The “rags to riches” story that Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance presented in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy has been panned as an endorsement of “endless resentment” in an opinion article published by The Columbus Dispatch.
Vance, now the 2024 running mate of former President Donald Trump, describes his upbringing in “an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember” in the book, while attempting to explain white working class voters in similar areas shifting support from Democrats to Republicans in recent decades.
In the opinion piece published by the Dispatch on Wednesday, Ohio Northern University English professor Douglas Dowland argues that the book, which also details Vance’s rise from a poor background to Yale Law School, “lacks the charitable embrace of those in need.”
“Instead, Vance uses his rags-to-riches story to write an America of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ a world of endless resentment,” Dowland writes. “In his younger years, Vance was well aware of the power of resentment … Yet as the memoir unfolds, the danger of resentment is something that he gradually forgets.”
“In one of his first jobs, he comes to see fellow co-workers as ‘immune to hard work,'” he continues. “And as he slowly moves from rags to riches himself, his resentment only multiplies … As he grows richer, he seems to find more flaws in his fellow citizens.”
Dowland goes on to tie Hillbilly Elegy to Vance’s transformation after the memoir was published, when the future senator went from pondering whether Trump was ” America’s Hitler” to frequently praising the former president as his running mate.
After writing that the book presents “a vision of America as a nation of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ makes it impossible for him to extend a hand, to help another up the ladder,” Dowland argues that “Vance is so fascinated by identifying foes that he is uninterested in finding friends.”
Dowland then mentions Vance’s ” childless cat ladies” comment as an example of the senator offering “gambits of gratuitous generalization” to advance his political pursuits, before warning that “the end of the American story” could come if the Republican ticket wins in November.
“‘Hillbilly Elegy‘ was the prelude to this,” Dowland writes. “It shows the limits of an American story. And, worryingly, that story, as it is shaped and resentfully reshaped by the hands of the now-candidate for vice president, may very well be the prelude to the end of the American story.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to Vance’s office and the Trump/Vance campaign via email on Wednesday evening.
While Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller when it was published and has gone on to enjoy further success following Vance’s Republican Party ascendancy, Dowland is far from the only critic to take issue with both the book and the senator’s political messaging.
In an opinion article published by Newsweek late last month, Arick Wierson, television producer and ex-adviser to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, argued that Vance was paying “hollow lip service” to “rural voters and small town America,” while asserting that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—whom Vice President Kamala Harris announced as her running mate on Tuesday—would be the perfect antidote.
“Walz is the real deal,” Wierson wrote. “In fact, it’s not hard to see Tim Walz as the very guy who, if selected as Harris’ VP pick, could effectively turn Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy into Vance’s very own hillbilly political eulogy.”
