Hillbilly Agent? By David Martin

Here is a decidedly different take on JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy than yesterday’s review by F. Roger Devlin. From David Martin at unz.com:

The first time I ever heard of the new young author, J.D. Vance, I was listening to National Public Radio (NPR) sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign, and he was the subject of an interview. The NPR interviewer seemed to love the guy and his message. The subject at hand was his newly published book at the time, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. To say that the book has received a great deal of media attention and that it has been wildly popular is almost an understatement. As of this writing it has received 11,692 customer reviews on Amazon, with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars. It has also received generally favorable reviews across the mainstream political spectrum, such as that spectrum may be.

Presented as a straightforward memoir of the grandson of migrants from coal country in the heart of Eastern Kentucky’s mountains, the little town of Parker, to the steel town of Middletown, Ohio, so named because it is about halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton, the book is also heavily political, which largely explains its popularity, either real or ginned up. Lots of people like J.D.’s grandparents have moved out of their home region to industrial cities in the Rust Bowl area from the Great Depression on, and the lesson we are to draw from the book is that J.D.’s pretty thoroughly messed up family is representative of not just the ones who have moved, but also the ones who were left behind.

Vance represents himself at this stage of his life as very much a conservative Republican, and that should not be very surprising, because the message that comes across in his book is one that we have heard from conservative Republicans for as long as I can remember. It is a message that irritated my liberal Democratic father no end. It is that poor down and out people are generally in that condition because of their own many shortcomings. In a land of opportunity such as ours everyone should be able to make it, and those who don’t shouldn’t be pointing the finger of blame at other people and always expecting the government to come to their rescue.

Searching the Web I find that Vance first attained a degree of prominence all the way back in the summer of 2013 as a regular columnist for the conservative National Review. (For some reason, that part of his budding career is not mentioned on his Wikipedia page.) Considering the content of his famous book we should not be at all surprised to see him being embraced by the National Review crowd.

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