I’m reading Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which came out in 2016, well before his political career began its rapid acceleration, resulting in his becoming Vice President earlier this year.
The book is a good read. Vance is a natural-born writer, and his story is an exciting one. He focuses on his “hillbilly” roots (his word), and why that rural community has so many challenges.
Here are some of the things Vance writes that I strongly agree with:
Regarding the psychological and moral problems of his hillbilly class (divorce, unemployment, lack of education, drug and alcohol misuse, domestic violence, resentment of learning and manners, poverty), Vance quotes a friend: “I don’t think that solutions…really exist…[Y]ou can’t fix these things.”
“The most important lesson of my life is not that society failed to provide me with opportunities.”
“The fault (with poor conservative red state people) lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control.”
“The real problem for so many of these [poor, hillbilly kids] is what happens, or doesn’t happen, at home.”
“Public policy can help but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”
Hillbillies constitute, of course, a prime element in the MAGA cult. Vance is a diehard Republican.
Vance gets it right: progressives who believe that government can solve all the problems of poverty, homelessness and crime—by taxing the people more and more—are wrong. These problems cannot be fixed; it’s too late for that in most cases. Instead, they can be averted in the future, by making sure that all children are reared in an environment of love, where the values of education and hard work are stressed. If that is lacking, as it widely is throughout Appalachia, then too many children will be doomed—and society will continue to suffer. These are simple lessons. Every time I express them, someone calls me a racist. It doesn’t bother me. The problems of Oakland have nothing, or very little, to do with how much money we throw into so-called “disadvantaged” communities. It has everything to do with the moral values prevalent in those communities; and morality begins in the home.
I give credit to Vance—the pre-Trump Vance—for establishing these verities. The 2016 JD Vance seems to have been a warm, compassionate and prescient human being. In his memoir, Vance makes tolerant references to gay people. There’s no room in a loving heart, he avers, for animosity toward people just because they’re gay.
But now, he’s working for the most virulently homophobic administration in American history.
He makes very little reference to being a Christian, beyond a couple obligatory references to “Christian values.” And yet he now works for an administration that has been hijacked by evangelicals, Biblical literalists, xenophobes and science deniers, whose supporters believe in the Rapture, and that dinosaurs and Adam and Eve played together in the Garden of Eden.
In the book, Vance comes across as remarkably fair-minded and reasonable. Yet he now works for a regime in which hatred, resentment, lying and vengeance are hallmarks.
He emphasizes repeatedly in the book that material wealth is not the signifier of the good life, but that family is its foundation. And yet he works for the most vulgar, ostentatious and materialistic president America has ever had, the one who has spat upon family values, with his multiple mistresses, divorces, groping and extra-marital affairs.
What happened to the JD Vance of the book? Mammon. The riches and lures of the entire world were spread out before him, like some all-you-can-eat Christmas banquet, and Vance abandoned his once-commendable values to gorge on power and wealth. It’s a sad lesson, one that apparently JD never learned at Yale Law School. Maybe, with God’s guidance, JD can realize the error of his ways, and return to the decent man he used to be. And maybe Oakland’s immoral criminal class can do the same.
Steve Heimoff