Before he ever ran for public office, I read J.D. Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy. It had angered someone who got triggered pretty easily, so I wanted to read it for myself. What I got was an eye-opening and entertaining memoir of Vance's childhood, some parallels with things I see in my own community, and a glimpse at just why the left would come to hate him so much.
The truth is that Vance is a lot of things that people want in a candidate. He's young, well-spoken, intelligent, and understands the issues.
Your average leftist would hate him for that alone, but they have more of a reason.
You see, Vance represents just how much of their ideology is an absolute lie.
Many leftists like to argue that America is a nation of haves and have-nots and that the haves got there via things like inheritance, cronyism, and other nefarious methods. They want people to believe that the system is rigged against them and they can never make it out of poverty on their own. The idea of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" just isn't realistic.
The problem is that Vance did just that.
He came from the lower socioeconomic strata. He joined the Marine Corps in order to pay his way through college. There, he worked his tail off to graduate with solid grades so he could go to law school at Yale.
Over my many years, I've seen a lot of leftists claim that getting out of poverty is all but impossible. Some have even claimed the military wasn't an option for escape despite the fact that yes, it is, and it's obvious to anyone who cares to look.
Vance shows that there's a pathway toward college if you want it badly enough.
He went from relative poverty to being a venture capitalist, a United States senator, and possibly just a week away from becoming vice president of the United States.
What's more, he did it without becoming a leftist like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. He recognized the virtue of his own hard work and rather than pretend he's some rare soul who made it out, he recognized that while others might not get quite where he has, they can escape their poverty-stricken lives and become more of they're willing to work for it.
They hate him because his very existence proves that what they're peddling to millions of people is nothing more than nonsense.
They attack him because they're scared the people they're peddling that nonsense to will see that the emperor has no clothes and that they, too, can achieve if they put their minds, hearts, and souls into doing so.
Will it be easy? Not necessarily. Vance doesn't prove it's easy, he proves it's possible, which is all a lot of people really need. All they need is to know that it can be done so they won't feel like they're wasting their time or will know that it's achievable when life gets hard.
And for the leftists, that's an issue because people who realize they can achieve on their own won't need them for anything.
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