Special Edition:

JD Vance & How America Uses the Poor for Gain

I’m over here making strawberry jam and blackberry cobbler, just like my Southern grandmothers taught me to do in this season. Maybe you heard about J.D. Vance becoming a Vice Presidential candidate today? I thought I’d write something about the problems in making Vance the legacy-bearer of Trumpian strategies to secure a justice-erasing whiteness for America. I’ll be back to Wanderland’s regular programming soon.

A lot of white guys who think they’re fighting for ‘fiscal sanity’. But for whom? Getty image.

Before he was a Vice-Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance had been called both “the false prophet of blue America,” and “the hillbilly-whisperer.” His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller that portrayed a caricatured account of dysfunctional life in eastern Kentucky. In the rise of Donald Trump, Vance became a politician, and offered a kind of Rosetta Stone to interpret “that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter.”¹

Candidate Trump has selected Vance to signal that the era of the old guard conservative is over, there is only the Republican party that’s fully behind Project 2025,² with little need to share power. Trump’s selection of Vance is meant to shore up support among the white working class, while ignoring candidates who might represent people of color. The hope here is that (just like the statistics indicate) white men and women are largely responsible for a Trump presidency, and whites remain his core constituency. Wall Street Journal political correspondent Molly Ball says that “By picking Vance, Trump is showing that he’s doubling down on this MAGA agenda. It’s a full-throated, populist national conservative ticket.”

But the problem of Vance as a politician is the same issue he had as an author— Vance doesn’t just create a flawed portrayal of the American South and its poor—he’s making a dangerous mythology and now, harmful ways to enact it.

The New Republic said of his memoir: “Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.” Anyone hear a dog whistle coming? In his work as an author, Vance made much of the world believe that Appalachia is white, that poor people are to blame for their problems, and that what the world really needs is old-time religion, and manly men. The lack of tradition, Vance says, is what caused his mother’s drug addiction and the region’s economic crisis. Vance so believes in the power of old-fashioned masculinity to address society’s ills that he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in support of Brett Kavanaugh. (“Kind of a dork,” Vance told the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, of the Supreme Court Justice. “Never believed these stories.”)

This Yale graduate who worked for Peter Thiel advanced a narrative of Appalachia as a homogeneous white region crumbling under a poverty created by its own lazy culture. For a decade now, Appalachians have been speaking out against Vance becoming the mouthpiece for an entire region, and trying to pass as a well-loved local boy, while obscuring that he really worked for a conservative "think" group.

While Vance’s book-to-Netflix concoction was about as helpful in understanding complex Appalachia as Deliverance, Vice-Presidential candidate Vance has plans to boost his populist aims—he backs tariffs and wants to have the Republicans lobby for more union voters. The culture war has morphed to economic nationalism, and its outcome is measured in a deadly loyalty to a unitary executive theory, a wiping out of legislators and the courts for a central Commander-In-Chief. Candidate Vance has already proven in his turnabout from a never-Trumper to devoted ally that he’s a living model to support the restructuring of democracy.

Here's where this economic nationalism of Trump-Vance et al ends up. These are the facts that Project 2025 reveals in writing and Trump has said that he’s going to enact—Mass deportation campaigns, which will end the availability of services currently provided by immigrants with very few Americans willing to take those jobs. Tariffs on imported goods, which result in higher prices. Maternity leaves end. Medicare stops. Interest rate cuts lead to hyperinflation. There’s a loss of credibility in the Central Bank. The value of the American dollar goes down. Five trillion is added to the deficit. Consequences to American households are catastrophic. Working- and middle-class people who already overwhelmingly bear this weight are crushed.³

There’s another possibility in the wake of this very white, very anti-elite, very loyalty-required and dangerous moment. Southern women writers I know, like award-winning essayist Lacy M Johnson, virtuoso fiction writer Ann Pancake, and historian Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, stake a claim for living in and organizing in the places where marginalized people and the poorly resourced and Trump voters exist. Read their books. Listen to their talks. Join with kin where you live to register voters and talk about what’s happening. These are a few ways to overcome the projected angst of more comfortable, influential Americans who need “others” to feel virtuous about, whether those “others” are women, people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people with disabilities and mental health problems, hell, even nature and the environment.

To redefine the story, we stay connected as kin within community. An interventionist narrative—one that assumes one point of view for an entire people—doesn’t need to override (and direct policy for) what is a complex, diverse, and changing constituency. Other ways out of this mess made by our supremacist, unrepaired history—white people talking the damage of whiteness to other white people, writing to disadvantage whiteness, making art that rejects the notion of centralized power and a dominant ethos.

I’m a sixth-generation Kentuckian, and my family are the kind of god-fearing hard-working farmers that conservatives like Vance fetishize. I grew up poor until my father moved out of state when I was a girl, offering me the chance to get a college degree, and one of the few in our family who left the state. Kentucky is my heritage, and I’ve luckily found Kentuckians in most places that I’ve moved. I have a resolute commitment to an accurate counter-narrative of Appalachia and America. I believe that it’s essential to push back against any history that doesn’t include the realities of injustice, as well as any system that naturalizes any place as the dominion of white people. Across tables in our homes, and on social media and everywhere in our lives, we need to talk about how very perilous it is to be included in this kind of devotion to a false mythology.

There’s no elegy in the rednecks I know. There never was. We are not dead. We are wildly alive.

Sonya Lea’s forthcoming book is Bloodlines, a story about the last public execution in America, a legal lynching in Owensboro, Kentucky, where she was born. In the summer of 1936, Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, was jailed for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman, and then tried by an all-white, all-male jury that took four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bloodlines is an essay collection combining memoir with reportage, narrative history, and cultural criticism. These six essays interrogate and complicate the narrative about how lynch culture happens in our communal lives, and how it continues to be created in families, communities, and institutions to uphold a system to make it easier to punish people of color and other marginalized groups rather than to create and sustain a culture of justice. Bloodlines reckons with our complicity in historical atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and shows us how we might become responsible on behalf of descendants, to bring justice to ancestral and communal crimes.

Lea has worked as a house cleaner, a cook, an editor, and for museums and science centers. She creates retreats and teaches writing in North America. Sonya Lea’s memoir, Wondering Who You Are, about what happened after her husband lost the memory of their life, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

You can find Sonya at~

My Instagram.

My Website.

The podcast I did with my kid.

1. The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/138717/jd-vance-false-prophet-blue-america.

2. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has drawn up plans for legislation and Executive Orders as it trains prospective personnel for a second Trump term. In addition, the Center for Renewing America, led by Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, is dedicated to disempowering the so-called administrative state, the collection of bureaucrats with the power to control everything from drug-safety determinations to the contents of school lunches. The America First Policy Institute is a research haven of pro-Trump right-wing populists. America First Legal, led by Trump’s immigration adviser Stephen Miller, is mounting court battles against the Biden Administration. 

3. Much of the reality of these economic views can be heard in a talk with Matt Yglesius on “Trump’s Bold Vision for America: Higher Prices!” Listen at the Ezra Klein Show.