JD Vance milks his upbringing, but that’s why he’s not the best advocate for poor people
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JD Vance rose to his current position as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a conservative, calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his credentials as an advocate for America’s working class.
“I grew up a poor kid,” Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of ordinary Americans can relate to.”
Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In that letter, he says his family carries a legacy of “exploitation, alcoholism, poverty and abuse.”
“Poor people,” he said in a 2016 interview with American Conservative, “are my people.”
But there’s a shell game going on when it comes to the details of Vance’s poverty.
Vance came from a troubled family. His mother was – like many Americans, whether poor, middle class or rich – addicted to painkillers. In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his painful relationship with his mother, before finding the full explanation: His mother’s addiction was caused by the fact that her parents were “billies.”
The truth – one that Vance slyly admits in his book – is that he is not poor. And he is not a hillbilly. He grew up firmly in middle class Ohio.
In my upcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those Who Have Money Show Those Who Don’t,” I explain in detail that Vance’s work is actually part of a genre I call “pornography.” This long list of novels, films and plays, created mainly by the middle and upper classes for like-minded readers, can end up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people.
Although these activities are sometimes done with good intentions, they often focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, evil and laziness of the so-called poor.
Peeping on all the poor people
When you think of novels and films about the poor, you come to the classics: Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Emile Zola’s “Germinal,” James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let us Now Praise Famous Men,” Jack London’s ” People of the Abyss” or “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck.
Yet all these memorials to the suffering of the poor were written by writers who were not poor. Most of them had little knowledge about the lives of poor people. At best, they were journalists whose sources were limited. At worst, they just fix things, and use stereotypes about poverty.
For example, John Steinbeck had connections with poor people as a journalist. But as she writes about the migrant camps in “The Grapes of Wrath,” she relies heavily on the notes of Sanora Babb — herself poor and homeless — who traveled to migrant camps across California to find the Farm Security Administration. Babb’s manager – a friend of Steinbeck – had secretly shown the author his notes, without his permission.
Babb would go on to write a novel based on his experience, which was bought by Random House. But the publishing company killed it after “Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it was not published until 2004, when the author was 97 years old. That year, he told the Chicago Tribune — well, I might add — that Steinbeck’s work was “not as accurate as mine.”
And then there’s London, “The People of the Abyss” which appears to be a faithful portrait of the lives of the British poor. But London, who went “undercover” to write a sordid story about the poor people of England’s town, nevertheless kept it in good shape. He kept a wad of money sewn into his ragged coat and escaped to hot baths and good food while pretending to pass as a pauper. The result is a book full of denigration of the English working class, labeled by eugenists as a degenerate race.
When you look at books or films created by people who grew up poor, the tone and focus often changes dramatically.
Instead of fixing on the side of life, he sees works that explore things that unite all people: family, love, politics, complex emotions and evocative memories.
You only have to open Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” Agnes Smedley’s “Daughter of the World” or Justin Torres’ “We the Animals” to see their characters’ appreciation for beauty and the ability to find deep pleasure – yes, all while suffering. .
Wright remembers how, as a child, he used to play in the sewer, where he would spend hours turning all kinds of detritus into toys. Young Smedley likes to look through the hole in his roof to look at the sky. And Mike Gold, author of “Jews Without Money,” sings a paean to the empty, trash-filled neighborhood that doubles as his favorite playground.
Hillbilly cosplay
Vance, on the other hand, fills his book with selections from the greatest hits of “pornography” – violence, drugs, sex, obscenity and dirt.
But Vance himself was never truly poor. His family didn’t worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all owned houses in the suburbs of Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “had stock in Armco and had a good pension.”
He falsely introduces himself to his classmates at Yale as a “tough climber from Appalachia.” Over the course of the book, he confuses himself – and the reader – by saying separately that he is middle class, working class and poor.
To justify his memoir as little more than a tale of a drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he makes a good theory that being a hillbilly doesn’t have to be associated with social class — or even living in Appalachia. .
For Vance, hillbilly-ness becomes a kind of cultural trait, tied to family history and identity, not class. His grandmother, he writes, “thought he had escaped the poverty of the mountains, but poverty — emotional if not financial — had followed him.”
Bootstraps rex
In developing his larger theory, Vance brings readers closer to the now-revealed view of the culture of poverty, in which the poor are responsible for their condition and their attitudes toward work are passed down from one generation to the next.
Relying on government handouts, according to the theory, reinforces this culture. Vance revels in the glorious past of his slice of America. His neighbors in Middletown have lost – because of the welfare state – “the tie that bound them to their neighbors, which encouraged them the way my nationality always encouraged me.”
But Vance finds himself in a dilemma: Are these people just lazy? Or are they victims of a system that encourages them to watch TV and eat junk food while collecting welfare or disability checks?
He often refers to people living on welfare as “never [having] he has worked a profitable job in his life.” He seems to fully buy into the idea that people are suffering because they are too lazy to load things.
He “solves” the problem with the old criticism of poor people: They got there because of “bad choices.” He mentions a friend of his who, although he had a well-paying job, quit because he didn’t like getting up in the morning.
He writes: “His situation in life is due to the choices he made, and his life will only be better with better decisions.”
No platform, no voice
And so the GOP general manager of the working class simply repeats the same bootstrap rhetoric that has been around for decades.
But it’s not just a question about believing a politician or not. That would be a fool’s game.
Rather, the issue here is what I call “inequality of representation,” by which I mean that one identity group — in this case, poor people — cannot represent itself.
What has happened – whether in politics or publishing – is something called “elite capture,” where those with cultural power and power take the right to speak for and represent the powerless.
In doing so, dangerous theories and tropes are developed with negative political consequences. Just because you’re drinking Diet Mountain Dew doesn’t mean you’re about to speak for the mountaineers.
Our political and educational system is beating many poor people by the elbow. First-generation students — like me, and like many of my students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I teach — have a harder time staying in school, have more food insecurity and homelessness, and often don’t benefit from mainstream development. education provides. They tend to have a more difficult time climbing the cultural and political ranks, becoming published authors and elected officials who may provide equal representation.
As political scientist Nicholas Carnes points out in his 2018 book “The Cash Ceiling,” only 2% of congressional lawmakers worked in manual, service industry or clerical jobs before entering politics. So it’s no surprise that if the wealthy want to pass certain laws, they are more likely to get passed.
In July 2024, the New York Times reported that Vance’s Yale law professor and author Amy Chua read the first version of what became the “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was aimed more at an academic audience and was based on a political viewpoint. He encouraged Vance to change his script, telling him “this is a great idea [about America] it doesn’t work.”
I would argue that his “grand theory” about the poor does not work, because the poor – unlike many other identity groups – do not have a platform to express and develop their needs and political vision.
Instead, we’re stuck with people like Vance, who give bromides about the best and worst stories of the worst doom.
Lennard J. Davis is a distinguished professor of English, disability studies and medical education at the University of Illinois Chicago..
This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the first article.
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