It is closer to the opposite: His Kentucky-exile grandparents are secure and prosperous in spite of their own humble origins and a long period of alcohol-fueled domestic strife; they own a nice, four-bedroom home and drive new high-end cars — convertibles, even. Growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 1990s, Vance lived in a household with an annual income exceeding $100,000, or the equivalent of about $175,000 a year in today’s dollars. He had a close-knit extended family, including a grandmother who read to him and a grandfather who helped him get ahead of the other children in math, which served him well: After college and law school — at Yale — Vance went on to become the principal of a Silicon Valley investment firm. He is 31 years old.
His family was indeed miserable, but theirs wasn’t the misery of poverty and privation. It was the misery of people determined to be miserable at any price. The great American bounty was wheeled out for their enjoyment like room service at the Ritz Carlton, and they decided they preferred Wendy’s and Night Train and OxyContin and desultory sex with strangers from bars.
Nothing happened to them — they happened.
The main difference between Vance and his unhappy forebears with their Byzantine marital histories and “Mountain Dew mouth” — exactly what it sounds like — is that he had the good sense to say yes to the happiness that was offered him.
What’s interesting about his story — his only real excuse for writing a memoir, in fact — is that he almost said no, and that he is one of those unusual men who actually understands the decisions he has made, why and how he made them, and the effects they have had.
Vance was saved by the intervention of certain “loving people”:
That is not usually how one hears Marine drill instructors described.
Vance had the good sense to delay college and enlist in the Marine Corps instead. And the Marine Corps is one of the few remaining American institutions that delivers more or less exactly as advertised. Vance entered the boot camp pudgy, disorganized, immature, and lacking in confidence. He left it harder, wiser, and more capable. His account of his time in the Marines is in fact one of the most interesting sections of the book, and the one that points both to the promise and shortcomings of public-policy interventions to counter the dysfunction of the white underclass. As Vance puts it, the Marines take in new recruits under an assumption of maximum ignorance, i.e., that they do not know the basics of anything, from personal hygiene to keeping a schedule. The Marine Corps interferes in Vance’s life in intensely invasive and personal ways: When he decides he needs to buy a car, an older Marine is dispatched to make sure he doesn’t buy something stupid and stops him from signing a high-interest financing contract with the dealer, steering him instead toward a much better deal available through the Marines’ credit union.
The man who did not know how to handle automotive financing works in finance today. By his own account, he did not know that “finance” was an industry and a career option until well into his college education. Things like how to dress for a job interview and how to conduct himself at a business dinner — he’s flummoxed to learn that there’s more than one kind of white wine — simply were not within his experience.
That sort of thing is awkward, and there are tens of millions of Americans who have had such fish-out-of-water experiences on their way up. The truth is, our schools and other institutions do a pretty good job of identifying the J.D. Vances of the world, thanks in no small part to standardized testing, though of course committed and engaged teachers play an indispensable role, too. But consider what it took to turn Vance’s life around and get him ready for Ohio State and Yale. Short of universal or near-universal military conscription — something that would be resisted both by the public and by the military, which is still resisting the politicians’ efforts to transform it entirely into a social-services agency — what policy options do we have to intervene in the lives of young men and women who come from backgrounds like Vance’s, but who are even worse off in both economic and social-capital terms, and who do not have the innate intelligence to cut it in Silicon Valley or who lack comparable skills and talents? We know what to do about poor kids with IQs of 120 — what about the ones with IQs of 100? What about those with IQs of 90?
See Cuckbilly Elegy: J.D. Vance & His Precious Proles.