Hillbilly Hoax

The “hillbilly” part of Hillbilly Elegy is actually a bit of stolen valor. The forty-year-old Ohio senator grew up in Middletown but claims a spiritual connection to rural Kentucky because his primary guardians, his grandparents, grew up there, and he summered there as a boy.

Vance’s grandparents — Mamaw and Papaw, as he calls them — migrated from Kentucky’s hills to Middletown as newlywed teens for a job at the Armco steelworks plant, which later became AK Steel. Like many industrial, blue-collar jobs in postwar America, Armco offered a comfortable middle-class existence without requiring higher education. But that life didn’t last. Soon came the neoliberal era of free trade, outsourcing, the defanging of organized labor, and deindustrialization — a bipartisan project that kicked off in earnest in the 1970s. Half of the steelworkers in America lost their jobs from 1974 to 1984, devastating communities, including Middletown, where Armco reduced its workforce from 7,500 to 2,500.

In the 1910s, Midwest manufacturing hubs like Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and St. Louis were among the top-ten largest cities in the nation. A century later, these blue-collar cities had declined significantly. As a native of a midsize industrial Illinois city, I’ve also seen firsthand how these communities have suffered from rampant poverty, crime, drug addiction, and a collective psychic wound after the loss of economic well-being.

The problem with Hillbilly Elegy is that it handwaves away the series of political decisions that hollowed out Vance’s home state and mine. Vance is, above all, judgmental, blaming the working-class people who live in Middletown for their own plight. Laziness and self-destruction are deeply embedded in the white working class’s way of life, he claims. “Doing better requires that we acknowledge the role of culture,” Vance writes. “I don’t know what the answer is, precisely,” Vance continues. “But I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better ourselves.”

It’s this finger-wagging critique that made Hillbilly Elegy such a hit in 2016. The book preached about the moral failures of the white working class from one its own (albeit laundered through Yale Law School) and confirmed what wealthy liberals and conservatives already believed: that the economic and social decline of towns like Middletown was a reflection of the personal failings of their residents.

The elites wanted an answer for the rise of the monster of Trump, and Hillbilly Elegy offered an easy scapegoat. The yokels were just too dumb to know what was good for them and too lazy to find out. What’s ironic, of course, is that Vance’s new job in the Trump campaign is to agitate against other politically convenient scapegoats for the economic struggles of Middle America: Joe Biden, China, immigrants, wokeness, and so on.

But when it comes to Middletown’s role in the Vance worldview, the shoe doesn’t quite fit. While it would be premature to declare neoliberalism over, the first couple of years of the Biden administration did depart from the status quo in significant and surprising ways. The Biden era’s bold and progressive policy moves towards reindustrialization and significant federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing — plus the rise of remote work and the relatively low cost of housing — have made it possible for the Rust Belt, including Middletown, to begin scraping off some of the old rust.

In other words, Middletown’s decline is reversing, and the reasons have nothing to do with an improved culture among its citizens. Instead, the reversal owes largely to economic reforms initiated by the party Vance now opposes.

Reviving the Rust Belt

Bidenomics is far from perfect. Despite hyperbolic claims from the MAGA universe that Joe has ushered in socialism or communism, nothing has fundamentally changed in the structure of the American capitalist economy. The Democrats’ last few years of achievements instead represent, at best, a nostalgic trip back to the peaks of working-class comfort: the New Deal order of a century ago and the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson.

But these reforms are nothing to sneeze at, either. Biden has enacted policies such as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law, the $2.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and the $280 billion CHIPS Act. These stimulating interventions combined direct public spending with grants, loans, and tax incentives to help lure new jobs to places like Middletown.

Among other positive effects, manufacturing has received a boost. American construction spending on new manufacturing facilities more than doubled last year compared with 2022, and companies spent roughly $16.2 billion a month building new production facilities. Spending on construction for computers, electronics, and semiconductors has quadrupled over the last two years. Especially striking is that this growth is disproportionately flowing to places hit hardest by deindustrialization, with strategic sector investment concentrated in communities with low employment and income levels.

That list includes Papaw’s Middletown steel plant, formerly known as Armco, now Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works. Earlier this year, Cleveland-Cliffs announced that it’s investing nearly $2 billion in federal grants and its own funds over five years to upgrade the Middletown plant with a unit that burns hydrogen and natural gas instead of coal. It’s a project expected to create 1,200 construction jobs in Middletown and dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

The additional tax money from the project, says Shawn Coffey, the steel plant workers’ union president for Local 1943, will fund more public safety measures in Middletown and support more local businesses. “Money in the pocket is money in the community, right? People work here, spend money here, it’s beneficial all the way around,” he told a local news outlet.

Over the next five years, Amtrak is looking to expand its passenger rail service to connect Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati by rail for the first time since 1967, thanks to Amtrak Joe’s infrastructure law. Meanwhile, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown secured $226.9 million in federal funds this year across 162 state projects, much of it in infrastructure, including $330,000 for Middletown’s regional airport.

Notably, Ohio’s other senator, J. D. Vance, did not submit any requests for earmarks. Vance panders to the working-class Rust Belt communities in speeches; he addressed his speech at the Republican Nations Convention last month “to the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio,” promising that he “will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.” But Vance’s greatest contribution to Middletown is still shitting on it in Hillbilly Elegy.

He doesn’t even live there anymore. Not really. In 2017, he announced in a chest-beating New York Times opinion piece that he was moving home to Ohio from Silicon Valley to help reverse the “brain drain” from Appalachia to “super ZIP codes.” And then in 2018, he bought a historic mansion in Cincinnati for $1.4 million in an upscale neighborhood that voted for Biden by a nine-to-one margin.

After being elected to the Senate, he added a $1.6 million home in the Washington, DC, suburbs. If Netflix ever makes a sequel to Hillbilly Elegy, it will be a boring version of Beverly Hillbillies for millennials.

Hometown Hero?

Many residents in Middletown seem ready to forget their newly fortunate son.

Ami Vitori, who Vance cites as a friend in his New York Times opinion column, recently told the Times that “Vance left Middletown behind a long time ago,” saying his interest in it seemed limited to using it as a badge of honor of what he has overcome.

On a recent road trip through the Midwest, I stopped into Middletown and took a stroll through its downtown. When I asked locals there about Vance, the responses ranged from disinterest — feigned or not — to outright disgust. Nobody wanted to sing the praises of their hometown hero.

I walked into Gravel Road Brewing, a brewery that opened in 2023 a block away from Central and Main Street, the corner that Vance describes in Hillbilly Elegy as “abandoned shops with broken windows that line the heart of downtown.” He may not have been wrong then, but the picture is very different now, something Vance seems intent to deny.

I asked a bartender what she thought about J. D. Vance. She shook her head and said, “We don’t claim him.”