They say timing is everything.
Last summer, the first run of J.D. Vance’s inside look into America’s working class sold a meager 10,000 copies. However, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” seemed to strike a chord right along with the growing Trump phenomenon that propelled the insurgent candidate all the way to the White House and Vance’s memoir to a top book club read.
Speaking to a full house at Smothers Theater at Pepperdine University Tuesday night, New York Times best-selling author J.D. Vance acknowledged he was catapulted into national prominence by detailing the pain and struggles of achieving the American Dream just as Donald Trump was claiming to offer that same dream to the country’s poorest and underserved citizens as Vance was growing up in the rustbelt of Ohio and Appalachia in Jackson, Kentucky. The successful author turned venture capitalist and political pundit read excerpts from “Hillbilly Elegy,” signed copies and took questions from the audience anxious to hear his views on today’s turbulent political scene.
Calling himself a conservative, the Yale Law School graduate said he’s worried about what he termed the “alt-right and resurgent neo-Nazi white nationalist folks,” calling them “about the worst people that exist in American public life right now.” Vance said he felt an obligation to “shout those people down,” adding “the under appreciated part in their rise is they are very good at social media.” But he also claimed, “The American Dream—the story of Trump’s voters as racist is overly simplistic and misses what’s going on at the heart of the country.”
Growing up poor and with an unstable home life, Vance praised the Marine Corps as a transformational experience for him.
“When I went in, I came to it from a environment where things were pretty hopeless—where I learned a certain amount of helplessness despite my Grandma’s and Grandpa’s positive influence. I was a pessimistic and resentful kid. I wasn’t capable of living up to my potential—grabbing opportunities—because I wasn’t necessarily looking for them.
“What the Marine Corps did was take me out of my environment, force me to work on a team, force me to go towards a goal in a team environment—in a high-stress environment—and give me the confidence that [I] could do it,” Vance described. “What’s so cool about the Marines is they will give you a task [and] let you fail; they will yell at you for failing, but they will make you try again. I think that process of not giving up on myself—of being okay with failure—is something I learned in the Marine Corps. When you grow up in circumstances like I did, it’s sort of debilitating—this fear that you’re just not good enough. You’re an imposter. You’re not going to make it.”
Vance has found great success and is often seen as a political pundit on TV. The happy, stable family life that he craved as a boy he now has, married and with a new baby. As a first generation college student in his family, his book’s theme of an impoverished upbringing and its imprint on adult life is shared by many. He favors rebuilding civic institutions “where they’ve disappeared neighborhood by neighborhood” to foster a “sense of the American ideal.”
“Community is important,” Vance stated. “Data supports positive benefits of a regular meeting church or community institution. If you think about a church purely as a place of belief, you’re missing the fact it’s also a place of social support. People will take up a collection to help a member in need. It’s a place that provides moral support and moral encouragement. Regular churchgoers are more likely to work, less likely to engage in risky behavior, less likely to have unstable families and so forth. It’s because they’re part of a broader community.
“You can’t transfer someone from poverty to prosperity and just expect that all their problems will go away,” Vance continued. “Habits and attitudes a person grows up with still influences even those lucky enough to get out of the poverty we came from.”
That resonated with Julie Devine from Seattle, one of 400 who came to hear Vance. “The book was such an important book for me,” Devine said after the event. “I resonated with it coming from a small mill town. I was excited to hear him speak his own thoughts on why he wrote it.”
