J.D. Vance and I both have Appalachian roots. We took away very different lessons. | Opinion

I read “Hillbilly Elegy” by author, Ohio senator and now Donald Trump’s Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, but it didn’t stick with me in the slightest.

As someone who was born and raised in northeastern Kentucky, in a pocket of Appalachia close to the borders of Ohio and West Virginia, Vance’s story wasn’t unfamiliar to me, or anyone else who grew up in a region like that. It’s also a story I’ve either read, heard or seen on TV too many times to count.

Some kids being raised by their mamaw and papaw, a parent with a drinking problem that was sure to break them before they broke it, teenage pregnancies, a people in decline due to forces outside of their control.

Yeah, I’ve seen this, and I know people who had the same takeaway Vance did: well, you just gotta pull yourself up from your bootstraps and work harder. Meanwhile the boots ain’t got their soles and some folks are missing toes.

I want to be clear, my intent is not to disparage J.D. Vance for the challenging life he had. My experience growing up was vastly different from his. That said, I take issue with the lessons he chose to extract from his upbringing.

Vance isn’t wholly wrong in describing some of the issues that plague Appalachia (lack of jobs and opportunity, education, drugs, etc.) but he diagnoses these problems as not structural but cultural. An astute observation from a proud product of Yale Law School.

The reason people don’t want to work anymore, like his mamaw and papaw did, is, as Vance argues, because of a culture of laziness. It’s not because Walmart came to town causing local businesses to close or because the mines shuttered years ago and hit the road leaving black lung and empty promises in their wake.

Had “Hillbilly Elegy” been published any other year than 2016 it would’ve probably just blipped in and out of existence. However, liberals were dumbfounded by Trump’s electoral win and they needed to figure it out. Enter Vance who was positioned to be this white working class whisperer and the rest is history.

Ironically, Vance did a lot in the last decade to further Appalachian scholarship. It became a cottage industry there for a bit to respond to Vance’s book. “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” by Elizabeth Catte and “Appalachian Reckoning” are two that immediately come to mind.

I’ll take a moment here to address a significant criticism of Vance and his book: he’s not from Appalachia. Yes, his family traces their roots back to Jackson, Kentucky but he was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, 30 miles north of Cincinnati. Not even the Appalachian Regional Commission’s generous definition of the region includes Butler County.

However, I dislike the notion of arguing someone’s “hillbilly bonafides” because it’s weird to me. That’s a different discussion for a different time.

So why does this matter? Why am I rehashing the same stuff that was already opined at length eight years ago? Because if Vance is going to claim the mantle of Appalachia, it is worth discussing how he would potentially use the office of vice president, a man one heartbeat away from the presidency, to address the issues he discusses so much in his book.

Determining what Vance truly, actually believes is difficult to parse. One day he’s comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler and then he’s kissing the ring so he can win his 2022 Senate election. Then there’s him singing a different tune on abortion.

He’s rightfully fighting on behalf of the people of East Palestine, Ohio after the horrible fallout from last year’s train derailment, and then he’s weakening the bill that would help solve the exact issue that caused this at the request of lobbyists.

Well what about the opioid crisis? That’s a big problem in Appalachia and a focal point of Vance’s book. Well in 2016 he started a nonprofit to tackle that problem up in Ohio and then a couple years later it closed down and did nothing aside from promoting an addiction specialist who worked at Purdue Pharma – you know, the manufacturer of OxyContin.

People online are praising him for the one time he joined United Auto Workers on a picket line and just taking that to mean, uncritically, that Vance is super duper pro-union. This despite the fact he has declined to support the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would end union-busting “right to work” laws.

Also, why am I supposed to believe that Vance, a guy who worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and is close friends with Peter Thiel (another weirdo venture capitalist guy) who basically bought Vance his Senate seat and the vice presidential nomination, is gonna be on the side of workers? Really?

What upset me most when I read “Hillbilly Elegy” is that I saw too much of myself in Vance at that time in my life. I was like him in some ways: a kid who made it outside of Appalachia and presumed he had gone on to bigger and better things; all the while thinking I was better than the home I left behind.

I was wrong, I wasn’t a big deal then and I’m still not now. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stick to your roots, and there’s nothing wrong either with wanting to spread your wings. The problem arises when you think you’re better flying high than staying planted in the earth.

Had I stayed content to foolishly think the problems facing folks back home could simply be explained by some ambiguous lack of work ethic or the right kind of family values then I’d be singing the same tone-deaf song J.D. Vance is still singing today.

Vance may not be a coal baron but he’s the exact mold of a man who is going to exploit the same people he claims to care for, and in my book that just ain’t right.