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‘HE’S DANGEROUS. SO IS HIS BOOK.’  
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Michael Kruse
May 6, 2022
Politico
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_ An Appalachian writer says Hillbilly Elegy played to bogus notions
on the left and right about the impoverished region. The only thing
that benefited was Vance’s political career. _

J.D. Vance arrives onstage after winning the Senate primary on May 3,
2022 in Cincinnati, Ohio., Photo: Drew Angerer // Politico

 

H_illbilly Elegy_ was published in the summer of 2016
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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
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week in the wild and tightly contested Republican Senate primary in
Ohio
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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
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the last few days on Trump’s role
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boosting Vance, Silas House
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back to the book.

House, the Appalachian Studies chair
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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.

 
Silas House, chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, Kentucky,
believes “Hillbilly Elegy” tells us what kind of senator Vance
could be.  (Photo: C. Williams  //  Politico)
“He’s dangerous. So is his book,” House said about Vance in a
Tuesday night tweet
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“When I criticize it, sometimes conservatives accuse me of wanting
to keep it out of readers’ hands,” he told me Thursday. “I want
to make it clear that I am in no way saying the book should be banned
or anything remotely like that. But 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.”

_This interview has been edited for length and clarity._

 

MICHAEL KRUSE: Why is he dangerous and why is his book dangerous?

SILAS HOUSE: 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?” My response to that is I don’t negate the family
story, and I think that if it had just been a memoir, it would be a
powerful piece of writing and it would be his own proof. 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.

There’s a lot of talk right now about how he was so anti-Trump, and
now, of course, he’s riding on the Trump bump and all that. But even
if he was anti-Trump from the beginning, he was always pushing ideas
that Trumpers really latch onto — like the idea of welfare queens,
or this idea that people in Appalachia just don’t want to work, et
cetera. 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.

KRUSE: Liberals or other people sort of aghast by the rise of Trump,
looking for explanations, seemed to find some of what they were
looking for in that book — but in your estimation, from the get-go,
it wasn’t really that at all. It was the beginning of a national
political rise of Vance’s own?

HOUSE: Absolutely. The “explanation” was these people are just
stupid, these people are just lazy, these people aren’t pulling
themselves up by their bootstraps — without mentioning that they
were not born with any boots to begin with. And so the 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.

KRUSE: Did you read it this way the first time you read it?

HOUSE: I read it as soon as it came out, even before it had become
just a huge book, because I was raised really close to where his
grandparents are from. And as soon as I read it, my antenna’s going
up all over the place, because we’re not even three or four pages in
and he’s already generalizing. For instance, there’s a scene where
he talks about his uncles, who are these drunks who fight everybody
and they beat their wives, and then he calls them the embodiment of
the Appalachian man. Well, as an Appalachian man, that’s deeply
troubling to me, because that doesn’t embody Appalachian masculinity
as I know it. It does embody the stereotypes of Appalachian
masculinity over the last 150 years of media. And that’s sort of
what I mean. It just sort of presses the buttons that are already
there and made people feel really satisfied, in that it’s sort of
like, “Oh, well, I knew this all along, and now somebody is
solidifying it for me.”

 
Clockwise from top: J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and author,
autographs a book after a rally last July in Middletown, Ohio;
Vance’s childhood home in Middletown; a steel plant in Middletown in
2008.  (AP Photos  //  Politico)
KRUSE: Do you think he wrote that book explicitly as a potential
political jumping-off point? Or did he see in the _reaction to
it_ political opportunity?

HOUSE: 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.”

KRUSE: Why, if Vance was writing that book in some sense as an almost
disguised political beginning, did he spend chunks of the early Trump
era saying the things he said about Trump?

HOUSE: I think because he’s a total opportunist, and when he was
saying that, lots of people were saying that, and I feel like he was
sure that Trump was just a blip that would go away and he didn’t
understand the way that Trump appeal was going to go so wide.

KRUSE: Given the results in Ohio this week, how do you think people
should be rereading and reconsidering _Hillbilly Elegy_?

HOUSE: I guess it depends on their political persuasion. 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. For instance, early on in the book, he says
that in Appalachia when there’s a funeral everybody stops their car
gets out of their car and stands on the side of the road. Well, I’ve
lived in Appalachia my whole life until the past three years, and
I’ve never seen that happen. What does happen is people pull over
sort of to the side of the road, the same way you would if an
ambulance was coming, and they stop as a moment of respect. Nobody
gets out of their car.

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. This is a Rust Belt story, but Appalachian stories,
Appalachian literature, is its own genre. In early cinema, one of the
most popular movie genres was “hillbilly movies.” We still have a
genre of horror that’s very popular called “hillbilly horror.”
So 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.

 
Clockwise from top: Vance greets supporters during a rally on April
23 in Delaware, Ohio; a supporter attends a primary election night
event for Vance on May 3 in Cincinnati; voting stickers for Ohioans
who have cast their ballots during primary voting are displayed in
Lordstown, Ohio, on May 3. 
KRUSE: And why do you think he did that? Was there something
calculated or beneficial about labeling it that way rather than as the
Rust Belt?

HOUSE: Think about all of the examples of hillbilly life that we know
in the media, whether it be “Deliverance” or “The Beverly
Hillbillies” or “Ozark.” It’s a constant in media over the
last 150 years. I can’t really think of Rust Belt narratives like
that, that are popular in the American consciousness. So I think he
did it just because there was that market that is very firmly there
and it’s a part of American consciousness. It’s one of the biggest
selling nonfiction books in the last, I don’t know, 30 or 40 years,
so it worked.

KRUSE: I guess the question is did it work as a piece of political
fuel?

HOUSE: I read it that way because it’s my job to read any piece of
literature or view any media coming out of the region. It’s my job
to analyze it and think about what are the intentions of this piece?
What is the historical and cultural context of this piece of media?
Are some of these stereotypes just coming out of ignorance, or are
they intentional?

KRUSE: If this was, from the get-go, even in the mind of Vance, a
political launching pad, it probably wasn’t going to be a successful
political launching pad until April 15, when Trump endorsed him. I
think it’s fair to say coming out of the results in Ohio that Vance
was not going to win without that. It took the Trump tap to take him
and his origin story and his sort of newfound populist rhetoric across
the finish line. Is there anything that was in that book that helped
him win as opposed to just the Trump endorsement?

HOUSE: 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. There’s not hardly anything Americans love
more than that. Again, I do not know for sure, but to me it just reads
like a political launching pad book, and it’s certainly a treatise
more than it is a memoir.

 
Former President Donald Trump listens as J.D. Vance speaks during a
rally hosted by the former president at the Delaware County
Fairgrounds on April 23 in Delaware, Ohio.  (Photo: Drew Angerer  //
 Politico)
KRUSE: And by treatise you mean exactly what in this context?

HOUSE: An orchestrated political statement.

KRUSE: And he’s not trying to explain the rise of Trump so much as
he’s trying to start his own political rise?

HOUSE: Yes. And I think that a lot of Republicans and probably many
who advised Trump at the time were like, “These are the issues
we’ve got to latch onto. We have to latch onto rural
dissatisfaction, we have to latch onto the employment numbers, we have
to latch onto welfare issues, et cetera.”

KRUSE: So, in some weird way, Vance actually is not some kind of phony
johnny-come-lately to the Trump style of politics. Vance
was _there_ before many people, most people, kind of
even _recognized_ he was there.

HOUSE: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the main things that I
would want to put a fine line under. He, ever since _Hillbilly
Elegy_, has always embodied Trumper ideas, even before there was such
a thing.

KRUSE: So, just to return to the original contention, why does all of
this make Vance and his book _dangerous_, as we look forward to
the general election
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against Tim Ryan
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Ohio?

HOUSE: 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.

_[MICHAEL KRUSE is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO
Magazine.]_

* J.D. Vance
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* Donald Trump
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* GOP
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* MAGA
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* Republican Party
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* Appalachia
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* Fascism
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* Right-wing politics
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* Right-wing agenda
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* Project 2025
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* Working Class
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* white alienation
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* South
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* Lost Cause
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* Confederacy
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* Hillbilly Elegy
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* poor white voters
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