Adam Isacson

(As with everything I post here without mentioning WOLA, this is my personal view expressed while writing at home and not during work hours. It does not necessarily reflect my organization’s point of view.)

Political writers are devoting a lot of pixels right now to J.D. Vance’s opportunism, digging into how his ambitions led him to ditch his former views and fully embrace white rage and Trumpism, riding that wave to the Republican vice presidential nomination.

Beyond that, I’m more concerned with a position that Vance hasn’t changed, but has only intensified: whose side he is on in the region he calls home, one of the poorest corners of America.

My view is colored by some reading I did over my two-month work sabbatical, which ends in a few days. More by circumstance than design, I dug into the work of two authors who come from Appalachia, not far from where Vance’s branch of his family lived before they moved to Ohio.

For many Americans—and to some degree for Vance, whose memoir Hillbilly Elegy I read in 2017—the mountainous, deeply rural, coal-and-tobacco region stretching from north Georgia into Pennsylvania is notable for high unemployment, family breakdown, drug addiction, and severe environmental degradation. Popular culture often ridicules its residents as “rednecks” or “hillbillies.”

The essays of Wendell Berry, the 90-year-old farmer and author from Port Royal, Kentucky, lament this condition, but place the blame far away. In his collected essays, which I re-read over my break (don’t miss the audiobook read by Nick Offerman), Berry’s Appalachia is a colony of the United States’ more prosperous areas, especially its cosmopolitan cities and big corporations.

[O]ur once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.

…At present, in fact, both the nation and the national economy are living at the expense of localities and local communities – as all small-town and country people have reason to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the government and the corporations think of as the nation, most of us have experienced the losses that I have been talking about: the departure of young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless present, in which the past is forgotten and the future, even in our most optimistic ‘projections,’ is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?

A blighted area stripped clean of its natural assets, where a small-farmer economy is no longer viable, and from where people need to migrate elsewhere, to cities? That sounds like many regions I’ve known during my work in Latin America, where levels of economic inequality still generally exceed those in the United States, but by less than they used to. One could switch out “campesino” for “farmer” in much of Wendell Berry’s writing, and the argument would be identical. From a 2017 New York Review of Books essay:

Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy. The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value—minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and “labor”—has been taken at the lowest possible price. As apparently none of the enlightened ones has seen in flying over or bypassing on the interstate highways, its too-large fields are toxic and eroding, its streams and rivers poisoned, its forests mangled, its towns dying or dead along with their locally owned small businesses, its children leaving after high school and not coming back. Too many of the children are not working at anything, too many are transfixed by the various screens, too many are on drugs, too many are dying.

…The rural small owners sentenced to dispensability in the 1950s are the grandparents of the “blue-collar workers” of rural America who now feel themselves to be under the same sentence, and with reason.

I also read a work of fiction set in Lee County, the westernmost county in Virginia: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I recommended it unreservedly.

Kingsolver, who lives in that area, reminds us that while the people of Appalachia seem defeated now, it was not always so. Two centuries ago, the population of these areas of rural Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia were smallholding farmers. Few owned slaves, and many supported the Union in the Civil War against their states’ plantation owners.

Their farms struggled to get beyond subsistence, then were bought up by coal barons (and much of the Black population migrated north, to industrial centers). They carried out some of the most militant union organizing in U.S. history to improve conditions in the coal mines.

“Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.

…Anyway, it was all in the past, nobody in class had parents working in the mines now. We’d heard all our lives about the layoffs. The companies swapped out humans for machines in every job: deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces. ”

The labor struggle cost many lives but earned some important gains in living standards—until mechanization, market forces, and captured politicians (of both parties) caused coal labor demand to dry up. Governments under-funded basic services, schools were not competitive enough to prepare students for a life of something better than coal mining. Then, in this century, came prescription opioids, ushered in by pharmaceutical companies’ lies, and then heroin and fentanyl.

Kingsolver, like Berry, paints a portrait of communities devastated by outside political and economic forces.

“Wouldn’t you think,” he [the main character’s teacher] asked us, “the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?”

What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.

Kingsolver’s lament about the state of the region closely echoes Berry’s:

“Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.”

This brings us back to J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy notes the same misery, but blames the people themselves, especially their “culture,” instead of predatory outside forces. Instead of corporations, globalization, and government siding with the economic winners and discarding the losers, Vance’s book blames government welfare programs for creating a culture of dependence and “laziness.”

We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.

…As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”

Why would people vote for a politician who, like Vance, believes that they are lazy and that they only have themselves to blame for their problems? Because, the book explains, even the region’s most shiftless laggards insist that they have a strong work ethic.

People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [Ohio, where Vance grew up, a town featured in Dreamland, Sam Quiñones’s study of the opioid epidemic]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. … Of course, the reasons poor people aren’t working as much as others are complicated, and it’s too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to, because the Armcos of the world are going out of business and their skill sets don’t fit well in the modern economy. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with the reality on the ground.

While Vance passingly refers to economic realities besetting the region, he insists that its residents, and their culture, are more to blame: “It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”

J.D. Vance became a corporate lawyer who worked in Silicon Valley venture capital, getting to know donors like hard-right billionaire Peter Thiel. He published his memoir and, despite once being a harsh Trump critic, ran for Senate as one of the most unabashedly pro-Trump candidates of the 2022 election cycle. In so doing, he cast his lot with the coal barons, agribusiness enterprises, and corporations that, Berry and Kingsolver forcefully argue, have done such harm to Appalachia’s beleaguered population.

Appalachia’s rural population, though, has voted overwhelmingly for Vance and Trump—not for people who, like Berry or Kingsolver, lean leftward. Even though they enable pollution, oppose wage hikes, under-invest in education, and de-prioritize access to drug treatment, pro-big-business conservatives win by huge margins in the region today.

They do so, usually, by whipping up anger about social issues like immigration, religion, and culture-war rage, often by repeating utter lies including about the 2020 election result. J.D. Vance’s 2022 campaign was a master class in this.

Reading what Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and others have written about the damage done to Appalachia makes J.D. Vance’s political success one of the most extreme existing cases of “the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.” It’s a cycle that the Democratic Party is far from figuring out how to break.

A big part of the blame lies with the Democrats themselves. When I was young, this region voted solidly Democratic, a legacy of the New Deal era when the federal government invested in infrastructure and jobs, and supported labor unions. That investment and labor support ebbed badly during the past 50 years, as leading Democrats turned away from the region’s population, in some cases even embracing business elites just as Republicans have. From Bill Clinton to Joe Manchin, Democratic politicians have backed big energy companies and advanced free-trade deals and farm policies that harmed small producers.

That opened up a political space that opportunists like J.D. Vance leapt into. And now, like impoverished Colombian campesinos who back the large landowner-aligned candidate promising the harshest security crackdown, the colonized line up behind their most outspoken colonizers.

It’s going to take a lot of work, and a long look in the mirror, to break out of this.