his grandparents in rural Ohio (by way of suburban Cincinnati) was criticized by actual Appalachian writers and others as misrepresenting the region. The story of his Mamaw and Papaw’s origins in Kentucky drives the story.
What also drives the story is Vance’s blaming of low-income people for their poverty, wrapped in a Trojan horse of addiction and family troubles. In this case, Vance echoed the GOP’s Welfare Mother Buying Steak trope by describing seeing food stamp recipients using cellphones when he worked at a grocery store, despite his not being able to afford one.
This, along with the hillbilly culture, was why they were poor. Of course, corporations such as coal companies screwing their employees and the pharmaceutical companies pushing opiates on their communities had nothing to do with it, in JD’s mind. Let’s just say that thought did not age well.
Despite this open disdain for the rural poor that came from a very right-leaning perspective, after JD’s book was published he was hailed among both the right and the center punditry world as kind of a hillbilly whisperer, a man with his finger on the pulse of the white working class. In the area where I live, the Happy Valley of Penn State fame, it also seemed to catch on among a certain type of well-to-do, center-left person.
This State College, Pa., region is basically a college town island surrounded by the northern reaches of Appalachia, so it spoke to them. There is a relatively high level of poverty in rural middle Pennsylvania, in a vast region from the New York border to the Maryland border and from roughly Scranton to Harrisburg on west to Pittsburgh. I live in a town where roughly a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. I now live in a rural version of the inner-city neighborhood I grew up in, a combination of working-class and low-income people, although much more white than my hometown.
There is a certain built-in level of disdain toward this socioeconomic level that I am highly sensitive to given my background, and I am well aware of the addiction to automatically blaming these folks for their misfortune. So, it did not surprise me all that person after person tried to get me to read Vance’s dismissive nonsense. He was, these people said, a very reasoned man who gets it and has ideas on how to improve things but first, those people have to want to help themselves.
Now, I know that I am talking about rural folks who are largely Trumpers, but not all of them are. And besides, given we are supposed to be liberals/progressives/Democrats, we are supposed to want to help them even if they do want to vote for the Orange Nightmare. But I have suspicions that Vance was so well-liked by the lib-leaning Hillbilly Elegy fams was because he gave them the okay to blame the sufferers for their suffering.
This stance of Vance as the Reasoned Wise Conservative was strengthened by his initial response to Trump’s candidacy in 2016. As has been reported (but not enough), Vance trashed Trump, referred to him as a grifter, a dangerous man, and yes, Hitler. My, how things have changed.
The mask eventually fell off. The JD Vance of today, the man who is the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, is a sniveling, dangerous person, an intelligent version of Trump with the same horrible views. He is the living, breathing embodiment of all that is terrible about Project 2025. And he is all in with the authoritarianism and incitements to violence—Behold, right after the Trump assassination attempt, JD decided it was a good idea to post this on TwitterX:
Today is not just some isolated incident.
The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.
That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 14, 2024
I can only wonder what some of those same liberal JD Vance fans today think of all this. I hope they now see who he really is.
The last word goes to Bernice Johnson Reagon, who passed away this week. The legendary singer and civil rights activist was 81.
