J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a #1 New York Times Bestseller
Between the years 1931 and 1939, 5 people were killed, several were arrested, and many went without pay and food during the Harlan County War. The war was a coal miners’ struggle to gain a democratic labor union in eastern Kentucky. Despite the collusion between coal companies and local law enforcement, this struggle ended in a victory for the coal miners. They formed a union, which resulted in better pay, better benefits, safer working conditions and vindication for those hurt or killed in the difficult battle. Harlan County is now a landmark in the history of worker’s rights, with books, film dramas and documentaries made based on the events. These events are also explored in the famous folk song Which Side Are You On?
JD Vance, author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, had a family that lived about 50 miles from Harlan County, in Jackson, Kentucky. Vance believes such people are a bunch of self-inflicting tragic rednecks who need to overcome their own personal problems if they are going to be anything in life.
Ok, maybe that’s being a little bit too harsh. But in Vance’s book, there is no doubt he severely misunderstood the economic and cultural problems that plague Appalachia, and the whole country for that matter. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is adored by conservatives and liberals alike and recently received a movie deal with Netflix. With Hillbilly Elegy’s acclaim, it makes it important to dissect Vance’s politics and reveal what they truly are.
In Vance’s autobiography, it’s hard not to feel bad for the author. His mother was a drug addict who had a new boyfriend every few months, and his biological father had a strained relationship with him. He struggled with schoolwork due to an emotionally volatile household, and, like many families from eastern Kentucky, grew up as working poor. He tells stories of how he overcame those odds to attend law school and become an entrepreneur. He explains the tough love his grandparents gave him that turned him into a better man, and expresses his sympathy for the poor due to what he experienced.
However, when doing a narrow read of some of Vance’s paragraphs dedicated to social analysis, his politics are not based on any theory about class consciousness, nor any concrete public policy that would account for real systemic change for America’s poor whites. What Vance offers instead is bootstrapping: a fallacy that believes anyone can lift themselves out of systematic oppression and poverty by their own efforts and will power.
In the introduction to the novel, Vance gives a small example of his political alignment. He tells the story of a young man named Bob who he worked with at a tile manufacturing company. Bob had no education beyond high school, no technical skills, and a pregnant girlfriend. When Bob was fired for taking hour-long bathroom breaks, he was furious, asking his manager how he was supposed to care for his family. Vance’s analysis is that this is “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it” and that “too many young men [are] immune to hard work.”
Vance doesn’t link Bob’s poor work habits to the history of his family’s poverty, a public school with inadequate resources, or a lack of decent-paying jobs with reasonable hours and benefits. Vance doesn’t seem to take into account Bob’s girlfriend’s lack of knowledge about reproductive health in an emotionally detached household, or her inability to buy birth control because it would be an out of pocket expense with no health insurance. No, the answer is simple: today’s hillbillies are scared of manual labor.
The phrase hillbillies here could easily be replaced with the word millennial, immigrants, or black people, and instantly be a theory rejected by most readers. However, Vance uses the word hillbillies because they are an easy target, a marginalized group of white people that he himself came from. Hillbillies actually operate under a similar system of oppression of many ethnic and racial minorities in this country, as they live in towns with inadequate resources, housing, jobs, and are cajoled into voting in-line with politicians who don’t have their best interests at heart. And, most importantly, these politicians shield them from developing class consciousness with their fellow impoverished citizens in big towns and different geographies.
It’s precisely this class consciousness that Vance is fully aware of, and feels the need to both subdue and abandon. His journey through the military, to Ohio State, and later to Yale Law certainly is an inspiring one. He also claims to be a champion for working people; we find out in the conclusion that he is buying Christmas presents for underprivileged kids in Washington DC. However, he isn’t using his skills as a lawyer to fight for public housing or workers’ rights — he’s an entrepreneurial lawyer, fighting for people like himself, who now have vast swaths of money to feed into projects. His book offers no solutions but for himself, as this New York Times bestseller is certainly a multi-million dollar deal at this point.
I don’t mean to make Vance out as a bad person, but he knows exactly what he is doing. His tragedy has been turned into profit. He is, unfortunately, the definition of a class traitor. I wouldn’t recommend this book or the future film to anyone. Instead, read up on the coal mine wars, listen to Trillbillies, an eastern Kentucky based podcast, and develop that class consciousness that J.D. Vance wants you to pretend doesn’t exist.
— Jesse Drake, Blogger.
Jesse’s Bio:
Jesse is a senior English major with minors in Political Science and Peace Studies. He currently lives on campus but is originally from northeast Indiana, and plans on staying in the Chicago area for his gap year before attending law school. Thanks to a combination of inspiring yet challenging English teachers and exposure to the culture of a small Rust Belt town, Jesse focuses his writing on working-class issues, political rhetoric, and inequality. He also enjoys craft beer and spicy food.