J.D. Vance’s Appalachian Graveyard
The Republican VP nominee’s politics of blame were never meant to help the working class.
Elizabeth Catte
In May, two months before his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate for the Republican ticket, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance described his political awakening to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. It was 2018, and Vance was closing in on the two-year mark of his tenure as America’s hillbilly whisperer. His 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, had transcended its genre to become an urgent sociological text held up across the political aisle, but especially by liberals — Hillary Clinton was a fan — for its ability to humanize the tensions of a fractured political moment.
Hillbilly Elegy told the story of a young man from a marginalized region who overcame the odds to become a Yale graduate and Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It also pantomimed analysis enough that readers could nod along as Vance described his neighbors in Ohio and Kentucky as social detritus doomed by their own personal failings and struggles with addiction and poverty.
Vance’s rise to fame came courtesy of the bipartisan myth that a self-directed person unshy of hard work could overcome the structural and traumatizing realities of poverty. His autobiography is the bootstrap narrative at its most classic, painting Vance as a survivor of not only a broke childhood but also a community devoid of “a single person aware of his own laziness.” Hillbilly Elegy allowed readers to feel culturally connected to Trump voters without having to think deeply about issues such as addiction, poverty and abuse that are nominally at the heart of the book. After all, J.D. turned out alright. Didn’t he? Sales of his book now total at least 1.6 million copies.
At the time, Vance’s celebrity appeal rested on his unthreatening persona as a messenger who could explain Trump’s popularity among the white working class while in the same soundbite condemning it. In 2016, he told NPR’s Terry Gross, “My dad is a Trump supporter, and I love my dad, and I always say, ‘Dad, you know, Trump is not going to actually make any of these problems better.’ And he says, ‘Well, that’s probably true, but at least he’s talking about them and nobody else is, and at least he’s not Mitt Romney.’” The apparent duality of his willingness to both sympathize with and challenge Trump supporters was intoxicating to liberals, who contrived to make Vance their token conservative both on stage and behind the scenes.
As a close observer of the Vance phenomenon, I would be hard-pressed to find anything out of place with Vance’s story about his first years of fame. The Vance I saw then was an ego-driven young man who stood out more for his unaddressed childhood trauma — his mother’s struggles with addiction and what he later came to recognize as various Adverse Childhood Experiences — than his political smarts, eagerly taking every opportunity offered to prove how far he’d come by calling the rest of us hillbillies losers forever.
In other words, it didn’t seem like Vance was having a bad time during those years. He had an enviable education, powerful friends, a talented wife, a bestselling book, a standing invitation to both Fox & Friends and Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC, plus access to enough capital to make the Appalachian Regional Commission’s annual grants budget look like a tip jar. Meanwhile, a lot of people in Appalachia ran out of creative ways to call him an asshole and a creep.
According to his New York Times interview, however, there was a hidden price to his celebrity: having to share intimate spaces with liberals who tested the limits of his conservative sympathies. His moment of clarity, he said, came at a 2018 gathering hosted by the Business Roundtable, a CEO lobbying group, as Vance sat next to an executive who opposed Trump’s immigration policies, but only to the extent that they interrupted his access to cheap labor. That the executive assumed he would be more sympathetic to his plight than that of the U.S. workers undercut by such practices made Vance realize, he told Douthat, that he was “on a train that has its own momentum and I have to get off this train, or I’m going to wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that I’ve become.”
Instead, Vance returned to venture capitalism that year, joining forces with AOL’s Steve Case to promote businesses in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Three years later, he entered politics, with the ambitious goal of winning the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman. His Silicon Valley connections proved fruitful during the race, as tech ultra-donors like Peter Thiel and David Sacks heavily funded his campaign. He also worked to forge a new alliance with the Trump movement he’d formerly disdained.
Trump was “well aware that I criticized him in 2016,” Vance explained at the time in an interview with NBC. But, he continued, Trump was “also well aware that I’ve been on TV the last few years defending critical parts of his agenda when other people were not.” Trump appeared to appreciate the transformation, declaring at a 2022 rally, “J.D. is kissing my ass. Of course, he wants my support,” before delivering his endorsement: that “The entire MAGA movement is for J.D. Vance.”
But even after winning, his ambition didn’t seem to wane. In 2023, labor historian Gabriel Winant predicted that Vance “will torture the rest of us until we agree to make him President to prove that there is nothing wrong with him.” Now in second place on the Republican ticket, today’s Vance the senator and vice presidential nominee appears to have a different set of politics from those of Vance the memoirist — at least superficially.
Politico writer Ian Ward has described Vance’s ascendancy as a victory for the New Right: a “rag-tag band of conservative intellectuals” who reject “the GOP’s traditional fusion of free-market fundamentalism, small government libertarianism and foreign policy interventionism in favor of a program that combines some elements of economic populism with ultra-traditionalist social conservatism and a more restrained foreign policy.”
Put more plainly, Vance is the face of a new conservative clique of the bookish super-elite, many with ties to Yale, who promote nationalism and a regressive social agenda on issues like abortion rights and immigration, all wrapped in claims of a more working class-friendly GOP.
No matter his professed empathy, Vance, like Trump, has no real warmth for the people he claims to represent. Hillbilly Elegy, as Vance’s first claim to a political ideology, blamed poor people for their poverty. The new iteration of his politics blames a phantom class of pro-globalist elites for poverty.
In both versions, however, the only real Americans are the ones who reproduce the next ruling class. This preoccupation — which appears in Elegy through eugenics-tinged suggestions about genetically inherited failure — has translated to a set of politics that is anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigration and anti-bodily autonomy. (Vance opposes abortion rights even in cases of rape and incest as well as amnesty for immigrants.) The collective harm such politics imply is immaterial to Vance, who sees his own lingering traumas as having been resolved by starting a family of his own. (“Usha has learned how to manage me,” he writes of his wife in Elegy.)
For some, his pivot to arch-conservative is a heel turn to rival them all, but such political fault lines are ultimately meaningless for the poor themselves, whose future Vance is happy to annihilate if it stops him from hating himself.
Currently, the only hints as to what a Trump-Vance ticket might look like on the ground come via the recent Republican National Convention, where Vance re-introduced himself as a young man from “a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts.”
I would like to offer my own speculation. Publicly, this alliance will see Vance set aside his recent wonkishness to return to the less threatening persona he adopted in the early years ofHillbilly Elegy’s fame. This will not mean a softening of his regressive politics, but likely quite the opposite. The malleable nature of Vance’s own myth-making — in which he adeptly plays the almost-orphan raised to Horatio Alger proportions — meshes well with the Republican need to imagine a future for the party beyond Trump. Does this future look like J.D. Vance? Sure, at this point, why not? He’s a Millennial dad with a young family and a heap of generational trauma to use in the service of selling out others.
The larger question is how the public will react to Vance. Among Trump’s base, including those in Appalachia, the partnership will likely feel incredibly validating. Appalachian Trump supporters often tell themselves a particularly pitiful lie: that they are within striking distance of a political order that will bring home their children who have left the region — whether driven away by economic collapse or a misalignment of values. It isn’t always clear how this return will occur; in kinder versions, it’s through economic revitalization, but I’ve also heard fantasies about Trumpism hollowing out urban areas to such an extent that adult children are forced to return home. Vance’s story — at least the one he has crafted for public consumption — encourages those supporters to believe their happy endings might yet come true. His did, after all, and now, just 10 years later, there’s real potential for him to be celebrating his mother’s hard-earned sobriety in the White House.
There’s a tangent in Vance’s RNC acceptance speech that will have particular resonance for supporters of this persuasion. It starts with a joke: “Now when I proposed to my wife,” he told the crowd, “I said, ‘Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.” After the laughs, he continues: “Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky.”
It’s a powerful call-out to people who have experienced profound loss. Here we were born and here we will die, it suggests, some of us destined for greatness and some of us doomed to be the nameless inbetween, but always together in the end, as it should be.
What a shame, for all of us, that there are people among us who would tell such lies. There is no version of a Trump-Vance victory that will bring these departed children home. Their politics will not revitalize small towns or propose solutions for the opioid crisis. The elite they represent do not care that young people are overburdened with student loan debt and housing costs. Their alliance is about destruction and not compassion. The only thing it could ever promise are larger cemeteries.
I, too, have a cemetery plot reserved for me, in eastern Tennessee. I doubt I will ever be buried there. It’s not a particularly beautiful place, and the only war my ancestors fought was against the Tennessee Valley Authority, which turned their farmland into a man-made lake that now serves as the backdrop for expensive homes. My late grandmother (my mamaw, if you will) purchased more cemetery land that was needed for my small family. She had the stubborn hope, which I now fully understand, that at least in death we might finally be spared the indignity of sharing common ground with assholes.
Elizabeth Catte is a writer and public historian living in Virginia. She is the author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia and Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia.
