Less than a month before Donald Trump was formally nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the 2016 RNC, an anti-Trump conservative named J.D. Vance released a memoir called Hillbilly Elegy. The bestseller follows Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional Scots Irish family in Middletown, Ohio, on his long and winding road to yuppiedom.
The book hit at a very particular political moment. There was increasing unrest among working-class whites in the Rust Belt, who were traditionally Democrats but rallying behind the bombastic Trump. These were people who had a lot of problems: drug addiction, unemployment, low wages, family instability. But whose fault was it? Was it the elites who looked down on them, who’d wrecked the country and shipped their jobs overseas? Trump thought so. Vance thought not: the problems of the white working class were of their own making.
“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on government or society and that movement is gaining adherents by the day,” he wrote. “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves the reason we aren’t working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves.”
To prove the point, Vance aired his family’s dirty laundry. They’d fight with each other in public and make a scene. Even when they had money, they spent it on booze and cars. Sure, his mother was raised by an alcoholic father, whose own wife once set him on fire. But at the end of the day, her problems with men and drugs were her own fault—a harsh conclusion that was entirely reflective of Vance’s worldview in 2016: an up-by-your-bootstraps version of free-market conservatism.
Meanwhile, his voyeuristic audience of elites who broadly shared his view of things was titillated by the details and very happy to hear that their hands were clean.
I know this routine.
Like Vance, and very much unlike most people in my industry, I also grew up in the Scots Irish working class. My own family and upbringing share some similarities with Vance’s. In the past, I’ve been asked to write about some of the finer points, the more salacious details about my upbringing—my biological dad’s drug issues and my complicated relationship with my mom, who was 16 when I was born—but I’ve always found some excuse not to. It is usually not the real reason, which is that a cynical and probably insecure part of me—the same part that spent my early twenties pulling the twang out of my voice—suspects they find the stories interesting only because they’re pleasantly surprised that someone who grew up like me isn’t too stupid to write them.
It makes me feel a little bit like a dancing monkey. When I read Hillbilly Elegy I see J.D. dancing, and it’s hard for me to not think less of him for it.
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