Hillbilly Elegy reveals JD Vance as a man of contradictions: ‘I view members of elite with an almost primal scorn’

In 2016, not even five months before US voters chose a bombastic businessman as their president, JD Vance introduced himself with frank modesty to the world in the first few pages of his memoir – admitting he was “not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary.

“I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary,” he explains in Hillbilly Elegy’s introduction. “I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me … poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

Vance’s professed ordinariness, however, evaporated almost immediately upon publication of the memoir – a raw recounting of his upbringing in the culture of America’s white Appalachian poor and a study of the ripple effects across generations and geography. The bestseller then became a 2020 film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Vance’s profile rose so fast that he did become a Senator in 2022, representing Ohio as a Republican. Now the 39-year-old, who bucked regional socioeconomic trends by earning a law degree from Yale, is moving even further towards extraordinariness – asking Appalachia and the rest of the US to vote him into the second-highest office in the land: Vice President. On Monday, Donald Trump, the man Vance once worried could be “America’s Hitler,” announced him as his running mate, and they waved to the crowd together that night at the Republican National Convention.

The vice presidential nomination marks just the latest chapter in the evolution of a self-professed “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.” Trump and Vance could hardly have had more diametrically opposed youths, and