Let’s start with a confession.
I didn’t care for J.D. Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Actually, that’s not true. I hated Vance’s memoir/polemic.
I remember throwing it against a wall at least three times while I was reading it. Vance’s lazy characterizations of Appalachian whites and the white working class in general annoyed me at first. Then his reliance on bigoted stereotypes of how hill people live and think offended me.
My mother’s people were Scots-Irish peasants who landed in South Carolina a few years before the Revolutionary War began. They fought for American independence, in part because experience had taught them to hate the crown.
In the coming years, my ancestors migrated north, traveling through the mountains in the western Carolinas and through Tennessee and Kentucky before settling in the hills of Southern Indiana just before the War of 1812 began. There, they built homes, farms and families, eking out hardscrabble existences for more than a century in country that yielded neither crops nor comfort without tremendous effort.
My grandfather was the first in the family to go to college. It took him almost eight years to finish. He took classes for a semester, then worked the next semester to make and save money for more schooling. His younger siblings worked and held onto the job for him when he was away at college so it would be waiting for him when he came back.
When he graduated, my grandfather became a teacher—and he helped his younger siblings go to school, too.
There is none of that world in Vance’s book, which indicts Appalachian whites as victims. At the same time, Vance spends an inordinate amount of time congratulating himself for making it out of that world by joining the Marines and eventually becoming a Yale-educated lawyer and venture capitalist.
Presenting himself as the ultimate self-made man, his moral isn’t subtle: If he could make it out, anyone can.
In other words, he sold out his family and his people just to make himself look good.
My grandfather, a loyal Republican his entire life, would have scoffed at Vance’s thesis. A man who sometimes walked 35 miles to get to school, Grandpa had at least as strong a claim to serving as a Horatio Alger-style exemplar of self-reliance as Vance did.
But my grandfather didn’t believe in self-made men. He knew everyone needed a helping hand to change their lives—and he believed that one of the reasons a person should work hard was that working hard is the best way to honor the sacrifices others made and make to provide that helping hand.
I’m with Grandpa on that one.
Given the insights into Vance’s character his book provided, not much about Vance’s chameleon-like political career has surprised me. His rapid-fire evolution from strident Never Trumper to MAGA lapdog was predictable.
So was his plunge into politics—and his self-abasing courtship of the man he often criticized as unfit for office and a threat to the nation Vance once took an oath to defend.
That is because Vance pursues opportunities where he sees them—and he allows neither loyalty nor scruple to slow or hinder his pursuit.
Much of the attention focused on Trump’s selection of Vance as his 2024 running mate has been devoted to the political implications of the choice.
Pundits and political observers note that Vance’s home state of Ohio is safely in the Trump column, so putting him on the ticket doesn’t add votes the way selecting Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley might have.
The conventional wisdom is Trump picked Vance because the former president prizes loyalty above all else.
If so, Trump may have made another bad bargain.
That’s often the way it is. Con artists often can be the easiest to con themselves.
There are stories that Vance has stopped wearing his wedding band because he learned that Trump doesn’t wear a ring and doesn’t trust men who do.
To get a shot at the vice presidency, Vance decided to stop sporting the visible symbol of the most important partnership in his life.
If push came to shove, would Vance betray Trump, the man who put him one heartbeat away from the presidency? Would the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” sell out someone who helped him?
Of course he would.
He wrote the book on it.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
