Reading J.D. Vance

In​ the first pages of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), J.D. Vance admits that he’s ‘especially skilful’ at charming older men. His mother has had many boyfriends, as well as five husbands, and Vance spent his childhood ‘navigating various father figures’. He flattered them, ‘pretended to like them’, and would pretend to like whatever it was that they liked:

With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool – so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of ‘girliness’, I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things was really true. I hated earrings. I hated police cars and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.

Vance’s parents, Beverly and Donald Bowman, separated ‘around the time I started walking’, and he went years without seeing his father. ‘He became kind of a phantom.’ His mother wanted to ‘erase any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour his maternal grandparents. Really, he wishes that he could have just stayed a Bowman. He’s been told that his father was a heavy drinker who hit his mother, but that doesn’t faze him – ‘I suspect that they were physically abusive to each other in the way that Mom and most of her men were: a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more.’ In 2021, he told pupils at a Christian high school that

recognition that marriage was sacred, I think, was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together, and when it disappeared, unfortunately, a lot of kids suffered. And this is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is this idea that, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them, and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m sceptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And I think that’s what all of us should be honest about. We’ve run this experiment in real time and what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.

Donald Bowman died last year, and his obituary remembers him as a ‘family man’ and ‘spiritual father and mentor to many’. After his divorce from Vance’s mother, he stopped drinking, became an evangelical Christian and started his own construction business, ‘building beautiful custom homes’. His second marriage, to Cheryl Bowman, ‘the love of his life’, lasted for 35 years, until his death – Vance remembers seeing them together, and was struck by their ‘almost jarring serenity’, the way they ‘rarely raised their voices at each other and never resorted to the brutal insults that were commonplace in Mom’s house’. Why couldn’t Vance’s mother have hung in there? Why had the law made it easy for her to dissolve not just a contractual obligation, but a covenant before God? (Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019.)

Instead she became ‘increasingly erratic’, which Vance sometimes seems to suggest is the plight of all single parents. Once, in the car with her, ‘she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both.’ She lost a nursing job after she rollerbladed through the hospital emergency room, high on painkillers. Vance likes to connect his mother’s drug problem to US immigration policy, claiming in one campaign ad that he ‘nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border’, though it seems that she mostly stole opiates from her patients. To pass a drug test to keep her nursing licence, she made Vance give her a sample of his urine. But ‘of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.’ His mother seems to have fought with all of them, and Vance was sometimes drawn in. He was nine years old when he punched one of his stepfathers in the face: ‘My intervention somehow ended the fight.’ He remembers ‘always walking on eggshells … a stepdad or a boyfriend could come home from work in a bad mood, and it would be like a battle royal for the next four or five hours.’ It has left him easily triggered: ‘The fight-or-flight response is a destructive constant companion … the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated – the switch flipped indefinitely.’ He worries that he’s ‘hard-wired for conflict’ – that any ‘perceived slight’ might set him off. He thinks his own marriage would be a ‘radioactive situation’ if his wife, Usha, hadn’t ‘learned how to manage me’: ‘The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion – I can be defused, but only with skill and precision.’ He once considered trying therapy but couldn’t face it: ‘Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit.’

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance is still trying to work it out – what was his mother’s fault? What was America’s? He started writing the memoir while he was a student at Yale Law School, where he studied with Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), which explores the reason ‘Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids’. His book, which Chua helped him to get published, is a kind of counterpart: why does the American white working class produce so many losers? Particularly dysfunctional, he argues, are his own people – the ‘Scots-Irish hillbillies’ who settled in Eastern Kentucky. He thinks that it wasn’t only his mother who ‘lacked even a modicum of temper control’, but nearly all the adults he grew up around – ‘seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life.’

These days Vance refers to his hillbilly brethren as ‘very hardworking people, and they’re very good people’, and he blames Kamala Harris for shipping their jobs to China and Mexico, and illegal immigrants for seizing on what little is left (when not too busy fricasseeing their cats). But in his memoir he argues that perfectly decent jobs are in abundance, but ‘too many young men immune to hard work’ are making ‘good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time’. One summer he worked in a tile warehouse and saw first-hand a ‘young man with every reason to work – a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way – carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance’. He often didn’t bother to turn up, and when he did, took too many bathroom breaks. ‘You can walk through a town where 30 per cent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.’ In his grandparents’ hometown in Kentucky, there’s ‘at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them’. And it wasn’t just that they had no work ethic: ‘Our homes are a chaotic mess.’ ‘Our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave, and it’s working.’ ‘We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game.’ ‘We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents.’ ‘At least one member of the family uses drugs – sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children.’ ‘We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk.’ The white working class needed to admit that its culture was defective and to emulate people who were doing better. Chinese immigrants didn’t have more money than they did, but, unlike his mother, they knew not to put Pepsi in baby bottles. He noted that girls were doing better than boys and seemed to sympathise with cat ladies: ‘The reason many young working-class women aren’t getting married isn’t that the tax code gives them incentives to stay single. It’s that too many of their male counterparts aren’t worth marrying.’

Vance thinks that the ‘trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt’. He’s often unsure that he’s doing the right thing, or that he really believes what he believes. One of the more remarkable sentences in Hillbilly Elegy is ‘I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay.’ Before becoming a Catholic, he’d been both a ‘devoted convert’ to Young Earth Creationism (‘I learned about millennialist prophecy and convinced myself that the world would end in 2007’) and an atheist who revered Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and was certain (until he wasn’t) that only ‘dumb people were Christians’.

Vance knows he’s good at appearing confident, even cocky, but suggests that it’s really ‘bitterness masquerading as arrogance’. He copes by latching on to the most powerful person in the room. For most of his childhood, that was his maternal grandmother, Mamaw Vance, the ‘pistol-packing lunatic’ who was the head of his family. In speeches, and in the Netflix movie of his life, Vance credits her with saving him from the ‘grim future’ that otherwise awaited him, one in which he never leaves Ohio or tells off Taylor Swift. She made him do his homework and kept him away from the local kids who smoked marijuana, threatening that ‘if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.’ He believed that she would do it: as a child she’d shot a man in the leg to stop him from stealing her family’s cow; as a young woman, unhappy in her marriage, she once ‘calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match and dropped it on his chest’. Vance’s mother, then eleven, ‘jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life’. He comes close to acknowledging that his grandparents’ ‘violent marriage’ damaged his mother, but ultimately decides that he’s proud of them for honouring their wedding vows. They sometimes lived in separate houses, but never divorced.

At Yale, where Vance felt like a ‘cultural alien’, he learned that he could entertain his classmates with Mamaw and Papaw stories. He’s still doing it: at the Republican National Convention he spoke of clearing out his grandmother’s house after her death and finding nineteen loaded handguns. He gave this a patriotic spin:

Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house. Under her bed, in her closet. In the silverware drawer. And we wondered what was going on, and it occurred to us that towards the end of her life, Mamaw couldn’t get around very well. And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arms’ length of whatever she needed to protect her family. That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance watches TV and plays a ‘nerdy collectible card game called Magic’ but otherwise seems to have few hobbies or interests. ‘I never found a passion,’ he says. ‘I’m just not the sort of person that is ever going to feel like that.’ He wasn’t interested in politics, though sometimes says that his first inkling that he might lean conservative came when he worked part-time at a grocery store as a teenager. He resented the way customers ‘gamed the welfare system’, as he saw it: ‘Our drug-addict neighbour would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.’ His grades in high school weren’t impressive – he says that he nearly dropped out – and when he wasn’t sure what to do afterwards, a cousin in the Marines persuaded him to enlist. ‘I knew that, most of all, I had no other choice. There was college, or nothing, or the Marines, and I didn’t like either of the first two options.’ He credits the military for teaching him what his family should have – ‘the Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene or personal finance’ – all true in his case, and he’s grateful. He was assigned to public affairs – they taught him how to speak with ‘TV cameras shoved in my face’. (He never saw combat.) The GI Bill paid for him to go to Ohio State, and he decided that he wanted to do well enough to get into law school – not because he had any real interest in the law, he says, but he wanted to make money, and he didn’t have a better idea of how to go about it. Growing up, ‘the “rich kids” were born to either doctors or lawyers, and I didn’t want to work with blood.’ There weren’t many Republicans in his Yale class, but his classmates thought of him as a nice one. He wrote in the New York Times about his admiration for Barack Obama, and a classmate, Sofia Nelson, remembers that whatever Vance’s qualms about abortion, ‘what he relayed to me is what his grandmother had taught him, which is that you can never know what situation a woman is in when she’s making that difficult decision. And it’s not the government’s business, essentially.’

The narrator of Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white people and added some about being called to public service. He was still working on the book after he finished law school, uncertain about his next steps. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel – who once answered a question about his interest in anti-ageing blood transfusions with the words ‘I am not a vampire’ – doesn’t appear in the book, though he’s listed in the acknowledgments. But Vance now says that hearing Thiel speak on campus in 2011 ‘remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School’ – he met his wife there too. Vance sent Thiel a mash note afterwards (one of Vance’s former friends remembers him spending hours googling variations of ‘PeterThiel@’ until he found his email address), which led to a meeting, then a job in Silicon Valley at Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (2021), Max Chafkin argues that Thiel treats ‘life like a chess game’ with ‘his friends, his business partners and his portfolio companies as means to an end’. His political philosophy is complicated and not entirely coherent – but, in the main, according to Chafkin, it ‘combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics’ that are sometimes indistinguishable from white supremacy. He’s often described as an ultra-libertarian, but he argues that the US should spend much more money on the military, especially via a tech company he co-owns. He’s also a Christian, and Vance has said that Thiel brought him to Christ – listening to Thiel speak and wondering ‘where his religious belief came from’ was the first step, he claims, on an intellectual journey that led to the Roman Catholic Church, and also, eventually, to Donald Trump.

Hillbilly Elegy was published in the summer of 2016, just as Trump was being confirmed as the Republican nominee for president. While still working for Thiel, Vance put himself forward as the man who could explain to liberal America why rural conservatives were backing a decadent New Yorker who was pledging to cut taxes for billionaires. Vance said that he didn’t expect Trump to beat Hillary Clinton, and wrote – many times, in many places – that he thought Trump was unfit for office and that his ‘actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd’. But he also acknowledged that ‘parts of his candidacy really … spoke to me’ – Trump’s chief Republican challenger, Jeb Bush, wouldn’t admit how much his family had screwed up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Vance said that his relatives enjoyed seeing Trump ‘raising the proverbial middle finger to a lot of the people that they wish they could have raised their middle finger to but they didn’t have the platform to do it’. The New York Times gave Vance a column. In the New Republic, he was called ‘the man of the hour, maybe the year’, appearing on almost every news channel as a ‘kind of Rosetta Stone for blue America to interpret that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter’. When Vance announced that he was moving to Ohio, the rumour was that he was eyeing a run for office, probably a senate seat. Then Trump won – surprise! There was no path for a Never Trumper to win a Republican primary, even with Thiel’s gazillions behind him.

Vance stopped writing for the New York Times, deleted dozens of social media posts and started appearing on right-wing podcasts. With backing from Thiel, he launched his own venture capital fund, and spent the Trump years getting rich, becoming Catholic and reckoning with the failures of liberalism. He announced that American institutions (all of them) were so corrupted by ‘garbage liberal elite culture’ that it was necessary for conservatives ‘of incredible courage’ to ‘seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left’. The media, universities, corporations – all of them were opposed to Christian virtue, but they didn’t have to be. Vance had been inspired by ‘Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary’, and decided that ‘his way has to be the model for us.’ It was obvious, he argued, that the ‘universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth’ – so why not take them over, as Orbán had done? Or use tax policy to incentivise people to have more children (and punish those who don’t), because ‘we want more babies because children are good, and we believe children are good because we’re not sociopaths’? At the National Conservatism Conference in 2019, he said that ‘if you think people not having families, not getting married, feeling more isolated, are problems, then you need to be willing to use political power when it’s appropriate to actually solve those problems.’ He knew that what he was proposing might sound ‘pretty wild, pretty far out there’, but ‘if you’re not recognising in this moment how crazy things have gotten, then I think you’re ultimately not serious about taking back the country.’

In 2021, Thiel arranged a meeting for Vance with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. It was less than a month since Trump had left the White House, and much of the Republican Party leadership thought that he was finished. They were embarrassed by the 6 January insurrection (whatever they would say later) and there wasn’t a modern example of a president losing an election only to win again four years later. Trump felt so abandoned by the GOP that he told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee that he was going to start his own party. In 2022, when he announced his third presidential bid, not even Donald Jr or Ivanka turned up. The White House reporter Jonathan Karl was struck by the ‘strikingly lame excuses’ of the many no-shows, such as Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, who claimed he hadn’t ‘adjusted to daylight savings time yet’, nine days after the clocks had gone back. According to Karl, in his book Tired of Winning (Dutton, £28.99):

By all accounts, Trump had a very difficult time transitioning back to life as a private citizen. People who interacted with him at Mar-a-Lago during those first few weeks universally described him as being in a dark and foul mood, and most of his friends and advisers simply avoided him. Mar-a-Lago members would give the dejected former president a round of applause when he showed up for dinner on the patio, but on at least one occasion, he got up from the table in the middle of his meal and left without explanation. The man who’d played hundreds of rounds of golf as president found it difficult all of a sudden to make it through eighteen holes, picking up his ball in the middle of one round and going home.

Vance made a bet that while the Republican leadership might have wanted to move on from Trump, Republican voters were going to stick by him. Supposedly Trump’s first words to Vance at their Mar-a-Lago meeting were ‘You said some nasty shit about me.’ Vance apologised and spent the next three years making it up to him. He wasn’t in the Senate long enough to sponsor any legislation, but by the time Trump picked him as his running mate, he’d become known as the man who ‘defends Trumpism better than Trump’, the most loyal of all the would-be vice presidents. And so he is, for now.