J.D. Vance’s Appalachian Graveyard

_{"JD Vance" by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC by SA 2.0}

In May, two months before his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate for the Republican ticket, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance described his political awakening to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. It was 2018, and Vance was closing in on the two-year mark of his tenure as America’s hillbilly whisperer. His 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, had transcended its genre to become an urgent sociological text held up across the political aisle, but especially by liberals — Hillary Clinton was a fan — for its ability to humanize the tensions of a fractured political moment.

Hillbilly Elegy told the story of a young man from a marginalized region who overcame the odds to become a Yale graduate and Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It also pantomimed analysis enough that readers could nod along as Vance described his neighbors in Ohio and Kentucky as social detritus doomed by their own personal failings and struggles with addiction and poverty. 

Vance’s rise to fame came courtesy of the bipartisan myth that a self-directed person unshy of hard work could overcome the structural and traumatizing...