JD Vance exploited Appalachia to sell his book, now he wants to exploit America

17 July 2024, 14:04

As soon as it became apparent that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance would be selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, Appalachian Twitter caught fire. The summarized version: not this #&%! again.

Vance first popped up as the author of the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir that quickly became the darling of a mainstream moderate and liberal American readership. People lapped up his “insights” into the struggling people of Appalachia, which Vance boiled down seductively.

“This is the reality of our community,” he writes. “It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.”

For the people of Appalachia, Hillbilly Elegy was immediately recognizable as lightly warmed-over stereotype.

In painting the region as full of folks who don’t want to work and who blame others for their own laziness, Vance presented the same backward Appalachia that has long held sway in the broader American imagination.

“A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” Will Wallace Harney wrote way back in 1873.

The people of Appalachia have long been portrayed as substandard and in need of salvation from the outside.

Those stereotypes have been consistently deployed to argue for the necessity of Christian missionary settlement, to rationalize timbering the forests, for caving out the coal, for later lopping off the mountaintops to scoop out what remains.

Most recently Appalachia has been a scapegoat for the election of right wing autocrats. In short, the history of Appalachian stereotype is deeply tied to the effort to exploit the people and the region’s resources.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance spins the usual tropes. Poverty as moral failure. Feckless people on the government dole. Druggies and miscreants.

As usual, the person doing the spinning stands to profit from the portrayals. Many Appalachians — novelist Silas House among them — accurately saw Vance’s memoir as the launching of a right wing political career. Vance did it by telling everyone that Appalachians are the monstrous hillbillies everyone thinks they are.

We’ve seen it all before, and often.

But Vance also claimed to be doing this as an insider. “This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse” he writes (emphasis added).

Claiming the region as his own, even while smearing it, galled a lot of folks, and rightly so.

Look, there are many definitions of “Appalachian,” and there are many ways to draw maps of the region. Lines are always provisional and contested.

None of those definitions or maps include the part of suburban Cincinnati where Vance comes from, however. Vance spent some summers with family in Kentucky, and from that experience claimed authority for his vacuous analysis.

That’s not too different from a politician saying they’re from London when they just visit family in London when they aren’t at home in Tunbridge Wells.

To Appalachians, J.D. Vance is just another grifter using exaggerated images of rural poverty to make a fortune for himself.

His willingness to do so should be seen as a clear signal of his willingness to exploit all Americans, and as an example of his fungible ideology.

Certainly, his cynical spinning of Appalachian trope is consistent with moving from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” to becoming his veep candidate.

So it’s not just that J.D. badmouths the people of the region, or that he isn’t really part of the region. Both of those things are true, but most of all Vance is just another in a long line of exploitative frauds who see the people of Appalachia as mere tools for their own enrichment.

As Appalachians, we have long seen Vance for exactly what he is, someone comfortable stepping into the role of exploitative opportunist.

I fear his moves toward the White House signal a desire to exploit America itself to feed his own self-serving ambition. He did it to Appalachians to sell his book.

He’ll do it to all of us to achieve power.

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MATTHEW FERRENCE is the author of I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay (West Virginia University Press, August 2024). He is a professor of literature and creative writing at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. www.matthewferrence.com

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