Hillbilly Spin Cycle
Dissecting POLITICO’s interview with an Appalachian Studies “expert” about JD Vance
When the real news doesn’t portend anything good where does one turn? On Friday POLITICO’s Michael Kruse turned to a fiction writer and academic when he couldn’t find anyone else. But just like with many articles by the website that attempt to explain the world outside of the Beltway, this one showed an inability to find a source that can interpret the average person’s perspective. I previously wrote about how his colleague Christopher Cadelago had to seek out a local Democratic Party activist to gauge attitudes about the party from its supporters in Pennsylvania, but Kruse may have outdone him.
Dolan out the false hope
It started on May 3 when Ohio went to the polls to vote in primaries for federal and statewide elections, with all eyes on the crowded GOP race for the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Rob Portman. Ahead of the primary there was a deluge of attention devoted to the rise in the polls of State Sen. Matt Dolan, the lone candidate who made a point of not seeking former Pres. Donald Trump’s endorsement. Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Jason Williams even projected that it wasn’t JD Vance that won the primary but rather Trump and after him Dolan, who came in third after Vance and Josh Mandel. Dolan was possibly buoyed by Democrats that pulled a GOP ballot to support Dolan and incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine because “there are no significant primaries on the Democratic side”. Williams had previously written that Vance would come in third place as a “best-case scenario” in March after his statement that “I think it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine. I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” But once the final results were in all of the candidates including Dolan endorsed Vance. Many liberals openly preferred Dolan over Vance for the simple fact that their only compass is which candidate is least supported by Donald Trump, despite the fact that unlike his rival Dolan’s money is inherited from his wealthy family with branches that own the New York Knicks and Cleveland Indians.
Introducing our totally unbiased object expert
In response to the primary result Silas House, chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Kentucky, tweeted that “[f]or years now people have asked me what I think about #JDVance, then get mad when I tell them. His book isn’t a memoir. It’s a treatise, full of dog whistles. In 21 years as a published writer it’s the only book I’ve ever publicly disparaged. He’s dangerous. So is his book”. Kruse then held an interview with him, and while mentioning House’s academic position, failed to include his long history of political activism. Among the items he could have included were that just a week earlier House had tweeted out a promotion of a joint event with fellow author and Democratic US Senate candidate Charles Booker who is running against incumbent Sen. Rand Paul with what can only be described as an endorsement. He began the tweet “@Booker4KY believes Kentucky is worth fighting for, and so do I”.
Or how about the fact that while House stated that “for the record, I do not like to give a lot of my energy to this man (JD Vance)”, House has repeatedly trashed him and his book? This includes promoting “alternatives to Hillbilly Elegy” such as the then two year-old documentary Hillbilly which he was executive produce of, in a 2020 tweet ahead of the movie adaptation’s release. The film explores a feminist female Hillary Clinton-supporting film director living in Los Angeles coping with the media’s blaming of Donald Trump’s political success on Appalachian hillbillies. Whether intentional or not, an early scene from the film shows a stack of books in her LA home that includes Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Much of the film covers her return to tiny Kimper, Kentucky to visit her family and cope with her family’s political loyalty to Trump during the aftermath of the 2016 election.
House also said in the interview “the first time I read it, it read like the launching of a political campaign to me.” Did he really think so? It’s hard to tell since in a 2018 interview House said that he “doesn’t believe Vance has any malicious intent” and mentioned nothing about a political motive. When the book was published in 2016 House left it off his book reviews on Goodreads.
Misogynist pigs for thee but not for me
Another criticism House throws at Hillbilly Elegy is that the memoir includes scenes of Vance’s uncles fighting and beating their wives. “Well, as an Appalachian man, that’s deeply troubling to me,” House comments, “because that doesn’t embody Appalachian masculinity as I know it. It does embody the stereotypes of Appalachian masculinity over the last 150 years of media.” It seems House objects to Vance stigmatizing Appalachian men as misogynistic he-men and alcoholics. Yet in 2017 House spoke at the Women’s March in Lexington, KY and read an account of his grandmother working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken where the men would pinch her butt and remark about her body, including an admonition from her that he would never act in such a manner. He went on to call on all men to take a stand against “rape culture” having generalized based on experiences of his grandmother in Kentucky from years before he was born. Ironically his criticism of Vance is that he extrapolates his grandmother’s experiences in Appalachia as being common to everyone there.
Finally if House’s real feelings towards his own Appalachian culture were not clear enough he tweeted in 2019 that “unfortunately, Appalachia IS part of the reason Trump is in office. Unfortunately, the region as a majority IS homophobic. We can deny it all we want, but it’s true. . .” House also splits hairs in the interview over whether Vance’s story is really one of Appalachia where his family originated or the Rust Belt given that they moved to southwest Ohio just outside the traditional boundaries of Appalachia. He calls Vance’s characterization of his family as Appalachian “manipulative”. This semantic argument is particularly petty given that just like southern blacks many Appalachian whites have migrated for generations to Ohio’s industrial cities like Akron, Toledo and Dayton in search of factory jobs as part of the extensive migration pattern known as the “Hillbilly Highway”. As an Appalachian Studies professor one would expect this to be a topic he is intimately familiar with.
The ironic pattern of the interview is built on the accusation by House against Vance of trafficking “in ugly stereotypes and tropes” as Kruse writes. However whereas Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir, House injects almost all of the same stereotypes into the fictional characters in his novels. In the Amazon synopsis of his first novel Clay’s Quilt it says that “Silas House introduced himself as an important voice for Appalachia, and indeed, for the entire rural South”. The plot to this novel is a young man’s “path to adulthood” surrounded by characters like his “Aunt Easter tied to her faith”, a fiddler, and two “wild girls”. His 2018 book Southernmost portrays a preacher coping with the homophobia of his congregation in a “small Tennessee town” against two gay men.
Kruse’s interview supports the notion that the same formula is baked into POLITICO’s coverage of the MAGA movement: To understand it one must only reach out to those that hate it the most. While one could argue that JD Vance’s memoir may serve to confirm outsiders’ perceptions of Appalachian hillbillies as backward drunks, having an author who typically adds to this that they are homophobic and racist religious zealots doesn’t exactly make an effective rebuttal. The tone of the interview smacks not only of partisanship but professional envy.
Kruse’s article seems like a desperate stab at finding a silver bullet in the coal mines of Eastern Kentucky to stop the Vance campaign. As a candidate he is not the most easy target to attack: as a veteran married to an Indian American woman who is a business partner of one of gay billionaire Peter Thiel, Vance does not necessarily fit into the mold of old-guard corporate Republican. It wouldn’t be the first time he chose a narrative of dubious importance in order to interpret the attitudes of pro-Trump communities that are so strange to him. In a January article he asked the question “does John Katko gave the secret to thwarting Trump?”, predicting that the Syracuse area GOP congressmen is in a “strong position to hold his seat” after voting to impeach Donald Trump in 2021. Every person interviewed in the article was a party insider. Eight days later Katko had announced his intention not to seek reelection. Do we expect any better from POLITICO as primary season continues?
Maybe expectations of higher standards are the problem. Why expect more balance from POLITICO in Washington, DC when Brent Larkin, the “retired” opinion editor of the Plain Dealer Northeast Ohio’s paper of record, excoriated Vance for parading around the state with congressmen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, whom he labeled “vermin”? Clearly with both the national and local media having such a unified perspective on JD Vance we can expect a lot of hand wringing should he decide not to seek their endorsements.