'Hillbilly phony': Appalachian tears back curtain on J.D. Vance's 'fictional' background
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is a "hillbilly phony" whose memoir of growing up in Middle America deflects the hard truths Republicans don't want to acknowledge about poverty and opportunity, wrote Caleb Miller for The Daily Beast.
Vance, now former President Donald Trump's running mate, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, left that life to be a venture capitalist in California, and made his fame writing his "Hillbilly Elegy" memoir that essentially concluded people in Appalachia are lazy, violent, and unable to work hard enough to solve the social problems holding them down. But that's not right at all, wrote Miller.
"When viewed from a distance, the arc of my life looks remarkably similar to his," wrote Miller. "Unlike Vance, my story actually starts in Appalachia. I was born in 1997, one town over from Coal City which doesn’t have luxuries like hospitals. My parents were white but that was basically their only advantage. My father is chronically ill and disabled. After getting a hysterectomy, and on the advice of her doctors, my mother started taking OxyContin. This prescription turned into an addiction that would carry her to an early grave." He detailed how they subsisted on cornbread and garden vegetables, and how his grandmother sold her jewelry when he needed a computer.
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Ultimately, Miller managed to find success, getting into Harvard and working in finance. But it was not through his hard work alone, as Vance would have people believe was the case for himself.
"The problem with Vance’s conception of the American Dream is that it is just a dream. A fiction. A convincing lie that successful people tell themselves in order to claim all the credit for their accomplishments," wrote Miller — in reality, he needed hand-ups at every turn to get where he is. "I never would have gotten into Harvard if my alumni interviewer hadn’t pleaded with the admissions committee to seriously consider me. I never would have visited Harvard if not for a generous mentor offering to pay for flights for me and my grandmother."
Moreover, he wrote, his mother's death had nothing to do with a lack of morals.
"Although she struggled, she was a great mom who loved her family with her whole heart and we loved her – and will forever miss her – just as fiercely. In Vance’s worldview, my mother died because she’s a bad person who made terrible choices. That’s another lie. My mother died because the American healthcare system is broken. She died because senators buckled to pharmaceutical lobbyists. Now I’m worried about the rest of my family. If Republicans gain power, they want to eliminate Medicare, which would hurt my grandma, and eliminate Medicaid, which would destroy my dad."
Vance's life story about growing up a hillbilly, concluded Miller, is "just another tool for Vance to wave around when it’s convenient, and hide in the shed when it isn’t. JD Vance isn’t a hillbilly. To me, he’s a parasite, feasting off a culture that he really doesn’t understand ... This is the core of why Vance fills me with rage. He wants you to believe that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he wants you to look away as he pulls up the ladder behind him."