From Hillbilly to Trump’s Running Mate // J.D. Vance’s meteoric rise

Mr. Vance doesn’t have all the answers. But he’s advancing the conversation.”
Those were the last lines of The New York Times’ review of J.D. Vance’s 2016 non-fiction bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. They would have been surprised to find out that just a few years later, the author they were praising would become the running mate of The Times’ biggest bogeyman, Donald Trump.
In his book, Vance explained—“in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans,” as The Times put it—why people from rural America had voted for Trump. He explained why their economic and social ills made them yearn for solutions and escapes from misery, which Trump had offered them with his presidential campaign.
Vance also wrote in that book about his own family’s problems with alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty and despair, and he tied that in to the larger political and cultural changes in the US. He himself had escaped from that despair, first becoming a Marine and combat journalist, then getting a law degree from Yale University. But he wanted to tell people about what he had grown up with.
Vance’s bestseller was lauded by both liberals and conservatives. Many liberals adopted his viewpoint toward the 2016 election, especially on the book review pages of the newspapers and magazines read by left-leaning cultural elites. In their search for some way to explain what they saw as Trump’s inexplicable rise, Vance’s book seemed like an oracle.
(He did have some detractors, people from the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the South—the places that he wrote about—who said that Vance’s depiction of his family was inauthentic and that he had not actually been deprived in the way that he had represented. But these were few and moving against the tide.)
Their support for his book came despite the fact that Vance identified as a conservative. But at the time, he seemed like a friendly conservative. Before the 2016 election, he had called Trump “an idiot,” “cultural heroin” and “reprehensible,” and he suggested that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Vance explicitly said on television that he was a “Never Trump guy.”