Home I’m the JD Vance of the left: The one who didn’t sell out the memory of his grandmother
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I’m the JD Vance of the left: The one who didn’t sell out the memory of his grandmother

Chris Graham

poverty of imaginationIf it seems that my thinking on JD Vance’s turn from center-right moderate to full-blown far-right MAGA feels a bit personal, it’s because it is.

Vance, you see, to me, realized that being a center-right Republican wouldn’t get him elected to anything, and he sold out who he was to get to where he is.

I faced a similar moment of reckoning a while back, and I stuck to being who I am.

Like Vance’s tale from Hillbilly Elegy, I grew up in a tough situation in a rural setting.

My parents were teens when I was born, and after years of violence, they finally split when I was in the eighth grade.

Neither seemed to ever get the idea that they should prioritize their kids, so my sister and I pretty much raised ourselves, with the help of my maternal grandparents, who were as close to saints as you can get, particularly my grandmother, god rest her soul, who will always be one of the two most important persons, along with my wife, in my life.

Because of my upbringing, from an early age, I wanted to do something with my life to try to make the world a better place, and more to the point, a fairer and more equitable place.

It struck me as totally unfair, for instance, that a freak car accident involving one of my cousins would end up bankrupting her family, and lead to her parents’ divorce – that our healthcare system was set up so that even people who had supposedly good health insurance could still get stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid medical bills because of something totally random.

And it still gets me that the way we fund public schools is nowhere near fair – that kids in wealthy areas get better schools, and thus more opportunities to succeed, than kids where I came from, who, god love the teachers and counselors that I had going through school, because they all worked hard, but they just didn’t have a lot in terms of resources to work with.

My first thought was to pursue the law as a career, to use a legal background to try to advocate for change, but a brief stint in law school made me think I might instead find myself get sucked into being part of a system that I couldn’t change from within.

I ended up gravitating to journalism, and after about a decade learning and writing about local government, and efforts by well-meaning folks to get things moving in the right direction at the local level, I decided to run for a spot on the city council in Waynesboro.

Here’s where reality hit me square on the bridge of the nose: I’m an unabashed center-left Democrat living in a ruby-red Republican area.

I lost that election to the ruby-red Republican, back in 2008, and, no, it wasn’t even close.

Now, here’s where I cop to, yep, the idea did actually to mind, if you want to get a foot into the political arena to try to effect change, you know what you need to do.

It’s what JD Vance ended up doing.

He was already a Republican, but he needed to veer from center-right to far-right.

For me, I needed to make the move from center-left to at least center-right.

And I’ll say to that, a former local Democratic Party colleague of mine, reading the same tea leaves, was able to reconcile himself to switching, ended up going all the way from center-left to far-right, and got himself elected a couple of times.

I couldn’t, or rather, just wouldn’t, do that.

You gotta stay true to yourself, is my thinking.

JD Vance came to any level of us knowing who he is by being supposedly honest about how his tough upbringing motivated him to want to be a part of effecting positive change, so that people who grew up like he did would have more opportunities.

Once he got that sliver of recognition for his supposed honesty, he saw that there was an opportunity for himself to cash that in to his personal benefit, but to be able to do that, he’d have to literally sell himself to one billionaire, in the form of Peter Thiel, who bankrolled his U.S. Senate campaign in 2022, so that he could do the bidding of another, in the form of Donald Trump, who Vance had considered “noxious” in 2016, back when Vance was still being honest with himself.

I mean, I can’t fault him in one sense, because Vance isn’t just a Never Trumper author who voted for Evan McMullin in 2016 and does guest spots on CNN and MSNBC to give perspective on how the MAGA movement doesn’t represent working-class white voters anymore.

His run to the far-right has him on the verge of being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

All he had to do was sell out his Mamaw, “the name,” he told the Republican National Convention last night, “we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers.”

Hillbillies from where I come from call their grandmothers “Granny.”

And my Granny, who, right before she died in 2009, told me that her only regret was that she didn’t think she’d live long enough to be able to vote for Hillary Clinton for president, would come back from the dead to haunt me forever more if I sold her out like JD Vance sold out the memory of his Mamaw.

Editor’s Note: Chris Graham’s center-left take on Hillbilly Elegy, Poverty of Imagination, was published in 2019.

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].