“It’s astonishing to me — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — that Hillbilly Elegy managed to seduce as many liberals as it did given that Vance’s scorn for almost everyone in his poverty-stricken small Ohio town reverberates on every page. He doesn’t do a very good job of disguising it, but he does arguably try — he occasionally tells us he feels empathy, while rarely actually displaying any. Early on, he writes, “I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks.” This comes immediately after demonizing a co-worker he once had because he was consistently late or absent from work, and who seems to represent the larger ailment among “hillbillies” he claims to want to diagnose.
Though he seems to hate his community full of deadbeats, drug addicts, fat people, and “welfare queens,” we’re supposed to read his portrayal as enlightening and empathetic because he’s constantly feinting briefly toward gentleness. “There are no villains in this story,” he tells us early on; except Hillbilly Elegy is full of them. Throughout the book, he frequently makes assumptions about the motivations and life circumstances of the people around him and rails against them for what he sees as their lazy, unmotivated, or bizarre choices. Indeed, more sympathy does not seem to be his concern.
Even the book’s title is a manipulation. As many people have pointed out, Vance didn’t actually grow up as a fabled “hillbilly”; he merely spent some of his summers in Appalachia as a child. When he’s describing the small town of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up, the first thing he focuses on is the town’s socioeconomic decline, unlike his more affectionate descriptions of the topography of rural Kentucky and detailed character profiles of his family there. He’s at pains to make sure we understand how much he hated it there, and how much his heart truly belonged with his renegade redneck family across the Kentucky border.
In Middletown, his focus on the town’s economics, its rising “residential segregation” into concentrated areas of working-class poor, and the row of decaying mansions on Main Street, all reveal his obsession with class and upward mobility. It’s a fixation that underpins the book. “Looking back, I don’t know if the ‘really poor’ areas and my block were any different, or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor,” he admits.
In all of the many moments where he demonizes the poor people in his orbit, Vance fails to offer or even consider the broader context of what’s happening with his community that might drive people to lives of penury and misery. He rails against drug addicts and provides a close, painful look at his family’s own battle with addictions, particularly his mother — but he never mentions the opioid crisis or the role companies and policy played in ravaging rural communities.
“We created these problems, not the government, not a corporation,” he insists, despite having plenty of evidence to the contrary.”
…
“Vance is, of course, a conservative, and the focus on individual failing rather than systemic failures is to be expected. But what’s striking about Hillbilly Elegy, especially in the context of his recent turn toward Trumpian populism, is its disdain for people.
Even as he’s trying to define himself as part of one in-group or another, be it the Scots-Irish or the “hillbillies,” he can’t stop shaming and distancing himself from the other people in it. His characterizations of his community and the people in it thrum with disgust and a deep sense of remove. As someone who grew up in a similar world, it would never even occur to me to feel for my own rural small Southern town the loathing Vance seems to feel for his, and the fact Vance never even second-guesses his own level of antipathy is one of the more chilling aspects of the book.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/360909/jd-vance-how-true-is-hillbilly-elegy-classism