J. D. Vance Is My Guilty Pleasure

He is not a compassionate conservative, but I have compassion for him

My favorite TV show was The Dukes of Hazzard. I wore cowboy boots. I bought a large folding knife that came in a leather case, and I wore it on my belt whenever I could get away with it. In an eccentric fashion experiment all my own, I would tie a red bandana around the left leg of my jeans. My favorite album was Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler.  

I was given my first gun when I was thirteen years old. It was only a .22, but in the style of an old-fashioned six shooter. It was a beautiful object. In a world of plastic items designed to become obsolete, it was metal and wood and true. It performed a single mechanical function perfectly. I kept it in a holster on my bedpost. I did all this while growing up in a suburb of Chicago. I get J. D. Vance.

Not everything is about politics. One of the things I get about J. D. Vance is that he too knows that not everything is about politics. Family comes high on his list. And culture, which embodies who we are as a family. He has come to value faith as well. I don’t know what he would say if asked—Lord knows what that man will or won’t say, if it seems politically advantageous—but I am confident that Vance believes that faith, family, and culture are more important than partisan politics. 

So I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about a person. A person called J. D.

I had an uncle, a storied uncle, named J.D. He was my mother’s brother, and Mom’s people were from Appalachian Alabama. My brother is an obsessive genealogist who has methodically proven that our people were of no account from time immemorial. Another uncle of mine was literally illiterate. I remember as a child how he used to say to me, “I don’t have my glasses, can you tell me what that says?” I wondered why my dad needed to do his taxes for him. As for Uncle J. D., that really was his name. My grandparents only gave him initials. When he joined the military, he was told that this was not possible, and so he had to make up some names to satisfy The Man. 

Dad was from New Jersey and a true Northeasterner. His favorite poet was Robert Frost. He read Louisa May Alcott to us. He reminisced about going to Ocean City and getting saltwater taffy. He pulled the family toward an Evangelical Free church populated with people with deep Scandinavian roots like himself.

My mom’s people all owned land in Alabama, but they came up to Chicago to earn a decent, reliable wage. My grandfather worked for a time in a paint factory. He died of cancer, and my kin always insisted that it had been caused by the fumes there. It seemed to be a kind of parable: Life in the North will kill you if you’re not careful. We went to Alabama every summer. I could roam around the land by myself with my revolver on my hip, taking shots at old tin cans.

Back home, Mom would take us to Pentecostal churches in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) denomination. Though they were in Illinois and only a short drive from Lake Michigan, everyone in the entire congregation was a transplanted Southerner. At the height of a certain moment in hill country spiritual fervor, my grandmother had been a snake handler. I have visited venerable cathedrals in Europe and thought to myself as I admired the marble and stained glass, “My grandmother was a Holy Roller snake handler.”

As if opting for the direct approach to negotiating our divided loyalties, my father would have us reenact the Civil War. He would often recruit my mother’s relations to fight for the South. It was not the first time they had done so.

I read Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) long before he turned to politics, and found it moving. The scene where he is at a fancy dinner put on by a law firm and almost spits out his drink because he had never encountered sparkling water before has lingered with me. It represents all the cultural code switching that one has learned to do over the years.

Vance wants you to know that he likes Diet Mountain Dew—and he is not going to let The Man create a rule against it. I would bet a decent sum, however, that Vance also likes vindaloo and naan bread. He once flunked the still-or-sparkling question, but he would have an informed answer ready now if he was asked to choose between pinot noir and merlot. Logically, learning to move in another culture should not mean that you have betrayed your roots, but somehow it can feel that way. You want some way to hold on to the truth—which you know with every fiber of your genuine self—that you are not better than the people you love even though they have never owned a passport or visited an art gallery.

A common criticism of Hillbilly Elegy is that it is the work of an imposter because Vance is not a true Appalachian. Yet that fact is precisely what gives the book its poignancy. It is a book written by a man who is tortured by a longing to somehow span the gulf over a mighty deep holler. He’s not getting it right, of course—Lord knows, he’s not getting it right—but can anyone get it right? Class, education, and region—can one stand on both sides of the mountain and keep faith with the people one loves in both places?

It’s not easy to be a Yale grad from Ohio with a Hindu wife of Indian descent yet still remain legible to your Scots-Irish Kentucky kin of modest means. I know, I know, I know: It is a lot harder to be a ten-year-old Haitian refugee who has found himself resettled in Ohio. I am not justifying anything, not campaigning for anyone. But I still see you, J. D. Vance. And I am rooting for you. Not for your success as a politician, but for your success as a person.

The violence in Hillbilly Elegy is truly frightening, and even more frightening is any desire to romanticize it. One rule Vance’s people taught him is that when your friend gets in a barroom fight, you back him up, right or wrong. Never mind that he is drunk, out of line, behaving like a jerk, and threw the first punch for no good reason. Anyone might come to the side of the right; you find out who your true friends are when you are in the wrong.

Vance’s behavior of late has sometimes been difficult to watch. J. D. Vance, one senses, sometimes knows that his side is in the wrong about some particular point. But he has decided that they are his people and he is going to try to have their back, right or wrong. OK. But it’s worth remembering that a republic is not a barroom. 

Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College and is an Honorary Fellow at Edinburgh University. He is the author of John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas. He is President Elect of the American Society of Church History.

_{Image credit: Bill Herndon}