I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away
It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
For people like me and people like you…
Livin’ in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do
‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end
‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
God, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.
Some lyrics from ex-addict factory worker and Piedmont country singer Oliver Anthony’s viral 2003 hit Rich Men North of Richmond. Rightful class rage at the political elites, with Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. being “north of Richmond”, Virginia. A righteous howl at economic super-exploitation and the misery of the American cost of living inflation-fuelled nightmare of the Biden years. Also, at ‘culture war’ and identity politics perceived attacks on freedom of speech. But with a reactionary element, kicking sideways, no doubt at Anthony’s neighbours, “milkin’ welfare”. Is it any wonder this was played at the post-Trump victory parties? Where not just Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, and Tesla tycoon Elon Musk have danced, but also the youngest vice-president-elect in history, author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance.
Taking advantage of Anthony’s lyrics, which obviously reflect the confusion of layers of the US working class, Vance and the “Magas” have lost no opportunity in promoting Rich Men North of Richmond as the “new generation’s protest song”. Anthony’s other songs such as Doggonit where he lacerates the whole political establishment – “Republicans and Democrats, I swear they’re all just full of crap / I’ve never seen a good city slicking, bureaucrat” – are ignored. Anthony, to his credit, then defended “the poor” and the welfare system against the pro-Trump right-wing religious fundamentalist commentator and podcaster Matt Walsh.
Although it was published in 2016, back when JD Vance raised concerns about “Trump being America’s Hitler” in a private social media chat, Hillbilly Elegy is worth reading. As is the Netflix dramatization worth watching, not just to trace the evolution and zig-zags of Vance’s populist politics and opportunist ideas, but to get a sense of the social conditions and crisis in US society that have led to Trumpism, itself a distorted expression of colossal social, economic and class polarisation.
Vance, through the saga of his chaotic working class family, gained attention and ultimately political power and high office by expressing what many commentators refer to as the “loss of the American Dream”.
Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, but his ‘Hillbilly’ Scotch-Irish roots are in eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, a huge area bordering the ‘rust belt’, running from Georgia in the South right up to New York state. His grandparents, like a whole generation of others, were economic migrants to Ohio. His grandfather worked in steel plant Armco. Such was the extent of post-war internal migration Middletown was called “Middletucky”. Hillbilly Elegy switches between steel producing Middletown and Kentucky coal country. An interesting early mention is made of his grandfather being active in the steel plants labor union. However, this part of the story is never further developed.
ln fact, Labor unions are conspicuous by their absence in Elegy despite Vance’s family saga taking place during their decline from a high point in the 1950s to their nadir period in the 1990s. Vance has nothing much at all to say about this – in contrast to his useful descriptions of many other social changes. This is not an accident, given the wrong political conclusions he draws from his and his family’s experiences. Vance either does not see, or deliberately distorts, the potential in working class collective struggle and the diametrically opposed class interests between ‘Hillbillys’ and the elites he later wines and dines with on his law course at Ivy League Yale. Rather, he promotes hard work on an individual basis and the strong work ethic instilled in him by his grandmother – i.e. a “positive culture” – as the way to realise the “American dream”. Vance contrasts this with another ‘culture’ he identifies in Elegy as “too many young men immune to hard work”. He claims this ‘culture’ has interacted with “wider social decay” to create the suffering in the US’s white working-class communities.
Vance overplays this ‘workshy culture’ in one particularly reactionary passage in which he and his grandmother vent about “those on welfare” who can buy more with food stamps at the supermarket he works at than those struggling in full-time work. His grandmother, in many ways a very admirable character, is full of contradictions. She is an ardent supporter of the poor in many other ways and her hatred of the elites comes out when Vance joins the marines and serves in Iraq. She and her husband mostly vote Democrat until the 1980s when they are attracted to Republican President Reagan on ‘cultural issues’. The irony of course is that his administration accelerates much of the social unwinding of the “American Dream” around them.
Vance writes movingly about the violence his family experienced and their struggles around poverty, drug addiction and lack of a universal healthcare. Outrageously, he is forced as a young worker and serving marine to subsidise his grandmother’s healthcare bills which the private healthcare vultures viciously chase towards the end of her life. His mother, heartbreakingly, showcases the addiction crisis in American, moving from alcohol to heroin while struggling to work as a nurse. Addiction-fuelled crime tears apart both his childhood communities in Appalachia and Ohio. He describes young Appalachian children’s agonising dental problems due to drinking sugary soft drinks – a phenomenon called “Mountain Dew mouth”. There are some expressions of anger at big business, but these are often equalised with appeals to his community to change their individual and cultural ways. For all his eloquence, interestingly, Vance does not have much to say about some events in his childhood home. In the mid-2000s, when large parts of Hillbilly Elegy take place, there were labor disputes in the steel industry, including two lockouts by Armco bosses, and the use of scab labour in Middletown and across Ohio. While Vance powerfully laments the decline of the industry and the town this is not mentioned.
Part of his conclusions in Hillbilly Elegy are that investment from the private sector, including those ‘made good’ like himself, can make a difference in working class areas. He suggests the education system better prepares students for the class-based elitism of the Ivy League.
After Hillbilly Elegy was published Vance was elected as a Republican into Congress. In 2010 his online blog called for a reduction in federal funding for social security, but this was softened in the book. Now he and Trump say they are committed to fully funding it. They are wary about a backlash from the working class. Will the ‘Hillbillys’ they court with Vance turn into bitter class enemies? Despite what Vance implies, the right to social security was not a result of a ‘workshy culture’ but hard won through battles fought by workers and the labor unions, including the mass strike and unionisation movement under President Roosevelt in the 1930s. Recently, Vance has moved closer to the far-right Project 2025. He has expanded his calls for cultural shifts around abortion and promotion of the family to appeal to the Christian-right. He concedes that the US ruling class “made mistakes” with their policies of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism, causing wealth inequality from the 1970s onwards, but is not able to see that his own family’s chaos arose out of the social conditions that resulted.
JD Vance represents a shift in the Republican Party, calling for an abandonment of laissez faire economics and says a “new American Dream” must be built on good jobs with will require state intervention. Of course this is tied up with reactionary social ideas. Trump and especially Vance will come under huge pressure from the coming class conflicts. What will they say about the many industrial battles ahead including the announcement of the biggest Amazon strike in history by the Teamsters? Vance’s demagogic calls to replace all politically hostile government workers will also meet resistance.
Ultimately, while reflecting the rage in US society Vance has no real solutions as that would mean taking on the capitalist interests whose world he now inhabits. Only taking the vast wealth, resources and potential of the US economy under democratic working class control – of those who suffer with “bullshit pay” – can offer a better world for the working class in the US. A mass workers’ party, based on the organising potential of the labor unions, undermining the corporate two-party system, will be a key weapon in this fight.
