By Wayne Allensworth
I recently finished reading J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The takeaways from that reading include:
Vance’s rejection of fatalistic hopelessness. Hopelessness is pervasive among Vance’s people, and many have fallen into drug addiction, which has spurred on the collapse of the family. Encouraged by grandparents who expended so much of their lives and energy raising him and his sister, Vance did not let anger, resentment and fatalism destroy him. He fought his way out of the milieu in Middletown, Ohio, that had become such a hindrance to others. He cites some instances of people he knew who would not take a job opportunity — and responsibility — when it did come their way. They weren’t even trying any more. He found that repellant.
He has rejected dependency on the state. Vance’s experiences taught him that “welfare queens” and their male counterparts knew full well how to game the welfare system, using food stamps, for example, to buy grocery items they could then resell, then use the money for cigarettes, drugs, alcohol and junk food. At the same time, he recognizes that some forms of assistance were essential, especially for older people like his grandmother, who needed help to purchase medications that kept her alive and able to raise her grandchildren. His views are not without nuance and empathy.
Regarding his education in schools deemed inferior by the authorities, Vance plainly acknowledges that the failure of so many of his peers in school was not because the school was bad, or the teachers incompetent, or facilities inferior. It was because the students came from chaotic homes where there was little or no parental involvement. When the town’s major factory closed, a brain drain followed. The community’s most successful and conscientious people left. Those left behind had no examples to follow, no one to emulate. The ethos of doing well in school was, in the eyes of many of Vance’s peers, a sign of subservience and not positive ambition. The young Vance noticed that two-parent households with intact families and stable marriages bolstered by traditional morality were much more conducive to a stable life than his own. And that those norms were necessary to save his people from the morass they had fallen into.
Vance has, I believe sincerely, stated that he will not forget where he came from. In his book, he seems to understand that the destruction of American industry also destroyed the towns and communities made up largely of hillbilly migrants with whom he is familiar. His family is from Eastern Kentucky and migrated to Ohio. He understands perfectly well that not everyone is suited for college and an office job, that men skilled at working with their hands, for example, cannot always simply “learn to code” as a neocon wag once sneered. His rough-hewn hillbilly relations seem familiar to this working-class boy from Texas. We had the same hot-tempered honor code he writes about, one that I had to learn to regulate, but will never fully relinquish. A sense of honor is a good thing. And I’ve witnessed the proletarianization of the white working class myself.
The virtues of the carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, welders, truck drivers, and telephone linemen and their families with whom I grew up are the same as those of Vance’s people. Toughness, resilience, resourcefulness, loyalty, a readiness to help anyone in distress, and a deep, sincere, visceral love of country stand out. I left home, too, and had my own adventures, but like J.D. Vance, I never forgot where I came from, eventually returning to my home state in time for my own children to know the people I love as well. Vance says he hopes to be buried in the same Kentucky soil as his ancestors and that America is not an idea, but our homeland, which speaks well for him. I thought I would never hear such language from a prominent public figure again. I’m hoping he continues to live up to it.
Vance may have thought that the initial praise for his book from establishment media and their speaking of the book as an explanation of the Trump phenomenon meant that establishment luminaries were trying to understand his people’s situation. In his memoir, he praises his Yale law school professors who gave him advice and a helping hand when he needed it as a fish out of water at an Ivy League school, for example. I didn’t read Hillbilly Elegy when it was published, so I only have impressions of what may have been going on with some of the book’s readers at the time: I think some of them believed that the book confirmed their dismissive attitude toward Middle America. They reveled in the stories of dysfunction. These contemptible hillbillies, these deplorables, were just bellyaching. They didn’t learn to code! In his book, Vance acknowledged that the death of American industry was a catalyst for many of the horror stories he recounted, but his emphasis at that juncture in his life was on self-reliance and rejecting victim status, not opposing globalization.
A former Never-Trumper, Vance acknowledged that Orange Man Bad was basically right. It could be that Vance’s experiences moving in elite circles in Silicon Valley and among venture capitalists, as well as his time as a U.S. senator, taught him just why people who may have earlier praised his memoir became his opponents once he started acting on his own stated beliefs, including enforcing antitrust law, challenging woke propaganda, and insisting that all of us have agency and are responsible for own fate. As he himself has put it, they just don’t like ordinary Americans very much. The woke agenda, largely aimed at attacking the group that has been most resistant to globalization, the Middle Americans that Vance represents, is a distraction from the real, tangible problems that afflict the working classes of all races, many of which can be traced back to globalization and misguided welfare state efforts. Vance is willing to use state power to take on those problems but rejects dependency on the state.
Vance’s life experiences while growing up in a rustbelt town — including a chaotic home life, a father he barely knew, the parade of boyfriends seeing his drug addicted mother, and a deep fatalistic sense among his people of having no control over their own lives — are, minus drive-by shooting levels of violence, considerably closer to the experiences of a lot of non-white, especially black, kids than those of Kamala Harris or Barack Obama. An America First agenda that includes reindustrialization, border security and immigration control, as well as extricating the United States from the dangerous war in Ukraine — for a Third World War would make all the rest moot points — would go a long way toward ameliorating the economic and social problems that afflict the working classes of all races. Vance’s rejection of victimology and promotion of traditional values, as well as reinvigorating an economic base that would support family formation, are on target as well.
It’s ironic, and telling, that the establishment media is piling on, doing all it can to undercut this man, a man the globalist Blob fears as much as it loathes the people he represents. Don’t believe a word of it. Read his book. It’s a much better guide to his character and beliefs. The globalists want to prevent any attempts to weaken their agenda of endless war, economic dispossession, and erasing borders by making outrageous claims that a man like Vance is somehow an extremist. I think that’s weird.
From Hillbilly Elegy:
I was so desperate for stability during my formative years … that I’m at risk … of focusing so much on what I lacked as a kid that I sometimes fail to offer Ewan [his son] the things I did have. I knew my family loved me, even when they struggled to take care of themselves. I knew that poor people had dignity and agency…I knew that loyalty was more important than advancement…I knew that a beat-up steel worker could be a good dad to a kid who needed it. I knew that a mother could love her son despite the grip of addiction. I knew that a sick old woman could be a mother, a caretaker, a protector, an ass chewer, a gun shooter, a grandmother, and I knew … that that woman, my Mamaw, would kill for me if she had to.
Will my son know these things?… I knew these things because I saw them with my own two eyes and felt them in my bones. For all the problems and hopelessness that exists in my community, I am proudest that my grandparents were hillbillies.
There’s a plot of land in Jackson, Kentucky, not far from where Mamaw grew up, that has been in my family for around one hundred years. … Mamaw and many of her siblings were born there, and both Mamaw and Papaw are buried there now. I joke with Usha [his wife] that someday we’ll be buried there too, but for me it’s not a joke. …
I bought it (the plot of land) most of all because I want Mamaw and Papaw’s graves to be maintained … but I also bought it because I wanted a reason to take my own son back to the place that formed such a large piece of my childhood. I want Ewan to explore those hills, search for crawdads in those creeks, and feel at home there like I did.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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