Home JD Vance thinks rural folks ‘show little interest in honest work’: That’s not my experience
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JD Vance thinks rural folks ‘show little interest in honest work’: That’s not my experience

Chris Graham
jd vance
(© Consolidated News Photos – Shutterstock)

JD Vance claims to speak for Appalachia, because the couple of weeks he spent each summer in Kentucky growing up told him everything he needed to know about the people there, where, he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, “people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.”

This is what a kid from a big city – Middletown, Ohio, population: 50,000, 45 minutes from Cincinnati – who looked down his nose at his rural kin would think.

People in Appalachia don’t want to work, the JD Vances have decided, they don’t want more for themselves or their kids, and that’s why drugs are rampant – because there’s some kind of moral failing with those hillbillies.

Augusta County, where I was born and raised, isn’t technically Appalachia – we’re just outside the official footprint.

I lived the first three years of my life in the rural-as-rural-can-get Deerfield Valley, in a trailer down a dirt road from my grandparents’ house, a house that didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was 8; my parents, who were teens when I was born, moved us to a trailer park on the other side of the county, and we were there for the duration, through their divorce, my mom raising my sister and me on a string of minimum-wage jobs, around leaving us with her parents for long stretches so that she could spend time with her alcoholic, virulently racist boyfriend.

My way out, in a manner of speaking, came when I earned admission to the University of Virginia, which changed the course of my life.

Vance earned himself a similar hand-up when he got into Yale, which he parlayed into jobs in Silicon Valley and writing gigs for conservative publications that built the momentum for his Hillbilly Elegy, which is where he spun his tale about lazy Appalachians that the New York Times set was the first to lap up, transforming him into the “liberal media’s favorite white trash-‘splainer,” in the words of The New Republic.

That’s right – it’s liberal elites who gave the world this JD Vance now running for VP as a MAGA, who were the ones first hoodwinked by his tales of why the hillbillies and rednecks in rural America aren’t worth their time and mental energy, years before he was able to weasel his way into the upper ranks of TrumpWorld to be their connection to the poor whites, who obviously haven’t read his book.

I say that because, for the life of me, I can’t explain the appeal of the likes of Donald Trump and JD Vance to rural voters, because the policies that they advocate do nothing for us, but then again, as I wrote about in my liberal response to Hillbilly Elegy, a collection of essays that I titled Poverty of Imagination, the Democrats who decided that JD Vance was their medium to Appalachia back when they made his book a best-seller don’t seem to care about us out this way, either.

One thing that will never leave me, in spite of the success that I’ve been fortunate to achieve in life, is that feeling from growing up in the trailer park that the people who live in big houses – Republican and Democrat – think they’re better than us.

And I’m one of those people in a big house now, but the chip on the shoulder is still there.

My wife, who also grew up, like I did, let’s say, tough, and I moved into our new home, in the country club neighborhood, surrounded by beautiful houses, with well-manicured lawns, four years ago. We weren’t here a week when, one early evening, sitting in our backyard spa, listening to music, the next-door neighbor yelled across the fence to ask us to tone it down, because the noise, such as it was, was “disrupting the peace and quiet that we’ve been accustomed to.”

A couple of weeks later, we were invited to a neighborhood block party, which was great, a chance to meet the neighbors; except that the folks who put on this block party do one every year, and we’ve not been invited back.

It could be the rainbow flag flying over our front porch, and the “Pro-Women, Pro-Choice” and “Black Lives Matters” yard signs out amongst our bird feeders, but my growing-up-poor PTSD wired a radar that gets me to assume that people are looking down at me that I can’t turn off.

That said, I’ll take the people that I grew up with in the trailer park over these country club people every day of the week, because unlike the JD Vances of the world, I know that they’re good people.

The JD Vance types see people struggling to keep a roof over their head and think, it’s because they’re lazy; I see people struggling to keep a roof over their head and think, it’s because they think they don’t have a chance.

To wit: the way we fund our public schools, with local property taxes providing the bulk of the funding, perpetuates inequality, because people in wealthy areas get better schools, and people in poor areas get what they get.

Rural areas tend to be in states with right-to-work laws, which tilt the scale in favor of big business, who use the laws to keep our wages down.

We have less access to decent affordable housing, affordable, reliable healthcare, basic infrastructure – safe roads, food networks, broadband.

When you have to fight every day just to try to keep up, it can be exhausting, and it’s not the moral failing that the JD Vances think it is to just say, I give up.

The frustration for me is that the JD Vances who think they’ve pulled themselves up by their bootstraps don’t turn around and try to help the people that they instead ridicule as being lazy and dumb.

I’m mad at myself that I’ve not been able to do more. I tried to run for local office, and when that failed – being a Democrat in a Republican area, it was going to fail – I got involved in the local Democratic Party for a time, which felt like beating my head against a wall, because, again, the Democrat in a Republican area thing.

The Poverty of Imagination e-book has more than 50,000 downloads, but aside from the occasional attaboy, the message that I was trying to relate there – that rural voters need somebody to stand with them, and it would behoove Democrats to stop ceding rural areas to Republicans, who only pay lip service to the issues of people here – is not resonating.

It seems that nobody in DC, nobody in Richmond and the other state capitals, gives a damn.

My high-school debate coach, a few years ago, asked me if I would be willing to mentor a student that she said reminded her of me 30 years ago.

Bright kid, brilliant writer, literally from the trailer park that I grew up in, but she was worried about his future, because he’d decided that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything with his life, and had just given up.

I worked with him for a semester, and tried to get across the point – dude, I was you 30 years ago, and I made it, and I see me in you, you can do it, too.

His mother and stepfather, though, had him convinced that college wasn’t an option, and he couldn’t see how he could pursue writing without college, and …

JD Vance looks at a person who surveys the landscape, decides that the deck is stacked against him, because it is, gives up, and says we show little interest in honest work.

He’s wrong, is all I can say.

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].