I’ve been reflecting on my previous post on JD Vance’s powerful memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and have since been looking back through the book (even had to renew it at my local library, as it had reached its due back date). I’d like to add a few more points and quotations; I hope they’ll provide a bit more clarity and detail about what to expect from the book, and what I deduced about its strengths and weaknesses.

 First I’d recommend The Rest is Politics podcast. Rory Stewart (former Tory MP and leadership candidate – he lost to that Trump-light buffoon Boris Johnson) – and Alastair Campbell (former journalist, then press secretary and strategy adviser to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair) present a regular discussion about current political and related topics. Coming from different positions on the political spectrum, they represent a refreshing ability to ‘agree disagreeably’, listening respectfully to the arguments the other presents, and taking issue with them productively – avoiding the polarised, often nastily aggressive polemic of so many online contributors to political discourse.

Their mini-series on JD Vance runs to six episodes, moving more or less chronologically through Vance’s life and career. The first, therefore, focuses largely on his childhood and early adult life, using Hillbilly Elegy as a basic reference point. They offer some perceptive and strongly expressed insights. It’s only available to subscribers to the podcast, but is well worth checking out if you’re able. Otherwise I’d recommend subscribing to the free platform (with ads), where their other episodes are available. Just use your usual means of accessing podcasts.

They begin by reminding us that before entering politics 3 years ago Vance said he was a ‘never Trump guy, I never liked him’, who likened the current president to Hitler, saying ‘he’s leading the white working class to a very dark place’, but subsequently reversed that position, saying he had been ‘wrong about’ Trump. He’s now foremost among the fawning sycophants who Trump has surrounded himself with in the White House. If he has to choose between his ‘intellectual statements and power he chooses power every time’ (R. Stewart).

He’s found it expedient (for his own ambitions) to side wholeheartedly now with the alt right, advocating that America would be best served by adopting the attitudes of the billionaire tech bros like Peter Thiel – who was one of the biggest financial backers to his early political career: that democracy has failed, and that America would be best served by a regime run by a CEO figure, or, even better, a monarch. At present that would mean, Vance poses as believing, DJT. But ultimately, he has his sights on that role for himself.

Bearing all this in mind as context, here are a few more snippets from the book that stood out for me when I revisited it.

I didn’t say much last time about what Vance says about his years in the marines (before he went to university). He says it was there that he learnt that his mind had previously somehow ‘confused lack of effort’ with ‘inability’; this is why he now says what he’d most like to change about the white working class is ‘the feeling that our choices don’t matter’. Seeing the joy shown by an Iraqi child to whom he’d given a simple gift summed up for him that his experience in the military taught him to value his home country as ‘the greatest’, and to ‘live like an adult’.

That doesn’t seem to be a lesson, however, that determines his behaviour now: witness that belittling performance with the president of Ukraine in February, which was like that of a schoolyard bully, a petulant, vindictive attack dog for his master.

Reflecting on his childhood upbringing, he says ‘Our homes are a chaotic mess’ – meaning in particular the constant violence, fighting, alcohol and drug abuse, serial maternal relationships (his mother was a typical example of creating a ‘revolving door of father figures’). He identifies one of the key reasons for Appalachian kids doing less well at school is this instability at home, evidently not an environment in which studying conscientiously is valued or encouraged. He even admits that he himself considered working hard at school was a feminine trait; for a tough hillbilly boy like him it would invite accusations that he was a ‘pussy’.

I wrote last time about the positive influence his ‘Mamaw’ (grandmother) had when he left his mother’s chaotic home. She and ‘Papaw’ represented one type of hillbilly person: ‘old-fashioned, quietly faithful [though he says Mamaw rarely attended church], self-reliant, hardworking’. Then there’s the other type, as exemplified by his Mom – ‘and, increasingly, the entire neighbourhood…consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful’.

Of his love for a fellow student at Yale, Usha, who went on to become his wife and the mother to their three children, he says that he found it difficult at first to commit – he wasn’t good at relationships. He’d try to break up with her, but she’d resist; he’d scream and yell at her, then realised this is the behaviour of his mother that had so traumatised and upset him as a child. He was becoming, he realised, ‘the monster in your closet’.

I’ll end with a final thought. He talks about the ‘fight or flight’ impulses, often destructive, caused by childhood trauma (‘adverse childhood experiences’, psychologists call them), particularly prevalent in his hillbilly community, and the devastating impact these have on those children’s later lives: doing badly at school, relationship problems as adults, anxiety, depression, obesity – even ill health and diseases. ‘Chaos begets chaos’.

He suggests that such experiences caused him to give in to an instinctively violent reaction to any ‘perceived slight’ or insult. He cites a road rage incident he’d been involved in when driving with Usha. A driver in another car cut him up; he honked, and the guy ‘flipped [him] off’ – presumably gave him the finger gesture. Stopped at a red light, he opened his car door with the intention of confronting this driver, ‘and fighting the guy if necessary’. But ‘common sense prevailed’, he got back in the car, and Usha was proud of him for ‘not acting like a lunatic’ and ‘resisting my natural instinct’. The guy had ‘insulted my honor, and it was on that honor that nearly every element of my happiness depended as a child.’ Real men stand up and fight when involved in such incidents, was his community’s code.

So much of this provides useful context for and insights into the ways we see Vance pursuing his career as VP. That bullying and humiliating of President Zelensky in the oval office last February. His crude gibe about Democrats being led by ‘childless cat ladies’ who want to make Americans’ lives as miserable as their own. His advocacy of parenthood as a prerequisite for the right to vote, because only those who are parents have the wherewithal to merit a stake in the electoral system. This is the guy whose portrayal of his feckless, drug-addicted mother is hair-raisingly negative.

I’m suggesting, then, as Rory and Alastair conclude, that this man is fuelled by anger, resentment, scorching intolerance and vaulting ambition. He’s also far smarter than his boss, and this makes him so much more dangerous, as I concluded last time, for the Europe that he openly despises, and the wider world, about which he cares little if it doesn’t serve to advance his own interests, and, less importantly, those of his country. He says he loathes elites (especially the liberals), yet has been sponsored and encouraged by super-wealthy and powerful figures like Thiel.

His memoir is a fascinating read as a testament to his ultimate ability to escape from that miserable life of dysfunctional homes and general hopelessness, aided by some loving family members and friends, to rise to the Yale law school (and now the second highest political position in the land). In these posts I’ve also tried to show how it provides evidence of how his experience taught him to abandon any kind of ethics, principles or the usual moral code that we’d hope motivates those who lead our countries, and in Vance’s case, arguably the most powerful country in the world.