J.D. Vance is a bestselling author. Now he’s a US vice presidential hopeful

J.D. Vance’s family lurched, blinking into the American middle class during the post-war boom when his Papaw left Kentucky and followed what they still call the Hillbilly Highway to a well-paid factory job in Middletown, Ohio.

Papaw was proud of his labour but once told young J.D., “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands.” It was a keen observation from a man who was a violent drunk, and in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance advances it further. “A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: to them, the American Dream required forward momentum,” he writes.

Hillbilly Elegy is the story of what happened when that momentum faltered over the past few decades. The bonds of family and church collapsed fast, and then the sturdy work ethic of the Anglo-Celtic hill people – who had spread from the Appalachian Mountains across the Midwest into cities like Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland – dissipated like a morning mist. Booze and opioids filled the great human fissures, vices that mixed combustively with an armed Appalachian honour culture that demanded bloody retribution for perceived slights. Vance’s Uncle Jimmy once observed that, like many hillbillies who travelled Route 23 north to a new life, Mamaw and Papaw Vance could go from “zero to murderous in a f---ing heartbeat”.

At any other time, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, a book with as much sociological ambition as literary, might have passed by with little notice. Not in the era of Donald Trump, though.

Vance found himself in high demand as a TV pundit following the book’s release. Credit: Naomi McColloch

During and after an election that many people came to see as a revolt by a forgotten class of poor, pissed-off white people, Hillbilly Elegy has become a kind of Rosetta Stone, translating the concerns of Trump's true believers to the coastal elites of the Left and Right that barely knew they existed a year ago.

Speaking with Good Weekend, Vance, just 32, is measured and careful with his words and faintly cherubic. He looks more like the Yale law graduate he became than the hillbilly or US Marine he once was.

The embrace of Vance’s memoir – which, it should be said, does not mention Trump – began suddenly last July when Vance was interviewed by Rod Dreher of The American Conservative. “For Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J. D. Vance,” Dreher wrote in a story that has attracted more than 262,000 likes, becoming so popular that it crashed the magazine’s servers three times. The book shot to the top of the bestseller lists and lingered there. It is now being adapted for the cinema by Ron Howard, the chronicler of white middle America.

Vance watches with Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno at the Republican National Convention on July 15, 2024.Credit: AP

Vance is modest about Hillbilly Elegy’s success. “I was very surprised that it was connected so closely to the political moment,” he says. “I understand why that eventually happened, but I was still a little bit caught off guard by how much it became a political book of the moment.”

The same month Vance’s book took off, Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination at a convention in the battered steel city of Cleveland, Ohio. The event was effectively boycotted by establishment Republicans, who were baffled and infuriated by Trump’s takeover of their party. In the absence of the country club set, white working-class Americans turned up en masse when they weren’t chanting angry slogans of disaffection – “Build that wall!” “Lock her up!” – they were cheering the man who was introduced to them as “America’s blue-collar billionaire”.

Watching on, as they prepared for their own convention, the Democrats were just as confounded – but could not believe their good fortune. As the political carnival played on, The New Yorker and The New York Times published long think-pieces about Elegy, and Vance became a high-value target for TV producers seeking pundits who could explain the new political mood.

Somewhere in the pages of his book, the thinking went, could be found clues as to why a class that once voted so reliably for the Democratic Party had now abandoned mainstream politics altogether to embrace a candidate who, to many, seemed unqualified at best, dangerously unhinged at worst.

Vance begins his story in Breathitt County, Kentucky, nicknamed “Bloody Breathitt”. “The people of Breathitt hated certain things, and they didn’t need the law to snuff them out,” writes Vance. After a rape suspect was shot dead before trial, the local paper reported: “Man Found Dead. Foul Play Expected.”

Hillary Clinton made a pretty terrible bet on the fact that people would prioritise their personal disdain for President Trump over the fact that their lives weren't going very well.

Kentucky in the 1940s was poor, white and insular; a region that had two exports: coal and the men to dig it up. But when the post-World War II boom began, demand for that labour emerged to the north, in the fast-growing steel mills and factories. Vance’s grandparents, Jim and Bonnie Vance – Papaw and Mamaw in the book – fled Breathitt after a teenage pregnancy for prosperity in Ohio. Jim was a mean drunk, while Bonnie was prone to extravagant loyalty and violence. As a girl, she shot a man who tried to steal the family cow, though only wounded him.

In Middletown, the family struggled in suburbia, stripped of the family network and Appalachian codes it had grown up with. Vance’s mother crumpled to alcoholism and then pharmaceutical and heroin addiction. During his early years, Vance’s father was absent, and Vance bitterly describes the string of stepfathers who had wandered through his life.

Eventually, Papaw gave up the grog, and Vance’s grandparents, particularly Mamaw, became the guiding force in his young life. He credits Mamaw with instilling in him the resilience to escape what should have been a pre-determined future. “Never be like those f---ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” she told him. “You can do anything you like.”

Hillbilly Elegy was a monumental success.Credit: AP

Mamaw, he says, instilled in him the sense that he could achieve something with his life despite the evidence of the chaos around him. This gave him the confidence to join the Marine Corps. (How Mamaw raged at this. “You’re a f---ing idiot,” she told him. “They’ll chew you up and spit you out.” ) He credits his service – which included a deployment to Iraq in a public affairs unit – with instilling in him discipline and determination. So equipped, he went on to secure a place at Ohio State University and then Yale Law School. This was an extraordinary rise, even in a nation still wedded to its belief in social mobility.

He then took a job running an investment outfit owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire libertarian founder of PayPal, who has become a key ally of Trump. By any measure, Vance today is a member of the absolute elite of American society. (Since he spoke with Good Weekend, Vance has announced he is returning to Middletown and plans to invest in start-up companies from there.)

He pauses and hesitates as he searches for the words to explain his rise before returning to the influence of his grandparents. “I don’t think I deserve no credit for what happened in my life, but I do think that the things that were most important to me – stable work, a happy family – were things that I would not have had, no matter how smart or lucky I was in other realms of my life. I just wouldn’t have access to the few things that mattered most if Mamaw and Papaw hadn’t been there.”

Vance’s book is most engaging when he marries his life story with analysis of the human tragedy that followed the collapse of America’s manufacturing middle class. It is even better when he challenges the notion that the United States remains a socially fluid society. He recalls the moment when, as a child, he realised how different lawyers and judges were from everyone else. “It was the first time I noticed ‘TV accents’ – the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.”

J. D. Vance and former US president Donald Trump at a campaign rally in November 2022 in Ohio.Credit: AP

At high school, he wanted to unpick this mystery and found himself in the library, wading through books on social theory. He came to understand that late 20th-century capitalism moved faster than people did, that when it became cheaper to move jobs and capital offshore, factories could be closed down far faster than the communities they had built could adjust.

“These remaining folks were the ‘truly disadvantaged’ – unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support,” he notes, citing the African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson. This point is crucial because with it, Vance explicitly links the plight of urban African-Americans suffering from intergenerational poverty to that of ex-urban (or semi-rural) whites.

That sort of insight did not count for much, though, when after his return from Iraq and his slog through Ohio State University, Vance found himself bewildered by the social environment of Yale. He found himself knocked sideways during a dinner being held by a Wall Street firm during a recruitment week. He’d had to call his girlfriend from a bathroom for advice on which cutlery to use with which course.

Central to Hillbilly Elegy are two key pieces of social research of the past half-decade that Vance harnesses to his own observations. The first was the startling finding in 2015 by two Princeton researchers that, for the first time in American history, the life expectancy of middle-aged white Americans was falling. The big killers were not diabetes and heart disease but, in a sense, sadness: from suicides, overdoses, cirrhosis and liver diseases. The mortality rate for the least-educated American whites aged 45 to 54 – by far the most affected group – rose by 22 per cent between 1999 and 2014, comparable to the effect of the AIDS epidemic in the country.

The second, from nonpartisan think tank Pew Research, found that no group in America was more pessimistic than middle-class whites. Their plight boiled down, again, to forward momentum. They might have had it better than recent immigrants or blacks, but not better than 10 years prior, and they were the first generation who had no cause to believe their children would be better off than themselves.

Vance saw the cynicism bite deep. When he got into Yale Law School, his father asked him if he had pretended to be “black or liberal” on his application.

The research, he says, confirmed for him what he had observed: that lower-class whites were not just feeling hard done by and were not just losing what little economic security they might once have enjoyed, they were also “losing months, years, off their life expectancy”.

For all of his insight into the lives of the people who helped elect Trump, Vance is not always sympathetic to them. He credits the Marine Corps for stamping out in him a learnt helplessness he believes has stricken white working-class culture. His sense of the primacy of personal responsibility runs deep.

Donald Trump supporters stand for the pledge of allegiance at a Florida rally in August 2016.Credit: AP

He is excoriating of a hillbilly culture which he says left people ill-equipped to cope when the factories departed. He writes of his resentment when he worked in a supermarket and saw his neighbours on welfare buy steaks and phone cards he could not afford himself. He laments a loss of sturdy religion, family and work ethic.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes, thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

His up-by-the-bootstraps tone and his general rejection of governmental solutions to endemic poverty have prompted significant criticism, perhaps exacerbated because he identifies himself as a conservative.

Writing in the left-leaning New Republic, Sarah Jones decried his book as “little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class”.

The Republican vice-presidential candidate and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, arrive on the floor during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention.Credit: AP

Vance says her criticism is unfair. “I felt that it, in some ways, pretty fundamentally misstated what my core argument is, which is not that this is not at all an economic problem or purely a problem of failed personal responsibility, but that these intergenerational problems of poverty and inequality are incredibly complicated.

“Sometimes you have to look to the government for solutions, and sometimes you have to look to individuals, and sometimes you have to look at community institutions that are outside of the government and the individual person. I thought that my book was trying to fundamentally argue that the root causes of poverty and inequality and low upper mobility are really complex.”

Vance is not the only observer to focus on the plight of whites in the Rust Belt, the northeastern states where manufacturing has been hollowed out over the past few decades of globalisation. The Falstaffian filmmaker Michael Moore was far more explicit about the potential political threat of this class. “I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president,” Moore wrote last July. “And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November.”

Hillbilly Elegy was turned into a Ron Howard film. Glenn Close, who plays Mamaw, comforts a young Vance, played by Owen Asztalos.Credit: AP

Moore was not only right in predicting that Trump would win, but how and where he would win. He even told us which voters would bring him victory. They would be Vance’s people, and in the privacy of a polling booth, they would let fly at a culture and economy that had betrayed them.

“[The polling booth is] one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit,” wrote Moore. “You can take as long as you need in there, and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can.”

In a scathing National Review essay, the conservative writer Kevin D. Williamson went further than Moore. “Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap,” he wrote. “Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs ... The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need [removalists] U-Haul.”

The adult Vance was played by Gabriel Basso, centre, in the movie adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy.Credit: AP

Williamson’s savage thesis is not targeted at Elegy, but goes to the main criticism of Vance’s book as a useful lens for viewing Trump’s base. Aside from comparing the new plight of the white underclass with the historical struggle of blacks, Elegy is absent on race – or more precisely on racism, the animating force of much of Donald Trump’s support.

More than half a decade ago, Donald Trump introduced himself to America politically by championing the birther movement, the nakedly racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama’s presidency was illegitimate because Obama was not American.

As a politician, Trump’s tone has never changed. He launched his campaign traducing Mexicans as rapists and murderers and made common cause with right-wing ethno-nationalists. When it was reported that two men invoked his name while beating a homeless immigrant with a metal pipe, he noted that his supporters were “very passionate”.

He made a senior advisor of Steve Bannon, former chief executive of Breitbart, the media home of the white-nationalist alt-right movement. Civil rights organisations and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League have reported a sudden surge in racist abuse and attacks since Trump’s election, while Trump himself has twice sought to restrict immigration from some Muslim-majority nations.

The language of white supremacy is creeping back into the mainstream under Trump’s presidency. Just before the Dutch election in March, Trump’s congressional ally Steve King tweeted, “[Dutch far-right leader Geert] Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.”

On this point, Vance is a little defensive when we talk. He argues reasonably enough that the most divisive stars of the New Right movement that evolved around the Trump campaign were hardly products of the Rust Belt. He mentions British libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos, who quit Breitbart after he defended older men having sex with young teenage boys and white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. “You go down the list and these people are pretty elite folks with good credentials, good education, pretty decent backgrounds and family lives – but they’re not especially attached to the Appalachians.”

This is why, Vance says, he disputes the suggestion that Trump’s base was driven by racism. He argues that Trump’s victory was as much a function of Hillary Clinton’s poor campaign, which focused on Trump’s unfitness for office. Clinton, he says, “made a pretty terrible bet on the fact that people would prioritise their personal disdain for President Trump over the fact that their lives weren’t going very well”.

The debate over the extent to which race and class drove Trump’s victory has by now become so mired in ideological trench warfare that little can be learnt from following it. Occasionally, though, you come across an analysis that explores the terrain in new ways.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote the book Strangers in Their Own Land, in which she sought to understand why the Americans who most need their government – specifically the white supporters of the Tea Party movement who came to back Trump – so despise it.

In it, she develops what she calls the “deep story” theory. The deep story is what many voters feel to be true despite contrary evidence provided to them by the sources they once trusted, such as government agencies and the mainstream media.

This is how she explained her theory to news outlet Democracy Now: “[Imagine] you’re waiting in line for something you really want at the end: the American dream. You feel a sense of great deserving. You’ve worked very hard ... And the line isn’t moving. It’s like a pilgrimage up, up to the top. It’s not moving.

“Then you see some people cut in line. Well, who were they? They are affirmative-action women who would go for formerly all-men’s jobs, or affirmative-action blacks who have been sponsored and now have access to formerly all-white jobs. It’s immigrants. It’s refugees.”

“Then they see Barack Hussein Obama, who should impartially be monitoring the line, wave to the line cutters. And then you think, ‘Oh, he’s their president and not mine. And, in fact, he’s a line cutter. How did he get to Harvard? How did he get to Columbia? Where did he get the money? His mom was a single mom. Wait a minute.’ And then they begin to feel like strangers in their own land. They feel like the government has become a giant marginalisation machine. It’s not theirs. In fact, it’s putting them back. And then someone in front of the line turns around and says, ‘Oh, you redneck.’ ”

Vance speaks to reporters following a debate with other Republicans at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, in March 2022.Credit: AP

I find the deep story theory useful, not only because it offers a more generous language to understand the racial anxiety at the heart of Trumpism, but because it returns to Vance’s key idea: that the American Dream demands constant motion. Modern America was always about movement. Europeans arrived and raged west, first in wagons, then in trains, then on highways in great finned motorcars built in cities like Middletown, Ohio. When the line stopped moving – when wages stagnated, and the jobs dwindled – the invisible tapestry of social contracts that bound the country together began at once to fray.

It reminds me of a chilling observation made last year by the American columnist David Ignatius. A few months before the election, he visited Australia as a guest of the Lowy Institute at a time when a Trump-style revolution seemed a distant threat. Ignatius likened the US to a spinning top, which was more stable the faster it spun. From time to time, the top took a knock and wobbled, only to regain its pace and, therefore, its strength.

Recently, though, it had taken two big hits: September 11 and the long wars that followed, and the global financial crisis. The top was faltering.

His fear, he said, was that the next hit could topple the faltering top, and that that hit could be Donald Trump.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.