The Irreconcilable Versions of J.D. Vance in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

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The Irreconcilable Versions of J.D. Vance in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Much has been made of the political pirouette J.D. Vance ********* to secure the embrace of Donald J. Trump, a man he once called “cultural *******” before seeking his endorsement for the Senate and, Wednesday night, accepting the *********** nomination to be his vice president.

Old friends and former classmates have expressed bewilderment at the seemingly irreconcilable versions of Mr. Vance. But contradiction has been central to Mr. Vance’s biography, nowhere more so than in his popular 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”

The memoir, whose political dividends have far exceeded the millions of dollars it has paid in royalties and movie rights, emerged at a pivotal point in national politics, quickly becoming a go-to guide to the white underclass discontent that propelled Mr. Trump’s surprise presidential victory.

Mr. Vance used his personal account of overcoming dysfunctional Appalachian family values to tell a larger story about forgotten Americans. In his acceptance speech at the *********** National Convention in Milwaukee, he leaned again into those themes, at one point drawing attention to his mother, “who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up.” She stood in the audience when he continued, “And I’m proud to say that tonight my mom is here, 10 years clean and sober.”

But during Mr. Trump’s presidency, reaction to the book, like so much else in culture and politics, became increasingly polarized. While he expected pushback, Mr. Vance was confused by the attacks from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, he professed in an afterword appended to the book in 2018.

“I’ve heard, for instance, from someone on the Left that my book is a victim-blaming piece of anti-government libertarianism,” he wrote, adding that “someone on the Right” had complained that the book’s premise “would justify a massive expansion of government ******** programs.”

“Both of these things can’t possibly be true.”

Yet the book clearly allowed people to believe each of those things could be true. And Mr. Vance himself straddled those contradictions in his acceptance speech Wednesday night, delivering a CliffsNotes version of the book interwoven with a critique of President Biden’s policies that ran counter to some of the book’s messaging.

When talking about how the people in his book had been “cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington,” Mr. Vance cited as examples trade deals with Mexico and China that he said had destroyed jobs back home.

But in “Hillbilly Elegy” he suggested quite the opposite.

“We talk about the value of hard work, but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness,” he wrote. “‘Obama shut down the coal mines’ or ‘All the jobs went to the ********.’ These are the ***** we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance — the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”

Even within the book, Mr. Vance’s biography contains a yin-and-yang quality. He described being raised in an Appalachian family fractured by drugs, ********* and ******** that had relocated to “an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” Yet he somehow managed to escape the gravitational pull of his chaotic clan to join the Marines, get a college degree and attend Yale Law School.

He cast a wry eye on Ivy League elites, noting how a trip to Cracker Barrel, the “height of fine dining” back home, became a “greasy public health crisis” for his Yale classmates: “I realized that in this new world I was the cultural alien.” At the same time, his struggling friends and relatives in Ohio, with whom he expressed solidarity and a degree of sympathy, were not spared his often acerbic observations about laziness, bigotry and domestic ******.

Mr. Vance packaged it all with a disarming humility. “To understand me,” he wrote, “you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

When “Hillbilly Elegy” was published during Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign, it was heralded as refreshingly original social commentary. People all along the political gamut tended to find in its pages evidence that supported their views, whether it be a need for greater personal responsibility or a more effective social safety net.

There were also objections, particularly among some others familiar with Appalachia. Silas House, an author and scholar of Appalachian studies at Berea College in Kentucky, later

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that “as soon as I read it, my antenna’s going up all over the place.”

“There’s a scene where he talks about his uncles, who are these drunks who ****** everybody and they beat their wives, and then he calls them the embodiment of the Appalachian man,” Mr. House said. “Well, as an Appalachian man, that’s deeply troubling to me, because that doesn’t embody Appalachian masculinity as I know it.”

Rather quickly, however, the book was being held up as an interpretive guide to the evolving politics of the moment. Liberals appreciated that Mr. Vance, though open about his ************* views, did not shy away from criticizing Republicans. In a

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entitled “Opioid of the Masses,” he said Mr. Trump was fooling the people described in his book with false promises of help and redemption.

But conservatives saw larger themes at work. The same month Mr. Vance’s essay was published in The Atlantic, the ********* *************

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by Rod Dreher proclaiming “Hillbilly Elegy” perhaps the most important book of 2016 for “Americans who care about politics and the future of our country.”

“You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance,” he wrote, suggesting the book “does for poor white people” what the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates did for poor ****** people: “give them voice and presence in the public square.”

Mr. Vance’s own path, meanwhile, was taking him further away from his roots. After briefly practicing law and starting a nonprofit focused on combating opioid addiction, he moved into private equity, eventually working with the venture capitalist and *********** megadonor Peter Thiel.

He flirted with running for the Senate in Ohio in 2018, but decided against it. Two years later,

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released a movie version of his book that earned

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but introduced Mr. Vance’s story to a wider audience. When Ohio’s other Senate seat became available in 2022, Mr. Vance jumped in, with help from Mr. Thiel, who

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to support his campaign.

By then, Mr. Vance’s public persona was undergoing a profound makeover. He made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in February 2021 to bend the knee before Mr. Trump, apologize for his past criticisms and seek the former president’s support. He grew a beard, which some saw as

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associated with the MAGA movement, and moved steadily rightward in his partisan assessment of the country’s problems.

As he changed, so did popular views of his memoir.

Liberals and “Never Trumpers” who might have once given Mr. Vance credit for speaking hard truths, now

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if he really believed what he had written or if the book had always been a launchpad for a political career.

In The Atlantic — the same magazine where Mr. Vance had called Mr. Trump “cultural *******” — Tom Nichols, a ***********-turned-independent, said he had once been “intrigued by his writing,” but now lamented Mr. Vance’s “silly and yet detestable moral collapse.”

“Instead of a truth-teller in his own community,” Mr. Nichols wrote, “Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.”

Others came to Mr. Vance’s defense. Abigail Shrier, a former Wall Street Journal opinion writer, said his book “

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the vast numbers of poor ******* who feel left behind” and offered “a conservatism that refrains from denigrating and dividing the ********* people.”

Mr. Vance won his Senate campaign. And with Mr. Trump’s re-emergence at the top of the *********** ticket for 2024, he positioned himself as a potential running mate, further solidifying his place as a lightning rod in the culture wars.

He has made occasional attempts to explain himself. In an interview last month with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Mr. Vance attributed the hardening of his views mostly to a growing irritation with progressives and elites. He cited, for example, the backlash to the rise of ****** Lives Matter in 2020.

“There was nothing you were allowed to say. Offending someone was an act of *********,” he said. “I think a lot of us just said: ‘We’re done with this. We’re not playing this game, and we refuse to be policed in what we think and what we say.’”

He also said he had come to believe that liberals and elites viewed his book as “an interpretive lens for Trump’s voters” without challenging their own preconceptions about the people he wrote about.

“I realized,” he said, “that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand but some people didn’t.”

Now vaulted back onto the national stage, Mr. Vance is bound to get a surge in new readers for the book, which spent 74 weeks on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list and 66 weeks for paperback nonfiction. On Thursday, the paperback and Kindle versions were trending at No. 1 on

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.

“We’ve gone to press several times and will continue as the demand grows,” the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, said in a statement.

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#Irreconcilable #Versions #J.D #Vance #Hillbilly #Elegy

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