(This is an essay I wrote in 2020.  I have updated it in light of the shocking scenes which took place in The Oval Office on 28 Feb 2025, in which a vice president of the USA ambushed and attempted to shame an ally in front of the world’s cameras)

Property.  Money.  Education.  Social connections.  Weapons.  The right skin color.

A man called J. D. Vance (his own name the product of a carefully selected identity) wrote a book about eight or nine years ago at the ripe old age of 32 called Hillbilly Elegy, in which he purported to explain the source of many Appalachian social problems. A successful venture capitalist, he offered his advice for “bootstrap” solutions to these problems.

J. D. Vance goes big on “poor white people”, because that is how he chooses to perceive his so-called “hillbilly” identity.

In his book, he speaks of his “Scots-Irish” roots and “Scots-Irish” cultural traditions, and the trans-generational effect he believes the culture of these people had on the creation of an Appalachian or Hillbilly “mentality”.

“The Scots-Irish are born fighters, blah blah, blah…”

“The Scots-Irish don’t like Big Government, blah, blah, blah…”

His book received endless blurbs and praise from the urban “intelligentsia” press, eager to find an easily digestible answer or simple reason for rural Appalachian poverty and voting habits.

For “voting habits”, read “Republican or Trump voters”.

Four years after publication, director Ron Howard made a film based on Vance’s carefully curated memoir.

For “carefully curated”, feel free to insert the words “self-serving”, or “ideologically driven”.

Although boasting some decent acting, the film falls down for blindly accepting Vance‘s unschooled sociological hypothesis and retro-fitted recounting of events.

*****

Vance brags about his own bootstrapping attitude, and how he had the get-up-and-go to get-up-and-leave his blighted community.

And how did he escape?  Saving money while working at Walmart?  Selling lemonade?  No.  He did what exactly a million other underclass kids do every decade. He joined the US military.

The US military-industrial complex is so deeply embedded in American culture that “the services” are virtually beyond criticism.  Even American lefties won’t touch the subject.

The military is on our sporting fields.  In our high schools.

But “protecting our freedom and liberty” has become a dead mantra, utterly detached from the real world meaning and consequences of American militarism and foreign policy.

US presidents start wars in places like Iraq at the drop of a hat, making billions for their insider cronies while killing half a million people.

Back on US soil it’s “Thank you for your service”.

No questions asked.

It seems to have never occurred to gung-ho capitalist and paleoconservative Vance that the US military is socialized, just like police or fire departments.

US taxpayers footed the bill which allowed Vance to escape his hometown via the US Marine Corps.

Vance would rail against such taxpayers funding universal health care or third level education, but these taxpayers are fully expected to fund a vast military with 544 US bases in 43 foreign states (with another 159 in US overseas territories).

What about all the young men and women of the Rust Belt who believed the Iraq War was immoral, and wanted no part in offering their “service”?

Where is a taxpayer-funded leg-up in the world for these citizens?

This writer is convinced that the very reason healthcare and third level education are not publicly funded in America, is to ensure a steady stream of young recruits for whom the military is their only hope of accessing further education (and any chance of a better future).

I should know.  I was one of these kids, joining the army on my 17th birthday.

And please.  Don’t thank me for my service.

*****

Mr. Vance is wrong, utterly wrong, about the historical causes of Appalachian poverty.

Even more than this, Mr. Vance misrepresents his own cultural roots, almost certainly by design rather than ignorance.

His “Scots-Irishness” is conjured from thin air to suit his White Christian Nationalist ideology.

His roots are to be found far more among the mixed-ethnic communities of Ohio, including among the people known as “Carmel Indians”.

Groups like the “Carmel Indians” (or the somewhat better known “Melungeons”) are an integral part of the ethnic fabric of underclass America, largely forgotten by mainstream history.

Much of the transgenerational poverty of Appalachian people stems not from something innate to their culture and genes (as claimed by Vance in his execrable book), but from the fact that many Southern Appalachian families started off as a mixed-ethnic, dirt-poor, subsistence farming underclass in the not-so-distant past, partaking of all the disadvantages which that entailed.

Note that Vance uses his mother’s maiden name; by usual naming conventions he would be called James Donald Bowman.

Some Appalachian Vances CAN trace their roots directly to Ulster in Northern Ireland, but our friend J.D. is not one of them. His mother’s Vance line fades into the undocumented mists of early 1700s Buncombe County, NC and Russell County, Virginia, where an ancestor was hanged for the murder of his son-in-law, a man named Lewis Horton.

It is hard to know whether these people were “Vances“, German “Wentzes“, or indeed Scottish “Vauses” due to a colonial era transcription error.

It is in fact certain that many of these Appalachian Vances were of non-European background altogether.

The current VP’s own Vance forebears might well have arisen from people of an African, Jewish, Shawnee, or Romani background, or indeed from any of the other peoples of the colonial and frontier eras who commonly borrowed a surname from “white” settlers and neighbors.

What IS certain (barring out-of-wedlock shenanigans) is that J.D. Vance is descended from Bowmans, Crafts, Gabbards, Creeches, Salyers, Taulbees, Bakers, Hensleys, Rudds, Blantons, Hounshells, Howards, Hammonds, Bollings, Sizemores, Lovelys, Workmans, and others.

He is profoundly mixed-ethnic, and of predominantly German stock (including “Black Dutch”), with some English, Dutch, Melungeon, and almost certainly some indigenous American and African ancestry.

He’s about as “Scots-Irish” as an enchilada.

The ultimate foundational myth of Appalachia revolves around a predominantly “Scots-Irish” identity for its people.

An identity designed to meet all of the right criteria. Non-British, Protestant, rebellious, and “white”.

A safe, all-encompassing, and often racist dog whistling identity, if you will – and in Vance’s case, an outright fake identity.

*****

This is the US senator who fell-into lockstep with the fake reality being propagated by his master in the run-up to last year’s election.

Sane US citizens now find themselves trapped between two ideological camps who have contracted a marriage of convenience.

On one side, we have the technocrats, corporations, and oligarchs (Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg).

On the other side, we have the faces and puppets these technocrats, corporations, and oligarchs have installed to do their bidding.

Trump has no ideology. He will change policies 17 times a day, if it means he gets richer and richer while remaining the center of attention.

He’s easy for the billionaires to handle.

But Vance? This reprehensible, shapeshifting opportunist is now a breath away from the most powerful political office in the world.

And the billionaires will have to be careful, because Vance appears to have finally settled on an ideology.

White Christo-Fascist Nationalism.

Because Vance is an inveterate liar, it is difficult to know how much of his ideology he actually believes, and how much is a show for the MAGA base.

The old PayPal mafia who funded his political rise is certainly rife with believers in “New Eugenics” and “Population Diversity” – in other words, white supremacists looking for scientific cover to justify their racism.

It will be a fascinating and horrifying few years watching the slow-motion death waltz between technocracy and right wing populism.

This is the man who made a public name for himself by throwing his long-suffering community – his own people – under the bus, blaming their poverty on “genes” and an imaginary Scots-Irish culture.

When you owe your position to billionaires, blaming rampant and rapacious capitalism, historical classism/racism, and corrupt government for transgenerational poverty and social dysfunction is out of the question.

Vance is already on record saying he would support the suspension of The Constitution.

This is man who views women as “breeders”.

This is a man who made sure to be on-hand for the gang-ambush of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.

A man fake in every way, ready to bring some very real and very ugly stuff to a town near you…

 

[updated 15 Jul 2024; 1 Mar 2025]