By Philippa Tracy
JD Vance has been making headlines again. This time following the recent deadly shootings by a 14-year-old boy at Apalachee High School in Georgia. He has been accused of a lack of empathy after he said school shootings were “a fact of life”. He actually said, “I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” and that schools in the US are a “soft target” if you are a “psycho”. His political opponents seized on his words to suggest that is dismissive about the killings. While he is clearly not in favour of gun restrictions as a solution, instead calling for more security in schools to prevent shootings, I am not sure it is entirely accurate to say he lacks empathy.
When Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was published in the summer of 2016 he was a Silicon Valley investment manager. It is his story of how he escaped the trauma of a dysfunctional family and the constraints of poverty class to achieve success at a leading venture capital firm, with all the associated privileges of being wealthy, white and male. Proof perhaps that the American Dream is not dead? He grew up in a steel town in Rust Belt Ohio, where the future for many of the kids was living on welfare or a heroin overdose. “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future,” he says. Vance bucked the trend via the Marine Corps, Iraq and Yale Law School.
This book is, at least in part, an attempt to explain why Trump is so popular with poor white Americans. Back in 2016, Vance was not a fan of Donald Trump. In the run up to the election that year, he referred to him as “an idiot.” Vance described himself, at the time, as, “a Never Trump guy”. But the books sheds some light on how Vance became a Trump supporter, and even his running mate. In the book he states that, “surveys have found, working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America.” He is not himself that pessimistic. He details in a fascinating way how he survived the emotional trauma of family violence, an absent father, a mother with a heroin addiction and an endless string of boyfriends and husbands. And his disadvantages as a child, he argues, mirror the experiences of millions of working-class white Americans that he identifies with.
Vance was saved by his grandparents. His Mamaw is the person he seems to most admire and the real hero of the book. She thought politicians were, “all a bunch of crooks” but she was deeply religious and patriotic and taught young JD her values through tough love. These are the “hillbilly at heart” values of hard work and taking personal responsibility. She supported Vance through the dark days of the Marine Corps from afar, and he read “every day that Mamaw was proud of me, that she loved me, and that she knew I wouldn’t give up.”
I would not vote for Trump or Vance. The latter’s opposition to abortion rights and his repeated comments about “miserable cat ladies” and childless people not having a stake in the country, perhaps make one wonder where the limit of his empathy really lies. But this book is a great read.
