NATURE, NURTURE, AND INERTIA

Novelist Rob Hart tries to understand JD Vance by reading his terrible book

A few days after Trump plucked JD Vance from the Republican clown car to serve as his running mate, I was browsing in a used bookstore in Ocean City, NJ, where I stumbled across a copy of Hillbilly Elegy.

Before Vance’s name was in play, even before Peter Thiel bought him a US Senate seat in Ohio, I knew the book. After Trump was elected, the media fawned over it, knighting Vance as a “must-read” author if you wanted to understand why white, rural voters pulled the lever for a billionaire conman who clearly despised them. I heard from a lot of other people the book sucked—an excoriation of Appalachia by someone not from Appalachia, trucking in stereotype and conservative pull your bootstraps–bullshit.

Standing in the bookstore in July, I didn’t think Trump had much of a chance of winning again. He was already a loser, and his base may be loud, but it’s dwindling. All those independent and undecided voters who carried him to the White House had finally gotten a good, long look at the naked emperor.

Still, a week is a lifetime in politics, and there was always chance—albeit slim—that the man who wrote the book could end up an ill-timed Big Mac away from the presidency.

And I don’t like walking out of bookstores empty-handed.

But the biggest deciding factor in purchasing the book was that it was a second-hand, and therefore unlikely to count for Vance’s Bookscan numbers. (Authors do know how to shiv other authors.)  

I cracked it open about a half hour later as I hid underneath an umbrella while my daughter splashed in the ocean surf. I wanted to hate it. When I pitched this piece I wondered: how florid can I make a skull-fucking?

Having finished it, I’m less inclined to do that.

Honestly, I just feel bad for the guy.

A lot has been said about the book’s authenticity. I’m a born and raised New Yorker, and therefore ill-equipped to comment on Vance’s perception of Appalachia. I will say that it often felt like watching a cheesy kid’s show, where a man in a safari hat and a bad Australian accent tries to explain kangaroos.

Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all.

This from the Marine who graduated Yale before working as a venture capitalist. Vance sounds like a tourist in his own narrative.

It’s fascinating to read this eight-year-old memoir while simultaneously watching Vance give endless sexist and racist sound bites, and play eager accomplice to one of the dumbest, most dangerous human beings alive. A man he admits, in the afterward of this edition, he didn’t vote for.

Hillbilly Elegy offers glimmers of a more reasonable, less shitty person. Vance speaks highly of women. He sticks up for a classmate who’s being bullied. He’s a smart, sensitive kid growing up in a culture of toxic masculinity—but he recognizes it for the poison that it is.

Knowing what was coming, it felt a little like watching a horror movie, and someone is about go into the room where we know the killer is hiding. That itch, like you want to scream at the screen, to tell them to be careful.

Except, the basement was Trump Tower, and Vance went in knowing who he’d find there. Any glimmers of hope I had were extinguished when the book veered into that most heinous attribute of the conservative: Exceptionalism.

Even for all the faults and foibles of the titular hillbillies (and according to Vance, there are many), he writes: “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamn people on this earth.”

This was a theme throughout the book. Hillbillies care about their families. They stick up for their own. They suffer hardships. They work hard. They’ve been abandoned by their government.

I’m not saying these things aren’t true.

But here’s the one little point that seems to be missing; that last connection that could have closed the empathy circuit.

The same can be said for everyone else.

Are hillbillies god’s chosen people because they care deeply about family? Give me a fucking break. Find me a culture on this earth where the concept of family does not carry a great level of import.  

It’s the same kind of mindset that makes religion so insidious (and why the Venn diagram of conservatism and evangelicalism are a closed circle)—that one single group has discovered something about the world that makes them better than everyone else. Which is especially ironic when put it in the context of Vance’s abusive mom and absentee dad, who sure as shit don’t seem to care much about the family unit.

It makes me wonder where that connection point failed for Vance. Maybe it’s a combination of nature, nurture, and inertia; he grew up in a conservative area, bombarded with those mindsets from a young age. People in rural areas, who’ve been exposed to less of the world, are more suspect of it.

What makes me so mad about his moral failure is that I see a little of myself in him.    

I bet he would find the assertion funny. I’m an elite liberal New Yorker, and he makes a lot of hay out of getting into Yale as Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel. (He goes to a fancy dinner and has to call his wife because he doesn’t understand why there are so many forks!)  After all, I’m white, I present as straight, I have all my hair. In terms of privilege, I’m doing pretty good. But I also grew up in a blue-collar setting where money was tight. My dad was a New York City firefighter, my mom works in a bowling alley. I went to a state college. I didn’t grow up around soup spoons and fish knives either, but I did grow up on Staten Island, surrounded by the “Fear City” conservativism of fleeing New Yorkers in the ’70s and ’80s. (Which is different from rural conservativism, but that’s another essay.)

The difference between me and Vance seems to be: I’m not so ashamed of where I came from, and I don’t think it makes me better or worse than anyone else.

It just makes me who I am.

So where did our paths diverge? I have no idea. I’m not even sure if Vance loves or hates these people, the same way he seems so dismissive of the elite class, while being desperate for their acceptance.

As to whether the book revealed any deep insight about hillbillies voting for Trump—I don’t think it does that. He argues that hillbillies need institutions to do a better job of helping raise them out of poverty, without creating a permanent underclass.  

Except he’s now running with the guy whose every policy ensures the underclass is carved in stone for eternity. He’s thrown in with billionaires like Peter Thiel, who uses his money solely to keep more of his money, live on a floating island, and the world can burn in the meantime.

Reading Hillbilly Elegy in a vacuum you can see a person with a capacity for empathy, who just wants to see the world become a better place for him and his loves ones.

But seeing Vance standing on stages and lamenting ethnic enclaves and childless people, you realize: he is absolutely okay with a permanent underclass, as long as he gets to choose who lives there.  

The more I think about it, the more this reads to me as a story of revenge.