Donald Trump’s 2024 Vice-Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance  who grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks hillbillies or White trash.

 In this latest memoir, Vance tells the story of his family’s demons and of America’s problem with generational neglect. How his mother struggled against, but never fully escaped, the legacies of abuse, alcoholism, poverty and trauma. How his grandparents, “ dirt poor and in love”, gave everything for their children to chase the American dream. Vance’s grandma told him: “Never be like these losers who think the deck is stacked against them”.

The best book written about the conditions that led to Trump is a work of photography, backed by sparse prose. Its title is hugely important. Dignity. Written by Chris Arnade, a freelancer who made his money on Wall Street, and endorsed by Vance, the book chronicles the lives of those ( many) Americans who have been left behind. It ends with these words: “ All those at  the bottom, educationally and economically – black, white, gay, straight, men, women – are guaranteed  to feel excluded, rejected, and, most of all, humiliated.” From a former marine and Yale Law School Graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican vice-presidential candidate for the 2024 election, highlighting the struggles of American’s white working class.

Their revenge on a system that has let them down has only just begun. It has hinted at in Hillbilly Elegy, but Vance pulled his punches  – the book is not overtly political. Vance goes out of his way to blame the victims, including his family members who abused him and made his young life a misery. Their culture  “ encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.

How Vance beat the odds to graduate from Yale Law School and how America came to abandon and then condescend to its white working classes, until they reached breaking point. Vance offers a compelling explanation for why it’s  so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it.

Now the 2020 major-motion picture directed by Ron Howard, and starring Amy Adams, Glenn Close, and Gabriel Basso. Liberal and Conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school graduate. Panic over a potential Trump presidency was flourishing, and the culture was awash in works purporting to explain to an alarmed public how exactly we arrived at a moment. Now await its upcoming Netflix adaptation.

The new-look Vance, populist Republican senator and now Trump’s pick for vice-president, who suddenly has a plan for action: essentially a new form of economic populism – Blue Labour would be nearest equivalent in Britain. Economic policy used to be –in the Republican Party of Regan to Romney – about increasing GDP. Now via  Vance and his friend Oren Cass  of the think tank American Compass – there is a new game in town. Strong, stable communities and family formation come before economic progress, they matter more. Liberty and the market are not enough: social cohesion comes first.

At one point Vance get into a schoolyard fight on behalf of a weaker student, but seems more excited by the fighting than the prospect of justice itself.

 Vance talks of the nation being run by “cat ladies” ( Welfare queens) who lead single lives and have nothing and no one to carry the torch into the future –they “are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. They want to make the rest of the country miserable too”. Vance was abused by his drug-addicted mother. One of the key moments in the book is when she takes him out in a car and threatens to crash it and kill them: at the age of 12 he faced this terror, the saw his mother carted off by the police. But he began a new life with his grandparents – he called them Mamaw and Papaw. “Mamaw and Papaw believed that hard work mattered more. They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. Mamaw kept 19 loaded guns in the house. Family always the bedrock even when they F*** you up. Vance’s life story  – a story about family and class – is a challenge to the identity politics of the Democratic Party.  Hillybilly Elegy he describes arriving at the fanciest of universities where he notes: “Very few people at Yale Law School are like me. They may look like me, but for all of the Ivy League’s obsession with diversity, virtually everyone – black, white. Jewish, Muslim, whatever- comes from intact families who never worry about money”. Vance may be cynical  his conversion to Trumpism is a U-turn for the ages.  He can think. He can write. He can charm. He can emote. He has a clear Pathway to the presidency now.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis By J.D. Vance