JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. William Collins 2020, paperback; first published 2016. Library copy

The current Vice President of the US, JD Vance, wrote this when he was just 31. He only entered politics three years ago. How did he manage such a meteoric rise?

Vance moved to industrial Ohio from rural poverty in Kentucky, and was brought up in a frighteningly dysfunctional family. It was a rust belt town that was ‘haemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember’. Few of his extended family attended college. Kids like him, he writes in the introduction, ‘face a grim future…if they’re lucky, they’ll avoid welfare, and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small home town just last year’.

His mother had numerous failed marriages and relationships, and descended into addiction. All he knew in his home and community was violence, neglect and hopelessness. His mother would subject him to alternating periods of sentimental affection and violent outbursts.

On one occasion she told him as she drove them that she was going to crash the car and kill them both – he’d said or done something that annoyed her. He escaped and called for help at a stranger’s house. His mother was arrested, and only saved from jail by his lying on her behalf. That was the hillbilly code he had ingrained into him: stick up for your own.

In this highly unstable early period of his life he ‘nearly failed out of high school’ and ‘gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me.’ Luckily for him, a ‘handful of loving people’ helped, encouraged and saved him: he’s not, he insists, a specially gifted person or a genius. The purpose of the book is, he suggests, that ‘I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.’

The tough Scots-Irish subgroup of immigrants to which he says his ancestors belonged (although others have disputed these claims about his ancestry), are the so-called hillbillies (after King William – ‘Billy’ – of Orange, the Protestant monarch invited to take the British throne to keep out the pesky Catholic line), ‘rednecks or white trash…I call them neighbours, friends, and family’. They have, he claims, that ‘intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country.’

This is the man who is now promulgating vindictive anti-immigrant policies; I suppose he doesn’t class his forebears as ‘real’ immigrants. But then he’s also converted to Catholicism, so can’t be described as particularly loyal to the values of his ancestors, or technically claim to be a hill-Billy.

The darker side of this mentality he outlines is that ‘we do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or most important, how they talk.’ There are some pretty unpleasant, clearer terms for views like that. This is a community, he adds, leaving aside these factors, returning to his unconvincing attempt at sympathy, whose fortunes seem ‘dimmest, from low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction’; ‘my home’, he states, ‘is a hub of misery.’

After moving in with his grandmother, however, he experienced for the first time a period of relative stability. She encouraged him to do well at school. He had a spell in the marines as a media relations specialist. From there he went to university, then to Yale law school.

This was a different world, and he felt out of place – a ‘cultural emigrant from one group to the other’. But he learned the lesson that might explain his current political position: how to be a chameleon, do and say the right thing to impress powerful, influential people. Expediency, cold-eyed pragmatism. He adds, tellingly, that ‘sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn.’ When he pauses the academic references and the polished prose style, his visceral anger and resentment burn through this scathing memoir.

He claims to be writing not just a memoir of his rise from misery and turmoil to success, acceptance and wealth, but also a sociological analysis of why the rural white poor communities like his turned away from voting Democrat to supporting the Republican party, and, by inference, though his name isn’t mentioned, Donald Trump.

What then is his message? He portrays these ‘poor white trash’ as bringing about much of their own deprivation and failure – a conservative attitude that’s quick to blame the poor for their own plight. He describes many of them as lazy, workshy, ‘welfare queens’, people who are quick to blame the government, the rise of China as an economic force and the decline of American industry, anyone and anything rather than take responsibility for their own lives. He mentions a young man and his pregnant girlfriend who worked in the same warehouse as him when he was young; they were habitually late for work, took unfeasibly long rest breaks, and were eventually sacked for being so feckless and irresponsible. Young men like that, he says, are ‘immune to hard work’, lack agency, yet feel the victims.

People in his community were no good at budgeting. They’d buy expensive items like cars and TVs that they couldn’t afford. People on welfare had cell phones when he, who was working while studying, couldn’t afford one. At Christmas they’d splash out on costly gifts for their children, gambling on getting a tax refund or taking out a punitive payday loan to cover the cost.

At the same time, paradoxically, he lauds what he sees as their ‘good’ points (the loyalties mentioned above), finding fault with a system in which family instability and opioid addiction make it almost impossible for most kids like him to get out of the poverty trap they’re stuck in. Public policy can help, he concedes, but ‘there is no government that can fix these problems for us. We created them, and only we can fix them.’

There are some glaring inconsistencies in these conclusions, then. It’s possible from reading this depressingly miserable memoir to perceive a man who’s proud of his own achievement – maybe even a bit arrogant and boastful about it. Yet he’s also full of simmering disgust with what he sees as the violent, profligate people from his background who he also claims to admire and sympathise with. He insists that they’re both not to blame for their own misery, but also irresponsible and habitually making the bad choices that he managed eventually to avoid.

This is the man who’s just a heartbeat away from the presidency. I can see why he changed his anti-Trump stance of a few years ago, and now chooses to voice the venomous opinions he claims to espouse. He’s a clever man who will say and do whatever is necessary to climb to the top, and this memoir reveals why he’s such a dangerous, angry force, not just for American politics and society, but for the world.