The Hill Trump Walked Up - “Hillbilly Elegy” by Grant Hiskes

Image from Netflix.com

A couple of weeks back during my daily Wall Street Journal read, one article really popped off the page for me. I saw Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, was personally backing two candidates in the 2022 GOP Senate races. For those of you who do not know much about Peter Thiel, here is a little background. Upon graduating from Stanford undergrad and Law School, Thiel was a founder of PayPal in 1999 and went on to found Palantir Technologies in 2003. Palantir Technologies is a data-mining company that provides “big data analytics” insights to the world’s biggest power players and according to a leaked document obtained by TechCrunch, among their clients are the CIA, NSA, FBI, and CDC. The company was privately held from its inception in 2003 until its IPO in September 2020, allowing for a lot of opacity and confidentiality. Other reports have disclosed that Palantir’s data mining had a major role in helping the US military find Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Thiel is also among the longest active members on the Board of Directors for Facebook having held a seat on the board since April 2005. Most importantly for the sake of this article, Thiel is said to be Trump’s most prominent supporter out of Silicon Valley and served on the executive committee of his transition team that gave him a hand in selecting Trump’s cabinet in 2016. So ya, this guy is ultra-powerful.

So, you now likely see why I was interested in Thiel personally backing two political rookies in the 2022 Republican Senate primaries. The first is Blake Masters, a fellow Stanford Law grad who co-authored a book with Thiel. Masters is also the President of the Thiel Foundation, a philanthropic foundation focused on investing in breakthrough technologies. Masters is running to represent the GOP in the 2022 Arizona Senate race. The other candidate being backed by Thiel is whose story the majority of this article will focus on, J.D. Vance. Vance was a principal at one of Thiel’s venture capital funds but is better known for his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. 

Donald Trump (Left) and Peter Thiel (Right) (Image from VanityFair.com)

For his whole story, you should read the memoirs (which I admittedly have not read) or watch the film on Netflix (which I admittedly have watched). To provide some context though, Vance grew up in a broken home in rural Ohio to a mother who abused both him, his older sister, and also drugs. Vance and his sister were raised largely by his grandmother (“Mamaw”, played by Glenn Close in an Academy Award-nominated performance), who dealt with her fair share of struggles before J.D. came along. The next part of Vance’s life is not covered in the film, but he went on to enlist in the United States Marine Corps and then went on to attend The Ohio State University where he graduated summa cum laude. The film only covers his adolescent years and the time after undergrad as a law student at Yale. It is in these flash-forwards at Yale that we really see how Vance was an outsider to the upper-crusted social classes he was exposed to through his classmates and recruiters at Yale. Despite being a law student, Vance still had to tend to family matters at home and his mother continued to struggle with her addiction and his older sister relied on him to provide financial and emotional assistance. Fortunately for Vance, a classmate that he went on to marry, Usha Chilikuri, was there to support him along the way. However, there were a lot of people that did not understand Vance’s situation and those obstacles to understanding are at the core of what I want to explore in this article.

What really makes this story so compelling is the journalistic response to the New York Times Bestseller. The book Hillbilly Elegy was regarded as one of the most provocative of 2016. The New York Times said that Hillbilly Elegy was “one of the six best books to help understand Trump’s [2016 Presidential Election] win”, and The Washington Post referred to Vance as the “voice of the Rust Belt”. The biggest criticisms the book has received are that Vance’s recollections are unique and not characteristic of most of the Trump electorate. Critics believed Hillbilly Elegy made too many broad generalizations in trying to be generous to the white working-class cause. I do not agree with a lot of the criticism of the book because, at the end of the day, they are Vance’s memoirs. His story is just as valid as anyone else’s and the way he tells it is more meaningful than the way anyone else could tell it. After all, it’s his life. Because it is one story though, I am also hesitant to buy into the notion that the story alone completely explains the rhetoric of Trump voters in 2016 and Trump supporters beyond.

By taking a more magnified examination of Vance’s story alone though, I think we can discover some of the core issues that exist within working class families and obtain a better understanding of why our country is faced with the problems of tension and difficulty understanding the other side that we feel we see so often in today’s times. The best lead I can provide for conveying this message as illustrated in the film is through the opening quote read by a pastor in the opening credits of the film:

“It is the year of our Lord 1997, an age of prosperity. The magnificence of God’s creation, the bounty of this earth, the miracle of modern life have never been so resplendent to our eyes. Yet for some of us, the American dream, the singular hope of our people, remains ever out of reach.

And though we may feel embittered, want to rail at injustice, even in our God. And though others may scorn our beliefs, let us hold faith not only in that God but in ourselves and our character.

Our ability to rise, yea, to fly, be this flight generations in the making be it delayed so long our faith is bound. Let that faith never be broken!

At a time when families across the world are falling apart …” (Audio fades out as diegetic sounds begin)

This is a very poetic and certainly intentional lead-in to the film. As the pastor’s voice fades out, we are taken to a time back in J.D.'s boyhood that eventually ends with a family dispute as they leave his great-grandmother’s house. One thing is clear from the film’s opening sequence, Christian values (not necessarily Christianity) are the key underlying factor of the film. And most central of the Christian values in this story undoubtedly is the emphasis on family. 

We see this attention to family emphasized early and often in the film. Towards the beginning of the film, we see a cut from family portrait to family portrait of J.D.'s extended family over the years. More than just emphasis on family, pride in family is also stressed. When J.D. returns to this great-grandmother’s home after getting beat up in the river by a group of boys his age, his Mamaw is riled up and asks J.D., “Did you tell them dickhead bastards the three of them ain’t worth one Vance”? The tone from Mamaw is not that the Vances are better than anyone but rather they are decent people and take a sense of dignity and respect with their family name. This sense of family pride and love also serves as a source of conflict though as the film goes on.

Take for instance the scene during J.D.’s boyhood when his mother, Bev, comes back home and tells J.D. that she needs him to urinate in a cup for her. Bev needs her adolescent son to pee in the cup because she needs to provide a clean urine sample for her job as a nurse, and she does not have it because she has been using drugs. J.D. is very frustrated and upset with his mom’s request as she has continued to relent to her vices. Mamaw understands the difficult spot that J.D. has been put in, but she also realizes that her daughter needs to hold on to her job to continue supporting her family. So, Mamaw takes J.D. out back behind the house and explains to J.D. that he has to help his mother out in this situation. Her final rationale is, “Family is the only thing that means a god damn. You’ll learn that”.

The values of ‘family’ are constantly instilled in J.D., but instances like that induce a lot of stress and confusion in him. He is raised to look out for his family, but his mother constantly crumbles when relied upon and sporadically abuses him. We see this play out in the scene at the card shop. Bev takes J.D. to the card shop to reward him with some football trading cards. As they drive home, Bev starts having a mental breakdown and starts taking out on J.D., as verbal abuse turns physical. She stomps her foot down on the gas and tells J.D. that she could crash the cat and kill both of them. J.D. manages to escape from the car and runs to a home off the road whose owner calls the police for help. The police come, but J.D. lies to them about what his mother did because he does not want her to get in any more trouble. We also have the scene where Mamaw and J.D. are relaxing at Mamaw’s watching The Terminator and playing cards. All of a sudden, they are alerted to a commotion outside down the block. Mamaw and J.D. go outside to see the neighbors outside as Bev is screaming in the street with blood running down her hand from another mental breakdown. Once again, J.D. is left speechless and has no idea what to do or how to handle himself.

One can only imagine how difficult growing up would have had to have been for J.D.. Surely he is not the only kid in America that has been a victim of abuse. And unfortunately, there are a lot of kids out there that have it a lot worse than him. However, this film provides some good insight into why childhood abuse can get generations of families into an unbreakable rut. We learn that Bev was also a victim of abuse when she was younger. J.D.’s older sister even says one time that they cannot complain because their mother and Aunt Lori had it way worse. The issue seems to be that relying on and supporting family is constantly reinforced in children like J.D. from a young age. At the same time, however, the family members that the children are conditioned to rely on, like his mother, are often very unpredictable and abusive.

If a kid like J.D. has hardly any constants in life, how can he be expected to have any sense of direction of where to go? If a kid has to worry about if his mother is going to beat him when he gets home or be too drugged up to prepare a meal, it is very unlikely that they would have the capacity to think too much about the other aspects of life. Accountability to uphold good grades or stay out of trouble is likely not persistent and therefore likely far less effective. If the parent is giving their children little reason to rely on them, it seems like there would be little incentive for the children to listen to what their parents(s) or other adults would tell them about life. And as we see in the film, there is very little screen time devoted to much that happens outside of the horrors at home. Scenes of J.D. doing normal kid things like attending school, playing sports, or pursuing other hobbies are limited. This is not to say that J.D. was not doing these things as a child but rather that he was preoccupied with his family issues. Once again, these experiences and disadvantages are not unique to white children in Appalachia. I think you could justify or determine a similar root cause for a lot of the social trends you see in impoverished or crime-riddled urban areas. Minority children who grow up in fatherless homes with mothers who are constantly working and have a difficult time devoting ample time, attention, and accountability to their children likely share a similar outlook on life as kids like J.D.. It seems like it is not so much an innate lack of hope for these children but rather a lack of understanding of what is out there. Due to this unawareness of the opportunities available and the avenues that have been manufactured to specifically help these kids get there, motivation to pursue these types of opportunities likely does not run as wild. J.D. has echoed that rhetoric in interviews. He had no idea about financial aid packages available at private universities, and he had no idea about the different career paths he could take out of law school.

What the white folks of areas like Appalachia and the minorities of big cities go through is very similar in the essence that adverse and unstable conditions at home do not create an environment conducive to thinking further down the line or instilling motivation to break out of the cycle that has been created. And where that hurts the broader society is a limited understanding of the problems of fellow citizens. How that is conveyed to the broader public though is generally different for the respective groups though. When journalists and political analysts were referring to this story as a key to understanding Trump’s 2016 victory, this could have been the tip of the iceberg. 

This conservative “right” that political commentators refer to when discussing this book is typically perceived as ignorant and lacking empathy. Rest assured, these are incredibly broad stereotypes. However, I think this film presents an excellent case study in showing why it is so difficult to place all blame on the issue of ignorance in this demographic. I discussed earlier how difficult it must be for those who grow up in the less than ideal circumstances like those depicted in Hillbilly Elegy to understand what their best path forward is. I do not think all of these people struggle to the same extent that Amy Adams’ character does, but I do think continued lack of direction and control over lives can be applied broadly to encompass a startling majority of Americans. So if the majority of Americans cannot truly figure out how to conquer their own problems, how can we reasonably believe that they would have the capacity to comprehend the problems of their counterparts of different race/ethnic/social backgrounds. And I do not mean this inability to understand is limited to racial or ethnic differences, not at all. In actuality, the greatest inability to understand we see in the film occurs between J.D. and other white people, whether it be the attorneys who are recruiting him or the nurses and doctors that get stuck providing or refusing treatment to his mother.

So how can we evaluate this analysis in the context of Trump’s 2016 election victory? My best conjecture is that Trump was able to appeal to voters that come from backgrounds similar to the Vance family by embracing the dignity of their professions and livelihoods. This embrace of their values and professions not only gave his eventual electorate dignity but also the sense that they were understood and validated in their beliefs and ideals. Instead of shying away from addressing this ‘hillbilly’ demographic as done in the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, Trump made the conscious effort to let the ‘hillbillies’ know he understood them. Along the 2016 campaign trail, we saw Trump don coal mining gear in an exhilarating rally in West Virginia and the Republican Party host its national convention in Cleveland. Conveying a sense of understanding to this demographic gave them the notion that the trajectory of their lives was valid and something to have pride in. This sense of validity likely allowed these Americans to have a more visible direction and outlook, and that path of direction was communicated to them as one very closely aligned with the agenda Trump was laying out. Take a look at the changes in the 2016 Presidential election results in the Appalachian states (data from 270towin.com): Margin of Republican victory increased by ~15% in West Virginia, ~7% in Kentucky, and Ohio flips to Republican for the first time since 2004 with Ohioans voting Republican 10.2% higher than the national average.

Hillbilly Elegy did not make Donald Trump the 45th President of the United States, but Hillbilly Elegy provides a firsthand account to political strategists that the way to earn the support of people in Rust Belt areas is by not writing them off but rather ensuring they are understood and heard in a world that thinks that conservative demographic is alone in not understanding. The more cloudy and complicated each Americans’ life gets, the more difficult it makes it for them to fathom and understand the problems of others.