I Haven’t Read Hillbilly Elegy

If you want a small glimpse into why we don’t like JD Vance, here’s an article we wrote in 2020 about his movie/book.https://t.co/ie9ijYyj1h

— Appodlachia (@appodlachia) July 15, 2024

And I never knew about the Netflix movie. I just assumed it was some kinds of pseudo-sociological examination of Appalachia, for purposes of some stereotypical metaphor for the American Dream.

I was wrong. It was worse than that.

Vance's life story is no doubt impressive in many respects: he grew up "poor" to a mother who struggled with substance abuse, joined the Marines, graduated Yale law school, and amassed a considerable amount of wealth and notoriety. Many people will tell you that Vance’s book is about this very story. It’s not. 

Vance uses his "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" story as a neat and tidy veneer to drape over the rest of the book, where he uses his singular lived experience to conclude an entire region suffers from what he calls a "culture in crisis."

After all, if J.D.Vance can get into Yale Law and get rich in Silicon Valley, why can’t everybody in Appalachia?

I’m glad I never wasted my time.

The gotcha quotes are fun. But the big deal about J.D. Vance is that he's a devotee of the neo-monarchist right. https://t.co/ZBvtrEiyzB

— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) July 15, 2024

Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence. 

This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law. 

“You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares. 

The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears. 

For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration.

Well, he seems nice.