It’s my 79^th birthday. How is that possible? I feel reflective but it’s hard to contemplate calmly the entirety of the wild month we’ve just gone through. So, I won’t try to do that, but rather offer just a few random observations on how I was feeling Saturday night, July 20, the rapid emergence and embrace of Kamala Harris starting July 21, and the seemingly enigmatic JD Vance.

July 20

This was Joe Biden’s last night as presumptive Democratic nominee. For Democrats, the vale of despair seemed deep. Since the horrible debate of June 27, there had been an ebb and flow of possibility that Biden would withdraw. By July 20^th it seemed possibly inevitable, but by no means certain, that he would.

I was at our place on Moosehead Lake in Maine. As I looked out over the lake, I was feeling pretty hopeless. All of a sudden, the leading edge of a reddish full moon eased out over Little Spencer Mountain. Fairly quickly, it had fully emerged and was on the rise.

My first thought was of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s great song “Bad Moon Rising” from April 1969, as the Vietnam War still raged with Richard Nixon in the White House. I had just returned from Vietnam. Here are John Fogerty’s lyrics:

I see the bad moon a-risin'
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin'
I see bad times today.

Don't go around tonight
Well it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise

I hear hurricanes a-blowin'
I know the end is comin' soon
I fear rivers over flowin'
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.[1]

That evening, I listened to CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” and also to a 1973 song by Judee Sill, a brilliant but troubled singer-songwriter who died of a drug overdose at the age of 35 and is only recently gaining the recognition she deserves. Her song “There’s a Rugged Road” is pretty dark but at least offers some hope:

There's a rugged road on the prairie
Stretchin' all across the last frontier
There a stranger strives solitary
Blessed is the lonesome pioneer

Roll on, roll on, roll on, night birds are flyin'
Come on, the light is gone, hope's slowly dyin'
Tell me how you come ridin' through
Still surveyin' the miles yet to run
On the long and lonely road to kingdom come

He can blaze a trail though the rumblin'
Dims his guiding light to just a spark
When the hour is low, he comes tumblin'
But when the moon is high he gives his heart

Roll on, roll on, roll on, night birds are flyin'
Come on, the light is gone, hope's slowly dyin'
Tell me how you come ridin' through
Gainin' steady till this round is won
On the long and lonely road to kingdom come.[2]

I went to bed soon with this picture and these songs in my head. I slept a bit fitfully.

“Bad Moon Rising” (?) over Moosehead Lake, July 20, 2024

The Emergence and Embrace of Kamala Harris

Well, July 21 was a new day. I won’t say much about what happened and how many people felt about it as it’s already been extensively chronicled. I spent most of the morning and afternoon reading, well past 2PM, when Biden announced his withdrawal. We are almost completely off the grid at our place, which is usually a welcome contributor to its precious peace and quiet. I didn’t hear the news until I turned on NPR’s All Things Considered at 6PM.

I shared what so many have described in this moment as a powerful wave of relief and a surge of optimism that this thing may actually be salvageable. Biden’s endorsement and Harris’s skillful and rapid consolidation of support, together with her effective early statements and speeches have fueled virtually unanimous support among Democrats and abundant hope of capturing enough of the critical independent and undecided voters, and anti-Trump Republicans, to swing the race in her favor. Tim “Weird” Walz, Harris’s VP choice, seems terrific.

Hillbilly Epistemology: The Enigmatic JD Vance

On the other hand, there seems to be substantial opinion among Republicans and perhaps even in their standard-bearer, that JD Vance was a bad choice. Perhaps Trump chose him with the hubris of someone overconfident in the inevitability of a victory in November. Maybe he was correct in his awkward non-endorsement of Vance’s ability to take over as President “on Day 1” that the VP choice doesn’t influence the election much at all. We’ll see. In the meantime, it’s worth exploring Vance’s tortured cultural and political journey.

I never read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out in 2016. I just turned to it this past week. I knew it was generally considered a powerful account of Vance’s overcoming a troubled and traumatic upbringing in a Kentucky “hillbilly” family that moved to Southwestern Ohio. Vance served in the Marine Corps for four years, including a tour in Iraq, graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State in two years, and went on to Yale Law School and a successful stint as a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. Hillbilly Elegy was a bestseller, praised by many liberals and conservatives alike, for its portrayal of the economic plight and political alienation of Appalachia and, by extension, other rural areas of the United States.

Around the time his book was published, Vance had a lot of highly negative things to say about Donald Trump, including that he was a “moron” and that he could become “America’s Hitler.” So, what happened to convert him to an ardent MAGA and Trump acolyte? Most observers seem to think it was pure cynical opportunism. Vance hitched his wagon to the star he thought would dominate the sky.

Plainly, opportunism was part of his calculus. But there was more to it, and I believe the seeds can be seen in Hillbilly Elegy. Maybe I’m projecting my own predisposition to doubt, uncertainty, and indecision onto Vance. But I think we can see in his book that he had deeply mixed feelings about some critical cultural and political themes characteristic of both right and left in America. He could have gone either way. He chose the right with a vengeance and then implied that there had never really been any choice.

I confess that at points I found Hillbilly Elegy moving and even inspiring. Its author comes across as introspective and self-reflective, qualities that Trump clearly lacks, and that Vance seems subsequently to have lost. It is in the cultural and political tensions Vance describes that the “new” MAGA Vance may be glimpsed.

Love vs. War

Vance seems ambivalent about the violence and abuse he witnessed and experienced so much growing up. He sometimes seems fascinated by and drawn to the hillbilly ethic of violence in defense of community and family. Not that he praises or approves of it full-throatedly, but he doesn’t fully condemn it either. He writes that “I started to like the drama of my parents’ fights…This thing I hated had become sort of a drug” [p 73].

Reflecting on his time at Yale Law School, Vance reports that “I began to understand why I used words as weapons…I did it to survive. Disagreements were war and you played to win the game. I didn’t unlearn these lessons overnight. I continue to struggle with conflict. Even at my best I’m a delayed explosion…Being a hillbilly meant sometimes not knowing the difference between love and war. When we graduated, that’s what I was most unsure about” [pp 229, 234].

Hillbilly Culture

Vance presents a seemingly contradictory view of hillbillies. Are they lazy bums and welfare cheats [pp. 139-140] or hard-working but ill-starred yet indomitable defenders of family, community, and country? Maybe all of the above. While at Yale, Vance felt “the inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility.” When asked by a woman he met at a New Haven gas station whether he went to Yale, he replied “No…but my girlfriend does.” Vance terms this “a pathetic attempt at cultural defiance…I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor” [p 205].

Vance touts the importance of family, but only of a certain type-- what he refers to as “intact families” [p 242]. Even though Vance admits his own family was “more non-traditional than most” [p 136], he seems to dismiss the value of such defective families. “Reams of social science attest to the positive effect of a loving and stable home” [p 149]. Yes, but there isn’t only one type of “loving and stable home,” or one type of “intact family.” It seems profoundly insensitive and unjust to provide, as Vance now advocates, major tax breaks and additional voting rights limited to his preferred family type.

Vance recognizes the hillbilly predilection for conspiracy theories based on mistrust of government and the media. He observes that “[t]here is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government… It’s not your fault you’re a loser. It’s the government’s fault” [p 194].

On the other hand, Vance celebrates the patriotism of hillbilly communities: “[M]uch of my family’s, my neighborhood’s, and my community’s identity derives from our love of country.” Vance’s grandparents “taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth.” This patriotism persists despite their living in a country that was “trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that couldn’t deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream – a steady wage” [pp 189-90].

Self-Doubt and “Learned Willfulness”

Vance’s grandmother “Mamaw” is the heroine of his memoir. She personifies the tension and confusion in hillbilly culture “between love and war.”  Vance recognizes that “in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry and heartbroken” [p 140].

After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps. He writes that “the trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt” but Marine Corps boot camp changed him profoundly: “If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching “learned willfulness” [pp 162-63]. As a Marine Vietnam veteran who has stayed in touch with Marine comrades over the years, I see Marine Corps culture and history as replete with great courage, devotion to duty, and kindness but also with the capacity for misogyny, savagery, and cruelty.

It seems clear now that Vance opted for the negative sides of all of these cultural tensions. No doubt, political opportunism played a significant role. We can observe some other potential sources of those choices in the contradictions of hillbilly culture but exactly why he resolved those contradictions as he did remains a mystery. Here’s one recent take, from Ezra Klein, one of my favorite political commentators these days:

Behind Donald Trump…emerged this very dark online set of subcultures, I would call it the sort of extended MAGA online cinematic universe, but it has white supremacists in it, it has very weird forms of…pronatalists in it. It has people who just are obsessed with race and immigration. It has neoreactionaries…. And JD Vance, his conversion went through this online world [Emphasis added]. What is weird about JD Vance is what is weird about somebody who spends too much time watching neoreactionary YouTube videos and then participating in the comments sections [“Transcript: Ezra Klein Discusses Kamala Harris’s VP pick.” New York Times, August 6, 2024].

Vance doesn’t spew the venom with quite the degree of anger and cruelty of Trump, who is, let’s face it, no mystery. Vance’s messages are just as toxic and unjust, even if they are presented in a slightly “nicer” tone. Perhaps we will learn more about what really makes JD Vance tick as the campaign unfolds.

[1] Listen to the song at:

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[2] Since this song may not be well-known to you, please be sure to take a listen to it:

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