JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” an appeal to the white working class

In his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” the politically conservative Vance focuses more on the personal than on polemics. Nevertheless, he wants to make people understand something he “only recently learned – that those of us who are lucky enough to live the American dream continue to be haunted by the demons of a life we ​​left behind.” For those who never achieved it, the demons – the anger, the depression and more – are hard to shake off. Trump, Vance said in the interview, is tapping into those demons. “His apocalyptic tone,” he said, “matches their lived experiences on the ground.”

Vance grew up in what he describes in his memoirs as “a steel town in Ohio that has historically been short of jobs and hope.” His mother suffered from addiction; he was raised by his grandparents, neither of whom graduated from high school.

“The statistics show that kids like me face a bleak future – if they’re lucky, they’ll avoid welfare, and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.” Vance himself almost dropped out of high school.

But he escaped that fate. He joined the Marines, served in Iraq, and then studied law at Yale University. At 31, he is a successful, happily married executive from Silicon Valley. Vance asks how he managed to get by. He replies that he grew up surrounded by his family and learned to believe in his own ability to improve his life.

Vance tells moving stories of his family’s hardships — including his grandparents, who came together as teenagers and moved from Kentucky to Ohio to work at Armco, a steel company. Vance’s “Papaw” had a bad drinking problem; his “Mamaw” could be downright mean. During one particularly heated argument, Mamaw threatened to kill her husband if he ever came home drunk again. He did, so Mamaw doused him with lighter fluid and lit a match while her children put out the fire. (Papaw, miraculously, was fine.)

Vance’s aunt and uncle emerged from that tumult largely unscathed, establishing stable families and solid economic foundations. His mother, however, bore the scars of her upbringing. Though top of her class, she became pregnant before she even finished high school. She became a nurse but moved from man to man, marrying half a dozen and uprooting Vance and his sister each time. And she struggled with drugs, in and out of rehab and eventually losing her nursing license. She could be neglectful (Vance lived alone for much of ninth grade) and abusive. After a brutal argument, Vance took refuge in a stranger’s home, fearing his mother would murder him.

That’s enough to make anyone bitter, but Vance’s feelings are more complicated. He’s sympathetic to the psychological gaps his mother was trying to fill, and how the abuse she suffered as a child shaped her behavior as an adult. It’s a tension he returns to again and again in his nuanced, thoughtful book – what makes some children resilient while others succumb to the temptations that beset their parents? Is his mother a victim, an abuser, or both? Can we ever truly escape our past and our class?

Vance left his mother’s house for good in 10th grade and went to live with a much quieter Mamaw. His grandmother insisted that he work hard in school and get a job. “We didn’t have cell phones,” he writes, “and we didn’t have nice clothes, but Mamaw made sure I had one of those graphing calculators. That taught me an important lesson about Mamaw’s values, and it forced me to engage with school in a way I never had before.” And more importantly, she insisted that Vance held the key to his future. “Never be like those damn losers who think the cards are stacked against them,” Mamaw would tell her grandson.

But the reality was that getting into college wasn’t easy. Vance and his grandmother struggled with financial aid and loan applications. The threat of debt was so daunting that Vance enlisted in the Marines. It was the right decision – he says the military taught him discipline, time management and confidence in his ability to persevere.

While in law school, Vance grappled with the legacy of his childhood. “Social mobility is not just about money and economics, it’s also about a change in lifestyle,” he writes. “When you move from the working class to the professional class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.”

Once he took a friend from Yale to Cracker Barrel, his grandmother’s favorite restaurant where he went on special occasions. “In my youth, it was the height of fine dining,” he writes. “With friends from Yale, it was a sleazy public health crisis.” Another time, at a fancy recruiting dinner, he spat out his bottled water because he had never tried it and thought it had gone bad.

Although he has overcome his demons, Vance feels compassion for those left behind. He describes their fate this way: “From low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction, my home is a center of misery.” And unlike other groups who also experience widespread poverty, “white workers are the most pessimistic group in America.”

Vance attributes this pessimism to their social isolation – and worse, he writes, “we pass this isolation on to our children.”

The wounds are partly self-inflicted. The working class, he argues, has lost its sense of ownership and its joy in hard work. In one telling anecdote, he tells of his summer job at the local tile factory, lugging around 60-pound pallets. He made $13 an hour and had good benefits and opportunities for advancement. A full-time employee could earn a salary well above the poverty line.

That would have made the job an easy sell, but the factory owner was having trouble filling positions. During Vance’s summer shift, three people quit, including a man he calls Bob, a 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. Bob was chronically late for work, if he showed up at all. He frequently took 45-minute bathroom breaks. When he was fired anyway, he railed against the managers who had done it and refused to acknowledge the consequences of his own bad decisions.

“He thought something had been done to him,” Vance writes. “There is a lack of agency here – you feel like you have little control over your life and are willing to blame everyone else but yourself.”

Perhaps Vance’s key to success is simple: he simply fought through his difficulties instead of giving up or blaming someone else.

“I think we rednecks are the toughest goddamn people on this earth,” he concludes. “But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our behavior is hurting our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can solve these problems for us. … I don’t know the exact answer, but I do know that it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless corporations and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Amanda Erickson is a writer and editor in Washington. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 2014 to 2023.

Memories of a family and culture in crisis