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JD Vance’s Latest Memoir Preaches to the MAGA Choir

The vice president claims to have reached a new level of spiritual maturity, but the evidence is nowhere in the pages of Communion.

JD Vance at a 2024 campaign stop in Milwaukee

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend who was born in Venezuela and moved to Texas when he was a child, to a town near the border. He is a from-the-cradle Catholic who wears a cross around his neck, and we talked amiably about Portugal, where he’s been living and working for the last few years.

The conversation turned to religion—more specifically, American Catholic converts, who often share key defining traits. They’re drawn to the pomp and ritual of the church, its formality and intellectual veneer. These qualities are increasingly absent in the more popular Protestant denominations, with their ersatz indie rock and country praise music, casual dress, and the widespread adoption of TED talk–style headset microphones by preachers who scorn conventional pulpits. My friend knew the type, but he said he was more deeply struck by the way American Catholics in Europe were so much more serious about ritual and aesthetics. He wasn’t talking about the theology or values or the way Catholic values might permeate one’s culture or life; rather, he was stressing the outward performance of Catholicism and its physical accoutrements. I was thinking about that as I read JD Vance’s new memoir, Communion.

First, let me get this out of the way: I don’t like JD Vance, and JD Vance and I also have quite a bit in common. I grew up Southern Baptist in rural Alabama in the foothills of Appalachia, and was the first person in my family to go to college. I went to Duke, the only school I applied to, via a combination of scholarships and student loans. I didn’t really know much about the school and suffered a great deal of culture shock when I landed at what turned out to be a kind of boarding school full of rich kids from New York and California instead of the quiet Southern school full of overachieving nerds like me that I imagined. In the eyes of people I grew up with, I went from being the daughter of a local lineman and a part-time contractor to a de facto defector to the “liberal elite” just by attending and graduating. This all roughly corresponds to Vance’s account, in his first memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, of his awkward matriculation into the American power elite after his hardscrabble upbringing in southeastern Ohio.

Like Vance, I also had a mamaw and papaw I loved. They were also Southern Baptists who liked guns and cussin’ and talked a lot about loyalty to family. And in my 20s, I cared more about external markers of achievement more than I do now. But unlike Vance, I don’t now imply that if I had to do it all over again, maybe I’d have stayed in my hometown and taken up welding, which would have been just as good. It wouldn’t have—largely because of the kind of policies that Vance and other Republicans support, and their unwillingness to do things that directly and materially help people who are struggling.

Here I should also disclose that I have some recent experience with Vance that doesn’t exactly make me like him more. When Charlie Kirk was shot, I wrote scathingly about his bigotry in this magazine. I had expected right-wing backlash, but I did not expect Vance to call me a soulless hack on national television and claim that I had been paid by George Soros’s Open Society and the Ford Foundation to disparage Kirk—which was all news to me. (If anyone from either organization is reading this: perhaps you’d like my address for the check? The Nation paid me in the low three figures for the piece, and my rent is quite a bit higher than that.)

At any rate, thanks to Vance the number of death and rape threats my family and I got were far in excess of what I’d normally get for an article criticizing a high-profile right-wing figure. The difference between Vance getting threats and me getting threats is that when a guy sends me a photo from the viewpoint of a shooter holding an AR-15-style platform gun and tells me he’s going to use it on my family—a typical e-mail—I don’t have a Secret Service retinue to check it out. I can only call and be ignored by the FBI after going through an extensive automated system and leaving voice messages that never get returned. I don’t mind criticism, but I do resent the vice president of the United States, whose salary my taxes pay, targeting me individually from a perfectly secure perch in his bulletproof bubble. That said, I hardly represent the worst example of figures in the Trump administration weaponizing their government positions against individual journalists. They do it every day.

But the main reason I disliked Vance well before all of that was because I read Hillbilly Elegy. I didn’t know who he was when the book came out, and I picked it up, hoping someone would finally get the contours and messiness of how I grew up right. By the end of it, I wanted to hurl it across the room: It wildly caricatured what poor rural people are like, in a way that was uniquely flattering to JD Vance. It made broad generalizations indicating that the kind of people I grew up with were, as a class, lazy and unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as he did.

I remember having that attitude when I was 19 or so. My logic was that if I could work hard and read books and put myself through college, then, well, anyone could. But I grew out of that because I was exposed to the real world. I met people who had struggled more than I did, were smarter, and worked harder—as well as many people who struggled and worked little, if at all. I soon realized that, all too often, the former group suffered while the latter prospered. I saw people who were vulnerable further harmed and even destroyed by the policies that Vance now espouses. Seeing that disparity first-hand is what radicalized me, moving me well to the left from my conservative upbringing. The injustice of it made me angry. It still does. I remember the person I was when I thought anyone who didn’t do what I did just hadn’t made enough effort, and I’m relieved that I outgrew her in my 20s.

Vance, meanwhile, still hasn’t. He leans hard on anecdotes in both of his books. His first big example of the stubborn shiftlessness of the Appalachian poor comes early in Hillbilly Elegy, when he recounts the unreliable work habits of an 19-year-old couple raising a newborn child whom he worked with at a tile warehouse. I don’t doubt that they were prone to flake out on the job, but they were also teenagers whose brains were still developing and were probably not equipped to raise an infant. Of course they were unreliable.

Thanks to people like Vance, they also have no safety net: no health insurance outside of employment and little in the way of maternal care. If they need food assistance, they will have to jump through endless hoops to get it. There are now work requirements for most federal income supports, which means that if they can’t get a job, they’re left to fend for themselves with a dwindling supply of resources. In order to qualify for many forms of assistance, they also might have to be married, regardless whether they want, or feel ready, to be. In Vance’s ideal........

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