My copy of Hillbilly Elegy is festooned front and back with praise from the same media outlets that have now made a blood sport out of attacking its author, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance. “A beautiful memoir,” said The Atlantic, which now refers to “J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Excuses” and calls Vance “Trump’s regrettable impulse buy.” “JD Vance walks you through the struggles of white working-class Americans,” said NPR, which is now awash in stories about Vance as a shapeshifting extremist. “A civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election … in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans,” was how Hillbilly Elegy was described by The New York Times, which now warns of Vance’s “Handmaid’s Tale Vibes.”
When these outlets praised Vance, he was the kind of conservative journalists love—a Never Trumper. You can get away with being pro-life and believing in the two-parent nuclear family as the way to ensure children aren’t downwardly mobile, if you are willing to ring the “I hate Trump” bell. It’s like that scene in Life of Brian: “If you want to join the PFJ, you have to really hate the Romans.” “I do!” “Oh yeah? How much?” “A lot!” “Right, you’re in.” Now that Vance has embraced Donald Trump and joined his ticket, the media can no longer forgive all that they so generously forgave in Vance’s Orange Man Bad phase.
Moreover, he isn’t just running with Trump—but against Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ all-but-certain presidential nominee. Compare the White House’s description of Harris’s early years to the upbringing recounted in Hillbilly Elegy:
As the daughter of immigrants, she grew up surrounded by a diverse community and a loving extended family. She and her sister, Maya, were inspired by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a breast-cancer scientist and pioneer in her own right who came to the United States from India at the age of 19 and then received her doctorate the same year that Kamala was born.
“Where Harris’s mother had a doctorate, Vance’s had a drug habit.”
Where Harris’s mother held a doctorate, Vance’s had a drug habit; side by side, their respective upbringings highlight how hollow accusations of “white privilege” can ring, and go a long way toward explaining the media’s need to find other ways to make Vance seem unsympathetic.
The truth is, Vance has evolved since he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. The book documented industrial decline, but its real focus was the cultural pathologies of working-class whites in Rust Belt communities and their habit of “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible.” Vance repeatedly called out his community for shunning hard work, for “spending [their] way into the poorhouse” with giant TVs and iPads and homes they couldn’t afford instead of saving for college tuition. The thing Vance said he would most like to change about the working class wasn’t any economic reality, but “the feeling that our choices don’t matter.”
It was the perfect book for the neoconservative right and the credentialed left. For the conservative establishment, it exalted personal responsibility and boot-strapping. For Ivy League progressives, it perpetuated the meritocracy myth that those who don’t make it in the globalized economy are partially—perhaps largely—responsible for their suffering. In effect, the book absolved the country’s elite for creating the conditions that immiserated working-class communities.
Yet these aren’t the views of the man who joined the Trump ticket—or who became a US senator from Ohio. In the intervening years, Vance converted to Catholicism, and his worldview changed. If Vance once viewed himself through economic terms as a man who succeeded in clawing his way out of poverty and achieving the American Dream, his writings since Hillbilly Elegy reflect an ongoing struggle to escape the psychological and spiritual wounds of his childhood and become not a successful man so much as a good one. It’s the kind of quest that truly humbles a person, and it seems to have granted Vance a different perspective on the folks he grew up with. In other words, he seems to have abandoned a worldview based on merit for one based on grace. As a senator, Vance has been a fighter for working-class communities, a populist willing to reach across the aisle to improve the lives of American families in significant ways.
And that is his real crime: Vance is a class traitor. His views are no longer those of a young, ambitious man who took advantage of the meritocracy and saw the world through the individualist fiction it enshrines. They are the views of a mature adult, a father, a man who takes a more communal view. As he wrote in 2020, “my Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.”
Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention enraged both the neocon right and the credentialed left—the people who had embraced his message when he was blaming the working class for its sense of dispossession and despair. And in so doing, he revealed the truth that mustn’t be spoken among the American elites of left and right: that the real divide isn’t left versus right, but the elites of both sides versus the working class.
Since he accepted his party’s nomination for vice president, the media have excavated more and more crimes—his Spotify list! his Venmo friends’ friends! His remarks about cat ladies!—to punish him for running with Trump. And of course, they have uncovered unforced errors. The cat-lady commentary, delivered in July 2021 during Vance’s run for Senate, is one such example. At a time when the GOP should be making its unity pitch to disgruntled Democrats, polarizing criticism of women should be eschewed—just as criticism of Harris as a “DEI hire” should be avoided at all costs. The Republicans could still blow this election with their own version of a “basket-of-deplorables” moment.
Indeed, Vance offers the Republicans a chance to tout something inspiring: He is a survivor of domestic violence who has now received a major party’s vice-presidential nominee. Seeing him achieve such heights is meaningful for millions of Americans who see themselves reflected in his struggle to overcome his family demons.
But don’t expect the media to highlight these facts. They view Vance as a traitor to their class and will continue to treat him accordingly. They will continue to defend their prerogatives and attack anyone who questions their authority. That’s where the true hatred for Trump stems from, and for anyone willing to join him in standing for the American working class against those who look down on it.