Abstract: The aftermath of the Great Recession has seen a rapid rise in right-wing populism in the US and abroad. This article contributes to existing literature on the phenomenon through an analysis of J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016). Employing Ernesto Laclau’s theorization of populism and Michael Kazin’s rhetorical study of American populism, the article demonstrates the memoir’s characteristically conservative, bidirectional antagonism and its reliance on conservative tropes to produce it. The article finds this populist form in the text’s articulation of antagonistic frontiers between the ‘poor’ and the ‘elite’ as well as a ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ poor. Focusing on the latter, the article demonstrates how Vance utilizes the trope of the innocent child, which is presented as being at continuous risk of abuse by the unworthy Other. In doing so, the value of tropological study in charting conservative populism’s ascendance is asserted.
In their collection of essays titled Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right, Christine M. Battista and Melissa R. Sande describe the awestruck reaction of the neoliberal establishment to the rise of conservative populism in the twenty-first century. This baffled response toward the phenomenon, they say, affirms the value of the critical tradition, which is uniquely capable of charting and understanding the development of it and other social movements (3). As other movements, conservative populism, the convergence of the post-WWII American conservative project and the populist rhetorical tradition, is not a recent phenomenon but a development that can be traced through an array of texts and rhetors ranging from the anti-communist US Senator Joseph McCarthy to President Donald Trump. This development is
defined by its bidirectional hostility toward a perceived “alliance between evil forces on high and the unworthy [...] below” (Kazin xiii-xiv). In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, which saw Donald Trump’s re-election, Battista and Sande’s call is more relevant than ever. With numerous analyses already dealing with Trump, the Tea Party, and Republican National Committee manifestos, it is imperative to extend the study to other conservative rhetors and forms of political speech. The famous memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, authored by Trump’s vice president J.D. Vance, now dubbed a populist member of the alt-right (Dias; Cassidy), presents an opportunity to study the phenomenon in a setting less explored.