Hillbillies don’t need an elegy, and the U.S. doesn’t need JD Vance

Early in the introduction of Sen. JD — no periods after the letters is his preferred spelling — Vance at the Republican National Convention on Monday, the new vice presidential candidate was called “a living embodiment of the American dream.” As the Milwaukee crowd chanted his name, Vance was presented to delegates as someone who “has never forgotten the working people of our country, and he never will.”

I’d like to interrupt the love fest with a little reality.

Sometime around page 10 in Vance’s 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis, I lost interest. By the second chapter, I was ready to toss the book across the room.

By the third chapter, I did.

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I wanted to read this book. After all, I am a hillbilly — born in Kentucky, raised in the lap of Jesus in the Missouri Ozarks, and Vance, a fellow hillbilly from Appalachia, had made good. From a raggedy childhood, he’d gone to far-off Yale University, made money, and now he could be the nation’s guide to those mythical hill people who huddle around their stills in the back 40.

But the book was rife with half- and ill-formed conservative talking points that boiled down to a repetitious recitation of the old trope that Vance’s cousins and mine were failing because they weren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

In other words: Get a job, hillbillies — which skirted entirely the reality of small-town and rural poverty.

Vance knew better, but the spotlight is a powerful drug.

His message was easily digested because it’s convenient to believe people live in poverty because they made bad decisions, rather than the idea that they’re there by dint of the capitalism game already being played against them.

But those who’d never sat in a hard pew saw only a man who made it out of poverty. The book sold millions and was made into a movie I didn’t watch, and along the way, as Vance himself has said, the media began to see him as something of a Trump Whisperer. As a rare cross-cultural public figure, Vance could explain how so many conservatives living in double-wides could embrace a rich showman who owned a gold toilet.

I don’t think Vance much wanted that role. I think he had his eye on something bigger, but he dutifully tried to explain his demographic origins as best he could. His fellows’ support of Trump seemed to baffle him. Early on, he said Trump was “reprehensible” and an “idiot.”

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But what we once called political flip-flops are an act performed by many of the stars in Trump’s constellation. His list of converts includes Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham, the latter of whom went from suggesting voters tell Trump to go to hell to telling the candidate “I love you” after Saturday’s shooting.

I am not here to speak for hillbillies. Far from it. There is no one story coming out of the hills, and no one storyteller fit to tell them. I would caution, though, that we love our rags-to-riches stories because those stories gloss over the realities of the people who never make it out of their rags — like those 36.5% of Ohio workers who earn less than $15,000 a year, or Ohio’s children who are more likely to live in poverty than are the state’s adults.

Vance told his half-story story all the way to a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, but a quick trip through the bills he has backed leaves you with thin gruel. There’s the oh-so-important Stop Trying to Obsessively Vilify Energy Act (the STOVE Act, meant to SOGS — save our gas stoves), and an attempt to declare English our national language.

On Thursday, Vance signed on as a cosponsor to a bill that would amend Title 28, “to authorize removal of a civil action or criminal prosecution against a president, vice president, former president, or former vice president.”

Sigh.

I would suggest that the ladder has been pulled up by ol’ JD, and that’s not just me talking.

If Vance’s star is shining, people back home remain unimpressed. While Vance was being lauded as the hero of the middle and lower classes, the Columbus Dispatch ran a story about the “not-so-pretty things” his constituents had to say about him. Most of the comments and letters aren’t laudatory — save for the guest editorials Vance wrote himself.

He’s been called a “craven shape-shifter,” “disgraceful,” and “No. 1 saprophyte” (an organism that lives on dead things). In a May letter, one writer asked Trump to choose Vance as his running mate so Ohio could be less one “lying, bootlicking, butt kissing, weak-willed, integrity lacking, sickening obsequious sycophant.” Try saying that in one breath.

So, in the vernacular of my youth: Hillbillies don’t need no elegy. And the U.S. don’t need no JD Vance.

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker,” and “Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl.” Find more at susancampbell.substack.com.