What ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ can tell us about JD Vance and his right-wing beliefs

America’s potential future vice president topped bestseller lists with his 2016 memoir, a tale of multi-generational, cyclical poverty in Appalachia. Nick Hilton looks back on what the politician argued in the book, from his criticisms of welfare to his belief that the working classes ‘spend our way into the poorhouse’

JD Vance and his 2016 memoir about growing up in Ohio (Getty, Harper)

Politicians are like superheroes: it’s all about the origin story.

For JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly minted pick for vice president, the interrelation between the man and his story is everything. Not since a young lawyer called Barack Obama – with ambitions for reaching the Illinois state senate – published Dreams from My Father in 1995, has a memoir served to propel a political career quite like Vance’s 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy.

With its tale of multi-generational, cyclical poverty – stretching from Middletown, Ohio back into the hills of Appalachia – it was an overnight success. Vance was praised on the right for his unflinching attitude to the way in which the rural poor conspire against their own success, and from the left for his embrace of the possibilities of social mobility. “As a cultural emigrant from one group to the other“, he wrote, of his own journey from poverty to financial security, “I am acutely aware of their differences.”

The antidote to economic decline and social decay, the book argued, lay in the individual choices of the working classes, who Vance accused of “truly irrational behaviour” and “spending our way into the poorhouse” by buying “giant TVs and iPads”.

“There is a lack of agency here,” he wrote, of young men struggling to keep hold of good jobs. “A feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” Welfare, Vance asserted, only creates an unproductive malaise, where the employed and unemployed are largely indistinguishable. "I could never understand why [working people’s] lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”

Vance was, at the time the book was published, a clean-cut 32-year-old lawyer living in Cincinnati with his wife, Usha, and their children. His was the respectable face of American conservatism: a compelling American dream story mixed with an Ivy League degree and a dollop of literary credibility. And, in 2016, as the book found itself on the New York Times bestseller list and the display window of every Barnes and Noble in the country, Vance made his position on Donald Trump’s candidacy quite clear. “I’m a never Trump guy,” he told ABC back in October 2016.

Much of Hillbilly Elegy’s cultural significance came in its soothsaying of the Trump movement. The belief that urban America had left its rural cousins behind, exposing them to untrammelled immigration and the economic ruin of the shrinking manufacturing sector, was the book’s central song. But the solution – unlike the solution of the Bernie Bros, who were making their voices heard on the left at that time – wasn’t an expanded state or more welfare provision, but an ownership of their personal plight. As the Trump wave swept across America, Vance’s voice became a moderate but informed one. He had a dog in this fight, but it wasn’t a snarling pitbull.

In the summer of 2016, he wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic that compared Trump’s appeal, in rural America, to the drugs crisis sweeping that part of the nation. “Trump is cultural heroin,” he wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them and one day they’ll realise it.” It was a position that kept Hillbilly Elegy on the reading lists of liberal America. In 2017, after the Trump victory, the book finally topped the bestseller charts. This was off the back of an interview with Megyn Kelly, a conservative news anchor notorious for her spat with Trump. In 2018, at the height of the Trump presidency, Imagine Entertainment greenlit a film version of the book, to be directed by Ron Howard, an outspoken critic of the president.

Trump and Vance during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 15 July (AFP via Getty Images)

So, what has changed in the intervening years? In some senses, the themes of the book have only deepened in salience. “An epidemic of prescription drug addiction has taken root,” Vance wrote, though the word “opioid”, ubiquitous now, is not present in the manuscript. In 2017, there were 47,600 deaths in America linked to opioids – by 2022 that figure was 81,806. The opioid crisis, especially in areas like Appalachia, became a major narrative in American social life. In 2021, the New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe published Empire of Pain, a mainstream bestseller that popularised the complicity of big pharma in this scourge. It was swiftly followed by two TV dramatisations: Dopesick, starring Michael Keaton, and Painkiller, featuring Matthew Broderick.

But while the liberal establishment was still using Hillbilly Elegy as a rubric for comprehending Trump’s victory (The New York Times listed it as one of “6 Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win”), Vance’s politics were drifting towards the right. In 2020, alongside Peter Thiel, the godfather of modern libertarianism, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist who also campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination this year, Vance became an investor in Rumble, a video hosting provider that has become the bedrock of far-right media. Then, in 2022, Vance ran for the Senate in Ohio. The only candidate to secure the backing of Trump, Vance won the seat, by 53 per cent to 47 per cent, in a narrow race.

Ohio is considered a bellwether state. Only three times since 1896 (including in 2020) has its electoral college failed to predict the national result. “It was Greater Appalachia’s political reorientation from Democrat to Republican that redefined American politics after Nixon,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. “And it is in Greater Appalachia where the fortunes of working-class whites seem dimmest.” Current polls give Trump a 10-point lead in Ohio, with that gulf likely to increase with Vance as his running mate. If, back in 2016, Vance was willing to write that Trumpism was not the solution to these dim prospects, it seems like no better cure has emerged in the intervening years.

“Where we come from is who we are,” the fictional Vance, played by Gabriel Basso, says at the climax of Howard’s critically maligned film adaptation. “But we choose, every day, who we become.” At every opportunity, Vance has sought that reinvention. Born James Donald Bowman, he changed his name to James David Vance only to be known, ultimately, by his initials. From a legal career he became a writer, investor and, eventually, a politician. From his Protestant upbringing, he’s become a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. From a never-Trumper, he became Trump’s right-hand man.

With Trump likely to turn 80 in office and only one term left in his presidential tank, the prospect of President Vance is no longer a surreal one. The prescription for American dependency, written in Hillbilly Elegy, is no longer just for Ohio. “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth,” is the clarion call of the book. But Vance’s brand of hillbillyism is less about resilience and more about fluidity. It’s a pragmatism that could take him all the way to the White House.