#How liberals turned on JD Vance, working-class author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — When J.D. Vance’s blockbuster memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” first came out in the spring of 2016, it was celebrated as a coup d’oeil of an American group long abandoned by the national conversation: the white working class of the industrial Midwest and Appalachia. 

While Vance grew up here in this decaying Rust Belt town, he was also equally connected to the hills of Eastern Kentucky where he summered with his extended family. In his book, he detailed with brutal honesty how social isolation, poverty and despair impacted his family and others in the region. 

Vance miraculously made it out, joined the Marines, and went on to graduate from Ohio State University and then Yale Law School. 

When his book was released, Donald Trump was about to secure the Republican nomination for president, and Vance was celebrated as the one person who could decode the white working class attachment to the brash candidate promising to “Make America Great Again.” 

In a glowing 2016 review for The New York Times, Jennifer Senior wrote that Vance’s combination of thoughtful inquiry and firsthand experience “provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans.” 

Vance, who was occasionally critical of Trump, became a sought-after guest on the talk show circuit. Before Vance joined his show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes told his audience that “Hillbilly Elegy” is “a really fantastic read, it’s really eye-opening, it’s a great piece of work. You should check it out.” 

For months the blue-check Twitterati could not get enough of him. 

Now, fast-forward five years and they want nothing to do with him. 

It started after Joe Biden was elected in November and Vance began offering his candid thoughts on social media about what he calls “woke capitalism” and “the border crisis” as well as Big Tech’s collision with the First Amendment, economic nationalism and China’s role in the pandemic. 

Suddenly, nearly everything he said was construed as some form of racism by blue-check elites, and anyone taking a sympathetic look at the white working class was considered taboo. When the film version of “Hillbilly Elegy” came out on Netflix in November, critics slammed it. 

Then talk started to circulate that Vance might run for US Senate in 2022, to fill the seat being vacated by retiring Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. So far, Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel has pumped $10 million into a super PAC backing Vance’s theoretical run. 

In an interview with The Post, Vance would not yet confirm whether he is running. But, one thing’s for sure, if he runs, it will be as a Republican. And that has stirred the ire of his former progressive fans. Greg Sargent in The Washington Post dismissed his positions as “performance populism.” 

“Once it became clear that I was more on the side of Trump and the conservatives than I was on the side of the left, it went pretty hard,” Vance told me. “Before Trump was elected, people were trying to understand the forgotten man, the white working class, however you want to put it.” 

After Trump won, “it quickly became one of two things: Either these voters are all racists or Russia hacked the election. 

“The whole culture of the media has shifted from, ‘Let’s try to understand the other half of the country,’ to ‘Let’s just beat up on the other half of the country.’ ” 

Vance recalls doing an interview with Don Lemon on CNN before the election and the host expressing “compassion and curiosity . . . he was trying to think through all of the problems that my family have gone through over the last couple of decades.” After the election, Lemon invited Vance back onto his show and “every question was, ‘How could these people still be behind Trump?’ ” 

Steve McMahon, a legendary DC-based Democrat strategist who worked on several presidential campaigns, says Vance’s rise and fall among members of the elite is regrettable — but unsurprising. 

“Vance demonstrated something in his uniquely American success story. [He] showed it’s still possible in America to pull yourself up from adversity and be successful,” McMahon said. “But once you go from being an apolitical American success story to a politician, you immediately inherit all of the enemies of your enemies. It’s the partisan environment we’ve created.” 

McMahon wishes Vance’s story ended with him being a Democrat. 

“His story is the story of many Democrats I know,” he said. “Frankly, it’s the story of too few Republicans.” 

Today, many progressives believe that Democrat candidates can win without white working-class voters, said Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University. 

“They think, ‘Well, we don’t really need the great unwashed anymore,’ ” Sracic said. 

But Biden did need white working-class voters to secure his narrow win over Trump last year. Exit polls in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania showed that the percentage of white working-class men voting Democratic increased from 23 percent in 2016 to 28 percent in 2020, while among white working-class women, support for Democrats increased from 34 percent to 36 percent. Biden did that by constantly visiting those places, reminding them of his blue-collar roots. Without those voters, he would have lost. 

What the media failed to notice from the beginning is that Vance is as much a conservative populist as the people he grew up with, Sracic added. 

“All you had to do was really read the book, it is between every line, but I think elites thought because he would occasionally criticize Trump’s behavior he was one of them.” 

Sracic believes that Vance and candidates like him secretly scare the heck out of strategic Democrats. 

The 2022 midterm election is “going to be a cultural war election,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be an economy election, it’s not going to be a pandemic election.” 

But, this time, the media are back on the path of dismissing the conservative populist message and its messengers. 

“And people like Vance are well positioned to just deliver that sort of cultural war message authentically.” 

Salena Zito is the author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.”