The political rise of J.D. Vance
Hollywood and the media helped fuel GOP’s unlikely new star
Members of New York’s smart set gathered on awarm Thursday evening in the early summer of 2016 at the ornately wallpapered apartment of two Yale Law
School professors in the elegant Ansonia building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to toast a Marine Corps veteran, venture capitalist and first-time author named J.D. Vance.
They were celebrating Vance’s new memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled his working-class upbringing in southwestern Ohio and an ascent that brought him to Yale, where his mentors included Amy Chua, one of the party’s hosts. Vance seemed modest, self-effacing and a bit of a fish out of water among guests drawn from the worlds of publishing and journalism, a half-dozen attendees later recalled. “It was almost stupid how disarmed the people were by that,” said one of them, novelist Joshua Cohen.
“Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out as Donald Trump was overcoming long odds to win the presidency, became a phenomenon, and Vance — a conservative who reassured Charlie Rose that fall that he was “a Never Trump guy” and “never liked him,” and later said he voted for a third-party candidate that year — became widely sought out for his views on what drove white working-class Trump supporters, particularly in the Rust Belt. The book, which had a modest initial print run of 10,000 copies, went on to sell more than 3 million, according to its publisher, HarperCollins. It was made into a 2020 feature film by Hollywood A-listers, including director Ron Howard and actresses Amy Adams and Glenn Close. But the J.D. Vance story did not end there.
The former “Never
Trump guy” went on to embrace Trump last year and eagerly accepted his endorsement in the Republican primary for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio that he won this month. Vance, who once called Trump “reprehensible,” thanked Trump “for giving us an example of what could be in this country.”
Trump’s endorsement proved critical in the race, along with the financial support of Peter Thiel, a conservative Silicon Valley billionaire, and favorable coverage by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. But Vance’s political rise was also made possible by the worlds of publishing, media and Hollywood, fields long seen as liberal bastions, which had embraced him as a credible geographer of a swath of America that coastal elites knew little about, believing that he shared their objections to Trump.
“The reason ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was such a highoctane book was academics, professors, cultural arbitrators — liberals — embraced it as explaining a forgotten part of America,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University who once introduced Vance at an event. “They wouldn’t have touched Vance with a 10-foot pole if they thought he was part of this Trump, xenophobic, bigot-fueled zeitgeist.”
Howard, who has said he sought to downplay the political implications of “Hillbilly Elegy” in directing the film, describing it as a family drama, declined to comment for this article. But he told the Hollywood Reporter he was “surprised by some of the positions” Vance has taken and the “statements he’s made.” He has not spoken with Vance since the film’s release, he said.
Many of the entities in publishing and Hollywood who helped fuel Vance’s rise — including HarperCollins, which published his book; Howard’s co-producer, Brian Grazer; and Netflix, which financed and distributed the film — declined to comment on his reinvention as a Trumpist who rails against elites and who campaigned with polarizing far-right figures, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
“Hillbilly Elegy” was published by a subsidiary of News Corp., which is controlled by the conservative Murdoch family, but through a flagship imprint that puts out broadly appealing books. It did not originally mention Trump. In an afterword added to the paperback edition, Vance wrote that despite his reservations about Trump, “there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me,” citing his “disdain for the ‘elites’ ” and his insight that Republicans had done too little for working- and middle-class voters.
“Hillbilly Elegy” tried to explain some of those voters’ concerns, and in appearances on CNN (where he was named a contributor) and National Public Radio, as well as in opinion essays in the New York Times in 2016 and 2017, Vance tried to connect those concerns to their support for Trump.
“He owes nearly everything to having become a ‘Trump whisperer’ phenomenon,” Rod Dreher, whose interview with Vance for the American Conservative in July 2016 was so popular that it briefly crashed the magazine’s website, said in an email. “The thing is, he didn’t seek this out. J.D. became celebrated because he really had something important to say and said it in a way that was comprehensible to a wide audience.”
But he also found a particular audience among liberals. “Though ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was read widely across the political spectrum, my impression was that the book helped liberals to understand the causes of what had happened to them in the election of 2016,” said Adrian Zackheim, publisher of several Penguin Random House imprints, including Sentinel, which focuses on conservative books.
The fact that a rising star in the Republican Party, which has recently emphasized cultural grievances with the likes of Twitter, CNN and Disney, came to prominence through elite media institutions is not surprising to scholars and cultural critics who have long understood the symbiotic relationship between those ostensible antagonists: the conservative movement and the media-entertainment complex.
“To establish populist bona fides — since they represent economic elites — cultural elites are the ones they can rally against,” said Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College.
Frank Rich, an essayist, television producer and former New York Times critic and columnist, said some of the contemporary Republican Party’s biggest stars — including Vance, Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. — are “the products of elite institutions” whose “constant railing against the elites is just odd, because it’s so disingenuous.”
“Where would Vance be if it hadn’t been for mainstream publishing and book promotion, if it hadn’t been for Ron Howard — an important person in show business who identifies as liberal — and Glenn Close and Netflix?” Rich said. “Where would Trump be without NBC Universal, Mark Burnett, the whole showbiz world?”
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, an associate professor of history at Purdue University, situated Vance in a lineage of figures from the entertainment world who became Republican politicians, including George Murphy, an actor turned senator from California; Ronald Reagan, whose success as a film actor helped him become California governor and president; Arnold Schwarzenegger, another movie star and California governor; and Trump, a longtime tabloid fixture who gained newfound celebrity during the 2000s as host of the NBC reality competition show “The Apprentice,” created by Burnett.
“This is something they are really quick to criticize the left for — relying too much on Hollywood for support and glamour,” Brownell said.
“But,” she added, “the Republican Party has been more successful at turning entertainers into successful candidates than Democrats.”