"It's like 2016 all over again," said Tracy Moore in Vanity Fair. JD Vance's memoir from that year, Hillbilly Elegy, is once again selling by the palette-load. And once again it is generating dozens of essays about why the people of Appalachia appear to be mired in poverty and what kind of spokesman they have in the book's author, who is now Donald Trump's running mate. As a person who grew up poor in rural Appalachia myself, it angers me that the region "never fails to stoke the liberal intellectual's sense of superiority." Liberal commentators were more than happy in 2016 to accept Vance's contention that too many of his family members and neighbors were lazy and looking to blame others for their troubles. But those same critics are not unjustified today in mocking Vance, who remains, as he was in 2016, "among the cruelest manifestations of bootstrapper I've come across."
When Hillbilly Elegy appeared, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post, Vance self-identified as an anti-Trump Republican, and his book was "hailed as a nuanced explanation for Trump's otherwise baffling allure." The author had escaped whatever was holding his neighbors back: After joining the Marines, he earned a law degree at Yale and, by 31, was a married, successful Silicon Valley executive. "At its core," his memoir was "a standard-issue conservative screed," celebrating his own rise while blaming his neighbors for what he labeled their "learned helplessness." But for people who wonder why Vance now blames white poverty on open borders and government scheming, "the signs of his eventual pivot were legible all along." Both versions of Vance doubt that traditional politics has any answers. What's new is that he now champions more authoritarian solutions.
Since entering politics, Vance has "shamelessly jettisoned" all the qualities that made Hillbilly Elegy "one of the best books I read in 2016," said Laura Miller in Slate. The memoir remains admirable, particularly for its "brutal honesty" about the self-defeating features of hillbilly culture. Alas, in Vance's subsequent career as a U.S. senator and national candidate, "all complexity has disappeared from his rhetoric," replaced by "peacocking certainty" that he and Trump are the answer to all problems. Not that Vance's liberal critics have better answers, said Ron Currie in The Hill. Though he will prove himself "a base opportunist" every time he tells rural white Americans this fall to resent progressive elites for looking down on them and offering them too little reason for hope, "he will not be wrong." |