What JD Vance gets wrong about Appalachia 

I was listening to Demon Copperhead on audiobook when my phone chimed with a notification that Donald Trump had chosen Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. 

In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver tells the story of Damon (who comes to be known as Demon) from childhood through young adulthood in Lee County, Virginia. The fictional Demon shares many experiences in common with Vance, whose memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, recounts his early life growing up in suburban Ohio and Appalachian Kentucky.  

But shared experiences do not guarantee a common perspective. And Demon and Vance could not have a more different view of the people they grew up alongside. 

Demon is a hard worker. His work-life begins illegally when he is exploited as a child laborer by a series of foster parents, who force him to tend cattle and log punishing hours topping tobacco, along with sorting trash both after school and on weekends. 

In Demon, Kingsolver exemplifies the resilient – and often exploited – Appalachian work ethic that Vance refuses to see. In his memoir, Vance writes of the summer before law school when he worked in the warehouse of a small tile company, describing one of his teenage coworkers, Bob, as an unreliable employee who is eventually terminated by the company. 

In Bob, however, Vance sees not a one-off case but rather a symptom of a larger regional flaw. 

“The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy,” he writes. “Too many young men immune to hard work.”

Vance casts the people in the region as lazy based on this single interaction. He does not know why Bob struggles to show up at work. And he ignores that most employees had been with the company for many years, with the bulk of the turnover concentrated in the warehouse, a place where jobs offered poverty-level starting pay and no benefits – or at least none that Vance mentions.

As the story of Demon Copperfield unfolds, Kingsolver’s protagonist begins to learn about the link between his addiction and Purdue Pharma’s early campaign targeting Appalachia for opioid sales through legitimate prescriptions. Vance comes to a similar recognition in Hillbilly Elegy. “​​I believe the problem started with a legitimate prescription,” he writes of his mother’s addiction.

But you wouldn’t know this from watching Vance’s first Senate campaign ad, in which he claims that “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” 

“This issue is personal,” Vance continues. “I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.”

In attributing his mother’s near-death to drugs trafficked in from Mexico, Vance advanced the falsehood that illegal crossings by asylum seekers are the primary source of criminalized drugs such as fentanyl entering the United States. (The vast majority are actually smuggled through legal ports of entry.) This lie attempts to pit people suffering from the opioid crisis against asylum seekers fleeing violence. It stokes vitriol and anger towards them hurting us. 

But even as he plays off fear-based stereotypes, Vance will claim ignorance of race. “I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism,” he writes. And throughout Hillbilly Elegy, he does this to a point where it appears he has willfully placed blinders on, with the only mention of a non-white person in his town being a passing reference to his aunt being kicked out of her home at age 17 for dating a Black person.

Kingsolver doesn’t shy from addressing the complexity of race, embracing the sometimes messy context it can exist in both in Appalachia and in the United States as a whole. Describing Demon and his kin, she writes, “These people were mixed, all the colors plus Cherokee and also Portuguese, which used to be its own thing, not white.” 

In surveying Appalachia, Vance sees rampant laziness, chiding the people in the region for their inability to hoist themselves up by their bootstraps. He repeatedly exhibits contempt for the poor, including his own family members, who he cannot refrain from blaming for their station in life. “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” he writes. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

Instead of casting blame on individuals, Kingsolver understands the poverty plaguing Appalachia is deeply systemic, with lengthy roots extending from decades of corporate lies, malfeasance and greed. “The coal guys came in here buying up land,” Kingsolver writes, “without mentioning the buried treasure under it.”