J.D. Vance arrives at the Republican National Convention, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 16, 2024 (Andrew Harnik/Getty)

Originally published by the Irish Independent:

In his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance wrote, “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

This claim to his essential identity has been an important part of Vance’s political image, first as a Republican senator in Ohio and now as the GOP’s Vice Presidential nominee. In his speech to the Republican National Convention, he told his story of a boy growing up in poverty with an absent father and drug-addicted mother. He was mainly raised by his Appalachian hillbilly grandmother “who could barely walk but…was as tough as nails”.

From this story, he proclaimed lessons and values as the basis of a populist Trumpist worldview. He assured that he would be “a Vice President who never forgets where he came from”. This rhetoric is catnip to conservatives, extolling the virtues of up-by-your-bootstraps individualism and disavowing government support for impoverished Americans.

Those who advised Trump to select Vance as his Vice Presidential sidekick have promoted the storyline. Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, the key think tank in the Project 2025 blueprint for another Trump stay in the White House, hail Hillbilly Elegy as “an authentic portrayal of an experience that tens of millions of
Americans have had”.

Cooler assessments of Vance’s hillbilly story, as well as some angry ones by Appalachian natives, have questioned its content and import and his commitment to working class Americans.

In all of this, Vance’s “Scots Irish” identity is often mentioned but rarely analyzed.

EA on International Media: The Double Threat of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance

A Trump-Vance White House Will Undermine Europe and Boost A Russia-China Partnership

The Scots Irish and America

The Scots Irish in the US today are a barely visible community, particulary in comparison with “Irish Americans”. While almost 39 million people signified Irish heritage in the 2020 national census, just under 800,000 selected Scots Irish.<

The disparity in numbers can be misleading, concealing different histories of settlement and assimilation. Protestant peoples, mostly Presbyterian, from Ulster and Scotland emigrated to the US in
large numbers in the later part of the 18th century, making up a
significant portion of the “new nation”. Most moved beyond
the Eastern cities in which the famine Irish would settle from the 1840s. They went westward as part of the pioneering exodus and southward into Appalachia.

The Scots Irish played an important part in the Continental Army of the Revolutionary War and the events that established the US as a nation. Their fingerprints are on the Declaration of Independence – five of the 38 signatories had direct Ulster Protestant family connections. General George Washington is reported to have said “If defeated everywhere else I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scotch-Irish of my native Virginia.” During the Civil War many Scots-Irish fought on both sides, including illustrious figures such as Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

Much of this history of the Scots Irish and of the mythologies that feed off it — pioneers such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and “a lost cause” in the Confederate defeat in the Civil War – are not well known in Ireland, where the popular imagination
has been fed on stories of Irish Catholic migration in the 19th century and its legacies to today.

Are many people in the Republic know that at least 17 of America’s 46 Presidents are of Scots Irish Protestant ancestry? In contrast, many people in Northern Ireland are well aware of this. The Unionist constituency looked to the Scots Irish in the US as a diaspora that can provide sustaining myths — have a look at the murals celebrating Confederate generals — for a community perceiving itself as besieged and disenfranchised. This drives efforts to establish organizations and networks for an “Ulster Scots
Americanism”.

Trump’s tapping of Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate was noted with interest by Northern Irish newspapers of a Unionist persuasion. A Newsletter editorial headlined, “J.D. Vance is a reminder of the historic Ulster influence in the United States.” It concluded, “Neither Senator Vance nor indeed the Scottish American Mr Trump himself have shown much interest in Northern Ireland. Even so, the Scots Irish are a community that unionists could tap into.​”

The Appalachian Myth

Over time many Scots Irish sloughed off any residual “Irish” identification, the better to assimilate. An interesting exception to this general pattern is the strong and continuing association of Scots Irish identity with the immiserated white working class peoples of the Appalachia region. It is this association and its sustaining mythology that J.D. Vance is tapping into with his hillbilly story.

The “Appalachian myth” of an “other America” or a “forgotten America” has 19th-century roots, when popular commentaries on the region focused on its geographical and cultural isolation. In the 20th century this myth took on more distinctly racial as well as class connotations: ethnically homogenous, predominantly made up of white Scots-Irish peoples who had not fully assimilated into a white mainstream America. It wqas at once a “pioneer society” and an “internal colony” of isolation and poverty, a narrative of self-indigenization that set the population apart.

The notion of “ethnic survival” has been critiqued and dismissed by scholars and yet it persists, deployed by politicians like Vance who want to claim some form of white working class authenticity. It has also been a rich source of popular culture representations, where the connotations of an isolated people readily play into gothic and horror genres –– see the film Deliverance from 1972 or the Wrong Turn series of films in the early 2000s that depicted Appalachians as inbred cannibals eating liberal city folks.

Thus, the Ulster Scots peoples of Appalachia have become linked with the white grievance politics of a divided and partisan America in recent years. In this politics, the white working class are the “real Americans” and the most misunderstood victims of economic, political and cultural disenfranchisements. They are the most overlooked and disrespected, the “final frontier of accepted prejudice” in America.

The working class and underclass people of Ulster Scots descent, sometimes referred to as hillbillies, are the quintessential victim grouping in this narrative. They conveniently fit into a white nationalist narrative of settler colonialism that conservatives would rather promote over the liberal narrative of a nation of immigrants. Trump’s rallies are symbolic sites for the staging and amplifying of the settler narrative as the true origin story of
America and of “real” Americans.

A Hillbilly President?

The rapid ascent of Hillbilly Elegy to bestseller suggests many Americans were looking for an explanation of Trumpism. But the book was widely criticised, perhaps most sharply by Appalachians, for
dealing in stereotypes of “white trash” and blaming working class peoples for their impoverished conditions. Some charged that it was exploitative “poverty porn”.

More measured critiques argued that Vance did not give enough attention to the region’s long history of environmental despoliation and rapacious capitalism, from coal to pharmaceutical companies.

I doubt such pushback will affect the popularity of Vance’s hillbilly story. Indeed, it is now aimed at and will reach an even larger number of people.

It could even become the compelling origin story for the 48th President of the US: the man posing as the “Scots-Irish hillbilly” alongside Donald Trump.