Donald Trump nominated JD Vance as his running mate on Monday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
18:51•Updated 19:07
I will be the first to admit that I have not achieved anything in my life. And especially not anything that complete strangers should pay to read. I am not a senator, governor or former cabinet secretary.
That’s what he wrote JD Vance in the introduction to his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, freely translated Junttielegia in 2016.
But people paid and read. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 74 weeks. The book was made into a movie of the same name four years later.
Now it is on a new rise. After Vance was nominated by the Republican Party Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate on Monday, Hillbilly Elegy has become the best-selling book on the online bookstore Amazon. It is among the most watched movies on the streaming service Netflix.
Eight years after writing the book, Vance has accomplished a lot, and that’s largely thanks to Hillbilly Elegy.
Countless articles have been published in the United States and elsewhere in recent days about the importance of the book to Vance’s rapid rise to the top of politics. Among them are traditional quality magazines, such as The New York Times and The Washington Postfinancial magazines such as The Forbesand culture and entertainment magazines such as The Vanity Fair and Variety.
The cabin described in the book is located in Ohio, and its name is Middletown. It’s also Vance’s hometown.
A steel company was founded in Middletown in 1900, but by the time Vance was born, jobs and hope had long since disappeared from the town.
Vance writes in the introduction to his book that he does not feel that he belongs to those Americans who are successful, educated and white.
I identify with the millions of working-class Americans with Scots-Irish roots and no education. For these people, poverty is a tradition.
Americans call them jerks, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.
Vance’s parents divorce when he is a toddler, and his mother drifts into alcohol and drug addiction.
Little JD spends a lot of time with his maternal grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw. He permanently moves in with them as a teenager.
According to Vance, they are the best thing that ever happened to him.
– We didn’t have cell phones or nice clothes, but Mamaw made sure I had a calculator. It taught me something important about Mamaw’s values and made me interested in the school in a new way, The Washington Post reports Vance as writing.
However, Vance cannot afford to study after high school. He joins the Marine Corps and serves there for four years, including half a year in Iraq. After that, he will be able to study: first political science and philosophy at the Ohio State University and then law at the top university, Yale.
Conservatives liked Hillbilly Elegy because Vance emphasized individual responsibility for one’s own success. He blamed the unemployed in the industrial towns of the Appalachian region for blaming everyone else for their miserable lives.
Democrats, on the other hand, found in the book an explanation for Trump’s election victory and rise to the presidency. It opened the eyes of the East Coast elite to the reality of the Rust Belt, the traditional industrial region of the Northeastern United States: structural change, unemployment, and social problems.
– Many people do not understand how truly desperate such places are. And it’s not about small islands or a few cities. “We’re talking about states where the white working class is struggling to survive,” Vance said The American Conservative in an interview with the magazine in 2016.
Even at that time, he vowed that he would never vote for Trump himself and found his rhetoric too harsh. However, he says that he changed his mind during Trump’s presidency and that he noticed in one case after another that he was right.
– I was wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president. He made a lot of good decisions for people, Vance said To Politico a couple of years ago.
He has not fully explained his coat turn that led to the vice presidential nomination.