Political lessons from hillbilly culture

Debbie Jacob

AS a graduate of Yale Law School, former US president Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate JD Vance is an uncharacteristic spokesman for “hillbilly culture.”

The junior congressman is best known for his memoir about life in the poverty-stricken rust belt. It’s a story of escaping the same fate as his drug-addicted mother, thanks to his supportive grandmother.

The 417,000 ratings on Goodreads for Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, attest to the book’s popularity since its release in June 2016, but it has hit some raw nerves too.

In the UK Guardian newspaper feature headlined I’m from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn’t represent us – he only represents himself, Neema Avashia, the daughter of East Indian immigrant parents, says, “Vance only captures the stereotypical image of hillbilly culture in a derogatory way (lazy, uneducated, underachieving and unemployed) and doesn’t include the different faces of Appalachia and their pride in being called hillbillies.”

The epithet “hillbilly” followed a similar trajectory to the n-word for black people. In the past, it was a derogatory term evoking prejudice against poor whites.

There’s truth to both Vance’s and Avashia’s viewpoints.

The Appalachian Mountains spread through parts of the midwestern and southern states Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania (straddling the midwest and east coast), West Virginia and the eastern state of Maryland.

In Ohio, where I grew up, Kentucky hillbillies migrated to the industrial town of Mansfield, where they worked in General Motors and the steel mill when coal mines and factories closed down in Appalachia. My dad hired them for seasonal work on our dairy farm.

Avashia’s East Indian family represents immigrant culture in Appalachia. (Also, retirees from the north, who once flocked to Florida, are now settling in Appalachia, which offers better weather, less taxes, lower housing costs and a more favourable cost of living.) The population of Appalachia grew by 3.8 per cent from April 2020-July 2022, says a March 24 USA Today magazine article.

Vance has been outspoken about his dysfunctional family, who moved from Jackson, Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio in search of work.

Many hillbillies remained rooted in poverty waiting for work to return to Appalachia. It never came.

Vance writes that hillbilly culture fosters loyalty to a region seriously challenged by lack of opportunity. Isolated and often perceived as victims of prejudice, hillbillies, Vance says, don’t trust the news or politicians.

His critics point out Vance’s vacillating political views: first he criticised Trump; then he jumped on the Trump bandwagon. He has been deemed a chameleon and opportunist.

His memoir paints him as the hero of his own story, where he escapes the anger, frustration, underachievement and drug addiction of his poorly educated family. For boys and men, he said, there is a “peculiar crisis of masculinity” – an inability to “succeed in a changing world.”

Even his relatively stable and supportive maternal grandmother doesn’t escape unscathed from Vance’s pen. She pushes his education, but sometimes appears angry, unpredictable and contradictory.

His memoir notes that social isolation in Appalachia creates mental and physical issues: depression, anger, lower life expectancy and high rates of drug addiction – all issues, he says, that are symptoms of a greater underlying problem: poverty.

He calls for more supportive teachers, more relevant education, drug programmes, and a change in perception. He says boys need masculinity defined in new terms, which allow them to realise that doing well in school is not unmanly.

It’s good advice for TT too.

Vance writes that hillbilly culture is “a complex state of mind where positive values of love, tenacity and trust become twisted into counterproductive qualities. Love becomes dependency on family, government or drugs; tenacity becomes a stubborn refusal to change with the times; trust gets turned inside out into mistrust.”

No magical public policy solution, he says, "or innovative government programme can deal with changing rust belt culture.” He calls for a greater understanding of the issues.

The corridor of poverty that Appalachia and the rust belt represent are now in the political spotlight – especially in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which can go Republican or Democrat in any election.

Will the poor people of Appalachia trust or support Vance more than other politicians who have ignored their plight?

If they can shake their political cynicism, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with. We’ll see.

This much we know: there comes a time when poverty and the problems it causes can no longer be ignored.