Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance on Barack Obama: ‘We dislike the things we envy’

This time last year JD Vance was a business manager at a Silicon Valley biotech firm, putting the final touches on a memoir about growing up dirt poor in Appalachia. He warned his boss that he might need to take a week of vacation over the summer to promote the book.

“Even that, I thought, was sort of excessive,” he recalls.

Hillbilly Elegy was published at the end of June – and Vance hasn’t stopped talking about it since. Now entering its 25th week on the New York Times’ bestseller list, it is one of the most discussed political books of the moment.

Though it doesn’t mention Donald Trump, Hillbilly Elegy has been hailed as a must-read prism into disaffection among America’s white working class and the rise of the new president. Vance, 32, is a Republican, but his writing has received accolades across the political spectrum. “Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it,” said Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary.

“It’s pretty insane,” Vance concedes. “I would say it has changed nearly everything in my life.”

This is the second time Vance’s life has been changed beyond recognition. The first is the subject of the memoir, which charts how he overcame a chaotic upbringing in Middletown, a deprived former steel town in the Ohio rust belt. He belongs to a fiercely proud and loyal clan descended from rural Kentucky and spares few details recounting how the family buckled under the pressures of poverty, drugs and violence.

He and his sister are brought up by their grandparents. Their father is absent, their mother a nurse and drug addict with a constant stream of boyfriends. On one occasion, she demands her young son’s urine so she can pass a drug test at the hospital where she works. On another, she spirals into a rage and threatens to crash a car and kill them both.

“It has definitely been hard on mom,” he says of the book’s raw depiction of their family life. “And that’s something that I struggle with quite a bit.” He hopes readers realise, he adds, “that when you live the life that mom has, it necessarily leaves its scars”.

Vance overcame these obstacles and made it to the Marines, and then Yale Law School. But he never forgot his affinity to “white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree”, a group for whom, he argues, “poverty is the family tradition”. “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash,” he says. “I call them neighbours, friends, and family.”

The memoir ends shortly after Vance graduates from Yale, where he has learned how to exploit networks and connections that many students at Ivy League schools acquired at birth – but kids from Middletown don’t even know exist.

The book finishes before it can tell the next chapter of Vance’s life: his relocation to Silicon Valley and his move, around April of last year, from the biotech firm to Mithril Capital, the venture capitalist firm founded by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel.

I ask Vance how he got the job. He says he met Thiel during a talk the tech entrepreneur gave at Yale and emailed him years later asking for work. “It was that simple,” he says.

Thiel has become a pariah in liberal Silicon Valley after backing Trump and aiding his presidential transition. Vance, who did not vote for Trump, says he’s never had a meaningful discussion with his boss about the incoming president. He insists Thiel’s reputation is unfounded, claiming he is “super thoughtful and incredibly nice”.

His view on the Bay Area is more conflicted, confessing that the unflinching optimism he sees around him can be “weird”. “This boom is just going to keep on going,” he says, recounting typical San Francisco conversations. “My life is great, my family is great, my job is great, my house is great.”

The positivity is both enviable and, he adds, disconnected from reality in the booming cities around Silicon Valley. “As an economic experiment, if your goal is to promote growth and innovation, it’s incredibly successful. As a social experiment, if you’re meaning to foster a long-term sense of community, and an attachment not just to the people that you see every day but the people that live around you, then it is not going very well at all.”

Poor in San Francisco is “absolutely” worse than the town where he grew up, he explains. “Poor in Middletown is you live in a really crappy, dilapidated house and you get your food through food stamps,” he says. “Poor out here is: ‘I’m sleeping in a street, I have no one who I really depend on’.”

He adds: “There’s this worry that I have that most of the people who live here don’t feel a special attachment to the place, or to the people who are less fortunate who live here”.

In the coming weeks, Vance will leave San Francisco – keeping the venture capitalist job if he can – and return to his native Ohio, where he has just founded a nonprofit that will help address the opioid epidemic. It is, he says, a chance to “capitalise on a platform” he has acquired since the publication of the book.

A few days before our interview, a newspaper in West Virginia, which borders Ohio, revealed pharmaceutical companies had flooded the state with a staggering 780m prescription painkillers over a six-year period – equivalent to 433 for every man, woman and child. Vance believes there is a growing appetite among Republicans and Democrats to deal with the opioid epidemic that is ravaging many rural, deprived communities.

“It is in your face, in your family, in your home,” he says, explaining why there is now widespread, bipartisan empathy for addicts. I suggest there’s racial dimension to that claim, that the opioid crisis has predominantly infiltrated the homes and families of white people, prompting a far less punitive response to the reaction to the crack epidemic.

Vance does not disagree: “There’s absolutely been a difference in a way I think the country has responded psychologically to the crack epidemic versus the opioid epidemic. So I think a lot of black Americans are completely justified in being sensitive about that fact.”

Vance is most interesting when discussing race, which many would argue remains a more significant economic and political cleavage than class. He does not dispute that the prospects for many black Americans are materially worse than for whites but says he is sceptical about the term white privilege, cautioning that it “collapses a poor kid who is the son of an unemployed coal miner into the same group as a rich boarding school kid who grew up in New England”.

Vance is curious why opinion surveys consistently show poor whites are more pessimistic about the future.

He recalls, for example, the differing responses to Trump’s campaign message about economic and social decay. There was uproar when Trump caricatured African American inner cities, blighted by violence and poverty. “But when Trump [delivered] a very similar message – your communities are falling apart, you can’t get any jobs, it’s terrible – to white audiences, they were much more willing to listen.”

Trump’s election was seen, at least in part, as a backlash from white, working-class voters frustrated at their relative decline in status in America – symbolised, of course, by its first black president. Vance plays down this explanation, but I bring up a line in his book that seems to hint at a racially toned resentment. “Obama,” he writes, “strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities.”

“I think that Obama is everything that the American meritocracy values at a time when a lot of us feel like the American meritocracy doesn’t value very much about us at all,” he explains. “It is just sort of like everything about him. He’s like the American ideal at the very moment that we feel like we’re the opposite of the American ideal.”

He adds: “The natural question that comes – especially in the modern political context as part of that – is the fact he has black skin. I think for some people that’s definitely part of it. But I continue to think the racial explanation of the reaction to Obama doesn’t quite capture how much everything about him is both enviable but also dislikable. Because we dislike the things that we envy.”

There is an arrogance to Obama’s demeanour, he adds, that makes him especially difficult to relate to. “He talks in a way that a professor talks, he talks in a way that you sort of aspire to talk if you’re a young law student. Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.”

When I ask about Vance’s own political ambitions he hedges, saying he has no burning ambition to run for office but would not rule it out “because maybe down the road I will”.

His return to Ohio tells a different story. As well as his nonprofit, Vance is also embarking on a listening tour, attending GOP events in the state, and enlisted the support of Jai Chabria, a former top adviser to Republican governor John Kasich. As the Washington Post observed: “Every step that Vance is taking is exactly what a sophisticated person in his position who wanted to run for statewide office would do.”

They also happen to be strikingly similar steps taken by Obama during his earliest strides into politics. He, too, followed an Ivy League law degree with a foray into nonprofit work – in his case, in Chicago – and a memoir. Dreams of My Father that wrestled with similar themes of family and racial identity and was published shortly before Obama ran for Illinois state senate in 1996.

When I point out the parallels, Vance shakes his head and demurs. “I definitely don’t see myself as doing that,” he says. “It is in some ways hard for me to imagine myself running for office, because the book was so raw. There are a lot of F-words in it.”

But a few moments later, he adds: “You know, you mention a parallel to president Obama. Maybe he didn’t think that either, right? Maybe opportunities just presented themselves and he went forward with them?”

A couple of days after our conversation, Vance emailed the New York Times with an idea for an op-ed. It was published a few days later under the title: Barack Obama and Me.

(Guardian service)