The Return Trip

I wanted to believe in J.D. Vance when I first heard about “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” his 2016 book about growing up poor in the hill country of Kentucky, and southern Ohio – not too far from my humble upbringing in Kentucky and Indiana, without hills. His story was especially relevant to me during that critical election year, spotlighting political attitudes in the Rust Belt, where angry workers felt abandoned by U.S. manufacturers, and their government.

Donald Trump tapped into this despair in 2016, and he has cultivated white, nationalist angst in the years since. Now, J.D. Vance has joined him as a running mate, stoking the anger and political disenfranchisement that has swept through what are now primary battleground states – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. Vance is using his biography as a platform to connect with voters in the Midwest, and to steer them to – or keep them in – the MAGA camp.

After 35 years working as a messenger for America’s unions, I appreciate these workers’ resentment over unfair trade, and how it shook up their lives. I helped raise labor’s alarm about sell-out “free trade” policies, championed by both political parties in the ’80s, ’90s and early 21^st century. International trade agreements crafted to benefit multinational corporations, presumably the global engine for growth, served to hollow out the industrial U.S. heartland, destroying hundreds of thousands of good jobs as U.S. companies abandoned workers and their families.

At the Republican National Convention in July, Vance praised Trump as the man who will rejuvenate U.S. manufacturing, dismissing the efforts of President Biden. “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man – union and nonunion alike,” he said. “A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry.” Vance’s rallying cry for workers must have rattled the corporate executives in the hall and skyboxes who bankroll Trump’s campaign, and who expect continued tax favors. And the words ring hollow when examined in the light of Vance’s record of words and actions. 

Never mind that Vance early on declared himself a “Never Trumper,” warning of Trump’s fascist tendencies, saying he was “cultural heroin” and could be “America’s Hitler.” He quickly fell in line with Trump when it became clear he needed to do so to advance a political career in the Republican Party. He won the U.S. Senate race in Ohio with Trump’s support.

Listening to Vance’s narration of Hillbilly Elegy, the second edition, I hear the contradictions sticking in his throat as he bounces from compassion and empathy for poor relatives and friends to harsh indictments of those who won’t get out of the gutter, including his mother, a drug addict who hooked up with a parade of men through most of Vance’s life. The tone he uses, though polished in college and Yale law school, comes off as a withering rant against his mother, and the predicament she put him in.

Deep-seated resentment against his mother may help explain Vance’s attack on women and gay marriage, such as his declaration in an interview with Fox News in 2021 that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. … It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

(For the record, Kamala Harris is “Momala” to her two stepdaughters, and helped raise Ella since she was a teenager. Buttigieg and his husband have twin two-year-old boys. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [AOC] is representative of the millennial shift away from prescribed baby-making and the “matrimania” of their elders. She represents a large bloc of young voters.)

Since joining the Trump campaign, Vance has taken his offensive commentary on women to the next generation, suggesting that menopause is nature’s way of telling women it’s time to care for their grandchildren. Although he celebrated his mother at the GOP convention, “10 years clean and sober,” Vance is looking back and looking down, finding little connectivity to his neighbors of old – except as metaphor to brace his political ambitions.

Vance does tell a good story, and his memoir is chockful of local color, from Jackson, Kentucky, to Middletown, Ohio, and beyond. He remembers the struggle of families fleeing Kentucky for jobs in northern industrial areas with a song by Dwight Yoakam, “Readin’ Rightin’ Route 23,” the road running from Jacksonville, Florida to Mackinaw City, Michigan. Yoakam, from the tapped-out coal country in Eastern Kentucky, celebrates the people who chase the dream. Listen:

Vance nowadays appears to be realizing that dream himself. He lives with his wife Usha and their three children in a $1.5 million home in Del Ray, a liberal enclave of Northern Virginia. The wealth he has accumulated, aside from the continuing success of his memoir, comes largely from venture capital investments with Peter Thiel and other Trump supporters in Silicon Valley. He’s a long way from the hollers of Kentucky and the needs of industrial workers, but in a fine position to serve himself.

Vance portrays his rise from humble beginnings as a heroic Horatio Alger tale, further elevated heroically with a four-year stint in the Marines, including six months in war-torn Iraq. A “public affairs specialist” in the Marines, Vance attacks the military record of Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who served 24 years in the U.S. Army National Guard, rising to command sergeant major before retiring to run for Congress. Walz refuses to take the bait, thanking Vance for his military service.

With little heft to his public service resume, Vance has focused as an outsider looking to break through with personal, moral issues he hopes will inspire the faithful. He converted to Catholicism in 2019, and has wrapped himself in the mantle of a pro-life absolutist, opposing abortion even in cases of incest or rape. In his Hillbilly Elegy, Vance had cast religion less as a guide to moral behavior than as a lever for success. “Religious folks are much happier,” he wrote. “Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.”

By contrast, Walz’s Evangelical Lutheran Protestant denomination has guided his progressive policy prescriptions as governor – from huge investments in public education, including a universal free school lunch program, to protections for reproductive freedom and gender-affirming care. Preaching and moralizing don’t compare with actually doing something to help other people, following the teachings of the Christ they both profess to worship. Listening to Walz, you hear a gregarious communitarian. Teach, bring people together. Solve problems.

Listening to Vance, you may get a whiff of the opportunist using the people he left behind in Middletown, Ohio, and in Jackson, Kentucky, to advance his career. In Hillbilly Elegy, few of the people he grew up with escape his imperious judgment, except the profane and violent Mamaw Vance, his guardian and inspiration in high school. He depicts most of his hillbilly family and friends as sad casualties of opioid addiction or self-loathing, who provide moral lessons for him as he creates his heroic and self-aggrandizing identity.

While J.D. Vance is waging a snide culture war with insults and wisecracks, pumping up the male MAGA base, Coach Tim Walz, his Democratic counterpart, is out in the field talking with voters and studiously preparing for his debate with Vance on Tuesday, Oct. 1. That should be a fitting postscript to the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Tuesday, Sept. 10. Two very distinct visions will be on display at both events, with the future of our nation very much at stake.

The election is Tuesday, Nov. 5, barely two months away. Be sure to register and vote.