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THE LONG SHADOW OF JD VANCE’S HILLBILLY PATHOLOGY  
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Billy J. Stratton
July 16, 2024
LA Progressive
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_ When I read Vance’s book as a person born and raised in Eastern
Kentucky myself, something just didn’t seem right. _

,

 

After Andy Beshear [[link removed]]’s upset win
[[link removed]] over Matt
Bevin [[link removed]] in my home state of
Kentucky’s 2019 gubernatorial race (which I wrote about then
in _History News Network_
[[link removed]]),
some pundits were quick to dismiss his upset victory as little more
than an aberration
[[link removed]].
Others attempted to explain it away as a natural consequence of
an incompetent or unpopular
[[link removed]] incumbent,
or as a columnist for Louisville’s _Courier-Journal _claimed,
because Bevin was just a “jerk
[[link removed]].”

Ouch, lol, but since when did being unlikable become a detriment
within a political party where spitefulness and belligerence have come
to be worn like badges of honor by so many?

At the same time, commentators with more liberal leanings saw in
Beshear’s victory a sign of the GOP’s vulnerability
[[link removed]] heading
into the 2020 election. The outcome of which, as a whole, despite what
all those well-funded insurrectionists
[[link removed]],
proud boys, and dishonest election deniers
[[link removed]] still
claim, what? ahem, yeah still...,reinforced the validity of that
perspective.

Despite the successes Democrats enjoyed in the 2020
[[link removed]] and 2022
[[link removed]] election
cycles, America has only seemed to have sank deeper into the mire of
a toxic
[[link removed]] political
culture. This is potently reflected at the level of ideas and policy.
With outrage in response to a series of Supreme Court decisions issued
over the last three years not abating any time soon, social divisions
have become more deeply entrenched along ideological lines on issues
from abortion
[[link removed]], religion
[[link removed]] and
its influence on government affairs and the Second Amendment
[[link removed]],
to the status of Native tribal sovereignty
[[link removed]] and
the protection of the environment
[[link removed]].

Moreover, the atmosphere in which it has become commonplace to
baselessly question the most basic facts, scientific data and truth
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if not disregarding them altogether, seems to be spreading
[[link removed]].
While this way of (un)thinking has now seemed to have seeped into
practically every corner of American social life, it is, perhaps, most
palpable in the aforementioned anti-democratic election denialism
[[link removed]] being
bandied about by a significant portion of the populace regarding the
results of the 2020 Presidential election.

That Joe Biden so soundly defeated Donald Trump
[[link removed]] for the
presidency in the 2020 election by a margin of 74 electoral votes and
over 7 million popular votes, and the results can still be so
obstinately rejected by so many
[[link removed]],
remains not just a source of endless bafflement but also cause
for serious alarm
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These broader national issues aside, Beshear’s two gubernatorial
victories in Kentucky appear as a reason for optimism within this
discouraging context. For this positive development to be best
appreciated, though, we need to move beyond the shallow surfaces of
conventional wisdom and recognize that there may be good reason to
reconsider the blunt dividing lines that have been drawn
between rural and urban voters
[[link removed]],
along with those separated by regional boundaries
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as well.

It bears reminding that Beshear’s stunning win over Bevin, the
incumbent Republican Governor, hinged on a vote difference of less
than one half of one percentage point. To emphasize the razor-thin
margin this result represents, that’s a mere 5,136 votes out of a
total of 1,443,077
[[link removed]] votes cast.

[Andy Beshear Wins]

Beshear’s improved performance this time around against Kentucky’s
current Attorney General
[[link removed]], Daniel
Cameron [[link removed]] who was touting a law and
order
[[link removed]] agenda
in a region many continue to see as hostile to Democratic candidates
is even more remarkable. As of the time of writing, Beshear’s margin
is more than 5 points, translating to an advantage of more than 67,000
votes, with 98% of the ballots counted
[[link removed]].

The scope of Beshear’s latest victory, and the strategy deployed to
get him there, has even prompted some to start considering him as
a viable presidential candidate
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the Democrats in 2028. Although 2028 is quite a ways off, even as the
crow flies, Beshear possesses some natural advantages over others
already in this discussion, such as California’s Gavin Newsome
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in having a lower profile and by virtue of not being associated
with a state [[link removed]] that so
many conservatives have been conditioned to see as anathema
[[link removed]].

However one looks at it, his victory is an impressive outcome in
Kentucky, which Donald Trump carried by 30 points in 2016, and again
by 26 points in 2020. Such a result, especially given the significant
financial support Cameron received from Kentucky Senators Mitch
McConnel
[[link removed]] and Rand
Paul
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along with an endorsement from Trump
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reinforce the premise that there is something far more complicated at
play here than red state/blue state predispositions and the
assumptions they imply.

The assertion I previously advanced, that the ostensibly deep-red
regions of rural America made up of areas such as Eastern Kentucky may
not be as “reliable for Republicans and unwinnable for Democrats as
conventional wisdom suggests,” are bolstered by this week’s
results. In fact, the tally for Beshear this election cycle provides
additional encouragement as he secured wins in six rural counties
[[link removed]] in
the heart of coal country
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including Knott, Breathitt, Magoffin, and my home county of Floyd,
with the addition of two other counties he had previously lost to
Bevin
[[link removed]] in
Letcher and Perry.

While some may dismiss the significance of Beshear’s support in such
places due to their relatively small and disempowered
populations—something those living in Appalachia have long dealt
with—Tuesday’s results, nonetheless, run counter to the widely
accepted narrative that people who live in such communities have
closed themselves off to Democratic candidates and the policies they
advocate.

This is precisely the notion JD Vance, using Eastern Kentucky as his
prime example, deceptively advanced in his _New York
Times _best-selling book, _Hillbilly Elegy_, which was also adapted
into a film for Netflix by Ron Howard
[[link removed]]. Bolstered by
sympathetic commentary
[[link removed]] and interviewers
[[link removed]], along with an
inexplicable number of largely positive reviews as seen here
[[link removed]], here
[[link removed]], here
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appearing in some of America’s leading literary venues, as well as a
myriad of invitations to lecture and give commencement speeches at
universities across the country
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Vance was successful in pushing a thesis predicated on white working
class anger at failed Democratic policies as a means to shift the
discussion away from the racial discord long promoted within the
conservative movement as a strategy designed to drive a wedge
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lower and working class voters. An effort that surged into overdrive
with Barak Obama’s candidacy
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the 2008 presidential election
[[link removed]].

According to the story Vance conjured, the disenchantment of rural,
working class people in Eastern Kentucky—which also applies across
America more broadly—traces all the way back to the early seventies,
as he claims, “it was Greater Appalachia’s political reorientation
from Democrat to Republican that redefined American politics after
Nixon.” This sweeping assertion is what forms the ideological thesis
of _Hillbilly Elegy_.

A pseudo-memoir that asserts itself as an object lesson on the social
realities of white lower and working class frustration and anger that
ushered in a new political map, and which should have twice doomed
Beshear’s chances in 2019 and 2023, if accurate. It wasn’t.

When I read Vance’s book as a person born and raised in Eastern
Kentucky myself
[[link removed]],
something just didn’t seem right. From my experiences growing up in
Floyd County, Kentucky, just seventy miles east of the town of Jackson
where Vance’s family was from, many of the claims he made just
didn’t mesh with the reality I’d known. So, I did what anyone who
values critical thinking and truth should do, I went looking for
facts. What I soon found, and with not all that much effort, was that
Vance's central claim based on the stories he tells of Eastern
Kentucky from which he derives his claim about the shift in the
Appalachian electorate, was just plain wrong.

This judgement is born out in the presidential election results from
the very place in which Vance bases his conclusions, Breathitt County
[[link removed]], Kentucky, in which
Jackson is located. Even a cursory review of the election results
themselves, starting with the 1972 contest between Richard Nixon and
George McGovern, and up through to the 2016 election between Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton, refute Vance’s claims.

In fact, the election data shows that in every presidential election
from 1972 until, wait for it [[link removed]], 2008
and the candidacy of Barak Obama
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Democratic presidential candidate actually won Breathitt County by a
margin ranging from a low for Walter Mondale of 9 points in 1984
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to a high of 55 points for Jimmy Carter in 1976
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That the _actual_ shift in party allegiance from Democrat to
Republican, which Vance attempts to rewrite, only happened in the
first election in which an African American person stood as the
Democratic candidate for president is suggestive of a correlation that
is quite different from Vance’s.

This historical preference is emphasized by similarly wide margins of
victory for Democratic presidential candidates across several Eastern
Kentucky counties in 1980, 1992 and 2000. These results offer a much
different take on Vance’s recollection of his Pawpaw’s
“hatred” of “that son of a bitch Mondale.” Not as a reflection
of the Eastern Kentucky hillbilly attitude he purports to celebrate,
but that it was actually his grandfather who’d grown out of step
from the place of his birth.

The successes Democrats enjoyed in Breathitt County are reinforced by
the similarly large margins they scored in other Eastern Kentucky
counties, including Floyd County
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Here the margins were often wider, with Carter besting Reagan by 44
points in 1980
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along with a pair of wins by Bill Clinton, who notched a 53-point
margin over George H.W. Bush in 1992
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followed by with a 45-point advantage over Bob Dole in 1996
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In all these cases, the actual election data contradicts Vance’s
claims of a great electoral shift dating back to Nixon. And speaking
of Nixon, the results for Breathitt County also favored George
McGovern—the winner of a paltry 17 total electoral votes—by an
impressive 18%.

[Hillbilly Pathology]

Photo by Joshua Michaels on Unsplash
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As this data makes clear, the thesis Vance, who has since parlayed the
celebrity status brought by the success of his book into
being elected to the US Senate
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Ohio, offered as an alternative to the inconvenient reality of the
conservative exploitation of racial conflict amounted to nothing less
than the rewriting of the political and social history of the region.
If only people like Ron Howard or the editors at HarperCollins, and
many others who praised and lifted Vance’s story, because, perhaps,
they really wanted to believe him or at least connect and sympathize
with working class people, would have been more diligent in confirming
the facts at the time, then maybe they would not be feeling so
surprised
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what they have been hearing from Vance since
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But, then, again, what happens to the people of Eastern Kentucky
and Appalachia
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ever impacts those so well insulated and distant from life in the
hollows, mines and welfare lines. And that, of course, is another part
of the problem.

While refuting the ideologically driven and objectively false claims
Vance put forth in his book, the relevant facts also challenge much
conventional political wisdom that has led the people of Appalachia
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unfairly dismissed, and often derided, as a monolithic assemblage of
ignorant, close-minded, conservative voters. This is an assumption
that Beshear’s initial win in the Kentucky Governor’s race and
re-election serves to dispel.

The results reported from Tuesday’s contest between Beshear and
Cameron by election boards in many of these same counties across
Eastern Kentucky, including Breathitt, Macgoffin, Floyd, Knott, and
others in an area that has been most impacted by the coal mining
industry
[[link removed]],
give promise to the possibility that a region that was among the most
consistently reliable Democratic strongholds in America throughout the
latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century may not be
a lost cause for Democrats after all. And that, in reality, lower
and working class peoples
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live in rural communities across America, more broadly, might not be
as rigidly fixed in the red column
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the current political maps would have us think.

As these facts, as well as common sense, tell us though, viewpoints
built on hasty assumptions that cede the loss of whole populations and
regions only act to reinforce simplistic and deeply flawed ways of
perceiving America’s social reality. The danger therein, of course,
lies in the way that the resultant ideas and expectations, when left
unchallenged, can quickly transform into self-fulfilling prophesies
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This is especially true when the concerns of such people and the
problems they face are not attended
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while their loyalties are taken for granted.

Unfortunately, the acceptance and even tolerance of what has become a
default means of evaluating America’s voting population will simply
continue to feed gas to the fire of the negative political and social
feedback loops that debase public discourse and lead to the neglect
and marginalization of people from regions and states written off by
some strategists as unwinnable
[[link removed]].
It’s a process that, at the same time, will continue to hinder the
success of Democratic candidates
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while bolstering the feelings of alienation, isolation, hopelessness
and fear conservatives have proven so adept at seizing upon.

Despite how deep such dissent and division has been sown among people
who share a myriad of personal, economic and social interests,
however, as the results on voter initiatives to protect
the constitutional right to abortion and decriminalize recreational
marijuana [[link removed]] in Ohio
show, for those who have a real concern for freedom and justice, there
is still much to be optimistic about.

Ultimately, when set against the bogus
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lessons of Beshear’s election victories, as well as favorable
results for Democrats in Ohio
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offer a refreshing counter to the trends in Kentucky, and other states
like North Carolina and Ohio
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that commentators lament as turning more and more red on
those ubiquitous election maps
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the last few election cycles. How this plays out in the future will
depend not just on how much we learn from these lessons but also in
our willingness to see and respect the agency and humanity of others
instead of merely counting them as numbers.

_BILLY J. STRATTON is originally from Eastern Kentucky, the son of a
coal miner. He earned a PhD in American Indian Studies from the
University of Arizona and currently teaches contemporary Native
American/American literature, film, and critical theory in the
Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of
Denver. _

* JD Vance
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* U.S. Poverty
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* disinformation
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* discrimination
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