By Lennard Davis, Used with Permission from The Conversation
JD Vance has climbed to his current position as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a hillbilly, calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his credentials to speak for the American working class.
“I grew up as a poor kid,” Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.”
Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In that book, he claims his family carried an inheritance of “abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma.”
“Poor people,” he proclaimed in a 2016 interview with The American Conservative, are “my people.”
But there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to Vance’s poverty credentials.
Vance did come from a troubled family. His mother was – like so many Americans, whether they’re poor, middle class or rich – addicted to painkillers. In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents were “hillbillies.”
The reality – one that Vance only subtly acknowledges in his memoir – is that he is not poor. Nor is he a hillbilly. He grew up firmly in Ohio’s middle class.
In my forthcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It,” I detail how Vance’s work is actually part of a genre I call “poornography.” Created mainly by middle- and upper-class people for like-minded readers, this long line of novels, films and plays can end up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people.
Though these works are sometimes crafted with good intentions, they tend to focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, crudeness and the supposed laziness of poor people.
When you think about novels and films about the poor, you come upon the great classics: Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Emile Zola’s “Germinal,” James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Jack London’s “The People of the Abyss” or John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Yet all these monuments to the suffering of the poor were written by authors who were not poor. Most of them had little to no knowledge of the lived experience of poor people. At best, they were reporters whose source material was meager. At worst, they simply made things up, recycling stereotypes about poverty.
For example, John Steinbeck had some contact with poor people as a reporter. But as he wrote about migrant camps for “The Grapes of Wrath,” he relied heavily on the notes of Sanora Babb – herself poor and formerly homeless – who traveled to migrant camps throughout California for the Farm Security Administration. Babb’s boss – a friend of Steinbeck’s – had secretly shown the author her notes, without her permission.
Babb would go on to also write a novel based on her experiences, which was bought by Random House. But the publishing house killed it after “Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it wasn’t published until 2004, when the author was 97 years old. That year, she told the Chicago Tribune – correctly, I might add – that Steinbeck’s work “isn’t as accurate as mine.”
Then there’s London, whose “The People of the Abyss” is seen as a faithful portrayal of the lives of the British poor. But London, who went “undercover” to craft a sordid account of England’s urban poor, nonetheless maintained a comfortable apartment. He kept a stash of money sewed into his ragged coat and conveniently escaped for a hot bath and a good meal while pretending to pass as a pauper. The result is a book laden with put-downs of the English working class, who are cast in eugenicist terms as a degenerate race.
When you look at the books or films created by people who grew up poor, the tone and focus often shift dramatically.
Instead of a fixation on the tawdry side of life, you see works that explore the things that bind all people together: family, love, politics, complex emotions and sensual memories.
You only have to open Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” Agnes Smedley’s “Daughter of Earth” or Justin Torres’ “We the Animals” to see their protagonists’ appreciation of beauty and ability to experience profound pleasure – yes, all while experiencing poverty.
Wright recalls how, as a child, he would play in the sewer, where he would spend hours fashioning all manner of detritus into toys. The young Smedley loves to stare through a hole in her roof to gaze at the sky. And Mike Gold, author of “Jews Without Money,” sings a paean to an empty, garbage-strewn lot in his neighborhood that doubled as his beloved playground.
Vance, on the other hand, fills his book with selections from the greatest hits of “poornography” – violence, drugs, sex, obscenity and filth.
But Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.”
He falsely introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” Over the course of the book, he confuses himself – and the reader – by variously saying that he is middle class, working class and poor.
In order to justify his memoir as something more than a tale of a drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he fashions a grand theory that being a hillbilly does not have to be related to social class – or even living in Appalachia.
To Vance, hillbilly-ness becomes kind of a cultural trait, tied to a family history and identity, not class. His grandmother, he writes, “had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty – emotional if not financial – had followed her.”
In developing his grand theory, Vance takes readers very close to the now-debunked notion of a culture of poverty, in which the poor are responsible for their situation and their attitude toward work is passed along from one generation to the next.
A dependence on government handouts, according to the theory, undergirds this culture. Vance pines for an imagined glorious past of his slice of America. His neighbors in Middletown had lost – thanks to the welfare state – “the tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me.”
But Vance finds himself in a dilemma: Are these people simply lazy? Or are they the victims of a system that encourages them to watch TV and eat bad food as they collect welfare or disability checks?
Several times he refers to people who live on welfare as “never [having] worked a paying job in his life.” He seems to fully buy into the notion that people are poor because they are lazy freeloaders.
He “solves” the problem with the age-old critique of poor people: They got there because of “bad choices.” He mentions a friend who although having a job that paid a steady income nevertheless quit it because he didn’t like getting up early.
“His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made,” he writes, “and his life will improve only through better decisions.”
And so the GOP’s young standard-bearer for the working classes simply repeats the same bootstrap rhetoric that’s been peddled for decades.
But it’s not simply a question about believing a politician or not. That would be a fool’s game.
Rather, the issue here is what I call “representation inequality,” by which I mean that one identity group – in this case, poor people – don’t get to represent themselves.
What has happened – whether it’s in politics or in publishing – is something called “elite capture,” in which those with cultural capital and power assume the right to speak for and represent the powerless.
In so doing, dangerous stereotypes and tropes get developed with serious political consequences. Just because you drink Diet Mountain Dew doesn’t mean you do get to speak for those in the mountains.
Our political and educational system elbows out most poor people. First-generation students – like myself, and like many of my students at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where I teach – have a harder time staying in school, have more food insecurity and homelessness, and will often not benefit from the normal boost education offers. They tend to have a much harder time ascending the stratified ranks of culture and politics, becoming the published authors and elected officials who might provide representational equality.
As political scientist Nicholas Carnes points out in his 2018 book “The Cash Ceiling,” only 2% of congressional lawmakers worked in manual labor, the service industry or clerical jobs before getting involved in politics. So it’s no surprise that when the wealthy want to pass certain laws, they’re much more likely to get passed.
In July 2024, The New York Times reported that Vance’s Yale law professor and author Amy Chua read an early version of what became “Hillbilly Elegy,” one that was more geared to an academic audience and grounded in political theory. She prodded Vance to change his manuscript, telling him that “this grand theory [about America] is not working.”
I would argue that his “grand theory” about the poor doesn’t work, because the poor – unlike many other identity groups – don’t have a platform to articulate and promote their own needs and political vision.
Instead, we’re stuck with people like Vance, who offer bromides at best and fatalistic narratives of doom at worst.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Connect with me on social media:
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
Truth is, American Democracy is the worst form of government and American people are not special. Just because you are told that God set you apart from all other nations as a kind of new Israel does not make you so.
The Native Americans are the true Americans. They’ve lived in the continent for thousands of years before any European set foot. Native Americans never dreamed of invading Europe or imposing their values on people living an ocean away from them. No other civilization does this except for those of Christians and Muslims.
Buddhists, Confucianists, Taoists, Jainists, and Hindus stay in Asia. Even Jews keep to themselves. It’s the Christians and the Muslims who say, “Believe and live like we do or our God will cast you into hell and torture you forever.”
An actual democracy only works if it is run by experienced, professional, moral people who actually represent the people who supposedly voted them in. The government reflects the quality of people in a country. If the average person is an idiot consumer slave, then you will get influence peddling whores in government and high places.
Here in South Korea, you have a presidential candidate who swore at his sister-in-law, calling her a whore and a c*nt, and threatened to kill her. Yet people still openly support him.
Just because a handful of countries like Japan or South Korea think America is great does not make it so. America supports dictators abroad, plunders from its own people, sells out its industries overseas, graduates illiterates from its schools, spends more on war than any other country, consumes more drugs than any country, wastes more food than any country, consumes more porn than any country, and imprisons more people than any country.
Men like Bruce Gerencser are a dying breed of traditional fathers who loved their wives and children. Today, men and women hate each other. Love and sex are no longer cherished as something sacred. Its casual and vulgar and people thoughtlessly engage in it, which is why you have so many bastard kids growing up with a single parent.
Wow, there’s a lot to unpack here. I’m not an expert on US economics, but I think it’s safe to say that poverty is a complex issue that can’t be easily summed up as “people are poor because they won’t work”. I lived in a middle class existence because I chose to live with my grandparents – my grandfather had a 6th grade education but as a WWII vet took advantage of the GI Bill and all sorts of benefits for veterans to be able to develop a stable career. However, he and my grandma lived with various relatives for years until they were able to buy a house – they were probably married for 12-14 years and had 2 kids at this point. My mom for years danced the thin line between poverty/debt and lower middle class existence. 2 divorces and being a single mom with no child support didn’t help – and she worked hard just to try to get by. We lived with my grandparents for years. She remarried and had another child, and my mom and stepdad both worked hard, saved and bought a house, then had to sell it after my stepdad became disabled and couldn’t work anymore. My younger brother definitely lived in a poor household longer than I did (because I chose to live with my grandparents and that wasn’t an option for him). My grandmother selling her house and moving in with my mom and stepdad financially saved my mom and stepdad.
These are the things that we should talk about. What is the safety net when someone can no longer work? How many families are living with relatives because they can’t afford not to? My Gen Z kids are entering the work force, and neither can afford to even think about buying a house. They talk about how their generation generally doesn’t think of starting a family because they can’t even find decent jobs to support themselves, much less adding in kids. And childcare options are ridiculously expensive. These things are not even possibilities for them. It’s not that “they don’t value families” it’s that they’re pivoting because sustainably having a family isn’t financially feasible for them right now. There are a variety of reasons for that…..
Yep. The poor are powerless. And European societies that have better protection for the poor, are healthier all around. Although the poor oppressed affluent may have to do a couple things like not affluent people. Our country did a great thing in the 20th century by using the rich and wealthy taxes to create an infrastructure. Now? The wealthy think they are going to somehow live out their lives in a compound if disaster strikes. Why should they pay for better roads and utilities and airports. Wonder what they will do when their compounds are overrun by those of us who decide to eat the rich?
I haven’t read the book, but did watch the Netflix movie. I watched it about the time he was picked to be Trump’s running mate. I’m wondered how is the guy who wrote this even a Republican? Especially telling is when his drug addicted mother, who lost her job because she went on a drug induced roller skating joy ride through intensive care, couldn’t get into rehab because she had also lost her insurance with her job.
I actually disagree with the author, J.D. (who also has changed his name so many times I think he’s having an I.D. crisis) could have been just another destitute slacker living in rural Ohio. It reminds me that one reason humans live so long is because Grandparents can be so vital to our biological fitness, and so it was with J.D., she kept him on the straight and narrow in school and his circle of friends. At one point his grandmother explains you’ll thank me later when she restricted him from having contact with his loser friends…. I wonder if she would reel him in now from being around loser Trump?
I heartily recommend Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and Mike Gold’s “Jews Without Money.” Both are beautifully written and reflect the lived experiences of both authors. I also recommend Carolyn Chute’s “The Beans of Egypt, Maine.” The Beans she writes about ain’t L.L.
I think artists—whether they’re writers, musicians, painters or working in any other genre—do their best work when they use what they know and find something in it to which people can relate. That is what makes a novel like “Anna Karenina” so great. It is set in Czarist Russian high society, but the ways in which people behave—and their lives unravel—is relatable because Tolstoy is inside those characters: They are not merely subjects or, worse, objects of “study.”
Therein lies the problem of “pornography”. (I love the term!) For all of their skills and talents as writers, Steinbeck, Dickens et al never really make their characters into flesh-and-blood humans. I think that is also the reason junior- and high-school teachers assign and beat them to death: They may not be getting rich from teaching (Trust me, I know about that!) but even those who come from poor or working-class backgrounds rarely understand the kind of grinding poverty they believe is depicted in “Hard Times” or “The Grapes of Wrath.” And I don’t blame students for being turned off.
At the beginning of this country’s history, Blackness was pathologized. Then, after slavery ended, it was criminalized. (See: Jinn Crow laws.)
Something similar has happened with poverty, at least since the Reagan years. First, the poor were blamed for their condition because they “don’t know how to comport themselves “ and “don’t want to work.” Then laws and policies were passed to push them further into debt, which caused some to become homeless—and therefore subject to “loitering “ and “trespassing “ laws.
There was a time—roughly between the electons of Reagan and Trump—when racism couldn’t be expressed overtly in “polite” society—but prejudice against the poor could be. (I have seen this among so-called educated and liberal people.) oversimplify just a bit, classism became a proxy for racism.
Now Trump has made it acceptable to express racism and classism, if in coded language. And he is doing exactly what Southern politicians did from the end of the Civil War: He whips up the resentment of uneducated working-class white people—who would be in the same boat as Blacks or “the poor” if their skin were a little darker or some other circumstance had been just slightly different.