Ten years ago this month Hillbilly Elegy was released. A few weeks later, Rod Dreher gave the little-known author J.D. Vance a national platform with his review and subsequent interview that crashed The American Conservative’s website. Not only did Vance’s book explain an undercurrent of frustration among the white working class; it also exposed a cluelessness among elites, unaware of the Big Sort bubble they created, as evidenced by their bewilderment when Donald Trump won the presidency later that year.
A decade later, Vance is no longer explaining white working-class angst to the silver-spoon crowd. Instead, his role has evolved and in some ways, inverted. Whereas the book was internally facing a critique toward a failing economy and culture, he is now externalizing the fight from the highest levels of government as an arbiter against the institutions that created the conditions that left his people (and many others) behind.
When Hillbilly Elegy was published, its diagnosis of white working-class decay was twofold. Vance painted a vivid picture of hollowed-out Appalachian coal towns from which those willing to take risks, like his family, migrated north, only to see globalization turn booming cities into the Rust Belt a generation later. This loss of both mining and manufacturing jobs was half the story. The other half, he argued, was a profound crisis of culture. Critics only focused on the latter half, saying he was victim-blaming. Dreher’s response to a very negative New York Times book review that summer was apposite. It was clear the critics hadn’t even cracked the text open, or had made their interns cherry-pick passages to fit their preordained narrative.
Out of the gate, Vance made it clear that his writing was not an academic study but a personal story that includes “the group of people I know—working-class whites with ties to Appalachia.” With no filter, Vance wrote about his mother’s struggles with drug abuse, the revolving door of father figures, financial insecurity and the instability of his home life. Through these personal tragedies, Vance diagnosed a pervasive, self-defeating fatalism in himself and the community—what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” This pessimism among Appalachians and 20th-century southern migrants is well covered in books from decades past like The Ethnic Southerners, White Southerners, The Invisible Minority, and Yesterday’s People.
When it comes to solutions, Vance didn’t offer any directly, but others were happy to pontificate on their own conclusions. On the left, critics said he forgot the entire history of exploitation and abandonment by coal corporations, so any “bad” decisions individuals make are not their fault. They accused him of offering up the age-old conservative narrative of bootstrap resilience. On the right, any of his mentions that elected officials might “do something” was deemed to be Big Government. So much for nuance.
The true central thesis is a focus on personal agency. To create that reality, Vance gives credit to something he believes is critical toward achieving the American Dream: family and community. With family, it was the three years of stability with his Mamaw and the high expectations she set along with the monologues against victimhood she peppered in. For the community, it was his time in the Marines that provided the structure and order needed to work as part of a team and see objectives through, along with developing other life skills like personal financial management. Those two anchors provided Vance with the baseline work ethic and discipline needed to succeed at Ohio State, at Yale Law, and eventually in Silicon Valley.
Today, as the 50th vice president of the United States, Vance has parlayed authorship into leadership. With his own elite credentials, network, and professional résumé, he has the authority to go on the offensive against groups such as universities, corporations, the administrative state, and globalists. He recognizes that the challenges confronting working-class Americans are not due to a lack of resolve, but to open borders, terrible trade deals, and indifferent elites in Washington—those who put these policies into practice over the decades.
Given his early statements about President Donald Trump, critics call him a hypocrite or political opportunist—but as my late dad always said, “Never measure a man by what he says, only by what he does.” Vance could have stayed in Silicon Valley to make millions, but chose to relocate back to Ohio shortly after his memoir was published—not exactly the typical strategy for a hyper-mobile elite. I worked in the U.S. Senate during his short tenure there and can objectively say he had one of the hardest-working and most principled staff offices on Capitol Hill.
In the Senate, Vance aligned his actions with his values by taking on big business, cosponsoring bills such as the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act, Stop Subsidizing Giant Mergers Act and Invent Here, Make Here Act. As far as supporting the American worker, Vance walked the picket line with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Toledo, Ohio, during the 2023 “Big Three” strike. He cosponsored a bill to raise the minimum wage, advocated for European-style sectoral bargaining, and touted protectionist industrial policy. Let’s not forget his close affiliation with American Compass and his strong paper trail of op-eds.
In his vice presidential acceptance speech, Vance’s story didn’t change. For 35 minutes, he spoke about his roots and the working class. He directly addressed “the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their jobs” and “the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands.” He railed against NAFTA, globalization, and past trade agreements with China, arguing that Washington elites sent American jobs overseas, replacing them with meager welfare checks.
As vice president, Vance continues to hold the line with his support for the Faster Labor Contracts Act and the push to resurrect his Railway Safety Act of 2023 by inserting it into the Surface Transportation Reauthorization this year. This shows both his consistency and commitment for the long haul. Vance often argues that the “cheap labor” drug of globalization benefited Wall Street and multinational corporations at the expense of Main Street. He still argues for protectionist trade policies, tariffs, and strict immigration controls, arguing that importing cheap labor stagnates wages for American citizens. Most importantly, he understands the dignity of work and emphasizes that replacing lost jobs with welfare or universal basic income is insufficient because work provides communal identity, purpose, and pride.
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Over the last decade, the American right shifted from telling struggling voters to “take personal responsibility” and “work harder” to pointing a finger at external forces such as the DC establishment. Vance didn’t invent the shift from internal despair to external hostility, but he has articulated the sentiment better than anyone. While Hillbilly Elegy pioneered a genre of “millennial trauma memoirs” (e.g. Educated, Rust, Heartland), none have articulated Charles Murray’s Coming Apart in layman’s terms like Vance. What once bubbled under the surface is now at the forefront of our politics.
To most, Hillbilly Elegy felt more like an eulogy for a forgotten America that had been permanently left behind by globalization, never to return. For me, the book was merely a fellow “Elder Millennial” from the Rust Belt preparing a call to action—starting with reshaping the Republican Party in the image of those who were shaped by the Iraq War and Great Recession. Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t an obituary but a prologue to a political takeover by our generation, perhaps with Trump as the conduit.
Vance already knows what’s needed to reinvigorate our culture. While he attributed family and community to his success, his spiritual evolution reveals the superpower that reinforces both: faith. With that, it is no surprise to me his second book would be on such a topic, and I look forward to reading Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.
