JD Vance has enraged and intrigued in equal measure since becoming Vice-President (Image: Getty)
All eyes are on JD Vance after he was forced to deny grievously insulting Britain by claiming a potential peacekeeping force in Ukraine would be “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.
The US Vice-President claimed he had been misquoted when he was accused of “disrespecting” British forces who served alongside the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, with former veterans minister Johnny Mercer branding him a “clown” who needs to “check his privilege”. But who is Vance, where does he come from and what lies at the heart of his character? Fortunately there are plenty of answers in his bestselling 2006 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about the Appalachian values of chaotic Kentucky family and the socio-economic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.
JD Vance’s accused President Zelensky of not showing America enough gratitude (Image: Getty)
He’s a master of the humblebrag
It’s known as a ‘humblebrag’ when you make seemingly modest, self-critical statements that, in fact, draw attention to your qualities – and JD Vance is a master at it.
“I’m 31 years old and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life,” he tells readers modestly in the introduction.
“Certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.”
Why are we expected to pay to read it, then? Don’t worry; he soon has the answer.
Vance tells us he wrote his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, not because he’d “accomplished something extraordinary”, but because he’s achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grew up like me”.
He continues: “I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that had been haemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I remember. I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents, one of whom has struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life.”
Kids like him, poor with no father on the scene and a chaotic, drug-addicted mother, face a “grim future”, he warns. “If they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.”
Fortunately Vance has been more than lucky.
“Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I’m some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could’ve made it to where I am today.” He describes that as “bull***”, but, really, it’s clear his escape from his impoverished hillbilly background, as he tells it, is pretty incredible.
JD Vance’s treatment of President Zelensky saw protesters target him during a holiday (Image: Getty)
He is obsessed with father figures
Vance’s mother, Bev, fell pregnant at 18 with his older half-sister, Lindsay, married swiftly and was soon divorced and a single mum. Vance, 40, was born in Middletown, Ohio, on August 2, 1984, to Bev and another man, Donald Bowman. He left soon afterwards. “Dad gave me up for adoption when I was six,” he writes – and Vance grew up trying to get on with a succession of his mother’s boyfriends. With them, he pretended to enjoy their interests but admits it was an act.
His happiest times came when he stayed with his maternal grandparents. “Home” was with his grandparents (“Mamaw” – pronounced ma’am-aw – and “Papaw” (Bonnie Blanton and Jim Vance) in Jackson, Kentucky, in the heart of Kentucky coal country.
Even as he lived in a succession of addresses with different men with his mother, until he was 12 he spent his summers in the city of Jackson in Breathitt County, Kentucky. There he worshipped his “uncles”, in fact his grandmother’s brothers.
Nearly everyone in his memoir is “deeply flawed”, while “some have tried to murder other people, and a few were successful. Some have abused their children, physically or emotionally. Many abused (and still abuse) drugs. But I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity”.
One uncle smoked weed with him when he was 12. But they were father figures nonetheless. His uncles were also the “gatekeepers to the family’s oral tradition”.
He loved their stories, although they were mostly “far from child appropriate”; like the time one uncle made his sister’s erstwhile suitor eat her underwear at knifepoint. Such stories made Vance feel like “hillbilly royalty”. The uncles were the chaotic enforcers of “hillbilly justice”. They were “classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side”.
Hardly surprising he is now in thrall to Donald Trump, you might think.
JD Vance and his wife Usha (Image: Getty)
He has a giant downer on his family background in the Appalachian Mountains
Vance was largely raised by his grandparents, neither of whom graduated high school, while few members of his extended family attended college.
He wants readers to know how it feels to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do this. What happens in the lives of the poor and the “psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children”. Yet for all his lived experience, he has little sympathy with the “hillbillies” of the Appalachian Mountains among whose stock he counts himself.
“For those of us lucky enough to live the American dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us,” he admits.
Vance tells us that he identifies with working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition”.
His family is from the hills of eastern Kentucky. Such people have become prey to low social mobility, poverty, divorce and drug addiction. “My home is a hub of misery,” he admits.
Surveys have found such white working-class men “more pessimistic” than black Americans. They fail to relocate for work and have dropped out of the labour force. “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash, I call them neighbours, friends and family,” he writes.
Yet it’s not just that the jobs have left them – they have left work. Vance writes that he desperately wanted to believe this himself, but “experience can be a difficult teacher”. Working in a tile warehouse as a young man, he recalls people who didn’t want to work; turned up late, were unreliable, took too many breaks and got fired… despite in one case having a pregnant girlfriend to support, before blaming the employer.
“Too many young men are immune to hard work. Good jobs are impossible to fill for any length of time,” Vance explains. What is wrong is a “culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.
“There’s a lack of agency here – a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everybody but yourself.”
JD Vance’s claims on other countries’ military capabilities caused widespread outrage (Image: Getty)
Loyalty is important
He writes warmly of his maternal grandparents. “In Jackson, I was the grandson of the toughest woman anyone knew and the most skilled auto mechanic in town. In Ohio, I was the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wished I didn’t.”
Mamaw had nearly killed a man when she was just 12 for trying to steal the family cow, “a prized possession in a world without running water”. Having winged one of the thieves, she prepared to finish him off before being stopped by one of her brothers. “Mamaw’s first confirmed kill would have to wait for another day,” writes Vance.
Yet his grandmother (who had “given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car and never spent a day in high school”) and grandfather, a violent, anti-social and chaotic drunk before he eventually quit drinking, “spent the last two decades of their lives showing me the value of love and stability”.
Despite this, he also reveals how his Uncle Jimmy told him of his grandparents: “Like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a f***ing heartbeat”. “Violence and chaos were an ever present part of the world that I grew up in,” he has said.
Today the Appalachian Mountains are a hotbed of poverty and prescription drug abuse. Hillbillies learn to deal with uncomfortable truths – like “Mountain Dew mouth”, as the epidemic of childhood dental problems caused by sugary drinks is called – by avoiding them and living in violent denial when they sense they are being criticised.
How this plays to his idea of loyalty is anyone’s guess, but there are echoes of mafia-like willingness of the hillbilly community to close ranks against outsiders, and come out fighting when under fire, again something we have seen in the Trump White House.
