With J.D. Vance Running, We Will Be Hearing about “Redneck” Culture

With J.D. Vance Running, We Will Be Hearing about “Redneck” Culture

Descriptor—Vance’s “roots” are a key to our history and liberal “celebration” of today’s “ghetto” culture.

By Walter Donway

Permit me to be first to call Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance, now a GOP nominee for the vice presidency, a “redneck.”

It is better coming from an admirer and supporter who has read and reviewed J.D.’s bestseller (now hitting the top of the bestseller lists, again), Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of A Family and Culture in Crisis, published in 2016. It propelled him to national celebrity that he parlayed into his successful 2022 race for the Senate.

I doubt he would deny, or be less than proud, to acknowledge his heritage as a redneck. That is the entire premise of Hillbilly Elegy—along with the story of extraordinary (and often nip and tuck) struggle to rise out of that culture, putting it behind him, triumphing in the American Dream—then, setting out systematically to understand how it had happened. That meant reading such works, to take but a single example he cites, as Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) about the devastating impact of the welfare state in setting back the earlier progress of black families and culture.

In a June 2021 interview, before he ran for Senate, Vance commented on a now-commonplace liberal-left views such as the theme of the New York Times “1619 Project,” now being pushed into schools, that American success rests upon the work of slaves or President Biden’s repeated references to “white racism” and “systemic racism“ in America. Vance argued that “critical race theory” “is trying to take away from us a pride of place, because: 

If you take away a sense of where a people came from, you can control where they’re ultimately going. If you disconnect people from their past, you can take from them a real sense of agency over their future, and that’s what I see is really happening, right? It’s making people ashamed of the things they were taught to be proud of.

He is frank that people and cultures in poverty first need not assistance but to change their habits and expectations. Lifestyle changes and personal responsibility are the ticket to success. He has been scorned for “oversimplifying” the complex causes of poverty: Ha! Just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right? But Hillbilly Elegy brings to life on almost every page the crucible of personal experience—brutal trials and dangerous errors, harsh correctives, and indelible role models—from which Vance speaks.

His Mamaw’s tough love carried convincing intimidation, When Mamaw’s husband, J. D.’s grandfather, becomes a nightly boozer, she declares: “If you come home drunk, again, I’ll kill you.” He soon comes home drunk and sprawls on the couch. Mamaw fetches the can of gasoline from the garage, pours it over him, and drops a match on his chest.

When Mamaw said anything, including that she would kill you, you had to take it literally. Fortunately, her 11-year-old daughter leaps to the rescue and beats out the flames so Papaw survives with minimal burns. Domestic clashes are serious in J.D.’s world.

Redneck Culture—the Roots

I would not have understood the origins of hillbilly (or “redneck” or “cracker”) culture without reading the brilliant work of historian Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Encounter Books, 2009). Could any title better typify the spirit of a contemporary author as well as typify the near-legendary black American scholar (who recently celebrated his 94^th birthday)? Professor Sowell has confronted the sacred taboos of our time (none more so than those related to race and slavery) with scintillating research, loyalty to facts, blunt language, and compelling analysis. Yes, I am a fan!

Black Rednecks and White Liberals begins, as always with Sowell, with where we have been—really been, broadly not parochially—all countries, all races.

The earliest settlement of America was almost exclusively from Great Britain. But the North and South, in particular, were settled by immigrants from profoundly different cultural areas of Great Britain. And that has made all the difference.

The northern colonies were heavily settled from the southern and middle parts of England. These were Puritans, among many others, who came from settled, effectively governed, law-abiding, and “civilized” areas of England.

Turning to the American South of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the story was dramatically different. Sowell’s research and documentation are detailed and complete but let me summarize. The colonies south of Virginia were heavily settled from three sectors of Great Britain. 

England’s northern borderlands are legendary (including in contemporary novels and ballads) for their lawlessness and resistance to government. Life was violent, defiant of control, too often focused on the ethos of the highwayman.

The notorious Scottish Highlands of legend and song were ruled by the great clans, making their own law and enforcing it, forcing everyone who hoped for self-preservation to affiliate with a powerful clan. Violent raids of other clans and of the Scottish lowlands—settled, more urban, lawful, productive—were a way of life. Reportedly, young men on horseback took joy and pride in these raids—rustling, stealing, burning, raping, killing, then charging back into the sheltering hills.

And third, under pressure of “enclosure laws” and mounting law enforcement, populations of the borderlands and Scottish Highlands fled to another “Celtic fringe”—Ulster County in Ireland. That in turn became the source of the great Scots-Irish immigrations to America, overwhelmingly to the southern colonies. Ulster, not surprisingly, had the same characteristics of lawlessness, resort to violence, avoidance of work, callous treatment of women...

These three areas, distinguished by their character, mores, and culture, were the demographic origin of the American South. Sowell documents, characterizes, and illustrates what this meant. His catalog, each item documented separately, amounts roughly to our view today of the most problematic aspects of “ghetto culture.” He writes that: 

Cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.

Today, when found in black culture, of course, the problems are blamed on the history of slavery and reconstruction, but it is a culture, Sowell demonstrates, that began with whites, emphatically including slaveholders, and also long predated its expression in America. When mostly poor Southern whites began their great migrations to cities in the north, newspapers there were full of stories and editorials that today we interpret as lamenting the problems of black culture. The newcomers were lawless, shiftless and lazy, ignorant, prone to troublemaking, drunks, noisy neighbors—all of it. Imported in chains from Africa, enslaved for two centuries or more, Blacks hardly could have avoided absorbing the redneck culture—and they did not avoid it.

“Centuries before ‘black pride’ became a fashionable phrase,” writes Sowell, “there was Southern “cracker” pride—and it was very much the same kind of pride. It was not pride in any particular achievement or set of behavioral standards or moral principles adhered to. It was instead a touchiness about anything that might remotely be construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it.”

The violence over such perceived slights could be astonishing: friends with rifles arriving with the “injured” man to burn down a house. And, of course, murder in a duel or animalistic personal combat—the outcome accepted by all as just the nature of things. Professor Grady McWhitney writes in Cracker Culture of the social approval of violence: “Men often killed and went free in the South just as in earlier times they had in Ireland and Scotland.” Juries would seldom convict—because they would be condemning themselves.

There were steamboats in both the North and the South, but fatal explosions were extremely rare in the North while dozens occurred in the South, where captains recklessly raced other boats, the safety valves soldered open, the drunken passengers cheering them on—until their boats blew up, sometimes killing hundreds of people.

McWhitney points out that ancient Celts were “boasters and threateners, given to bombastic self-dramatization.” Prof. Sowell suggests: “Examples today come readily to mind, not only from ghetto life and gangsta rap, but also from militant black ‘leaders,’ spokesmen or activists.” It is ironic, he writes, that these are attributed to “black identity” when they are “part of a centuries-old pattern among whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South.” 

This is not a blanket indictment of America’s southern colonies. Instead, it is an exploration of the cultural element that has come to be called “redneck.” The American South could not have become economically powerful, with an educated and cultured upper-class, able to fight the North to a hard-won victory in the Civil War, if it had been simplistically “redneck.”

Sowell makes evident that “redneck” culture crossed class lines from plantation owners to slaves . The roots in male pride, touchiness to insult, and readiness to resort to violence manifested, as mentioned, in many duels among the “aristocracy” to settle issues of “honor”—Andrew Jackson was involved in 13. 

Violence among the lower classes took the form of constant fights with “no holds barred.”  Ears and noses were bitten off, eyes gouged out, and opponents sometimes finished off with a knife. To a large extent, it was accepted. The way things were. 

Sowell illustrates at length the culture of men who did not work—hunting all day, drinking and chatting, gambling, fighting, attending cockfights—and the women who farmed, worked, kept the household together. While in the North, premarital sex and pregnancy were rare, in the South a very large percentage of girls married pregnant in their early teens. The pattern is identical today among black Americans (69% of births to non-Hispanic black women are to unwed mothers and 96 percent of them are teenagers). And the role of white liberals? To blame it all on slavery, white racism, now systemic white racism.

Vance’s Redneck Roots—and His Struggle

This, then, is the culture par excellence from which J. D. Vance came. Born in Middletown, Ohio, he was a part of the great post-WWII migration north of whites and blacks alike for the jobs boom in the midwestern manufacturing belt.  But the redneck culture of the “Holler” in Kentucky came with him—his mother as a pregnant 13-year-old girl, a drug addict, fled home with her 16-year-old boyfriend. Migrating north, too, were his grandparents, including “Bonnie Mamaw Blanton, who was J. D.’s salvation through the toughest of ‘tough love.’”

The redneck culture came with him to Ohio: the family violence, guns, sexual looseness, avoidance of work, drugs and alcohol, touchy pride, the premium on fighting.

J.D. survived it—barely. By the time he scraped through high school, he learned from Mamaw to think, to question.  Did he have the discipline to succeed in college? No, he thought not. So, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines, stationed in Iraq as a military journalist. After returning, he attended the University of Ohio—and graduated in just two years, summa cum laude. Then, he went to Yale Law School—no problem. A few years later, in 2016, while working in a venture capital firm, he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which became a New York Times bestseller.

I have been building toward the conclusion, which should be obvious, by now, that J. D. Vance understands the “American dream”—from both sides, the bottom looking up, and the top surveying contemporary American culture. He recalls for example, that in his family’s struggle for subsistence in Middletown, their work meant no welfare. And they “burned with resentment” that those on food stamps ate better than they did. 

He understands, viscerally, the culture of the black “ghetto,” where intractable-seeming problems are attributed to the history of slavery and blamed on “white racism.” But whose origins, in fact, lie not in the American South or slavery, but in a culture long ago in Great Britian—a culture originating in the 16^th century and earlier. It cannot be blamed on white Americans, today. But blaming is the only focus of the “white liberals.”

It seems a realistic hope that J.D. Vance will come to the vice presidency of the United States understanding the sovereign power of the “American Dream” of the individual in a free society taking responsibility to make choices, even against the powerful current of “culture,” to work, study, resist temptation, prioritize virtue. And achieve a dream.

On the other hand, Vance, raised in the South’s evangelical tradition, then becoming an atheist in college and law school, recently converted to Catholicism after a remarkable journey of soul-searching, philosophical investigation, research in a dozen directions, and debate. In other words, his “red-neck” upbringing drew him powerfully to religion, but his intellect and exacting education drew him toward a theological/philosophical relationship with religion. But whatever else he is, he is not a secular-minded, scientific deist in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and (arguably) George Washington. 

The evidence, thus far, is mixed. It is too soon to draw conclusions. But he comes to leadership in politics with an experience and first-hand insight the dynamics of American culture rare and potentially invaluable among U.S. politicians today.

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Note: This article was originally published by Savvy Street and is republished with the author's permission.