Thank yuo for postiong this. I haven’t reread it in years and it is a timely reminder.

Given the RNC, this time it reminded me of a new Vox article that had an alternate take of Vance and his book: https://www.vox.com/culture/360909/jd-vance-how-true-is-hillbilly-elegy-classism

From Thompson (with heavy edits):

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors … successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. … His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

… Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

… He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

…But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery

From Vox:

It’s astonishing to me — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — that Hillbilly Elegy managed to seduce as many liberals as it did given that Vance’s scorn for almost everyone in his poverty-stricken small Ohio town reverberates on every page. He doesn’t do a very good job of disguising it, but he does arguably try…

… The book drips with open disgust for his neighbors, his town, his government and its representatives, and frequently, his mother. It’s full of casual fat-shaming for the bodies around him as well as his own, and constant complaints that no one around him wants to work hard enough to earn a better life for themselves.

At the same time, he also distances himself from the upper class. He seems determined to convince us that he’s superior and detached from the higher social strata into which he’s been inducted. Even after he’s ensconced in law school, he claims to mistrust the people around him, including the dean of his college and random people who enter his life.

Vance acknowledges that both he and his sister still grapple with trust issues as adults due to their childhood experiences of violence, addiction, and abandonment; yet something about the mistrust he displays in Elegy seems consciously deployed. “There were two kinds of people,” he confesses at one point. “[T]hose whom I’d behave around because I wanted to impress them and those whom I’d behave around to avoid embarrassing myself. The latter people were outsiders.”

All of this creates the picture of a man who wants to be seen as a populist hero, a common man risen from the working class into a fairy tale story of success. But throughout Elegy, he unwittingly shows us how much he’s motivated not by empathy or love but by naked ambition and a desperation to be anywhere but here — “here” usually meaning around other people.

This might be the real takeaway from Hillbilly Elegy — not that Vance is an anti-elitist, but that he is, to his core, anti-humanist.