JD Vance and the American Elegy
Hillbilly Elegy, a book written by JD Vance, the current Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, was a best seller in 2016. Vance’s book was a “memoir” and story about the devastating problems in his family life and the white working class city of Middletown, Ohio in which he grew up.
Elegies are typically written to mourn loss, and to reflect upon and pay tribute to who or what was lost. Vance’s Elegy did not. It primarily placed blame on those “hillbillies” who were not doing well and succeeding in their lives.
As Becca Rothfeld notes in her recent July 23 Washington Post review of his work:
Vance acknowledged that jobs in Middletown were in short supply, but he ascribed that to a culture of “learned helplessness” and insisted that many of the city’s residents “choose not to work”. He claimed that our “eating and exercise habits seem designed to take us to an early grave.” When the poor took out “high interest credit cards and pay day loans” he faulted them for engaging in ‘irrational behavior without sparing any scorn for predatory financial institutions.
Vance was not going to be one of those hillbillies. After graduating from high school, he served in the Marines, graduated from Ohio State University, got his law degree from Yale, worked for a short time as a venture capitalist, was elected to be a U.S. senator from Ohio, and is now Donald Trump’s running mate to be elected to the second highest office in this country.
With his track record of accomplishments by the age of 40, Vance is in a position to be a leader in writing about and finding ways to address the American elegy we described in our blog posted in September 2016.
At that time, after examining the status of Americans throughout the country, we stated:
Those are the studies and statistics. But they do not tell the human stories of the tens millions of Americans who are affected by these cataclysmic changes. Those are the stories that provide the sad and complete picture of once vital manufacturing cities disappearing, inner city neighborhoods being hollowed out, and rural areas being devastated by drugs.
That is the American elegy. It is an elegy for the end of an era. The question is what to do about it.
There are no easy answers. But, there is one thing for certain.
This problem cannot be solved by looking backward or romanticizing the past.
Unfortunately, JD is looking backward and romanticizing the past. That past is one in which women stayed home, had children, and took care of the kids.
This perspective was revealed by Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment which has gone viral in media coverage since it was disclosed. NPR reports that:
In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
It’s not just “childless cat ladies” who are problematic for Vance. It’s also “childless people.” Reporting for The Hill, Lauren Sforza writes:
In a 2020 conservative podcast, Vance suggested “childless people” in the country’s leadership were “more sociopathic” than those with children.
“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said on the podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”
“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he said.
Vance has also called for extra votes for families that have children at home under the age of 18. He wants those parents to be able to cast a vote for each child they have under that age. According to Zack Beauchamp of Vox:
The “extra votes for parents” proposal came in a 2021 speech sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that encourages college students to engage with right-wing ideas. About halfway through the speech, Vance says that he wants to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.”
Vance’s political posturing and attacks on the left are understandable. What is not understandable is his attacks on the “childless” and why he believes his law degree qualifies him to be a psychologist and sociologist. What is also not understandable, given his roots, is his continuing to ignore the needs of the tens of millions of people in this country today who need assistance and support.
As we noted in our 2016 blog, “Economic anxiety, diminishing circumstances, income and opportunity inequality, declining aspirations and growing concerns about the future know no ethnic, racial, or geographic boundaries.”
In 2024, due to a variety of factors including inflation, supply chain shortages, and price increases and gouging, those conditions still remain, and, in many cases, have worsened.
Jeffrey Fuhrer documents the economic impact of these factors on the poor today in his research article “The Cost of Being Poor is Rising” for the Brookings Institution. Fuhrer highlights the following points at the beginning of that article:
- An alarming fraction of families garner insufficient resources to pay for basic necessities — more than one-third overall, and over one-half for families of color.
- One reason for this shortfall of resources is that the cost of necessities — food, housing, clothing, transportation — has risen markedly faster than the cost of other goods and services. I estimate that prices of necessities have risen 36% faster than other goods and services over the past 60 years.
- Combining rising prices and the more sluggish increase in low incomes reveals that use of the “wrong” price index to deflate low incomes results in an 18 -28% over-estimate of purchasing power adjusted incomes over the past 50 years.
We assume that many of those poor people are women with children and families with children. We also assume that helping them are not on V.P. candidate Vance’s radar screen.
We believe this would be the case because Democrats, and not Republicans, have been leaders in advocating for providing a hand-up to those in poverty. We also believe it would be the case because as he disclosed in his best-selling, money-making, and self-promoting Hillbilly Elegy, Vance faults and blames those in poverty for not being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as he did.
In closing, there needs to be an American elegy written for the poor, lower-income, and middle class workers. More importantly, a plan and a framework need to be put in place to lift them up and to empower them to work toward accomplishing their goals and achieving their version of the American dream.
JD Vance will do neither. His American elegy will be about one American. That American will be JD.
Originally published by the Frank Islam Institute for 21st Century Citizenship. For more information on what 21st century citizenship entails, and to see exemplars from around the world, please visit our website.
