When JD Vance’s autobiography appeared in 2016, Hillbilly: A Rural Elegy (Deusto, translation by Ramón González Férriz), its author could say that he was a 31-year-old who had not invented a brilliant technology despite working in Silicon Valley, nor had he founded a large company or done anything extraordinary. He had only graduated from the very elitist Yale University, despite coming from a poor family and from a devastated place: the immense Appalachians and the industrial devastation that the Rust Belt had already experienced and continues to experience, as he says several times: “From eastern Kentucky to southwestern Ohio.”
The current Republican vice presidential candidate, Donald Trump’s number two, is what Americans call a hillbillytough, poor people, whites who had worked in coal mining, then in steel mills and later in nothing. The initial edition of 10,000 copies quickly jumped to 300,000 without losing any of its unmistakable style, or perhaps precisely for that reason: “We shove a chainsaw up the ass of anyone who insults our mother” or two pairs of panties in the mouth of the idiot who said he would eat a sister’s panties: the honour of the family and the compact sense of community are sacred.
A family sociability based on violence, emotional incontinence, fights and insults as a rule is behind his diagnosis of an existential crisis that is not only due to bad government policies but to factors that must be addressed as real and insoluble problems instantly. He had a grandmother who saved his life, without hesitation and swearing like a machine gun, and it was “the best thing” that has “ever happened to him.” When Vance feels doubts about his sexual identity, his grandmother asks him if he likes “sucking dick,” he answers no, so the grandmother prudently concludes: “Then you are not gay. And even if you wanted to suck dick, nothing would happen. God would love you just the same,” a little before threatening to put the barrel of his gun in his mother’s face if she threatened to kill the boy again. Although the mother did not change the habit of the “revolving door of father figures” (Vance barely knew his biological father but did know countless of the mother’s boyfriends), nor did she abandon the abrasive and intermittent consumption of alcohol, sedatives and heroin.
It was his grandmother who bought him a $180 scientific calculator for high school, and told him, “You better get started on that[homework]right now. I didn’t spend every last cent I had on that little computer to make you sweat all day.” It’s the same law of “justice” hillbilly”, like his mother, who doused her husband with gasoline and set him on fire with a match while he slept off his drunkenness (he was saved by his daughter). Extreme people means clan law and a vague sense of legality, like the grandfather who had a giant marijuana plant in the backyard. And what was the grandfather going to do but show 12-year-old Vance how to roll a joint?
In fact, the book aims to be a pedagogical manual to learn how to reverse the social decomposition of a stable and predictable order that began in the eighties, and reduce its cruelty and impulsive irrationality. At the crossroads of choosing university or college, marinesVance picks the marines a year after 9/11 without the slightest patriotic fervour, but rather as a useful outlet in terms of discipline and inner stability (but full of fears). What he took away from those four years (with a few months stationed in Iraq in 2005) was an unprecedented self-confidence, a regulated life, useful information and a regularity unknown until arriving, already as a veteran marine (and partly publicly funded) to Ohio State University to make a living there as a part-time worker at an NGO for abused and abandoned children, and also as an advisor to a senator in the Ohio state house.
That short time was enough to prove that no, his grandmother was not always right and not all politicians were a bunch of thieves. Despite the contagious spirit of defeat and detachment of his tribe —“I am the kind of patriot they laugh at on the East Coast”—, and despite being guilty of being “sentimental,” he does not keep quiet about his “overwhelming gratitude” to the United States. While Barack Obama embodies the good functioning of meritocracy, all his friends hillbillies They know it’s not made for them, even if Michelle Obama’s dietary recommendations are healthy and relevant or Barack Obama is a good father: “Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities” precisely because he is right. And yes, it is true that there is “an industry of conspiracy theorists and lunatics,” she writes in 2016, but the distrust of the white working class is deeper and has penetrated very deeply. “For many of us, the free press – the bastion of American democracy – is up to its neck in shit,” she adds.
The resulting picture is a direct challenge to the conservative discourse on the white working class: no, the failure of life is not only the fault of the government, but the result of bad decisions and fierce social skepticism about the possibilities of the future. The deep-rooted culture of resentment narrows the horizon a little more and accentuates the fear of escaping the tribe and feeling chronic discomfort, paralyzing insecurity, living with the feeling of being displaced forever, the one who is out of place, the one who does not fit in, the one who has no manners, the one who does not know how to dress for an interview or… the one who studies Law on a scholarship at Yale almost for free the first year because he is the poorest in the faculty.
When he works as a cashier in a supermarket he discovers that his poor family would not be given the same credit as those who are more affluent, but above all he discovers the distrust of the abuses of the welfare state by the subsidized, its tricks, its indifference to prosper. There lies the acceleration of resentment against his own class for being lazy, negligent, indolent and slothful at the expense of the taxes that he, and others like him, pay with their salary, as he saw every month in the payroll. It is the “first indication” that the policies of the “workers’ party” that his grandmother votes for “were not as good as they said,” due to overprotection or mistaken and late protection. He identifies in his own social environment the co-responsibility for the loss of a golden age that never existed, associated with the decrease in faith and the sense of community as a support network for poor kids and broken families amidst incessant moving, furious fights at home and in the rest of the neighborhood, and the omnipresence of drugs and weapons.
The shift in a decade from the unconditional Democratic vote in Appalachia and the South to the unconditional Republican vote is explained, according to Vance, by the fact that many white working class people feel they are paying for the hardships of subsidized people who live off the “welfare state without doing anything.” Or to put it another way: he is positioning himself against a government “that encouraged social decay through the welfare state,” although the determining cause is the deterioration of an old community of culture and faith: that is the authentic elegy that this book sings in the face of the dissolution of the family order among wasteful, vociferous, furious, violent, inconsequential, capricious and irrational people. That is why it is also a song of gratitude to the same grandmother who threatened the boy with running over his friends who were smoking weed if he broke the rule of not seeing them.
The unequivocal class consciousness that he displays in the book has two directions: the feeling of betraying his community by studying at Yale (to the point of hiding it when he returns to his town in Ohio) and the experience of displacement or even tacit contempt when he knows that he comes from a poor environment of mercy. The dinner at the beginning of the second year with the talent scouts of a very high law firm is anthological (“Class tourism” he brilliantly calls it), including the anguish of not knowing that there could be a white wine chardonnay and other sauvignon white… He leaned towards the easiest to pronounce while discovering the mega-democratic “society of contacts” and the practical meaning of the expression “social capital”, without repressing the humor that permeates almost every page.
Scientific articles of The Yale Law Journal (which Vance himself would later edit) “sound like the instructions for a heater: dry, formulaic, and partly written in another language” (my father would say, more like Aramaic). But it also does not cut through the legacy of a violent, rude, and aggressive childhood: “Put two like me in the same house and you will surely have a radioactive accident,” because that legacy endures and acts, always ready to emerge in the form of aggressive impulsiveness, a snub, a brawl, or a head-on collision with a careless driver or an impertinent comment.
Eight years ago, Vance did not believe in the nonsense of Trumpist populism: “These problems of family, faith and culture are not like a Rubik’s cube, and I do not believe that there are magic solutions or innovative government programs to solve them once and for all.” The furious reaction of the Biden/Harris electoral campaign against the new candidate in an untimely statement is the desperate reaction to a truly intelligent political decision with winning music on the part of the Republicans: bad electoral news for November and at least today, no matter how you look at it, although Vance may also be the future that repositions the Republican Party in coordinates that expel unhinged, destructive and demagogic Trumpism. Indeed, it is more than gratifying that he convinced us eight years ago that “we can adjust how our social services treat families like mine,” to understand differently what the sense of extended family is in that environment, to better understand the obstacles that the kids encounter in the midst of chaos, poverty and structural violence. The democratic hope is that the Vance of yesterday is somewhere in the Vance of today, even if tactically hidden.