Do Hillbilly Lives Matter?
JD Vance's memoir is brat
JD Vance might someday be the United States’ first poaster president—a guy who consumes edgy anonymous blogs and speaks their ideas into reality. Case in point: he recently mused that easing car seat regulations might raise fertility rates. If you're a poaster yourself, it's hard not to feel a glimmer of recognition flipping through Hillbilly Elegy. Young JD, scrambling through social classes, keeps hitting the library, cramming social science to make sense of alien experiences.
It’s a tough pull between staying loyal to his roots and ditching them completely. There’s scant Elite Human Capital in Middletown, Ohio, so why did Vance return from his VC job in California to the land “where everyone worried about how they’d pay for Christmas”? It’s easy to imagine an alternate JD who followed the typical “hicklib” shuck-and-jive, railing against the homophobia and misogyny of the Scotch-Irish. And yet, his first footnote? Razib Khan. Vance knows exactly who he is, deep down.
Is We Getting A Self-Reflection?
Matt Lakeman nails the core question of Hillbilly Elegy: “To what extent are hillbillies responsible for their own poverty or social breakdown?” Vance offers no tidy politician’s answer. When he wrote it in 2016, he was still far from his first run for office in 2022—a stark contrast to Barack Obama, whose memoir hit shelves in 1995, the same year he entered the Illinois Senate race. Vance’s musings may be less satisfying but ring truer, and I’d argue they carry more aesthetic and literary merit.
Papaw’s rare breakdown strikes at the heart of an important question for hillbillies like me: How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?
The “hillbilly” branding invites presumptions against Vance’s intelligence, yet his capacity to hold contradictory thoughts and embrace nuance shines through. His willingness to accept both sympathy and shame strains against his perfunctory equation of hillbillies with blacks. In one attempt to counter “unfair” stereotypes, he writes: “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.” Can you imagine a single black thought leader reciprocating that generosity?
Just kidding. One improvement in 2020s politics is that fewer people are asking, “but what if the roles were reversed?” We’ve learned interracial empathy is a one-way street—nonblack beneficiaries are either a concession or an accident. Lakeman guesses that Vance “attributes Appalachian poverty to 10% external, 15% genetic, and 75% cultural.” For black Americans, though, this question is obsolete, with any answer other than “100% external” illegal under civil rights law’s disparate impact doctrine.
Whose Lives Matter?
Although I’ve highlighted Vance’s theorycel side, his memoir reveals him as a man of action too. (Get you a man who can do both!) When JD’s addict mother turned to the Just Be A Good Person types in her support group, the ones soothingly preaching that her pain pill habit wasn’t her fault, her 13-year old son grasped not only which belief was true but also which one had value. After all, this wasn’t just a question of blame—it was a question of whose families would continue down the generational line.
Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was a scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family. Oddly enough, it’s probably both: Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it. Mom was telling herself the truth, but the truth was not setting her free.
Vance’s blunt realism forces us to ask who holds value in a world where shared moral frameworks have collapsed. Nietzsche warned of this. His “death of God” concept presaged the unraveling of shared values—like the Christian belief that all lives are sacred. Today, “Black Lives Matter” has replaced the cross; “All Lives Matter” defies the moral consensus, and the rest is a battleground. The unborn have already lost—their lives deemed disposable, inconvenient to career women.
Now the question becomes: do rural white lives matter? Vote your answer Nov 5.