JD Vance's Bestselling Tale From Rags To Riches Can Be His Political Tool

With sales surging and Netflix viewership soaring, Hillbillly Elegy's portrayal of the American Dream could prove a potent tool - or a double-edged sword - in JD Vance's political arsenal.

The Ohio Senator's 2016 book returned to bestseller lists as soon as he was selected as Donald Trump's running mate for the 2024 US Presidential election.

It sold 200,000 copies in five days after the announcement. Just 1,500 books had been sold the previous week. Viewership of the Netflix film adaptation, directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, has surged more than 1000 per cent since July 15.

The book and the film peddle a cultural narrative about the American Dream that is potent - if the audience buys into the story it's selling, and ignores a couple of inconvenient truths.

Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of Vance's upbringing in a poor, white, working-class family in Appalachia. His single mother struggled with addiction and continually re-partnered.

The young JD, as described by the 32-year-old narrator, lamented the repeated loss of father figures.

Critics quibble over whether Vance or Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up, can legitimately claim to be Appalachian (check out Reddit, if you like). Regardless, his story of a mixed-generation, migratory family that struggled with alcohol and drugs and disappearing jobs in Rust Belt America should have wide resonance in the lead-up to this year's presidential election - just as it had resonance in 2016 when Trump won.

Vance's account of the lack of individual responsibility in the face of difficult circumstances (his family, especially his mother) and individual discipline and determination leading to next-generation success (Vance) initially became a decoder ring for voters in important swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.

And it may also resonate with these voters themselves - who include not only working-class Americans left behind by America's financialised, de-unionised, postindustrial economy - but also immigrant families who hold conservative views and are chasing the classic immigrant's tale of achieving the American Dream.

The latter group is often overlooked as part of Trump's Republican Party.

But there are caveats to how resonant this book is to American voters. Its message about the American Dream is potent only if you ignore two key facts.

Understanding Trump voters

First, the memoir functions as a political object. The book is not for hillbillies, or anyone else who might see themselves in Vance's construction of what scholar Dwight Billings has called "Trumpalachia."

Instead, the book was a kind of manual for a liberal, coastal, and upper-class understanding of Trump voters after the 2016 election.

Vance could not have been luckier with the timing of publication and the ensuing appetite for explanations of "what was wrong with America."

Happily for liberal readers, the book can be taken to suggest the problem is mostly something wrong with the voters, rather than America. Yes, the loss of well-paid, union manufacturing jobs doesn't help, but there is something intransigent about the hillbillies who held these jobs, it seems to say.

The first character that gets extended treatment, besides Vance, is a workmate at a tile store who takes half-hour toilet breaks and doesn't turn up to work despite a pregnant girlfriend. Yet he complains of being hard done by when he is fired.

This character becomes a stand-in figure for a crucial pivot away from Vance's previous worldview - that the issue is the historical and economic conditions in which these people find themselves, not the people.

The book paints Vance as an underdog who, through hard work and, finally, some home-life stability, managed to throw off the shackles of intergenerational trauma and tough economic times and "make good".

In this way, the book is like a manifesto for the American Dream. (If Vance can do it, so can everyone - no excuses.)

Vance and the elites

Second, the book is an exercise in personal and professional credentialing for Vance.

He is a native informant for the network of elites of which he wants to be a part.

He follows different trends, such as the tech bro anti-humanism of someone like former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, but he also converts to Catholicism in 2019. (Appalachians and "hillbillies" are usually some variant of Protestantism.)

Vance explains to readers that he didn't realise wealth and power derives from networks of the already wealthy and powerful. They already know this, of course - he's letting them know why he didn't know.

He simply wanted to be a lawyer because they were the richest people around him growing up. To signify this network, "Yale" is uttered as a talisman by hillbillies and Yalies alike throughout Ron Howard's film adaptation.

Vance getting into Yale Law School is not so much about a job - what he will or wants to do as a lawyer is not clear, and the book indicates he didn't really care about what kind of law he would eventually practice - but what it symbolises: making a strong, positive impression on those that can advance your career, despite the complications of a heroin-overdosing mother back home, and your attendant righteous rage.

There's no suggestion that the existence of this elite network might be a problem.

Vance's story is also that of a child seeking out parental figures. After his grandmother's death, he is guided through adulthood initially by Marine superiors, then by the infamous Tiger Mom, Amy Chua.

Trump the father figure

His latest father figure, of course, is Trump.

Of that pair, Jeffrey Fleishman offers a now-striking contrast in his 2016 review of the book: "Trump, whose father gave him a fortune, and Vance, whose father gave him up for adoption, are speaking of the same audiences but with opposing messages."

While Trump likes to suggest that the American Dream is dead because of liberal governments whose environmental policies ripped coalfield jobs from American workers (and shipped other work overseas), Vance "pushes the blame back onto individuals," as Fleishman explains.

This brings us to a much-discussed question: Vance once pondered whether Trump might be an American Hitler, and is now his running mate - so what's changed?

It seems at the time of his book's publication, Vance was already moving on from the hard work ethos and respectability politics of his memoir.

Wading out of the mainstream, he, for example, accepted the financial backing of a section of Big Tech that thinks democracy has played out.

This move dulls some of the political usefulness of his elegy, in which the pastoral lament jars against a dystopian, posthuman agenda: Peter Thiel is thanked in the book's closing acknowledgments.

Democrats can trace this path by highlighting the shifting, out-there positions Vance has advanced in previous years.

His suggestion that parents should get more say in the democratic process by being able to vote on behalf of their children, for example, or his apparent suggestion that even violent marriages shouldn't end in divorce.

The function of Hillbilly Elegy has changed with Vance entering the presidential race.

It is no longer a manual for coastals, liberals, and elites to understand the Trump voter, but something that hews more closely to its credentialing purpose: It's a political object.

It becomes ballast for Vance's claims to be, to speak to and for, and to serve, an idealised if imperfect Everyman who loves his country and his family yet is not getting his fair share.

But it is also an argument and story that can be dissected and contrasted with his later political statements and every public utterance and performance he makes between now and November 5.

Dr Rodney Taveira is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Academic Director at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

(Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info)

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