Debunking J.D. Vance’s Biography Is Counterproductive

Litigating who really counts as poor isn’t helpful.

Yesterday at Public Notice I wrote a piece about J.D. Vance’s faux populism. The essay mostly focuses on Vance’s writing and his policies. I deliberately avoided litigating issues of Vance’s personal identity or history. That’s because I don’t think that arguing, “J.D. Vance was middle class growing up” is the best way to talk about his candidacy and/or about his weaponization of his personal life story.

Vance in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy famously represents himself as a “hillbilly” by which he means, more or less, that he grew up working class and is from Appalachia.

Various commenters, with various levels of charity, have pointed out that Vance by some measures was not that poor. His mother went to school to become a nurse; Vance was not first generation college. His maternal grandparents had enough money to hire lawyers and cushion some of the fallout from Vance’s mother’s addiction (as this review points out.) Some critics have taken data points like this and argued that Vance is actually middle-class and is lying about his working-class status.

No doubt there are people who have it worse than Vance did; there is very often someone who has had it worse than anyone you can name. Nonetheless, Vance’s mother was an addict, and that made his childhood violent and precarious, emotionally, physically, and financially.

People have also questioned whether Vance is really from Appalachia; he spent most of his childhood in Ohio, where his grandfather worked in a steel plant. The family, though traveled back to Kentucky frequently. They were basically internal immigrants, and lots of immigrants continue to identify strongly with their family’s roots, even if they themselves weren’t born or raised in the place their family came from. I think it’s reasonable for Vance to call himself an Appalachian, and reasonable for him to call his childhood one of at least intermittent neglect and poverty.

I’m not defending Vance here for his own sake, because fuck that fascist ghoul. I’m not really even defending him at all. What I’m doing is arguing that we need to be careful about policing people’s experiences of poverty, or their experiences of displacement and immigration.

Poor people are routinely stigmatized. And one way that that stigma is expressed is through epistemic doubt—or to put it another way, poor people are routinely told that they aren’t really poor. When journalist Linda Tirado first went viral after talking about her experiences with poverty, lots of individuals and even media outlets responded by raking through her personal history, trying to prove that she wasn’t actually poor or hadn’t actually struggled to make ends meet. People refused to believe that someone who could write so well didn’t have enough money to afford dental care. The assumption is always (a) that real poor people can’t speak for themselves, and, contradictorily but simultaneously, (b) that poor people are degraded liars who can’t be trusted to tell the truth about their own experiences.

Similarly, people who have experiences of immigration or migration, over borders or within the same country, are often insulted and targeted for supposedly having no real home or no real roots. If they try to claim the right to speak about where they currently live, they’re told they don’t belong and should go back home; if they claim roots in their family’s place of origin, they are often mocked and told that they don’t really belong there either.

People’s identities often don’t fit easily into neat boxes. You can be fairly affluent, and then end up suddenly and dramatically downwardly mobile if you’re caregiver becomes ill (and addiction is an illness.) You can have a strong attachment to a place and a community even if you don’t live there. You can even have strong attachments to more than one place and community at a time.

Of course, the Trump/Vance GOP’s entire reason for being is to refuse to give people this kind of grace. MAGA hates immigrants and smears them all as violent criminals. MAGA assholes (very much including Vance) hate the poor; right wing politicians (again including Vance) assume automatically that poor people aren’t really poor, but are just slackers who want government handouts.

Given that, it may feel like justified revenge to use Vance’s identity against him. But it’s self-defeating. Setting up a norm whereby anyone who says they have been poor is going to be means-tested by viral dogpile is bad and hurts people with a lot less privilege and power than J.D. Vance. The same goes for setting up norms where you police the identities of migrants.

That’s why I think it’s best to focus on Vance’s policies rather than litigating his identity. Clarence Thomas also grew up quite poor—poorer than Vance, in most respects—and he’s a horrible person. It happens. Sometimes experiencing hardship leads you to compassion and solidarity; sometimes it leads you to resentment and a hatred of those you believe should always have been beneath you.

People are complicated; how they process their experiences and identities is complicated. J.D. Vance has embraced the simplicity of bigotry. For him, anyone who suffers is weak and immoral and deserves it. He pushes that lie not because he never suffered himself, but because, whatever his past, the identity that for him is ascendant right now is wealthy, white, racist shithead.