By Pierre Tristam
On Nov. 1, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier, published a 270-page book called Restructuring and New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Donald Trump published The Art of the Deal the same day, a few days after Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities appeared. Within weeks Trump and Wolfe were atop the bestsellers lists, Wolfe in fiction, Trump in non-fiction. The categorization was debatable. Gorbachev’s book made the list further down as the more catchy Perestroika, the Russian word that made “restructuring” sound like a blast of magic from the Urals. Gorbachev would go on to change his country and the world, at least for a while. He ended the cold war. Trump would go on to change his country, too, starting the American Civil War’s cold equivalent. His Sherman McCoy act isn’t finished. Mastering the universe awaits.
J.D. Vance was 3 the year of Deal. He published Hillbilly Elegy at age 31, on June 28, 2016, a few months before Trump was elected president, on a day when the New York Times, with the kind of serendipitous coincidence that could make Hegelians of all of us, chose as its Quotation of the Day the following from John Kerry, Barack Obama’s secretary of state at the time: “I think it is absolutely essential that we stay focused on how, in this transitional period, nobody loses their head, nobody goes off half-cocked, people don’t start ginning up scatterbrained or revengeful premises, but we look for ways to maintain the strength that will serve the interests and the values that brought us together in the first place.” Kerry was referring to Brexit, the referendum that pulled Britain out of the European Union. The blurb could have beneficially dusted Hillbilly’s jacket.
This July The Economist thought the Trump and Vance books “worth rereading to understand how the authors have changed from their original printed personas.” The Economist might have more sensibly replaced how with whether. Much about Trump and Vance has changed, but most of it is circumstantial and cellular. The rest has been less movable.
The Art of the Deal prefaced Trump’s method as president. He became the most powerful man in the world and its biggest celebrity. But for age’s crustier venom, the change in his personality from real estate broker and Manhattan’s gossip schist to president to Mar-a-Lago exile is hard to detect. He joked that the attempt on his life on July 13 may have changed him, but for no more than a few hours. To media’s limited horizon he’s been done with being nice since his first campaign. But nice, like good taste, was never part of Trump décor. The words “nice guy” appear in The Art of the Deal twice, not even about himself. The words “kill,” “killer,” “killed” and “killing” appear 20 times.
So it is with Vance, whose venom flows as tactically today as it did in 2016. When he went from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” and calling himself a Nevertrumper to calling him a man of “extraordinary vision” as he accepted the nomination for vice-president, the apparent change was mistaken for the apotheosis of an opportunistic pivot and a betrayal of his memoir’s affective nuances. But it was the reflection and perfection of a skill Vance displayed throughout Hillbilly Elegy: the construction of a persona scaled to a chameleon’s tongue.
Read on its own terms, as all books should be read, and compared to the staged Vance of today, there is no difference between the Vance of then and now. Vance is not a seeker, an observer or a seer. There is no evidence of an Augustinian moment in the garden or of Paul falling off his horse on Damascus Road. Hillbilly Elegy is not even The Road to Wigan Pier for the Rust Belt. But for its missing heft, the book’s frame of reference is closest to Ayn Rand vanity auditioning on “The Apprentice,” the TV vehicle Trump rode to the presidency. Hillbilly Elegy is self-promotion as means and end, its categorization as non-fiction as debatable as Art of the Deal‘s. Nabokov recommended that the word “reality” should always be in quote marks. It is especially true of Vance’s “reality.”
Here’s the beginning of Vance’s introduction as the book he called “A memoir of a family and culture in crisis” appeared in 2016:
My name is J.D. Vance, and I think I should start with a confession: I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd. It says right there on the cover that it’s a memoir, but I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it. The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something thirteen-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous. But about two hundred people do the same thing every year, and trust me, you don’t want to read about most of their lives. I am not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary. I haven’t started a billion-dollar company or a world-changing nonprofit. I have a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two lively dogs. So I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary. I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.
You can map Vance’s ideological and methodical genome, all 264 pages that follow, from that opening paragraph. It’s all there: the disingenuous self-deprecation, the cherubic style, the disclaiming paradoxes (nothing justifies you buying the book, but buy it anyway), the subtle boasting, the condescension, the generalities, the reductionism, the Fortune 500-like definition of success that diminishes the unsung triumphs of a teacher or a small business person or a family doctor to invisibility.
“I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.” Strunk and White would disagree. You do not achieve something ordinary that doesn’t happen to most kids. If you do, it is by definition out of the ordinary. Sometimes it’s extraordinary. But even without what we now know–Donald Trump lining up Vance to be the nation’s 50th vice president after his pivots–Vance has always been a natural in saying black is white, as red, white and blue is now MAGA red, or else.
Vance is comfortable with Trump’s brand of confidence-man dishonesty, whether it’s adding imaginary floors to towers, imagining record crowds at an inaugural, rewriting the passion of Christ as a stolen election or framing a confessional in–to borrow Tony Tulathimutte‘s phrase–the “fetish necklace of martyrdom.” If it advances the story, don’t just go with it. Make it the story. “I call it truthful hyperbole,” Trump wrote in his Deal. “It’s an innocent form of exaggeration–and a very effective form of promotion.”
Vance uses the technique when he describes his childhood in “poverty” or identifies as a “hillbilly” though he grew up in middle class homes in an exurb of Cincinnati, when he gloms onto a few strands of Appalachian DNA as if it were his Mayflower, or when he frames his military service as “going to war” with the few and the proud in Iraq, though he was never in combat. To the extent that he spent any time in Iraq at all, he was a PR man giving reporters tours and occasionally playing soccer with voiceless natives. He spent the majority of his four years in public affairs assignments stateside, close enough for regular trips home to the exurb. (Vance’s criticism of Tim Walz’s military record is especially disingenuous.)
Hillbilly Elegy is in that public affairs tradition. It is an extended advertisement to oneself with Vance almost as its exclusive subject but mostly free of turgid prose, which helped him seduce reviewers. It is not, as its problematic subtitle claims, “A memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” I don’t think you can justly claim to be writing about an entire culture based on your grandparent’s alternations between violence and tough love, your mother’s drug addiction, a brief stint as a cashier and another as a forklift operator, a few words about an aunt and a sister and lunch with “a sweet kid with a big heart and a quiet manner” called Brian. Yet those, plus two deceptively cited reports, are the sum total of Vance’s evidence. That’s what he distilled into culture-defining conclusions that led an impressionable New York Times reviewer to see him as “a fiercely astute social critic of the sort we desperately need right now.”
There’s a recognizable phenomenon behind the reviewer’s conclusion.
“It’s one of those books that I own but haven’t read,” Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, told an interviewer when asked about Elegy. It’s probably the same for most. Every decade has its Closing of the American Mind or Brief History of Time, books everyone buys and cites from ethereal echo chambers but never reads, including reviewers, many of whom rely on other reviews for fear of sounding like outliers. As in a Borgesian transfiguration, the books discussed in the culture at large end up having little resemblance to the books as written.
The Times typically reviews its chosen books before their official publication. Blind to the breadth of the Trumpian phenomenon in 2016, the paper ignored Elegy when it appeared that June. The Times review appeared four months later in one of those catch-up quickies for the record. It was not really a review but a packaged summary of three memoirs that “Show How the Other Half Lives” by a Vassar and Columbia-educated reviewer who clearly put her MFA-trained secondary readings to work to give us that “fiercely astute” analysis. Jacob Riis would have disputed the appropriation of his book’s title to associate it with Vance.
Hillbilly is back on the bestsellers’ lists thanks to Trump, though it’s likely read even less than during its first chart run now that social media memes and Vance himself are cliff-noting the Cliff Notes. So before returning to the book’s deconstruction, here’s a detailed summary, which you are welcome to skip if you’ve read the book or would still prefer not to. You can pick up the more critical part of this article after the summary, here.
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My summary is based on only two readings of the book, one in hardcover close to the time when it appeared, one, in recent weeks, as read by Vance. I wanted to hear the author’s inflections and pathos, his hillbilly accent and sense of irony–all those things I seemed to have missed in my first reading. But it is standard Ohio speech that reminded me, I am sorry to say, of the automated voice The New York Times has taken to using in the audio version of its articles, albeit a male one. Unlike, say, The Waste Land or The Bridges of Madison County, the book did not yield further insights from a second reading. The punches it packs tend toward the rabbit.
“‘Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,’ my grandmother often told me.” The grandmother is the moral and sometimes immoral center of the book, the hinge of its themes. People don’t want to work. Bob at the tile warehouse has a child on the way yet refuses to put in the hours despite the good pay. “Welfare queens” was one of Ronald Reagan’s infamous dog whistles. It was discredited after reporters discovered he had fabricated the tale. Vance revives it to describe mostly white, unidentified “queens.” He was born in Jackson, Kentucky. He refers to hollows as hollers a time or two, establishing his bonafides. His parents were unfit. He was at times raised by grandparents, including his “pistol-packing lunatic” of a grandmother.
His grandparents are Bonnie Blanton and Jim Vance. Jim is 16 when he gets Bonnie pregnant. She is 13. The baby lives six days. Allegedly to escape prison, they are forced to move to Middletown. The sequence doesn’t make sense, though JD Vance concedes the truthful hyperbole: family legend “plays fast and loose with the details,” he writes. His grandparents are part of a big migration out of the hills. “As Papaw knew when he was a young man, the best way up for a hillbilly was out.”
The grandparents made it into the middle class on the strength of Jim’s job at the local steel plant. Their miserable marriage–drunk Papaw, mean Mamaw–produced nine miscarriages, two daughters and a son, who’d tell JD: “like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat,” an epitaph Vance prizes the way old families prized their coat of arms. His grandfather made good money but drank until 1983, and until a late reconciliation ended up living in a separate house from homicidal Mamaw, who once set him on fire. A child had to save him.
The Armco steel plant dominates Middletown in the 1980s. Faltering, the company merges with Japan’s Kawasaki. A lot of young people are out of work, not because of automation, efficiency, job-exporting trade agreements and globalist competition, none of which exists in Vance’s universe, but because they refuse to work hard in school and become steelworkers. Their parents don’t expect much of them, though we meet none of those parents. If Vance has researched the local sociology, none is footnoted. Trust me, he seems to say. He was surrounded by losers. He’s the exception. He had good grandparents who helped him with multiplications, divisions, reading and punching down: “I received a different message at home, and that just might have saved me.”
His aunt Lori was briefly a drug addict before getting her life together, as was his uncle Jimmy. Not so Bev, his mother. She is a well-paid nurse at the local hospital. She appreciates the mind, Vance tells us, but appears not to have been the sort of mother to have taught him that gay people weren’t out to molest. He had to wait for his cousin Rachel to tell him that on a vacation to California. When he thinks he’s gay, his Mamaw asks him, “do you want to suck dick?” He did not. She also assures him that even if he did, “that would be okay. God would still love you.” Unchallenged homophobia nevertheless lurks throughout the book, compliments of the same grandparents and rendered with Vance’s odd affinity for pulpit prurience: “There were perverts even in Jackson, they told me, who wanted to stick sticks up your butt and ‘blow on your pecker’ as much as the perverts in Ohio or Indiana or California.” The latency is bizarre when, as we have since learned, Vance purposely misidentifies a transgender law school friend as “an extremely progressive lesbian.”
The middle section of the book is a family story that evokes the opening line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Vance confuses the unique with the emblematic, but there’s nothing revealing about his family’s uniqueness. The sequences feel like voyeurism into the pages of an adolescent’s journal big on self-absorbed shock and–again–prurience.
Vance lives with his mother and stepfather in a six-figure salary household. The marriage sours. Debts pile up. Marital fights are bitter, chronic, cruel, though “over time, I started to like the drama.” It had “become a sort of drug.” This attraction to violence is not minor, or limited to his parents’ brutalities. It is the glorification of what he calls “hillbilly justice” throughout the book–of the fist, of guns, of vigilantism.
His mother has an affair. She attempts to kill herself by crashing her car. She parties with different men. “Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures,” he writes. She loses her temper with Vance, who claims she tried to kill him in a car crash (new cars seemed not to have been difficult to acquire). She’s arrested and found guilty of battery. It could have been worse but Vance agrees to some mercy in exchange for his freedom. He could choose to be at his mother’s house or at his grandmother’s house down the street. “And Mamaw told me that if Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun.” He unholsters the first of many reflections about masculinity and describes his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity.
His grandfather dies. His mother turns from functional to full-fledged addict. Unlike most, she can afford rehab. For Vance, “Mom’s newest problem exposed me to the underworld of American addiction.” One person, one experience, and Vance is drawing sweeping conclusions about “American addiction.” Mother moves on and marries “Ken,” eventually getting Vance to move to Dayton after a stint with his grandma, who pushes him to work hard, get good grades and help around the house. He portrays her as a unique force in the Rust Belt, and himself a unique flowering of this force.
“Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist.” With that, a little past the book’s halfway point, sermonizing largely crowds out autobiography. Here’s the fount of generalities recycled in reviews and on TV chat shows that made Vance “a fiercely astute social critic.” Notably, the sermons are delivered as he describes the years away from Middletown–in the Marines, at college and Yale Law School, which are more tedious than earlier anecdotes. The sermons are like packing foam in a wanting autobiography.
He joins the Marines to kill “terrorists,” an oddly abbreviated chapter of his four years in the Corps, likely because it wasn’t, as he put it, that he had “gone to war.” This “public affairs marine” had such good media relations skills, he boasts, that he won a commendation for marketing a fabulous air show stateside. Even in the six months he spent in Iraq–in the book he doesn’t specify how long–he was a tour guide for journalists with only occasional escorts into combat zones. He wrote rear-echelon press releases and played soccer with locals. It’s not nothing. Serving is its own honorable value. But it’s not combat. It’s certainly not “killing terrorists.”
He served at the nicknamed “Camp Cupcake,” the Al Asad air base to which he was assigned. The National Guard describes it as “a well-established airbase with a lot more support facilities from swimming pools to restaurants during the height of the Iraq War.” It is also where, in 2005 (Vance’s posting straddled 2005 and 2006), Marines, apparently without objections from the public affairs office, recorded “Hadji Girl,” a racist and cruel music video cheering the killing of Iraqis.
In Elegy there are no reflections about the Iraq war, its justification, its illegality, its futility, its devastation, its psychological effects on hundreds of thousands of veterans, a disproportionate number of whom would come home to drugs and suicide, or maybe to loitering on Middletown’s streets for Vance to call them lazy. Considering that until the book’s publication the four years he spent in the military represent 30 percent of his adult life in the midst of America’s most divisive war since Vietnam, the incuriosity about it all is arresting. He devotes one paragraph to praising the ethics of his fellow soldiers and how, in what appears to be one of his only encounters with an Iraqi, a child’s face “briefly lit up with joy” when Vance gave him an eraser. You can sense the white man’s burden relieved of a few grams.
The four years in the Marines yield this: “whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, ‘The feeling that our choices don’t matter.’ The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor.” He delivers the prescription four pages after his encounter with erasure boy who, it’s fair to assume, had every reason to think that his choices did not matter.
The GI Bill pays for college at Ohio State and tassels his self-congratulations: “I wasn’t supposed to make it, but I was doing just fine on my own.” The suggestion of bootstrapped independence is overstated. His Mamaw died when he was in the military. He inherited a share of her estate, sold at “the height of the real estate bubble” in 2005, in his words. It could not have been a small sum.
Graduation with honors during the Great Recession follows. He gets nearly a full ride at Yale Law School. The chapter is a celebration of himself, a “Vance and Man at Yale” remake of William Buckley’s one-man jacquerie against the university’s secularism. “Very few people at Yale Law School are like me,” Vance writes. He describes his experience as if he were one of Yale’s only outsiders, without reflecting that perhaps minority students, perhaps foreign students, perhaps even rich students or conservative students feel like outsiders, like outcasts, like frauds, or like Buckley did, like heathens. There is no evidence of engagement with his college community, or revelations more original than Scott Fitzgerald’s “the rich are different from you and me,” maybe because it was at Yale that he met his Gatsby.
Another reductive conclusion sums up the experience: “One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to newcomers who don’t quite belong.” He does not say what those public policies might be, though by now he’s made his distaste for public policy clear. Hearts and mind are not examined beyond the cliché.
He falls in love with Usha, a fellow-law school students. He compares her to a heroine in an Ayn Rand novel but for her lack of a “terrible personality.” It’s not a throwaway reference. The transactional self-absorption defines the way he networks for profit. Even the humor is transactional. The sequence about Vance trying to figure out why there are so many utensils on the table at a job-interview lunch feels forced and unauthentic, as if he’s appropriating the scene from the zillion movies using that trope.
He’s offered six-figure salaries but attributes it to “some mysterious force at work.” He may be referring to the “élites.” The reader is never sure. Nearing the end of the book he continues to write as if he were the first lower middle class man to make it out of the Rust Belt: “I knew that kids like me weren’t supposed to get this far, and I congratulated myself for having beaten the odds.” “I was upwardly mobile. I had made it. I had achieved the American Dream.” “I was able to escape the worst of my culture’s inheritance.”
He ends with a few good observations on “adverse childhood experiences” that often saddle working class populations. But when observations turn to analysis, the pages read like more decontextualized Facebook memes. To Vance, “American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world,” he writes, because women are sluts and children live with a “revolving door of father figures.” He provides a few poorly unsourced figures (no footnote here), but his only illustrations are himself and his mother. He asks an honest question: “How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?” His answer is not so much dishonest as evasive, like all prescriptions scripted from a non-existent golden age.
So it is with his lunch with “Brian,” a “sweet kid with a big heart and a quiet manner.” He tells us little about Brian. He fills in a few vague details about how rough Brian has had it, his mom’s death, “multiple instances of childhood trauma” Vance doesn’t explain. When Brian does what every kid, every adult, does–he asked for more french fries–Vance interprets the request as a statement about American hunger. From there Brian becomes another big emblem of American failure-in-waiting leaping to another indictment: “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us… These problems were not created by government or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”
People of the abyss, it’s all your fault.
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Reviewers, marketers, politicians and especially Vance focus on the personal in the book–the folksiness, the grit, Mamaw’s and Papaw’s Hatfield and McCoyness, the hillbilly Walter Mitty making good after all. No firing squad for Vance. The stories aim for the poignancy of survival literature. They lubricate the sermons and hypnotize the reader, suspending disbelief. But Vance proposes in the opening pages that “to understand my story, you have to delve into the details.” He invites deconstruction.
Let’s take him up on it with one of the most quoted lines in the book: “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” Vance makes four demographic assertions (proportion, age, time-clock and non-existence) and one judgment reducing everyone to one defining characteristic. Not unemployment, not hard luck, not illness, not disability, not well-earned leisure, not even the possibility that some of these young men, like Vance when he was one among them, may have been in school or on leave or disability from work or the military. Just: laziness. These are the people he called “neighbors, friends, and family” in his introduction.
The observation can skim by as uncritically as if you were watching a shocking image in a television news report flash on screen without comment or context. The shock of the image stays with you more than the report’s details, if there are any. Here, there are none. It’s all shock. But for age and gender, there’s no reference to race, creed, ethnicity, “illegals.” Vance’s observation appears uncolored by prejudice. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” he writes. But the “laziness” progeny is all WASP: the inferior Black begat the treacherous Indian who begat the disloyal Catholic who begat the wily Oriental who begat the shifty Jew who begat the uneducated Black, the lazy Mexican, the terrorist Arab, and so on. Substitute any one of these groups for Vance’s “young men” and the observation goes from generality to slur. Vance can claim innocence because he confuses disclaimers with indemnification: the young men know not what they do. He’s only calling them ignorant. But as Vance suggests, to understand him, you must delve into the details.
If the generalization about laziness were simply a reflection of Vance’s inability to feel compassion, it could still pass as sloppiness his editor should have redlined. But it’s also not factual, even by Vance’s standards. Its evidence rests on a straw man. He qualifes his evidence as a “left-leaning think tank” that he misidentifies by omitting the word “research” from the organization’s title (picking up on his future guru’s relish for misidentifying enemies). He cites a Public Religion Research Institute finding in 2012 that, in Vance’s words, “found, among other things, that working-class whites worked more than college-educated whites.” The 72-page report states: “White working-class Americans also work hard, averaging more hours per week than white college-educated Americans (51 vs. 46).”
To Vance, “the idea that the average working-class white works more hours is demonstrably false.” He derides PRII’s method for relying on surveys–“essentially, they called around and asked people what they thought.” To prove his “demonstrable” point, he footnotes an Economist article without further explanation. It takes looking it up to better understand how Vance works. The article does state that “Americans with a bachelor’s degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma.” But the statement is based on the American Time Use Survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted in exactly the same way as PRII: surveyors “called around and asked people what they thought.”
The Economist claims “other research” showing the same trend, without attribution. It also modulates the finding: “Higher wages make leisure more expensive: if people take time off they give up more money. Since the 1980s the salaries of those at the top have risen strongly, while those below the median have stagnated or fallen. Thus rising inequality encourages the rich to work more and the poor to work less. The ‘winner-takes-all’ nature of modern economies may amplify the substitution effect.” In other words, if the working class is working fewer hours, laziness has nothing to do with it. The headline on The Economist’s article? “Nice work, if you can get it.”
Both Vance and The Economist miss more telling differences by theorizing their conclusions. Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed described how low-wage workers are routinely defrauded of work time, grossly skewing downward the number of hours recorded as work. “We’re told to get to work at 7:30, but the meter doesn’t start running until about 8:00, when we take off in the cars,” Ehrenreich wrote of her days as a house cleaner, “and there’s no pay for the half hour or so we spend in the office at the end of the day, sorting out the dirty rags before they’re washed and refilling our cleaning fluid bottles.” White-collar workers can klatsch all morning around their coffee and jabber all evening before leaving work without worrying about the clock. It’s part of their “work” day.
There’s no pay every time hourly workers clock out for a break or for lunch. Salaried employees are also often exploited, a problem the Biden administration started addressing. But that’s a different issue. The question is whether they log more work hours and how those hours are calculated–or not. Salaried employees’ breaks and midday splurges–that porterhouse and martini at Delmonico’s–are on the clock, as are all those personal calls to the nanny or the plumber or the side dish. Lack of benefits and the absence of “personal time off” (PTO) compound the losses when the worker has to take time off for illness or to tend to a sick child or parent, or when a car breaks down, or when any number of obstacles the whiter-collared don’t have to worry about get in the way: in white-collar jobs, PTO is still counted as work time. Paid time off. No such thing for the working class.
Having to hold several concurrent jobs to make ends meet on pitiful wages–as 5 percent of job-holders do–enormously discounts the number of hours a worker spends commuting between jobs, and commuting from outer, cheaper urban zones to work zones, adding untold unaccounted, unpaid hours a week to the worker’s schedule. White-collar workers–one in three in management and related services–work remotely, converting or inflating their previous commute time to work hours. Blue-collar workers have no such privilege. They’re instead the subject of constant surveillance for time theft and servility to the demands of time-and-motion studies. So the numbers the white-collared give surveyors are hopelessly, demonstrably skewed. (Ehrenreich, incidentally, was “genetically speaking” a Kentucky Hillbilly, she wrote.)
By the time Vance concedes that “Of course, the reason poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness,” the qualifier seems disingenuous, and is again dismissed with yet another howler restating the inaccuracy two sentences later: “But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground.” Emphasis added, because Vance is dismissing an entire world–and scholarship and reporting–of that working-class abyss with that whatever shrug.
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Here’s whatever, or what you could term the real culture in crisis that The Economist article alluded to in a throw-away line: Six months after HarperCollins published Hillbilly Elegy, The New York Times’s Patricia Cohen, in an article unrelated to the book, reported on the nation’s growing wealth over the previous four decades, and its growing inequality. The share of pre-tax income for the bottom half of earners exceeded 20 percent between 1970 and 1980. By 2014, it had fallen to 12.5 percent. The share of the top 1 percent doubled from 10 percent to 20 percent. Conservatives revile income redistribution. But Reagan’s transfiguration of taxes and government as heresies started an income redistribution upward without parallel. “It wasn’t just that serious salary increases started going only to a small group of fortunate workers,” Kurt Anderson wrote in Evil Geniuses (2020):
The share of money that went to all employees rather than to corporate shareholders and business owners, also became smaller. Until 1980, America’s national split of “gross domestic income” was around 60-40 in favor of workers, but then it began dropping and is now approaching 50-50. That change amounts to almost $1 trillion a year, an annual average of around $5,000 that each person with a job isn’t being paid. Instead, every household in the top 1 percent of earners has been getting $700,000 extra every year. It undoubtedly has been the largest and fastest upward redistribution of wealth in history.
Inflation-adjusted pre-tax income in the years after 1980 for the top 1 percent rose from $428,200 to $1.3 million. For the bottom half, it flatlined at $16,000, adding a mere $200. “We Americans,” Richard Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, “did not need Marx to show us the need for redistribution, or to tell us that the state was often little more than the executive committee of the rich and powerful.”
Despite its overhaul as part of Trump’s 2017 tax cut, the mortgage-interest tax deduction, which, as Reuters notes, “only benefits those able to become homeowners and secure financing in the first place,” remains among wealthier Americans’ most gratuitous subsidies. It costs the federal government $30 billion a year. It is enough to provide every working poor a $4,700 housing voucher every year or provide a $10,000 credit to first-time homebuyers. Compounding that $4,700 the working poor cannot dream of with the $5,000 a year every worker isn’t getting paid begins to explain the difference between adequate shelter or not, and why we’re in the midst of a housing crisis. Redistribute those sums in line with FDR’s third freedom (“the freedom from want”) and homelessness would go from crisis to exception.
Not in the works: The mortgage deduction is set to return to its pre-2017 level when the tax provision expires at the end of 2025, at a cost of $80 billion, enough for a $12,600 voucher. For all his wails about the élites, you can guess Vance’s approach if he and his landlord are elected.
Whatever.
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In Vance’s hands, truthful hyperbole is also cultural appropriation. Some of it is innocent, as when he appropriates universal proverbs as if Appalachia were their Olduvai: “Hillbillies have a phrase–‘too big for your britches’–to describe those who think they’re better than the stock they came from.” Just hillbillies? I recall hearing the phrase in Arabic and French variations in Beirut, then in English when I was in boarding school in England–the britches were usually mine–and later in Queens, N.Y., or hearing the phrase on “Gray’s Anatomy” and in movies from Hollywood to Bollywood, reading its theme and variations in literature as old and distant from Appalachia as Odysseus’s scar.
Innocence curdles when the appropriation extends to the Black experience. Two examples stand out: He equates hillbillies’ migration out of Appalachia to Blacks’ Great Migration from South to North, and he compares white working class struggles to the kind of struggle Barack Obama endured. The comparisons are overt, if slipped in with just enough rambling padding them to make them seem inadvertent: Vance is a sloppy writer and thinker, after all. Why should this be any different? Because the method is too obvious not to reveal willfulness more cynical than careless.
He transforms the “massive hillbilly migration” along U.S. 23 to the Rust Belt as a unique American experience and burden, as if the Oregon Trail, the Okies of the Dust Bowl, the Great Migration of 6 million Blacks leaving Old Confederacy states between 1915 and 1970 and the ongoing Latin or Asian migrations into more diffuse parts of the country were less defining of the American experience or less burdensome on those who endured them. He then refers to the Blacks of Middletown as “the product of an analogous great migration.” Escaping from injustice, oppression, white terrorism and lynching is made “analogous” to poor white hillbillies looking for work.
The equivalence manages to get both the Great Migration and the hillbilly migration wrong. It’s a lesser-known part of American history and one of many examples of stereotyping Appalachia, whitewashing it of its exemplary contributions to national ideals. But the coalfields of Appalachia were among the first and most integrated industries of the country. “By 1920, about 88,706 African Americans resided in central Appalachia and over 26% of all mine workers in the area were Black,” according to the U.S. Department of Labor. (Below ground, everybody was Black.)
As the coal mines’ mechanization shed jobs, Blacks were first to be laid off and first on the highway to other industrial jobs in the Rust Belt. They weren’t part of the Great Migration as generally understood–the great movement from the Jim Crow South to the North. The coalfields certainly weren’t a haven from racism. Above-ground communities were segregated and James Dickey didn’t invent Appalachian brutality. But Blacks’ movement west did not follow the “massive hillbilly migration.” It forged it. The Blacks of Middletown would have been its pioneers.
If it’s not an intentional blind spot for the Black experience on Vance’s part–I have my doubts about that if–it’s a telling one, particularly when he is setting the standard by which he wants to be judged.
Vance alleges to distance himself from “our race-conscious society” by claiming kinship with “the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.” But the dot-connecting is alarming now that he is potentially a vice president and possibly president one day, Trump’s immortality not being of this world. He claims there are “no heroes,” no “George S. Patton figure in the modern army.” He claims he and his hillbilly kind have a lock on patriotism unique to them, offering up a few statistics about the proportion of volunteers for wars from this and that county. He then segues into a duplicity so wily that it makes you rethink any possible innocence in his equivalence of Black and white migrations.
He refers to others’ doubt of Obama’s citizenship and religion, repeating the myth over several pages. He doesn’t discredit it. Not for a long while. He chooses his own words to bolster the myth. He uses the word “alien” to describe Obama in the eyes of his hillbilly friends. Obama’s accent is “foreign.” His credentials are “frightening.” Vance repeats the theory that Obama is “a foreign alien actively trying to destroy our country.”
There’s no mention that Obama won Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania in 2008. No mention that Trump birthed the myth of Obama’s Muslim ancestry and used his stature and money to fuel the fabrication while delegitimizing the man in the office he sought. Vance instead rationalizes the lie as the organic concern of a working class that has reason to doubt Obama’s authenticity because “Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up.” The Black migrants out of the coalfields have vanished. None could possibly have been successful, professional, accomplished. At least not in Vance’s circles, where Vances can go to Yale but Obamas going to Harvard bears no resemblance to “people I admired growing up.” He never discredits the myth, except to concede, between two diminishing dashes, that people believe it “–despite all evidence to the contrary–”. It’s not a concession to fact but a licensing of the bigotry he rationalized over three pages.
He sneers at Obama’s elitism before this disclaimer: “Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right–adversity familiar to many of us.” And here it is again, the rancid equivalence. Vance makes the Black experience in America, not just in the Great Migration or the hillbilly migration, relative to the white working class experience, and compares his experience of struggle to Obama’s and Black America. The two are really the same, he is telling us, so stop cramming your Black struggle narrative down our throats and start listening to ours. In the near future, The 1619 Project would be banned from schools while Hillbilly Elegy is urged onto syllabi. Elegy provides the playbook.
Even when Vance discredits the kooks, as he seems to do right after sounding like a kook about Obama, he’s only throwing the kind of bone some readers lapped up when the book appeared, mistaking the examples either as sincere denunciations or as examples worth citing, considering their provenance from the vilest corners of the web. He bullet-points Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory about 9/11, “an editorial suggesting that the Newtown gun massacre was engineered by the Federal government to turn public opinion on gun control measures,” and something about Obama imposing martial law to keep power for a third term. He wants you to believe he disagrees with the conspiracists. But explaining and denouncing is one thing. Explaining while framing the conspiracies as just another side of the story places facts and denialism on the same level.
We’ve since learned that he did not disagree with the conspiracists. Like his “going to war,” like his poverty, like his hillbilliness, it was all a pose. In his 2021 campaign for Senate, he praised Alex Jones as a truth-teller: “I got myself into a little hot water last week, because I made what seemed to me a plainly obvious observation that Alex Jones, the Infowars guy, is a better source of information than Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC gal.” (Note the dismissive, sexist gal.) It is plainly obvious to Vance that the man who must pay nearly $1 billion in damages for spreading the fabrication that the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre never happened, that the 20 murdered children are living their lives, that their parents are liars and frauds, that the government staged it all to confiscate guns, is a truth-teller.
In Hillbilly Elegy Vance capped his Cheshire-smirked denunciation of conspiracy theories with this duplicity: “This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream.” This after he spent several pages justifying the skepticism, platforming it, mainstreaming it, and veiling his denunciation in qualifiers.
*
Method is not accident. Examine the method behind the writing, and the stories become threadbare anecdotes. They may be true. They certainly have a lot to do with “a family in crisis,” as the book’s subtitle suggests. What family ever isn’t? But they have little to do with “a culture in crisis.” That’s not denying the Rust Belt and Appalachian crises. But the unpretentious reporting of the Ohio Valley ReSource that launched the year of Elegy, later collected in Appalachian Fall, the several deeply reported books of Beth Macy, especially Dopesick, even Philip Meyer’s American Rust, a novel, are more insightful about the crises than are chapters of Elegy. (The Los Angeles Times’s “8 books you should read instead of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’” is also a useful guide.) The difference is the individuality of shared experiences that permeate more authentic books. In Elegy, a selfie posing as memoir, the only individuality is Vance’s. Everyone else is them: Faceless, theoretical, monolithic.
The claim of Vance as “a fiercely astute social critic” or of the book as a window into the Rust Belt’s agonies is not supported. No need to invent more than Vance does: Vance’s method, especially his habit of taking a single personal anecdote and drawing it out into a broad brush indictments about the culture, with no evidence, puts the veracity of the book in doubt and the validity of its conclusions in question.
Yes, it’s a “memoir,” not a sociology monograph. But when Vance assumes the pose of a sociologist, as he does in half the book, he may be judged on the results, especially since his admirers see him more as prophet than memoirist–“the St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus,” in Steve Bannon’s sado-orgasmic formulation.
Vance is from the “some people say” school of unverifiable opinions. Example: “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown.” What people? The people at the Journal-News, the local paper? The people at the bowling alley and the football games on Friday nights? The people at the grocery store line where Vance seems to have gathered the data for most of his field work? He doesn’t say, because he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t engage. Vance’s Middletown bubble was smaller than he lets on.
Just twenty-eight footnotes fill a page at the end of the book. Seven are Ibidized doublings. The other 14 are an assortment of media reports, Discovery Magazine’s blog, three books, two journal articles, and a few “reports,” including a poll on media trustworthiness by Rasmussen Reports, which the polling site 538 considers so lousy that it doesn’t rank among the 277 pollsters that get a rating.
This is not the method of a memoirist, an amateur sociologist or an analyst. The boundary between fact and fiction is too fuzzy, the manipulation of history too obvious, the fast-and-loose games with relativism too frequently targeted. These are the basic methods of propaganda, as intentional as a middle class suburban man’s appropriation of a poor Appalachian-hillbilly’s heritage.
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The generality is Vance’s accomplice, the pulley that suspends disbelief, starting with his origin story as an Appalachian hillbilly. A birth certificate and a few trips to Kentucky don’t make him Appalachian. I spent five and a half years at the beginning of my reporting career in the coalfields and hollows of Southern West Virginia–certainly more years than Vance spent in Kentucky. I’m no more hillbilly than I’m zebra. But when he portrays his grandmother as demanding and himself as unique, it’s as if parents or grandparents demanding the same of their children were fossilized rarities extracted by chance from coal beds.
To Vance, “Appalachian hills and single-room, K-12 schoolhouses don’t tend to foster big dreams.” Read today, that line is as discordant–as offensive–as his “childless cat lady” remark of 2021. It underscores his propensity for careless, sweeping generalizations that weaponize ideological flourishes at the expense of accuracy and the humane. So when he attempts to walk back a damaging line, it does not ring true. It isn’t the one line but its illustration of repeated, cavalier contempt for entire segments of humanity that stands out, especially when he doesn’t mean to walk it back anyway.
He fuzzed up the line between the Cincinnati exurb of Middletown and Appalachia and early reviewers bought it. Most are from inside Washington’s Beltway or the nation’s other urbane-blue sprawls. They bring their bourgeois sensibilities–what we refer to as “woke” these days–to their reading. If they ever set foot in Appalachia, it’s for leaf or ski season, trudging inside compounds of resorts like the Greenbrier or Pipestem or Snowshoe the way Vance trudged around an air base and called it Iraq. Reviewers were desperate. Trump’s 2016 election sent the traditional ruling class and millions of shellshocked voters grasping for explanations. Hillbilly Elegy was their Da Vinci Code–up to a third of whose readers thought the 2006 thriller was fact. More than that believe Hillbilly Elegy is.
The story of his mother’s addiction, a more interesting story than his own, is harrowing. But it isn’t a southwest Ohio story. It isn’t a Rust Belt story or a story of class or poverty or of “a culture in crisis.” It’s a terribly ordinary story that could be set anywhere on the planet: an unhappy woman who compensates with an emptiness in her life with alcohol, anger and violence. Any booking list from any local jail includes one or two or three arrests for the same reason.
I don’t know what poor 12 year old has the chance to have “visited Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and Lexington,” to have gone on road trips to Texas and “spent a considerable amount of time in South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and even Arkansas,” or to have benefited from a $180 graphing calculator and private golf lessons from his poor Mamaw. His definition of poverty is odd: “I didn’t wear clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle.” By that measure, any of us who get our threads from Amazon must be poor. As long as it’s not food stamps, handouts for Vance, like his grandmother’s inheritance, pass unremarked.
When his uncle Jimmy flies him and his sister Lindsay to California for the summer, “It is a testament to the class consciousness of my youth that my friends’ thoughts drifted first to the cost of an airplane flight.” He wasn’t cost-conscious about it, because he wasn’t poor. The line’s technique is just as telling. He projects sociological analyses on surface observations (“my friends’ thoughts”–how many friends? Two? Three? None is named or quoted), and out of the thin air of that airplane ride, we get a pontifical bull on class.
“Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are exaggerated, that I am too close to the picture and lack perspective,” Jack London wrote in People of the Abyss. You will not find that kind of reflection in Elegy.
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The passages betraying Vance’s uninformed or uncomfortable relationship with race, discussed above, get little attention beyond readers taking Vance at his words when he implies that some of his best thoughts are post-racial. His “amateur sociologist” pages draw more attention, among them this line about people on food assistance, a favorite quote in right-wing indignation circuits: “They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets I only dreamed about.”
There’s no attempt at deeper analysis. He complains about a drug-addicted neighbor who buys T-bone steaks. He decides with his Mamaw “to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust” since “a large minority was content to live on the dole.” The reductiveness is as shocking as his analysis of laziness. It’s also what made Vance’s stump screeds so appealing in TV appearances, when viewers and interviewers are not about to look up his fabrications.
Here’s the “largesse” Vance is referring to. The average monthly food stamps benefit per household was $162 in 1999, around the time Vance was playing cashier sociologist at Dillman’s (the store closed in 2014). The thriftiest monthly grocery bill for a family of four was $430, so food stamps could cover a little over a third of the bill. (The average benefit in April 2024 was $189 per person, and the average, thriftiest food plan for a family of four was $976). More than half the beneficiaries were children. The 1996 welfare reform law–Temporary Assistance for Needy Families–had cut millions off food stamps. That a cell phone may be more lifeline than luxury doesn’t occur to Vance.
Are Medicare and Social Security government largesse, too? Is the Medicare benefit that allows its recipient a gold club membership at a fitness center a trinket? Or maybe those “trinkets” are “no more than manifestations of the poor hind’s pathetic effort to raise himself out of his wallows, to justify and dignify his existence, to escape from the sordid realities that daily confront him,” as H.L. Mencken described the sort of things the poor clung to in 1924. That amateur had the good sense to title his piece “Vulgar Psychology.”
Vance was not discovering something new at Dillman’s, nor anything particular to his corner of the country. But he never lets evidence or compassion get in the way of a rant. He reminds me of commenters bitching about “nice cars” that wait in line every Saturday and Sunday at the Grace Community food bank in Palm Coast.
“I began to see the world as Mamaw did,” Vance tells us–like Jimmy Carter sounding out his 8-year-old daughter Amy for advice on nuclear weapons–exploding from vague anecdotes picked up at the corner store to Summa Theologica-caliber conclusions about “not just me and my family but our neighborhood and our town and everyone from Jackson to Middletown and beyond.” He name-drops Charles Murray and his Losing Ground, hardly an example of objective scholarship, but mostly sticks to a couple of stories about neighbors with leaky roofs and their children with soiled diapers to build up to this rehearsal for the talk circuit and what became his national stage at the Republican National Convention:
This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. 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. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class. And when the dust clears–when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity–there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.
Especially when not all of us have a billionaire to propel us. This is a Wagnerian aria from the underworld written for Facebook comments where all is black and white, where judgments are the currency and nuance, research, proofs, are suspect: “My grandmother embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood, embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, mistrustful.” (Emphasis added.)
Victor Gollancz, who edited George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, described the book’s “burning indignation against poverty and oppression.” Vance’s burning indignation is against the poor. There is no oppression, because outside forces have nothing to do with their condition. Only their laziness, lack of faith and blaming everything and everyone (“Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese”) but themselves. In Vance, grievances are a hillbilly invention, “lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance–the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach,” as if the working class of industrial England 90 years ago were any different (“their chief pleasure was talking about their grievances to anyone who would listen,” Orwell wrote of the working poor and unemployed then.)
Black Lung disease, asbestos, work in two of industrial America’s most dangerous trades–coal mines and steel mills–lack of health care, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family’s poisoning of Appalachia and the Rust Belt with Oxy have nothing to do with hillbillies’ lower life expectancy. Vance blames hillbillies’ eating habits.
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But Vance is different from you and me. He’s especially different from them, those Appalachians among whom he grew up and that he alternately eulogizes and scorns, depending on the Janus-like face his sermon requires in the moment, with stereotypes recycled from a century of Appalachian exploitation. His grandmother’s totemic advice (“Never be like these fucking losers”) reflects a sense of boot-strapped Darwinian supremacy that reduces everything to personal responsibility, as if chance, environment, history, the economy, the circumstances of one’s birth, intelligence, character flaws, have no agency. As if individuals are their own gods, capable of anything they please if only they set their mind to it.
“You can do anything you want to,” his grandmother told him, words every child anywhere has heard at one point or another. Many children make good on the encouragement. Many don’t. It is Vance’s job, as he sees it in this book, to declare that those who don’t have only themselves to blame. It always is in this hillbilly’s analysis, which may explain the book’s immense appeal to those who prefer to see the world in absolutes and judge human beings in their essence as atoms responsible for their own destiny from day one, though in one of innumerable contradictions, he acknowledges that he could not have become who he is without certain people in his life.
The Ayn Rand-like callousness and indifference to others’ circumstances frame his conclusions: “But social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap.” His big epiphany: he had a few people helping him along the way. “Mamaw always resented the hillbilly stereotype–the idea that our people were a bunch of slobbering morons.” He made it out. But he is blaming those who didn’t for not tapping into the social capital around them. For not deciding to seize their day. For being slobbering morons.
It is the difference between the person who gives $5 to a panhandler with a smile and a kind word, and the person who conditions against spending the money on booze even though the giver has a bar-hopping night planned after work. Getting drunk after a 60-hour week is more virtuous than getting drunk to escape the misery of another 168-hour week as a pauper (or a 55-hour week as a house cleaner). It is Vance’s language, Vance’s attitude, that scourges the people in the weekend caravans outside food banks for driving fancy cars and texting on their iPhone XVs as they wait.
Which brings us to the most disturbing part of the book. Blaming the poor, playing footsie with class and race and sneering at the conspiratorially defined “élites” on his way to joining them are Elegy’s ideological hook. The glorification of masculinity, honor and brutality is its profession of faith. This is JD Vance as JD Vance, potential next vice president–and arterially speaking, very possibly president–of the United States: a Proud Boy in all but name.
Elegy has all the folksiness of stereotypical Appalachian tales of violence and honor and family lore garlanded in self-destruction and told with the pride of distinction: It is “us hill people,” Vance likes to say. His parents’ fights are bitter, chronic and cruel, but “over time, I started to like the drama.” It had “become a sort of drug.”
The attraction is not limited to voyeurism. There is a recurring glorification of what he calls “hillbilly justice” throughout the book, of the fist and guns and vigilantism that segues into his sympathy for Jan. 6 insurrectionists and defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2020 election ruling. His gun-toting grandmother–“my keeper, my protector, and, if need be, my own goddamn terminator”–tells him sometimes you have to fight. He does. Repeatedly. And likes it. “In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor and toughness,” he writes. I’m not sure how that’s different from the droogs of Clockwork Orange thuggery in any old alley. But Vance demarcates those values as unique to his people with the same oracular certainties he applies to lazy men and his own exceptionalism.
It’s all wrapped up in his thing for “masculinity,” believing as his grandfather told him that “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” Just the women. Not other men, not children, not neighbors, pets, strangers. It’s not “decency,” not “respect,” not “responsibility,” all of which apply to men and women, but “masculinity,” because men have a responsibility to women that women do not to men. It is the mythical masculinity of the crusader–or The Handmaid’s Tale, if you prefer a more familiar reference–when men sanctified their bestial superiority to women and infidels behind a veil of selective chivalry.
“My desire to fight arose more out of a sense of duty,” he writes of the time when he heard his stepbrother call his stepsister a bitch and Vance, inheritor of Mamaw’s homicidal tendencies, wanted to “beat my new stepbrother to within an inch of his life.” Duty to whom? To what end? You get the feeling that protection of the stepsister plays only a bit part in the equation. She is pixie girl to his affirmation of primal manhood. Family honor in Vance is no different than gang loyalty, and just as violent.
“How do you be a better husband, a better man, a better father?” he asked in a 2021 podcast. “How do you build a sense of masculinity that is protective and defensive and aggressive but isn’t just showy? Elites don’t care at all about the difference between men and women and how we need to inculcate masculine virtues and feminine virtues. But Christianity really does.” By then the one-time atheist then agnostic then “devoted convert” who in his words “devoured books about young-earth creationism and joined online chat rooms to challenge scientists on the theory of evolution” had adopted a version of Catholicism its intellectual preachers call “post-liberalism.”
Like all euphemisms intended to destinkify whatever doesn’t pass the smell test–don’t call it garbage, call it biosolids–there’s nothing “post” about post-liberal Catholicism. It is all retro. Very retro. It is an integralist version of Catholicism that apotheoses its violently authoritarian Medieval origins and vilifies all who stand in the way. Secularists and humanists are its Cathars. “[E]ven the word humanism made me want to vomit,” says Michel Houellebecq’s Black Madonna-smitten protagonist in Submission who, in the 2018 novel, takes a pseudo-spiritual “journey” similar to Vance’s, albeit with a more humorously ironic come-to-Mohammed moment for culmination. Vance just came to Trump.
Vance’s conversion has elicited notable reports raising alarms even in the National Catholic Reporter, which calls him a fraud. To most American voters Catholicism is Catholicism. It is JFK, it is the Popemobile and St. Peter’s Square, it is Joe Biden, it is the majority of the Supreme Court. But as Lloyd Bentsen might have told Vance, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
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In a recent profile in The Economist’s 1843 magazine of Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys the year of Elegy’ publication, and with whom Vance shares the same idea of Catholicism, McInnes is said to have become “convinced that the decline of male-only clubs had left too many men isolated and adrift. It is healthy for men, he believed, ‘to be alone together, fart, tell rude jokes and be offensive,’” while celebrating “stay-at-home moms and take-charge husbands” and glorifying violence: “We need more violence from the Trump supporters, choke a bitch, choke a tranny,” he’d said.
Elegy is Vance’s Proud Boy Odyssey, ending where it started. It was never a conversion to Trumpism. It was a homecoming.
The deceptive scene on the book cover has nothing to do with it. There are no Appalachian shacks in this book, no gravelly roads, no isolated hills, no lyricism or culture or memory. It is storytelling in the service of chauvinist ideology. It is like that Soviet painting from 1950 (at the top of this article) of a father and son toweling themselves after a suspiciously simultaneous shower, captioned, again with suspiciously unselfconscious irony: “If you want to be healthy, harden yourself.” I could not verify the authenticity of the painting. It has all the elements of mid-century Soviet artistry–the pastel pigments, the brutalist bulk, the PVC smiles, the sinister in waiting. It’s sold on American art sites and on t-shirts, which suggests fabrication more than authenticity: a fitting Vance elegy.
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor.
