J.D. Vance: A Dangerous Politician

Having once been a Republican back in the days when truth mattered and Christofascists and overt racists were not welcome,  it is beyond disturbing to witness the lengths higly educated individuals will go to prostitute themselves to Donald Trump and the MAGA base solely for perceived political advantage.  A poster boy of this phenomenon is Trump backed J.D. Vance who is now the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio.  Of course, Vance has fellow Ivy League educated Republicans who have thrown truth and morality to the wind - think Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton for but two examples and then there is Princeton and Yale educated Justice Alito who wants to exault 13th century legal theories - as they brazenly seek to promote themselves with the MAGA base of religious extremistsand white supremacists.  Indeed, it's enough to make one wonder what is being taught at the Ivy League schools that they are turning out such morally deficient or religiously extreme individuals.  But back to Vance who has gone from being a Trump critic to giving Trump daily political fellatio.  A piece in Politico looks at Vance and the danger he poses if elected to the U.S. Senate.  Here are excerpts:

Hillbilly Elegy was published in the summer of 2016. It became a New York Times bestseller and a cultural sensation — and it made a celebrity of sorts out of J.D. Vance. He was for a time one of the main explainers to those on the left of what was to them the inexplicably successful presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. In the last six years, though, the title has turned into but a piece of Vance’s resume, a part of a quick clause that says who he is — Yale Law, venture capitalist, author of …

In the wake, though, of Vance’s victory this week in the wild and tightly contested Republican Senate primary in Ohio — one that makes him a favorite to get elected to the U.S. Senate come November — Hillbilly Elegy is newly relevant. And while legions of pundits and commentators focused the last few days on Trump’s role in boosting Vance, Silas House went back to the book.

House, the Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, one of the premier thinkers in and about the South and a bestselling writer in his own right, considers Hillbilly Elegy offensive and inauthentic. He sees it, and saw it from the start, as not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance. And it’s as meaningful now as it was when it first came out, House believes, because it helps show what kind of candidate Vance has been and what kind of senator he might be.

He’s dangerous. So is his book,” House said about Vance in a Tuesday night tweet.

“When I criticize it, sometimes conservatives accuse me of wanting to keep it out of readers’ hands,” he told me Thursday. . . . I am saying that I hope people who read it seek historical and cultural context. Every family story has value, but I wish he’d told that story without generalizing an entire place and people to fit his agenda.”

It’s a dangerous book because it’s a treatise in disguise. Lots of times when I would voice my opposition to the book, well-intentioned people, often liberal people, would say, “But it’s a memoir, it’s his family story — how can you negate his own story?” . . . But the problem is it is woven through with dog whistles about class and race, gender. And if your ears are attuned to those dog whistles, you know exactly what he’s saying. If you’re not, then it can read like a heartwarming rags-to-riches story. And everything that we’ve learned since the book came out sort of proves that it was just laying the groundwork for this political career.

One of the most troubling things to me about the book is that it talks a lot about unemployment and poverty, domestic violence, the opioid crisis, but it never gives you context for why those things exist the way they do in Appalachia. For anybody who really knows the region, it’s a deeply troubling book because it’s so misleading, and it lacks so much context, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

[T]he whole thing’s political in every way. The whole reason so many people responded to that book to help them understand the rise of Trump is because in a way it gave them exactly what they were looking for: easy answers instead of really complicated historical answers. And that’s why I think it’s so disingenuous and dangerous because it’s not true. It’s full of untruths, intentionally manipulative stories.

The first time I read it, it read like the launching of a political campaign to me. As someone who has read a lot of political memoirs, it felt that way. It’s an origin story, and to some degree it’s a superhero origin story that’s terribly condescending to the rest of his family. The gist of it is, “Well, I’m the one who made it out, I’m the one who’s successful. I had the same sort of opportunities they did, but I did it, and they didn’t.”

I think a lot of conservative people read that book and they really responded to the rags-to-riches aspect of it. I think a lot of liberal people read it and had a lot of their suspicions confirmed. Lots of times a book is what readers bring to it themselves.

Let’s say somebody’s on the fence about voting for Vance. I would hope they would read that book and see the dog whistles and see the lack of complexity, see the generalizations, see the outright falsehoods that are throughout the book. I mean, lots of times in the book when he’s talking about Appalachia, it’s almost like he’s never been to Appalachia.

And I think it’s so telling that this book was pushed as an Appalachian narrative when this man is two generations removed from Appalachia. . . . . there’s a market there, in a different way, for the idea of the hillbilly, more than there is for the idea of the Rust Belt. So that alone is manipulative in that it’s sold as an Appalachian story or a hillbilly story, and if you read the book, you realize that hardly any of it is set in Appalachia. He’s saying, I guess, that generationally you can’t escape Appalachia, because here he is, his grandparents left there when they were very young, his mother never lived there, he never lived there, and suddenly, after the book came out, he’s on every news show as the representative of a region that he barely knows.

The first thing of course is it made him kind of a household name for a whole lot of people. It’s a very popular book, and it put him on practically every news show, and at the time he became the representative for quote-unquote Trump country. He was the expert on Trump country. He was hoping to explain why this was happening for people who have no understanding of rural America, but think they do, who have no context for it. And when he wrote the book, he didn’t know he was going to need that Trump tap, but he did know that he would need this origin story. He did know that we love a rags-to-riches story. . . . but to me it just reads like a political launching pad book, and it’s certainly a treatise more than it is a memoir.

It’s dangerous because there’s such a lack of complexity in the book in a time when the national conversation lacks more and more nuance. There’s no nuance in the book. There’s a lot that’s false and intentionally misleading, and I always think that’s really dangerous when there’s intentional misinformation being shared. And I think he’s dangerous because he embodies all of that. And it seems to me that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to rise. And I can think of nothing more dangerous in a politician than that.