“My grandmother comes from a family that would sooner shoot you than argue with you… Anyone else in our family could turn from calm to homicidal in an instant.” With these words, J.D. Vance describes his family roots in his famous memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” revealing a turbulent environment that shaped his personality since childhood.
Vance says in his biography: “We never knew when a wrong word would turn into a violent quarrel, or when a plate would fly through the air because of a simple mistake… We lived on landmines, and a small mistake was enough to detonate the storm.”
Vance was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, to a family of Scottish-Irish descent that settled in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. There, where poverty, marginalization, and addiction prevail, the identity of the white working class he lamented in his book was formed.
Vance lived between an addicted mother, alternating fathers, and grandparents who were the only refuge in his life. This background made him see his community as a mirror of a broader collapse in rural America: family disintegration, declining faith in the American dream, and the collapse of conservative values.
In his memoirs, he says: “We are programmed to fight. Disintegration seems like an inescapable fate.”
In his teenage years, Vance almost collapsed under the pressure of poverty before joining the U.S. Marine Corps, where he learned discipline and perseverance. He says: “The Marine Corps taught me that I could succeed… to work twenty hours a day, and to stand confidently in front of the cameras.”
After his service, he attended Ohio State University, then Yale Law School in 2010 on a scholarship, becoming the first member of his family to enter university. There, he faced a cultural shock among the elite, and later wrote that he felt “like a stranger at a party who doesn’t know the rules.”
His book “Hillbilly Elegy” was published in 2016, at the height of Trump’s rise. The book gave Vance widespread fame, as many read it as an explanation for the rise of white populism. Although Vance initially criticized Trump and described him as “morally empty,” time brought them closer together.
Vance saw in Trump an embodiment of the anger of the white working class to which he belongs, and over time he became one of the most prominent theorists of the new populist right within the Republican Party.
Vance believes that America’s crisis is not only economic but also cultural and moral, and that the collapse of the family and the loss of faith in traditional values is what destroyed his community. Therefore, he adopts strict conservative positions:
Anti-abortion, while advocating for national standards without an absolute ban.
Rejecting same-sex marriage and gender reassignment surgeries for minors.
Calling for encouraging the American family and supporting mothers economically.
Economically, he calls for protectionism and local manufacturing, raising the minimum wage, and restricting the dominance of major technology companies. He says: “We don’t need giant companies that believe in America on paper, but those that build and employ in Ohio.”
Internationally, Vance adopts a relatively isolationist approach:
He opposes American military expansion and calls for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, even at the expense of fully restoring its territory.
He supports negotiating with Iran on a new nuclear agreement that prevents military armament.
He considers China the biggest threat and calls for an economic and technological confrontation with it.
He describes Israel as part of American national security.
When Vance was sworn in as a senator in January 2025, it was the culmination of an extraordinary journey: from the depths of poverty in the mountains of Kentucky to power.
Vance is no longer just a senator, but represents a new face of the American right, as he combines the language of the elite with the experience of the countryside, between academic thought and popular anger. Some see him as a potential heir to the Trumpian school, and perhaps a presidential candidate in the future.
J.D. Vance is not just a traditional politician, but a cultural and political phenomenon that expresses a profound transformation that America is witnessing, where the center of gravity is shifting from the dominant elites to the marginalized rural areas.
He is a rising figure from among the “bottom of white American society,” who has not forgotten the pain that shaped his personality, but has employed it as a driving force towards power, turning it into a political project that reflects the aspirations of an angry America, which is looking for internal salvation above all else.
source: 961 today
