How the Liberals turned on JD Vance, working-class author of “Hillbilly Elegy”

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio – When JD Vance’s bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” first came out in the spring of 2016, it was celebrated as a peek from an American band long abandoned by the national conversation: the white working class of the industrial Midwest and Appalachians.

While Vance grew up here in this decaying Rust Belt town, he was also linked to the hills of eastern Kentucky where he spent the summer with his extended family. In his book, he explained with brutal honesty how social isolation, poverty and hopelessness impacted his family and others in the area.

Vance miraculously made it out, joined the Marines, and graduated from Ohio State University, then Yale Law School.

When his book came out, Donald Trump was on the verge of securing the Republican nomination for president, and Vance was celebrated as the only person capable of decoding the attachment of the white working class to the impetuous candidate promising to “return it.” ‘America more beautiful’.

In a 2016 rave review for the New York Times, Jennifer Senior wrote that Vance’s combination of thoughtful investigation and first-hand experience “provided a civilized reference guide to an uncivilized election, and it did. did in vocabulary intelligible to Democrats and Republicans ”.

Vance, who sometimes criticized Trump, has become a sought-after guest on the talk show circuit. Before Vance joined his show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes told his audience that “Hillbilly Elegy” is “a really fantastic read, it’s really eye-opening, it’s a great job. You should take a look. ”

For months, the Twitterati blue check couldn’t get enough of him.

Now go forward five years and they don’t want nothing to do with him.

It started after Joe Biden was elected in November and Vance began offering his candid thoughts on social media on what he calls “awakened capitalism” and “the border crisis” as well as Big Tech’s collision with the First Amendment, economic nationalism and China’s role in the pandemic.

Suddenly, almost everything he said was interpreted as some form of racism by the blue-check elites, and anyone who took a sympathetic look at the white working class was considered taboo. When the film version of “Hillbilly Elegy” hit Netflix in November, critics criticized it.

Then, discussions began to circulate that Vance could run for the United States Senate in 2022, to fill the seat vacated by retired Ohio Senator Rob Portman. So far, Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel has pumped $ 10 million into a super PAC supporting Vance’s notional run.

In an interview with The Post, Vance has yet to confirm whether he is showing up. But, one thing is certain, if he presents himself, it will be as a Republican. And it aroused the wrath of his former progressive fans. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post called his positions “performance populism.”

“Once it became clear that I was more on the Trump and Conservative side than I was on the left side, it was pretty difficult,” Vance told me. “Before Trump was elected, people were trying to understand the forgotten man, the white working class, as you mean.”

After Trump’s victory, “it quickly became one of two things: Either these voters are all racist or Russia hacked the election.”

“The whole media culture has gone from ‘Let’s try to understand the other half of the country’ to ‘Let’s just beat the other half of the country.’ ”

Vance recalls interviewing Don Lemon on CNN before the election and the host expressed “his compassion and curiosity. . . he was trying to think about all the problems my family went through over the past two decades. After the election, Lemon invited Vance to come back on his show and “every question was, ‘How could these people still be behind Trump?’ ”

Steve McMahon, a legendary Washington-based Democratic strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, says Vance’s rise and fall among the elite is regrettable – but not surprisingly.

“Vance has shown something in his uniquely American success story. [He] has shown that it is still possible in America to come out of adversity and be successful, ”said McMahon. “But once you go from apolitical American achievement to politician, you immediately inherit all enemies from your enemies. This is the partisan environment that we have created.

McMahon wants Vance’s story to end with him as a Democrat.

“His story is the story of many Democrats I know,” he said. “Frankly, this is the story of too few Republicans.

Today, many progressives believe Democratic candidates can win without white working-class voters, said Paul Sracic, professor of political science at Youngstown State University.

“They think, ‘Well, we don’t really need the big unwashed one anymore,” Sracic said.

But Biden needed white working-class voters to secure his narrow victory over Trump last year. Exit polls in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania showed the percentage of white working-class men voting Democrats fell from 23% in 2016 to 28% in 2020, while among white women of the working class, support for Democrats fell from 34% to 36%. . Biden did this by constantly visiting these places, reminding them of his blue collar roots. Without these voters, he would have lost.

What the media didn’t notice early on was that Vance is as much of a conservative populist as the people he grew up with, Sracic added.

“All you really had to do was read the book, it’s between every line, but I think the elites thought because he sometimes criticized Trump’s behavior that he was one of them. ”

Sracic believes Vance and candidates like him secretly scare strategic Democrats.

The 2022 midterm elections “will be a culture war election,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be an economic election, it won’t be a pandemic election. ”

But, this time, the media is back on the path to rejecting the populist conservative message and its messengers.

“And people like Vance are in a good position to deliver that kind of culture war message in an authentic way.”

Salena Zito is the author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics”.