Hillbilly Excuses
6 min read
Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, after only three years in politics, is now the Republican nominee for vice president. I’ve written, and continue to believe, that Vance is a hollow man, an opportunist driven by a strange melding of self-admiration and insecurity, who has risen to great heights in the Republican Party by saying things he does not believe, especially when it comes to his new running mate, Donald Trump. But in his acceptance speech Wednesday night, he attained new depths of cynical emptiness.
When the world first met Vance less than a decade ago, he was a relatively clear-eyed critic of the dysfunction of the people around him during his childhood in Ohio and Kentucky. In Hillbilly Elegy, a painful look at his own past, he did not shy away from the kind of messages about personal responsibility that long characterized conservative politics. But those criticisms were leavened with a certain understanding that good people can become trapped by bad circumstances.
Hillbilly Elegy gained added attention because it promised to explain the white working class, which had helped propel Trump to the presidency in 2016. Vance refused to make excuses for his own people, rejecting claims of victimhood. He wrote of the self-defeating behavior of poor white people, and of the limits of state intervention. And although he may not have had a lot of solutions, he knew that Trump—the charlatan Vance once worried could become a Hitler-esque figure—wasn’t the answer.
The Ohioan was not a perfect messenger. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy after he gained a Yale law degree and became a multimillionaire in Silicon Valley, and the book has more than a whiff of self-satisfaction. His observations struck some critics as the smugness of a man who escaped a shipwreck and now has some thoughts about the swimming techniques of the people behind him who drowned.
I didn’t see it that way. Like Vance, I am a son of the working class who could have taken some very bad turns but ended up an educated, white-collar professional. People who have made such class transitions are sometimes conflicted about the roles played by mentors, initiative, talent, and sheer luck in switching the rails of a young life away from tragedy and toward success. Transcending a childhood surrounded by abuse, economic hardship, and addiction can be hard to explain to someone who’s never had to do it.
Whatever lessons he once believed could be learned from his own life, however, the senator on Wednesday night showed America that he now recommends a different choice for others.
Vance’s acceptance speech was flat and somewhat awkward. It was laced with the groveling about Trump’s incredible strength and manliness that can now be found in every Republican speech; hearing them is like slogging through a bland stew and then biting down into a stale peppercorn that shouldn’t even be in the recipe. But despite its dullness, the speech was shocking, at least to anyone who can remember anything about Vance or the pre-Trump Republican Party.
J. D. Vance has apparently discovered that capitalism hurts poor people. In a speech that could have been lifted from almost any generic left-wing Democrat of the past 50 years, Vance spoke about trade and big corporations and “out of touch” politicians who hate the little guy. “Jobs were sent overseas,” he said, “and our children were sent to war,” a line that could have been chanted outside Richard Nixon’s White House in 1972 by a hippie in a faded Army jacket. Vance even went so far as to cast Trump—a man who has infamously stiffed his own workers—as the hero of ordinary laborers. (I’d say this was chutzpah, but from Vance it seemed more dutiful than brassy.)
Worse, Vance talked about working-class white people the way liberal Democrats used to talk about Black communities in the early 1970s. At 39, he is too young to remember those days, but Republicans back then charged liberals with abetting the misery of Black communities by making excuses for their challenges. And they had a point: Half a century ago, some liberals did indulge in a kind of cringey, paternalistic excuse-making that depicted Black people as mindless victims, unable to control themselves when faced with the relentless forces of capitalism and consumerism.
Conservatives countered that the narrative of victimhood never serves anyone except the political leaders who reap votes from convincing people that they are merely hapless targets who need to be protected from a world full of sinister conspirators. Those who genuinely cared about the collapse of the cities (and there were more than a few who didn’t, to be sure) stressed the importance of personal choices and the power of individual responsibility. They refused to accept policies that led, in their view, to permanent dependence on the state. Perhaps most important, they sharply criticized the language of victimhood. And Vance, until recently, seemed to embrace those old-school, center-right views.
So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington’s scheming elites.
Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call for revenge: It’s not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home, staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall Street did that. We’ll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.
What accounts for Vance’s reversal? Once he decided to make a run as a Republican, he seems to have become angered by the criticism from a cultural establishment whose approval he had only recently enjoyed. (If that seems too simple, consider that his best friend from Yale told The Washington Post that what cemented Vance’s rightward turn against “the elites” was that the movie version of Hillbilly Elegy was ridiculed by critics.) Now that the elites have rejected him, he has embraced MAGA as his chosen revenge—and conveniently, the movement is also offering him a path to power.
ProPublica recently reported on a speech in which Vance said that he is not pleased by my criticisms. “I am well aware,” he told his audience, “that Tom Nichols is not a fan of me.” He went on to complain that his critics are not acting in good faith. “They don’t actually care about the arguments that I’m making,” he groused. “They don’t actually care if I maybe really did change my mind.”
On this, the senator from Ohio is wrong. I care very much whether he has changed his mind, because the views he now espouses threaten to hurt the very people he claims to be defending.
J. D. Vance may well become the next vice president, and given Trump’s age, he might even make it to the Oval Office. But after describing Trump as “cultural heroin,” Vance himself has now become a kind of cheap high, a transient buzz designed to narcotize the people he is betraying. He can ask us to believe he has changed his mind, and that is his right—but he can never again ask anyone to take him seriously.
