If J.D. Vance were not a candidate for the US vice presidency in this election cycle, I would never have read his famed memoir by now.  Memoirs are not among my favorite genres, and reading one written by a 30-year-old Yale Law alumnus turned venture capitalist seemed like a waste of time.   Don’t get me wrong—I have no doubt that someone with Vance’s résumé is smart, ambitious, and hard-working, and their life may even be interesting.  However, stories of such prodigies are abundant in this country, thanks to popular culture’s obsession with them. While these successes are well-deserved and respectable, they hardly inspire any curiosity or excitement in me.

Now that Vance is on the ticket for the highest office in the land, paired with the most controversial and divisive politician in generations, his memoir suddenly becomes a window into his inner world—his beliefs, values, and preferences that could profoundly shape the future of this country.    My interest was also piqued because Vance was known for his anti-Trump stances—he famously compared his current running mate to Hitler. Would his book reveal any clues about his 180-degree turn on Trump? Was his change of heart simply political expediency or the result of some sort of epiphany? In any case, I felt this was a book I needed to read, even if I did not want to.

Given my relatively low expectations, Vance’s book was a surprisingly smooth and thought-provoking read.  As a competent writer, he knows how to command the attention of the reader through storytelling.  I was never bored, partly because the lives of hillbillies—white working-class people from rural, mountainous regions of the United States—feel so alien to me. Of course, I’ve heard about the “white working-class,” but never before had I been brought so close to the vivid details of their day-to-day lives.

Vance’s maternal grandparents were from Appalachian Kentucky, which they left for the Midwest at a young age. Vance speculates that his grandmother’s unexpected teenage pregnancy may have hastened their departure. However, they were largely part of a broader wave of Appalachian people migrating to America’s industrial heartland in search of better opportunities.   The young couple settled in Middletown, Ohio, where Vance’s grandfather secured a blue-collar job in the steel industry, which, in those good old days, paid well enough to support a middle-class family.

Vance’s mom was a good student in high school—even the salutatorian, according to the book. However, her life was derailed after she became a single teenage mother.  Following her first unsuccessful marriage, she married a few other men and dated many more, but gave birth to only one more child, the lucky J.D.  The central plot of the book revolves around how young Vance grew up with a mother who led a tragically chaotic life and was rarely able to provide him with anything resembling a normal home.   He never had a stable father figure—the introduction of a new father to the home always brought an escalating series of dramas that ended with the disintegration of the family.  Mostly, the destructive force seemed to come from Mom—at least that’s the impression one gets from reading the book. Here is how Vance described one of the episodes unfolding after Mom moved in with Matt, one of her boyfriends (or husbands, it’s not entirely clear).

Living with Mom and Matt was like having a front-row seat to the end of the world. The fighting was relatively normal by my standards (and Mom’s), but I’m sure poor Matt kept asking himself how and when he’d hopped the express train to crazy town. It was just the three of us in that house, and it was clear to all that it wouldn’t work out. It was only a matter of time.

Vance was deeply troubled by his mother’s “revolving door of father figures”—it must have felt like a disgrace that tainted the honor of the extended family.  He recalled being set off by a Facebook post from a 13-year-old girl pleading with her mother to stop changing boyfriends. Sympathizing with the young girl, Vance lamented,

for seven long years, I just wanted it to stop. I didn’t care so much about the fighting, the screaming, or even the drugs. I just wanted a home, and I wanted to stay there, and I wanted these goddamned strangers to stay the fuck out.

It wasn’t just boyfriends and drugs. Mom once threatened to kill him by crashing the car they were riding in, forcing Vance to flee while she pursued him in a rage. The ordeal ended only when the police came to take her into custody. I paused for a long time after reading about this horrifying event, trying to imagine how I would have coped as an 11-year-old boy in that situation—I’m not sure I would ever fully recover from such trauma.

After the incident, Vance struck a deal with Mom: he lied to the judge to keep her out of jail, and she agreed to let him decide where he wanted to live. In the ensuing years, Vance would live briefly with his biological father, then with his half-sister Lindsay on and off (while his mother was either in treatment centers or otherwise unable to care for them), and finally with his grandma—the Mamaw—after the freshman year in high school.

The constantly shifting family structure and endless domestic violence Vance endured in his youth must have left an indelible mark on his psyche.  Even as an adult, he regularly has nightmares in which Mom is the monster chasing him in a treehouse.   He writes that he “used words as weapons”, because he had to survive in a world where “disagreements were war”.    He had to fight hard to control the “demons” within him, feeling they were “as much an inheritance as his blue eyes and brown hair.”

Sociologists have shown that children experiencing such family instability often face severe developmental challenges.   According to Vance, he would have succumbed to them had it not been for Mamaw and his sister Lindsay, who provided him with a semblance of stability and much-needed emotional and material support when he needed them most.  Mamaw was his savior, protector and hero. Without her, Vance would probably never have made it out of Middletown, let alone earned a J.D. from Yale and become a disciple of Peter Thiel.  Looking back at his high school years, Vance wrote,

Those three years with Mamaw—uninterrupted and alone—saved me. I didn’t notice the causality of the change, how living with her turned my life around. I didn’t notice that my grades began to improve immediately after I moved in.

Yes, the book is about a poor kid achieving the American dream despite the odds stacked against him.  The young author can be forgiven for wanting to brag about it—his achievements do seem like a small miracle when you realize how close he was to complete ruin. However, the book is also about more than that.

Vance tries to generalize his lived experiences—his struggles as well as his triumphs—to those of his neighbors in Middletown, of hillbillies, and more broadly, of the white working class. He notes that many families in these groups faced similar problems. In fact, his grandparents had their fair share of domestic violence and alcoholism.  To help understand the nature of the violence, it is worth noting that Mamaw once tried to kill her husband by literally setting him on fire after he broke his promise to never get drunk again.

Vance describes his communities as a world of “truly irrational behavior.”  Wherever he looked, he saw only desolation, indolence, and cynicism. But who or what is responsible for the predicament of his people?

It appears that Vance has been pondering this question since his teenage years. While the book is, to some extent, an effort to seek answers, it is by no means a formal and comprehensive analysis. Instead, his thoughts are scattered throughout the book, often presented as spontaneous rants inspired by some random anecdotes. His opinions are nuanced—remarkably so for a writer in his thirties.

To Vance, the hillbilly elegy is, above all, an economic story. In the booming postwar era, vibrant communities sprang up around manufacturing centers in what is now America’s infamous Rust Belt. Yet, these communities, heavily reliant on specific well-compensated blue-collar jobs, were inherently fragile and vulnerable to disruption. When those jobs were lost to globalization and technological advancements, workers and their families faced drastic lifestyle adjustments. Those unable to adjust—often people without advanced degrees or resources—became the “truly disadvantaged.” They found themselves trapped in communities where meaningful social support is scarce. These people were Vance’s family, neighbors, classmates, and friends.

As economically disadvantaged as the hillbillies might be, Vance argues that their conditions are further worsened by several cultural and psychological traits.

The first of these traits is the belief that one’s choices and efforts don’t matter. According to Vance, hillbillies often assume those who “make it” are either naturally gifted or born into wealth and influence. In this view, hard work is not nearly as important. Vance, once influenced by this mindset himself, vehemently rejects it. Before joining the Navy, he doubted whether he had what it took to succeed, even as Mamaw insisted he was destined for something great. Only after enduring Marine Corps boot camp and excelling as a military journalist did he realize that he had been consistently “underselling” himself, mistaking a lack of effort for inability.

Vance urges hillbillies to take personal responsibility for their failures and to stop making excuses. A case in point is Mom. Although Vance acknowledges that genetics and upbringing may have contributed to her substance abuse and erratic behavior, he also believes she bears much of the responsibility. No one, he argues, should be granted “a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Hillbillies share a deep-seated skepticism toward institutions: news media and politicians are seen as incessant liars, and universities, especially elite ones, are believed to be rigged against their children. This distrust reinforces a sense of helplessness and discourages engagement with society. The logic seems clear: if the path forward is blocked by liars and grifters, why try at all?  To his credit, Vance holds modern conservatism accountable for failing its “biggest constituent.” He writes, “Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.” According to Vance, it’s the message of the right—that “it’s your government’s fault you’re a loser”—that has planted seeds of cynicism and despair in these communities.

Hillbilly families also have a massive parenting problem. Teachers feel powerless to help their students succeed in school because, as one teacher allegedly told Vance, these kids are “raised by wolves” at home. The cause of poor parenting, it seems, has more to do with culture than economics.  Even for those who do live in poverty, their basic material needs—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and school supplies—are rarely at risk.  Mom always made sure Vance and Lindsay had the “trendiest Christmas gifts,” even if it meant spending money she didn’t have.  And Mom seems not alone in her desire to indulge her children’s craving for extravagant gifts. What seems lacking is a fundamental appreciation for raising kids to become educated, responsible individuals. Their actions ultimately harm the children, but they don’t care enough to change course.  As Vance observed,

We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools to succeed.

Are there solutions to the problems in these communities? Vance didn’t think so, especially not in the form “a magical public policy or an innovative government program.”  Public policy can help, he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”  In fact, Vance frequently points out—like a true conservative—how government intervention can make bad problems worse. His greatest frustration appears to be with welfare.   He describes, often with exasperation, instances like a neighbor who has never worked a day in her life but unabashedly complains about other welfare recipients abusing the system; or a jobless, drug-addicted acquaintance who often buys T-bone steaks at a grocer, which Vance could not afford while working part-time at the same grocer.

To Vance, the welfare system not only rewards and perpetuates indolence but also creates resentment among those who work hard to earn an honest living. He argues that welfare is one of the main reasons “Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation.” His objections feel passionate and authentic, though a bit ironic, given that both he and Mamaw were once welfare recipients themselves.

Vance urged hillbillies to stop “blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies” and to start asking themselves what they can do to make things better. But how? Vance admitted he didn’t have answers. However, he did suggest that his people might look to coastal elites—the new friends he made at Yale and in Silicon Valley—as potential role models, because

their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game.

If memory serves me well, the book never mentions Trump by name, so we don’t actually know what Vance thought of him back then.   That said, Vance the VP candidate is no longer the young Silicon Valley investor who wrote Hillbilly Elegy nearly a decade ago.  He has now enthusiastically embraced much of the MAGA agenda. He converted to Catholicism not long ago, reviving his once abandoned career as a devout Chrisitan.  He speaks fondly of government-imposed tariffs as if it is a panacea to the economic plight of the American working class. On social issues, he remains staunchly conservative—pro-life, pro-family, pious and patriotic.  I am sure many progressives find Vance unbearably repulsive: the sleazy, heartless spin of January 6, the adamant opposition to abortion rights, the sexist slur of “childless cat lady”, and the list goes on.   However, if you read Hillbilly Elegy, you can at least understand the origins of his politics and behaviors:  he was trained, as a child, to weaponize words to win petty battles, he longed for families where kids enjoy safety and stability, and he hated women who mistreat their children.

By now, I’ve listened to many of Vance’s interviews, with both friendly and hostile hosts. It’s clear to me that he possesses a talent rare even among politicians: the power of persuasion. His performance at the Vice-Presidential Debate was nothing short of a political masterpiece, a testament to his extraordinary abilities. He was attentive, respectful, articulate, and persuasive, yet he also conveyed a strong sense of fortitude and conviction. His countenance and tone remained steady throughout, projecting a stoic image remarkably mature for his age—I think that is a gift from his troubled upbringing.

Whatever happens next week, I have my fingers crossed that this man may use his political genius for the good of the American people.

Marco Nie, 11/2/2024