[The Idle Forum] A Letter to J. D. Vance

To the Vice President of the United States, Mr. J. D. Vance,

Forgive me for writing from Greater Atsugi, a drunken city in the Far East.

In 2016 your memoir became a bestseller in the United States. Hillbilly Elegy was the story of a young man born in Middletown, Ohio — a town that once flourished on steel and then fell into decline — making his way from a dysfunctional family and poverty, through the Marine Corps, to Yale Law School. In 2020 it was made into a film directed by Ron Howard. The book has long been read as "the key to understanding the white working class of the Rust Belt." Yet reading it again now, I do not find it to be an understanding of "class" at all. Might it not be, rather, that it converts class into the story of one young man's ascent?

For twentieth-century class theory, class was a "relation." It made an issue of who draws surplus from whose labor. But in your Hillbilly Elegy, class is not a relation but merely the scenery of one man's origins: a troubled mother, drugs, a grandmother's love, self-help, escape. There is no class struggle there; there is only the moving tale of one man climbing out of his class. By staging the already-dying category of class as a spectacle, might you not be concealing the class structure that is alive right now?

You were born in 1984 to a poor family in Middletown, Ohio. After serving in the Marine Corps, you studied at Ohio State University and Yale Law School. With Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 you secured the position of "spokesman for the white working class," and then became a venture investor at Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital. With Thiel's financial backing you won an Ohio Senate seat in 2022, were chosen as President Trump's running mate in 2024, and have served as the fiftieth Vice President since January 2025. By now you are no mere Vice President. You are spoken of as the strongest Vice President in history, a Vice President with influence beyond that of Cheney in the Bush years. As Trump's "enforcer," you have handled everything from congressional strategy to building the framework for the transfer of TikTok's ownership, and in 2025, with President Trump's own backing, you took the post of finance chair of the Republican National Committee. I am told it is the first time in history that a sitting Vice President has taken this fundraising role. Since President Trump is barred by the Constitution from a third term, you are treated as the leading successor for 2028 — the so-called heir apparent of MAGA.

Here there is one thing I wish to say. Your ascent is supported from the very opposite place to the class you claim to speak for. The capital that made you a politician was Silicon Valley's. You entered the Senate on Thiel's money, raised within the capital network of the Silicon Valley right. The spokesman for the Rust Belt is a politician cultivated by the capital that laid the Rust Belt to waste — might it not be so?

The Spectacularization of Class

Back to the book. The core of Hillbilly Elegy lies in "erasing class while speaking of class." The reader comes to feel they are reading the life of the working class. But what is on the page is not a relation; it is the story of one exception. You climbed out, but the great majority who could not are processed as background scenery. By making the one who escaped into the protagonist, the very structure that makes escape impossible is displaced into a matter of individual will and family circumstance. This is nothing new. It is the standard form of the American "self-help story." But in your case, this story became fuel for politics. You made your own origins into a book, the book into a film, and on that momentum entered the Senate and became Vice President. Devastation converted into the energy of ascent. Class made into the material of your own ascent. In this way the relation called class is compressed into the spectacle of one man — you. When you say "I am the working class," what is being spoken is not a "relation" but your "face" — might it not be?

What Is Spectacle?

Class was, to begin with, a social relation between persons. The relation between capital and labor. What you are doing is mediating and displacing that relation through the spectacle of your own origins. The worker comes to be able to see their own class only through your face. Class struggle is displaced by the consumption of your moving spectacle. Guy Debord once called this "separation": the state in which people are cut off from their own lived relations, and those relations rise up before them as spectacle, so that all they can do is look on. Might you not be the completed form of separation for the working class?

Class Disappears Twice

So, does the "white working class" you stage still really exist? This is the heart of it. The industrial working class you speak for is a twentieth-century category. It is the class of an era when the steel mill, the assembly line, and a single income made a middle-class life possible. That era is over. What produces value now is not the factory line but platform capital, data, and knowledge congealed into AI. The capture of value is being severed, more and more, from living labor.

Today's class structure takes the form of platform capital at the top, and beneath it a technical elite, an intellectual middle stratum such as researchers and editors, skilled workers being replaced by AI, gig workers, and at the very bottom, propertyless bodies that are no longer even workers, stacked one on another. The propertyless who do not hold their own data as a means of production — I call them, in my serial, the AI of the dispossessed. As I confirmed in the preceding essay of this issue, the bodies that now appear at our threshold no longer fit any of these categories.

At this point, class disappears twice. The first time, it dissolves into the language of distribution ratios and statistics. The second time, the very denominator you speak for — the industrial worker — becomes obsolete and disappears. The working class you stage is already a statistical residue, the ghost of a past category. Your function lies in staging this ghost as an image. By movingly performing a dead class, the class structure that is alive right now — the relation by which platform capital draws rent from propertyless bodies — becomes invisible. The real work of the spectacle lies here. Speaking-for is another name for concealment — might it not be?

So the reconstruction of the concept of class is not a matter of difficult theory. It is to name the relation: behind your moving spectacle, who is now drawing what from whom. To peel away the spectacle and return it to the relation. That is all it is.

The Body That Does Not Need to Be Named

Finally, let me return to the preceding pages of this issue. The man who lay collapsed at the threshold there was simply taken in, without registering in any class. He did not even need to be named. The philosophers received him without naming him. You are the reverse. You go on naming, while registering in no class yourself. That man was received without being named; you name without receiving anyone. If the opposite of hospitality is speaking-for, then what you are doing is speaking-for — that is, concealment.

The real class, behind your moving face, like that man, becomes no spectacle at all, and simply lies collapsed and asleep at the threshold. The reconstruction of the concept of class can surely begin only from the side of this body that does not need to be named — might it not be so?