Former U.S. President Donald Trump selected Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate during the Republican National Convention for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections.
Born in 1984, JD Vance has been a Senator since 2023. He previously served in the U.S. Marine Corps and spent some time in Iraq. Later, he went to Ohio State University and subsequently Yale Law School.
He first rose to prominence because of his best-selling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy” which was published in 2016. The memoir chronicles the tales from his childhood in Middletown, Ohio and the Appalachian values of his family. This book became popular during the 2016 Presidential Elections as people sought to find an explanation for Trump’s popularity amongst voters which eventually led him to win the presidency. The book focuses on his upbringing in the ‘rust belt’ and being a poor white person in the forgotten parts of America.
After graduating from Yale, Vance practiced law for two years before moving to San Francisco to attend to the highest calling of mankind, Venture Capital. He spent a year at Peter Thiel's venture firm. Later he joined an investment firm and even co-founded his own investment firm in 2019 and raised $93 million for it. He had backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen.
All this while, Vance was becoming more of a political figure especially after his fame from Hillbilly Elegy. Then, Thiel donated $10 million to Vance for him to run for Ohio Senate in 2022. This was Thiel's largest publicly disclosed political donation and significantly contributed to Vance's victory in the Senate race. He was also backed again by Andreessen and also Robert Mercer of RenTech.
After winning the Senate race in 2022, he embarked on his political career. Now less than two years after he became a Senator, Trump has chosen him as his running mate. So I thought I would read this memoir to learn and understand more about this guy who has good odds of being the second most powerful person in America.
Hillbilly "an unsophisticated country person, as associated originally with the remote regions of the Appalachians"
Elegy "a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead"
Hillbilly Elegy focuses on Vance’s turbulent upbringing with his family and their Appalachian values and how it shapes his worldview. He grew up in a poor neighbourhood and was basically raised by his grandparents because his dad left and his mom was a drug addict who kept relapsing and going to rehab and had a whole assortment of other issues.
The book tells the tale of the ‘forgotten white people’ of America. The people in rural areas who have no hope in their future who are held down by debt and no opportunity. Vance tells the story of his people and how he overcame his circumstances to be where he is today. He talks about how he was the first in his family to go to college. He talks about how most people barely finish high school and make a series of bad decisions that leads to teenage pregnancy or a crippling addiction in the form of gambling, alcohol or drugs that limits their upward mobility. He talks about how in his own family, most people do manual labour jobs to make a living and when those jobs left his town, the town became abandoned and all those who moved their whole lives there for opportunity were left with nothing. He tells the stories of countless people in his early life and later contrasts this with the type of people he met at Yale. He talks about being an outlier in Yale and entering a whole different world. He talks about how the way his mother had acted continues to haunt him and he himself sometimes erupts like his mother when facing challenges in his marriage. Vance explores all these ideas and more starting from his great grandparents all the way down to him.
Although I would have loved to read this book without reading reviews, it’s inevitable especially considering he’s on the presidential ticket with Trump. Some common criticism of this book comes from the way that Vance talks about poor people and how he blames their lack of hard work for being poor. However, in the book Vance backs up what he is saying by his own lived experiences and what he has seen. Vance repeatedly talks about how people in his life who talk about hard work barely work at all and instead fall into vices. He observes the lives of his extended family and neighbours, and shares these stories. Extrapolating it into a false image of every poor person is the fault of the reader who is looking for pitfalls.
As bizarre as it might seem, this book was apparently popular with liberals when it was first published. This book's publication was timed perfectly during the 2016 presidential election when many liberals were struggling to understand working-class white voters and why they supported Trump so fervently.
This book offered an easy explanation for why Trump had huge support in these rural and often forgotten about parts of America. Vance's personal story showcased the American dream and how social mobility is possible. Moreover, apparently it offered liberals, who were disconnected from rural and working-class communities, a glimpse into their life and struggles. It also supported liberal views about the impact of deindustrialization and globalisation on these communities. Oddly enough it was seen as non partisan. It also helped that Vance was publicly critical of Trump in 2016. However he would later change his views over the course of Trump’s presidency and become a full supporter.
Personally as someone interested more in the story of his life and how that led him to be where he is today, I found the memoir interesting. The only other recent memoirs that I can compare this to based on my own reading, is that of the Obamas, Jennette McCurdy, Prince Harry and Trevor Noah. Excluding Harry, the rest of these memoirs followed similar themes. That of the story from rags to riches and achieving the American dream. I found Vance's story to be quite similar to that of Jennette McCurdy. Both are memoirs published by someone in their thirties, both were 'raised' by single moms who were deeply problematic in different ways and both were subsequently traumatised by it.
Vance's mother caused so many issues for him growing up and faced a lot of her own battles with drug addiction and falling into abusive relationships that affected her children. This led to Vance being raised by his grandparents which allowed him to focus on school and lead a vastly different life from those around him. Some common criticism about the book is that some people have issues with him writing a memoir critiquing his own mother and putting his family issues in public while ‘selling out’ by going to Yale and selling this book. This criticism is quite juvenile and trivial in my opinion. Moreover, what Vance has done during his short pre-politics career and what he’s doing now during his campaign trail is much worse and worth writing about. While I don't typically write about recent politics, I am making a slight exception for myself here by only writing about recent events that are relevant to this book and events that transpired recently that can be explained by his best-selling memoir.
Vance is not only a great opportunist as can be seen from him completely switching his views about Trump. He also does this by fabricating stories about his own mother, about whom he wrote so much in his book. Vance's recent ad campaigns have involved talking about the American border issue and he specifically talks about how the border crisis led to his mother getting addicted to drugs. However, this does not appear to be the case when we read his own book. His mother was a nurse who stole painkiller drugs from patients and was addicted to opioids like oxycontin made by pharmaceutical companies.
This story does not stop here for right out of Yale, Vance would work at Sidley Austin LLP, a prominent law firm in Washington D.C., where he was involved during a time the firm was lobbying for Purdue Pharma. However, while some may find this morally repulsive considering his own mother and his society is suffering from the opioid crisis because of corporations such as Purdue Pharma, I think we can let this slide since Vance could not have been involved directly. However, despite this, the story gets even more crazy.
In his quest to get some political power and experience, Vance would start a nonprofit to tackle the opioid crisis in Ohio called "Our Ohio Renewal". He started this organisation months after releasing his memoir in December of 2016. While the organisation was closed after two years with little achievements, it was found out, by his opponents during his run for Ohio Senate in 2022, that the nonprofit spent more on "management services" to Vance's top political advisor than it did on programs to actually help fight opioid abuse.
Here's an even more outrageous quote from Vance's wikipedia page.
According to the Associated Press (AP), the charity's biggest accomplishment, sending psychiatrist Sally Satel to Ohio's Appalachian region for a yearlong residency in 2018, was tainted by the ties among Satel, her employer, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Purdue Pharma, in the form of knowledge exchange between Satel and Purdue and financial support from Purdue to AEI, as found by a ProPublica 2019 investigation. In an email to AP, Satel denied having any relationship with Purdue or any knowledge of Purdue's donations to AEI.
I have previously written about what I learnt from reading Empire of Pain, which chronicles the rise and fall of Purdue Pharma and how they caused the opioid crisis in America and its devastating impact on millions of people in the pursuit of profit.
Anyways, back to the book at hand. In summary, JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy offers a deeply personal glimpse into the struggles of America’s forgotten communities and highlights themes such as personal growth, social mobility and more. While some may criticise Vance for his negative comments on his culture, it must be noted that these same critics were those who wrote raving reviews about it when it was first published in 2016 when Vance was against Trump. While the words on the paper has remained the same, it’s interesting to see what narratives are weaved about it marred by the guise of politics. This book and Vance’s personal narratives will only get more interesting as the campaigns continue. Whether Vance’s quest for political glory is viewed in a good or bad light, depends on the narratives he continues to create to garner more support. Overall, I would recommend reading this book since it touches on so many topics.
Also, it must be noted that despite what the internet will tell you otherwise, JD Vance did not have any relations with a couch and there’s no other references to such relations with other inanimate objects. Also, I feel compelled to end off this post with a passage from the book that succinctly sums up how he grew up and what you can expect from this book.
“Take gay rights, a particularly hot topic among conservative Protestants. I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay. I was eight or nine, maybe younger, and I stumbled upon a broadcast by some fire-and-brimstone preacher. The man spoke about the evils of homosexuals, how they had infiltrated our society, and how they were all destined for hell absent some serious repenting. At the time, the only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women. This described me perfectly: I disliked girls, and my best friend in the world was my buddy Bill. Oh no, I’m going to hell.
I broached this issue with Mamaw, confessing that I was gay and I was worried that I would burn in hell. She said, “Don’t be a fucking idiot, how would you know that you’re gay?” I explained my thought process. Mamaw chuckled and seemed to consider how she might explain to a boy my age. Finally she asked, “J.D., do you want to suck dicks?” I was flabbergasted. Why would someone want to do that? She repeated herself, and I said, “Of course not!” “Then,” she said, “you’re not gay “. And even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you.” That settled the matter. Apparently I didn’t have to worry about being gay anymore. Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about Mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about.”