Now that J.D. Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate, that’s probably what he’s most well-known for. However, it wasn’t long ago that J.D. Vance was well-known for his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in which he describes his childhood growing up in suburban Cincinnati, visiting his extended family in Kentucky from time-to-time. It’s a reasonably well-told rags to riches story.
It took me quite a while to get around to reading Hillbilly Elegy. I learned of Vance’s work via a 2016 review of his book by Sarah Smarsh. Hillbilly Elegy had been published for a few months, and there were a lot of coastal elites who were shocked (SHOCKED, I say!) that registered voters existed in these weird areas they saw from cruising altitude who wanted to vote for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. They wanted to understand the “hillbilly” mindset (i.e. people from households earning under $75,000/year who lived in modest homes more than an hour outside the urban core of large U.S. cities; you know….hillbillies). The zeitgeist at the time was that Vance’s book provided the key to understanding those people.
Smarsh’s review in The Guardian (“Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans“) was prescient and unfortunately not well-heeded prior to the election. A good quote from her 2016 piece:
“While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. […] One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread.”
The chattering class had already elevated Vance to being the unofficial spokesman for the hillbillies of Trump country. Besides, Hillary Clinton was almost certainly going to win. After all, it was inconceivable that anyone would vote for Trump, especially after the Access Hollywood tapes.
The first time I skimmed Smarsh’s 2016 article, I thought “she” was a “he”, because I made the mistake of thinking that someone working at a grain elevator and worried about “physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers“. That’s because I imagined the physical dangers I faced when I was driving tractor as a kid where our family farm responsibilities were often doled out in a gendered manner. And I was only skimming until I got to the end of the article, and I thought “wow, that dude has it right“. I read the by-line to discover that “he” was a “she”, so I read the article more carefully. Smarsh had quite a story growing up. When I read her article in The Guardian more carefully, and learned that she had a book on the way, I eagerly awaited this book.
Smarsh’s book (“Heartland“) eventually came out in 2018. As Elizabeth Catte at the Washington Post put it:
‘Heartland’ is intended as a rebuke to the conservative myth that grounds ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, that the poor have brought their misery upon themselves by shunning hard work and clean living. Smarsh, a woman with progressive politics, deserves the same recognition for authenticity that made Vance the de facto spokesman for the working class.”
I liked listening to the Heartland audiobook, but it was clear (to me) it wasn’t going to be as popular as Vance’s book (despite the success that it did have). Part of what I was hoping for out of this book was a book that could serve as a roadmap for attracting young voter who were like Smarsh (and myself). Like Smarsh, I had also voted mainly for Republicans in my college years, and only shifted to voting for Democrats in my working years after college. I was hoping this book was going to help provide a roadmap for helping young people in rural communities to get from supporting Republicans (or whatever nutty things that their parents believed) to supporting Democrats more quickly than I had. Unfortunately, the book wasn’t the guide I was hoping for, and it didn’t get the sort of traction in political circles that Vance’s book did. I say more about the book in the 2018 review I published about Heartland, where I gave the book 4 out of 5 stars.
Vance’s book was well-written enough that I gave it 3 stars, but that was not a rating I liked giving. Vance himself is full of shit, and is clearly a power-broker suckup, but his book was serviceable. I didn’t fault Ron Howard for making a movie out of it a few years ago, and I even tried to watch the movie on Netflix when it came out. After watching the first 30 minutes, I thought “Ron Howard used to make better movies than this“, and I haven’t gotten around to watching the rest of it (and I’m not sure I need to). I will fault Ron Howard if Vance actually becomes Vice President of the United States (which we’re uncomfortably close to that outcome).
What’s clear from both Vance’s story and Smarsh’s story is that someone in their early 20s is at an important crossroads in their respecitve viewpoints. A lot of the “progress” in “progressive” comes from progressive generations advancing beyond their parents’ politics, and not getting caught (as Vance did) in bootlicking. My story was also a crossroads; even though I probably wouldn’t have been as successful, I easily could have aspired to be the type of person that Vance is, but I aspire to be a lot more like Smarsh. One can learn bits bits and pieces of my political evolution from my “Flyover country” story on DailyKos. I also wrote elsewhere about how Ross Perot provided the permission structure for me to proudly proclaim to my parents that I didn’t vote for the Republican in 1992, which (as far as I know) even they didn’t vote for Bush 41 either. They went back to being loyal midwestern Republicans, but soon I was done with them (the Republicans, not my parents).
We need to figure out how to make sure that young voters have Smarsh’s aspirations (and my aspirations), and not Vance’s aspirations. How can we exercise empathy with young, mistaken, working-class voters and get them to see that voting for a suck-up and hypocrite like Vance is NOT going to lead to a better world for them and everyone around them?