Classism, Memoirs, Me and Vance

In 2016, I was in the midst of writing my own rural working-class memoir when JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was released. Vance’s book details his upbringing in the Rust Belt and ends, as most books of this genre do—including Stephanie Land’s Maid, and Tara Westover’s excellent memoir Educated—with the protagonist leaving home to attend an elite college. According to this storyline, Vance transcended the limitations of his working-class upbringing by going to Yale and getting a job in finance. This resolution reinforces the American ideal of class mobility. It has the added benefit of putting the average book buyer—educated, middle class, white collar—at ease by reinforcing the belief that their position in life is one to be aspired to. The hero wins, in essence, by conforming.

In my book, I refuse a message of middle-class aspiration. The Good Hand (the title of which literally means “good worker”), details my upbringing on a farm in rural Maryland but focuses primarily on time I spent working as a rig mover in North Dakota’s oil field during the Bakken Boom. It concludes with me returning to my mother’s house and continuing work as a laborer. After years of running away from my working-class, rural upbringing, I came to see it as a central part of who I was and who I continued to want to be. The transformation I describe in my book is not based on my education, my status within capitalism, or my acceptance by a certain stratum of society. Instead, it is spiritual, artistic, vocational and largely internal.

Currently, I work for a small landscape gardening company based in south Brooklyn, NY. My boss, a buddy from Georgia, and I spend most of our days in freewheeling conversation. We talk about music, politics, and relationships. I practice storytelling at my job, and I learn something new nearly every day I work. I love being outside and in the dirt. Recently, I built a fence in the rain. It was a simple, beautiful experience.

Often, we work side by side with a group of Guyanese immigrants who my boss met in the Home Depot parking lot. We often struggle to understand each other verbally, so we communicate by pointing, waving our hands, shaking our heads and mostly, when we are in good moods, by poking fun at each other. One of these workers, a stocky bulldog of a man who drives a large white cargo van, calls me “Kentucky,” because I lived there for a few years. He says it in a deep baritone and the word is fat and plosive rolling off his tongue. His colleagues, whose nicknames include “Animal” and “Bush” often refer to him as “Short Man.” When he shows up to work, they sometimes say, “The devil has arrived!” We have a good time together.

Of course, blue collar work is hard. The jobs I have worked over the past decades offer low wages. If I don’t supplement my income with money from writing or playing guitar, I’m in trouble. As big tech has effectively strip mined the creative arts over the past twenty years, I’m squeezed there, too. I have no retirement plan, and the vagaries of aging cannot be denied. As I enter my late forties, carrying bags of mulch and kneeling down to weed patios is taking a greater toll on my body. A career change is starting to feel more inevitable than unlikely, but I’ve worked in offices, and I don’t very much like it. I figure I’ve got a few more years left in me as a laborer. For the time being, at the end of my workday, I’m dirty, my body is tired, and my mind is clear. For me, this is a good life.

When it was released, Hillbilly Elegy was, in some ways, inspiring to me. I was heartened by the focus on the working class characters and excited by the fact that the book had created such a stir. I also connected with certain parts of the work emotionally, particularly the later chapters when Vance finds himself at Yale, unaccustomed to basic cultural signifiers of the wealthy. Vance had to be taught as a twenty-something that the color of his belt should match his shoes, and he embarrassed himself at a dinner by believing there were only two types of wine: Red and White. These experiences are familiar to anyone with a working poor background who attempts to ingratiate themselves with the upper and middle classes. They may sound mild but I have my own version of these tales, and simply conjuring them in my memory can cause a flush of embarrassment.

In other ways, I found Hillbilly Elegy frustrating. In 2016, at the dawn of a progressive movement aimed at addressing the systemic causes of racism and sexism in society, the most popular book about white poverty in a generation was one that blamed the poor. Hillbilly Elegy contains no discussion of NAFTA, the housing crisis, the coal industry, the opioid epidemic or any systemic contributors to rural poverty.

More than the book itself, the media reaction to it disturbed and angered me.  While rural media outlets wrote scathing critiques of Hillbilly Elegy, major national media outlets championed Vance and his condescending bootstrap messaging. The New York Times called the book “a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor.” The Washington Post claimed Vance was “The voice of the Rust Belt” but—in a jaw dropping headline—wondered if he’d even “want the job.”  Vance’s memoir was largely dismissed by the working class, rural people it was written about, but it was successful because it told both liberal and conservative well-to-do Americans what they wanted to hear.

The national reaction to Vance’s book was my first real lesson that in this new progressive post-Obama era, racism and sexism may be off limits, but classism was not. Living in Brooklyn, New York, I confront it often. As an author who loves music, writing and theater, I regularly spend time in circles of upper class liberal white-collar professionals and artists. When I talk about my time living in Kentucky, I am sometimes confronted with “jokes” about hillbillies committing incest. I went to college but never received a degree, and I regularly hear disparaging remarks about people who are self-taught. I grew up in the country and, in the past two years, since returning to New York from Lexington, KY, I have heard rural, working-class Americans referred to as “those people” more times than I can count.

Usually, I just ignore these comments. Like a tradesman buddy said to me when talking about the racism he has encountered on job sites in rural Pennsylvania, “I just don’t smile or participate in it and usually people get the idea.” The difference I have found in dealing with classism is that, unlike racism, it has become so ingrained in our culture, that most of the people I hear it from have no idea that what they are saying is wrong. As a study from University of Groningen, “Educationalism and the Irony of meritocracy” succinctly concludes, “For the higher educated prejudice toward the lower educated seems to be acceptable, whereas it is not for the classical targets (racism, sexism).”

These insults aren’t confined to cocktail parties, concerts and book readings. Major media outlets regularly trade in classist tropes. Trump was elected by “low information voters.” People in rural America “vote against their own economic interests.” According to liberal economic consensus, the economy is doing great right now; those who disagree are simply experiencing a “vibecession,” as if forty years of stagnant wages comprises a “good economy,” and as if workers aren’t smart enough to know how much money they have in the bank.

Is it worth noting that a lack of educational diversity amongst our governing class has had a detrimental effect on the nation?

In 1945, only ½ of the House and ¾ of the Senate had a college degree. Those numbers have risen in a decades long trend and now stand at close to 100%. This lack of practical, vocational voices in the halls of power has been a disaster for our country. As Michael J. Sandel points out in The Tyranny of Merit, America’s governing class from 1940 to 1980 “won WWII, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthened the welfare state, dismantled segregation, and presided over four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike.” The more educated elitists who have governed America since the 1980’s have brought “four decades of stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities in income and wealth not seen since the 1920’s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008, a decaying infrastructure, (and) the highest incarceration rate in the world…”

Ironically, Vance, the author of a book trading in socially acceptable classist tropes, has transformed himself into a real voice for the American working class. He has done so using the same means that made him a darling of the mainstream media: by appealing to the lowest common denominator. To gain favor with the educated Left, Vance blamed poor white Americans for their problems. His rise to power on the Right has been fueled by his willingness to blame immigrants for theirs. Vance has also hitched his wagon to the one man in America willing to insult everyone but the working class: Donald Trump.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Vance as all bluster. Over the past few years, the Vice President Elect has aligned himself with Oren Cass and the New Right conservative think tank American Compass, who promote an economics that “asks whether the economy empowers workers to support their families and communities, whether it strengthens the social fabric, and whether it fosters domestic industry and innovation.”

On the campaign trail, Democrats did their best to demonize the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for which Vance wrote the forward, and indeed much of the 900 plus page document sounds nuts. But it also contains passages like this: “Our federal labor and employment agencies have an important role to play by protecting workers, setting boundaries for the healthy functioning of labor markets, and ultimately encouraging wages and conditions for jobs that can support a family.” This kind of prose is bound to make many liberals incredulous, but as The New Yorker reports, the foundation is run by “pro-family conservatives who are practicing what they preach…(they recently) increased maternity leave to fourteen weeks and instituted a six-week paternity leave.” 

As over the past decade the Left has further embraced classist rhetoric and leaned deeper into race and gender-based identity politics, the Right has quietly been building a platform from which to help American working men and women of all ethnicities. Should Vance and his Republican colleagues turn the above prose into policy on a federal level, it could be that he will prove to be a strong advocate for American workers after all. This would be a surprise to me, but frankly, it would be a welcome surprise. Working people, as far as I am concerned, are working people. I would like one of America’s political parties to fight for the working class without talking down to us.

My memoir, The Good Hand, is not a particularly political book, but in it I relay the experience of telling a fellow oil field hand that I voted for Obama.  Word spread quickly—you don’t find many Democrats working the rigs— and I took an incredible amount of grief from coworkers for my political identity. I was struggling to find my place among the community of men I worked with, and this difference between us was acute. It forced me to reckon with myself, to make decisions about my values that affected my day-to-day life. It was hard.

I am now proud to call myself a member of America’s oil field community. When, in 2021, I testified before Congress on workers’ rights at the behest of the Democratic Party, I pissed a lot of those community members off. They saw my differences of opinion as a threat. This bothers me, because it put me at odds with some people who could have become my friends. It probably hurt my book sales, too. But I write to figure things out, to try to make sense of the world, to try to make sense of myself in order to develop an ethic that can act as a roadmap that can help guide me through this life.  Anything I write now will be clumsy. Because I am clumsy. It will be furious, because I am furious. It will not have all the answers, because I don’t have them. As I’ve drafted it, this essay has ended as both a call to arms for a strong working-class progressivism and as an explanation for why I’m jumping ship and joining the conservative coalition. The truth is, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Currently, I feel an incredible amount of anger toward a liberal community of which I consider myself a member. Along with the faucet drip of oblivious classism I have encountered over the past decade, I have witnessed a cultural clamp down on debate, an imposition of purity tests, and a stifling of critical thinking. I have heard people called racist, sexist and bigoted because they did not adhere to strange linguistic puzzles devised by academics. Latinos I’ve gardened with have expressed annoyance and confusion over the term LatinX, which they find unpronounceable and dumb, but it hasn’t stopped liberal white editors from pressuring me to use the word. I have heard family members called “anti-science” and “anti-vaxxers” because they don’t want their kids, who happen to have auto-immune disorders, to get state-mandated shots their physicians say will hurt them. I have heard science itself, a methodology I respect, sloganeered into an ideology we must “Believe In.” I have heard differences of opinion labeled “misinformation,” as if gossip were an existential threat now that humans have computers. I have had people roll their eyes at me for being a “White Man,” two things I have no control over. I have had my ancestors insulted as if my maternal grandfather, an immigrant who worked proudly as a school janitor in Cazenovia, NY somehow oppressed them, or as if the great-great-grandfather on my father’s side—a Yankee soldier who survived the Civil War only to die plowing a field on a farm in Ohio—was responsible for redlining laws in Boston. According to the anti-racist ideology that has become so fashionable in liberal society, it is racist for me to even talk about class. Well, like I told the roughnecks who threatened to throw me in front of a truck for voting for Democrats, today I’m saying, “I’ve had enough.”

Here is what I want to see: I want to see Democrats showing respect, allowing pride of place, and offering a seat at the table to the self-educated, to the workers, and to those who prefer the sound of the river to the sound of the street. I want to see liberal people disagree more often. I miss honest, open, messy debates. Without creating an annoying list of unacceptable words, I want liberals to attune their ears to the classism rampant in their everyday speech. Then to stop it. I believe that diversity does not end with the color of our skin, our gender identity, or our sexual orientation. I believe we are diverse in what we do, what we can teach, and where we make our home. I want differences in class, education and geography to be celebrated.

In the oil patch, the ire directed toward me for my politics culminated in a night at a hotel bar in Glendive, Montana where me and my boss, a usually laconic North Dakota born truck pusher, after a few too many beers, nearly came to blows. At the time, I loved that truck pusher. I still do. He could be mean as hell, but he was funny and smart and good at his job. Lately, I’ve been thinking of him and me on that particular night, our sleeves rolled up, pushing a cocktail table out of the way, squaring our shoulders, just about to start swinging. Neither one of us threw a punch. We weren’t that dumb. We had bigger things to do. The next morning we got up and went to work.