Hillbilly Elegy reveals JD Vance as a man of contradictions: ‘I view members of elite with an almost primal scorn’

In 2016, not even five months before US voters chose a bombastic businessman as their president, JD Vance introduced himself with frank modesty to the world in the first few pages of his memoir – admitting he was “not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary.

“I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary,” he explains in Hillbilly Elegy’s introduction. “I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me … poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

Vance’s professed ordinariness, however, evaporated almost immediately upon publication of the memoir – a raw recounting of his upbringing in the culture of America’s white Appalachian poor and a study of the ripple effects across generations and geography. The bestseller then became a 2020 film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Vance’s profile rose so fast that he did become a Senator in 2022, representing Ohio as a Republican. Now the 39-year-old, who bucked regional socioeconomic trends by earning a law degree from Yale, is moving even further towards extraordinariness – asking Appalachia and the rest of the US to vote him into the second-highest office in the land: Vice President. On Monday, Donald Trump, the man Vance once worried could be “America’s Hitler,” announced him as his running mate, and they waved to the crowd together that night at the Republican National Convention.

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The vice presidential nomination marks just the latest chapter in the evolution of a self-professed “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.” Trump and Vance could hardly have had more diametrically opposed youths, and the joining of forces is a marked turnaround from Vance’ vociferous objection to the 2016 election of the 45th president.

But contradiction, Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy, has been a hallmark of his life and of his people for generations.

He was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, four months after The New York Times ran a glowing feature headlined The Expanding Empire of Donald Trump. Vance’s family had also been expanding over the previous few decades – but from the poverty of Jackson, a town with a population of around 2,000 in Kentucky’s coal country, to Middletown, Ohio, a three-hour drive north.

The grandparents Vance lovingly called Mamaw and Papaw had moved to Ohio after his grandmother, Bonnie Blanton, became pregnant at 13 – his grandfather, James Vance, just a few years older. The pair hailed from “hill people” and followed work migration patterns of the time as Appalachians flocked to burgeoning midwestern industrial centers.

Papaw secured a job at Armco steel, which was “an economic savior – the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance writes.

Other Appalachian families – and many of his relatives – stayed put in Kentucky, where it was far harder to find work and thrive.

“The truth is hard, and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves. Jackson is undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts,” Vance writes. “It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside. Its people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work. Jackson, like the Blanton men, is full of contradictions.”

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The Vance clan was distantly related to the Hatfield family of McCoy feud fame and took pride in it – while both Vances and Blantons continued the tradition of fighting. His grandparents had a tumultuous marriage that produced three children, including Vance’s mother, Bev – whose scuffles with the law and battles with drugs left him often in the more protective care of Mamaw.

When he was about 12, Vance’s mother lost her temper with him on the highway and “pulled over to beat the s**t out of me,” he writes. Vance fled to the nearby home of a woman lounging in an above-ground pool, begging her to call Mamaw; the woman also called the police.

“Mom would officially retain custody, but from that day forward I lived in her house only when I chose to – and Mamaw told me that if Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun,” Vance writes. “This was hillbilly justice, and it didn’t fail me.”

He was reared on stories of hillbilly justice and hijinks during summer and other trips with Mamaw back to Jackson – where he considered home to be his great-grandmother’s house “in the holler,” as locals pronounced “hollow.” Vance idolized his great-uncles and other male relatives, steady father figures in his life as his mother routinely switched boyfriends back in Ohio.

“I was obsessed with the Blanton men,” he writes. “ I would sit among them and beg them to tell and retell their stories . These men were the gatekeepers to the family’s oral tradition, and I was their best student.

“Most of this tradition was far from child appropriate. Almost all of it involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail … Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics. But the stories made me feel like hillbilly royalty, because these were classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side.

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“My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something – defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes. The Blanton men, like the tomboy Blanton sister whom I called Mamaw, were enforcers of hillbilly justice, and to me, that was the very best kind.”

His grandmother was a formidable and hugely influential force in his life; often armed and swearing, she’d never finished high school but lived by a “quirky” religious code, simultaneously recognizing the merits of good behavior and education.

When she found out many of seventh-grade Vance’s neighborhood friends were already smoking weed, she “promised that if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.

“‘No one would ever find out,’ she whispered menacingly,” he writes.

She steered Vance towards college and professional success, going the extra mile – like buying him a $180 calculator – as “both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream,” Vance writes. “Neither was under any illusions that wealth or privilege didn’t matter in America. On politics, for example, Mamaw had one opinion – “They’re all a bunch of crooks” – but Papaw became a committed  Democrat … because that party protected the working people.”

To his grandparents, Vance writes, “not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich.”

He began to form his own opinions on the culture and plight of America’s poor as he watched his community while working jobs such as at local supermarket checkout. After serving four years in the Marines during the Iraq War, Vance’s educational journey exposed him to more unfamiliar social subsets within the US.

“Yale Law, with its prestige and privilege, was a culture shock unlike anything I’d ever experienced,” he writes in the Afterword of Hillbilly Elegy, penned about two years after the memoir came out.

He married a Yale classmate, Usha, in 2014, and they built a life that “was the stuff of fantasy during my childhood,” Vance writes – among high-powered lawyers, venture capitalists and other powerbrokers a cultural world away from his Appalachian roots.

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“However you want to define these two groups … rich and poor; educated and uneducated; upper-class and working-class – their members increasingly occupy two separate worlds,” he writes in the book’s conclusion. “As a cultural immigrant from one group to another, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn …But I have to give it to them: 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.”

When Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016, at a time when working-class white voters were propelling Trump to the top of the polls, much of the buzz centered on its insights into the culture of that voting bloc. Vance became highly visible and vocal but loyal to his beloved Kentucky – using some of the proceeds to purchase the plot of land in Jackson where Mamaw and Papaw were buried.

“I bought it most of all because I want Mamaw and Papaw’s graves to be maintained for our family for generations to come,” he writes in the book’s afterword. “But I also bought it because I wanted a reason to take my son back to the place that formed such a large piece of my childhood.”

The afterword also addresses his life – and political views – since Hillbilly Elegy’s publication. He’d been publicly critical of Trump’s 2016 campaign, calling him a “total fraud” and a “moral disaster.”

“Despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for ‘the elites’ … to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base,” Vance writes in the afterword.

“For so many years, I and a few of my intellectual fellow travelers in the Republican Party were telling politicians to make precisely these sort of arguments. Yet the populist rhetoric of the campaign hasn’t informed the party’s approach to governing. Unless that changes, I suspect Republicans will pay a heavy political price.”

It remains to be seen how the rhetoric might evolve now that Vance has joined Trump’s current campaign – and just how the Republican Party he warned years ago will fare. Vance is due to give an address to the RNC on Wednesday night.

“Just overwhelmed with gratitude,” Vance posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “What an honor it is to run alongside President Donald J. Trump. He delivered peace and prosperity once, and with your help, he’ll do it again.”

So much for ordinariness for Vance; he’s a long way from coal country with an Ivy League law degree, a bestseller under his belt, a star-studded movie produced on its basis, a successful senatorial campaign and now, perhaps most unlikely, a bid for vice president.

In some ways, the words of his Hillbilly Elegy were even more prescient: “Most kids who grow up like” him don’t come close to the White House.