Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Revealed America’s Forgotten Communities

When J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was published in 2016, it was widely regarded as a significant text for understanding how America came to elect Donald Trump as president that year.

Now, with the Republican presidential candidate choosing Vance as his running mate, the widely-discussed bestseller is back in the spotlight.

With Vance’s announcement on the Trump ticket, the book surged to the top of Amazon’s list of bestselling books in the United States.

Its publisher, HarperCollins, has begun reprinting the book, which has already sold more than three million copies in the eight years since its release, according to the New York Times.

Spanning roughly 270 pages, Vance’s memoir recounts his upbringing in rural America, which has been deeply affected by a declining economy and loss of hope.

Raised by his grandparents from Kentucky, Vance vividly illustrates how a historically Democratic electorate in Appalachia came to support Trump amidst the collapse of the steel, coal, and agriculture industries.

The book narrates Vance’s journey from being born into poverty to rising to the esteemed heights of Yale Law School, one of the country’s most elite educational institutions.

When the memoir debuted, Vance was a 31-year-old financier working in Silicon Valley.

The book, later adapted into a Netflix film, catapulted Vance into the national limelight.

Leveraging his newfound fame, Vance transitioned into a political career: he was elected to the US Senate from Ohio in 2022 and is now running for the second-highest office in the United States.

Just four days after Trump secured his win in the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times published a list of six books to help readers understand the victory of the political outsider over Hilary Clinton.

Among them was “Hillbilly Elegy,” described as “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive… the ascent of Donald J. Trump,” according to the review.

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a steel town that “has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope” for as long as he could remember, he wrote in his book.

He was raised by his grandparents rather than his drug-addicted mother.

Vance characterizes his community as having “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

Despite this, he expresses love for his community, using the term “hillbilly” in the title of his memoir as a way to combat the stigma.

This portrayal, however, sparked controversy as critics accused Vance of reducing the Appalachian people to harsh stereotypes.

Some left-leaning commentators argued that the individuals Vance described were not responsible for their decline but were victims of a system that had left them impoverished.

The memoir also reveals a significant shift in Vance’s views on immigration and foreign trade over the years.

Today, he argues for the need “to protect American industries from all of the competition” and says that cheap labor provided by undocumented immigrants is destroying American jobs.

However, in the memoir, he suggested that Americans should not blame the economic policies of Barack Obama or China for their problems but should look at themselves.

“We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese,” Vance wrote. “These are the lies we tell ourselves.”

Source: New York Times, Amazon, HarperCollins