With Sen. JD Vance named Donald Trump’s running mate, commentators are dusting off Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” to explain America’s political moment.
Eight years ago, Vance was a Never-Trumper, comparing Trumpism to “cultural heroin” in an op-ed for The Atlantic. Yet Vance’s book about growing up in a struggling city in southwestern Ohio became a go-to primer for explaining the Trumpian turn in American politics. One reviewer even likened Vance to an Appalachian Ta-Nehisi Coates, revealing white, blue-collar America to outsiders in the same way that Coates’ writing explained Black America to white readers.
