There’s an old Washington saying that whenever a senator looks in the mirror, they see a president. If it’s true, then a good chunk of Senate Republicans seem hell-bent on rerunning their last president’s playbook — say and do as much silly shit as possible and see what sticks — all the way to the White House. Between Rand Paul’s incessant feud with Dr. Anthony Fauci over COVID-19 precautions, Tom Cotton’s authoritarian musings about showing “no quarter” to protestors, and Ted Cruz’ ongoing obsession with bringing children’s books into the Capitol, it’s difficult to stand out as a particularly irritating member of the upper chamber’s GOP caucus.

Difficult, but in this land of opportunity, not impossible. And assuming he can secure a general election win this November (hardly a heavy lift in a red Ohio), newly minted GOP nominee J.D. Vance just might become the most contemptible member of the lot.

It isn’t because Vance is a pro-Trump Republican. It’s not because he’s a former Trump critic who later accepted an endorsement from the former president. And it’s not because he’s a wealthy technocrat who dresses himself up as a tell-it-like-it-is populist kvetching about the elites who are ruining America.

In 2022, none of that is special anymore.

It’s because in addition to being a lawyer, veteran, venture capitalist, and professional Twitter troll, J.D. Vance is also a writer. And it’s because in 2016, a mere six years and great big bushy beard ago, he wrote a little book called Hillbilly Elegy.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, Hillbilly Elegy was an inescapable part of the #discourse surrounding Trump’s surprise victory. And for people trying to get inside the mind of the White Working Class without saying the ra–word, Vance’s book was a lifeline, if not an intellectual shortcut, that ended up fueling the economic anxiety angle that dominated coverage in the early days of the first Trump presidency.

An angle that, while still a matter of good-faith debate, is not entirely accurate.

But it’s not just that Hillbilly Elegy become a hit, despite being a seemingly well-intentioned book that advanced an overly simplistic and potentially harmful narrative. This is America; turning books with overly simplistic and potentially harmful narratives into bestsellers (and then turning those bestsellers into bad movies) is kind of what we do.

It’s that, in the sudden need for the nation to Come Together and Heal the Divide after the election, Hillbilly Elegy was often put into juxtaposed conversation with another book that came out around the same time.

A better book, by a better writer, that focused on a perspective that never received nearly as much attention or sympathy as the White Working Class, as though it was only working class Whites that buoyed Trump, and as though the concerns of working classes of other racial groups didn’t matter in the grand political calculus.

This book.

It was an unlikely pairing, but almost overnight, the two books became joined at the hip. The internet is still littered with compare-and-contrasts between the two. And if only the left would read Hillbilly Elegy and the right would read Between the World and Me, the narrative went, we’d all understand each other better. The political temperature would go down, our societal wounds would heal, and maybe the next time the presidential pendulum swung to the right, Republicans wouldn’t be forced to nominate, and support, and endorse, and vote for someone as loathsome as Donald Trump.

Look what you made me do, and all that.

Now, comparing J.D. Vance’s writing to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ isn’t exactly fair — either objectively, given their respective careers, or subjectively, given my own race and upbringing, to say nothing of the very public esteem in which I’ve held Coates’ writing for years. And there’s nothing to suggest that either man was seeking or expecting the explosion of attention that their books gave them, to say nothing of how their books became so unexpectedly entwined. But looking at how they both dealt with that newfound limelight is educational.

To listen to and read Vance in interviews after his book’s ascendancy is to see a man increasingly comfortable being the avatar of Appalachian Americana, and increasingly certain of his framing of their struggles. To do the same to Coates is to witness a man adamant that he’s speaking for himself as himself, genuinely discomfited with his growing celebrity, and increasingly hopeful that the country might yet prove him wrong.

(By the way, want to guess which of the two writers has been getting banned lately? Damned left and their cancel culture!)

So, let’s fast forward five years from early 2017 to mid-2022, and let’s skip over some of those swell moments of economic anxiety that defined them.

The ones that we might not have seen coming…

…and the ones that were depressingly obvious.

Let’s check in how Vance and Coates are wielding the respective power their books gave them.

Vance, as stated, is now a GOP nominee for the United States Senate, a position he attained by renouncing his past critiques of Donald Trump as apostasy and trafficking in conspiracy theories on everything from Joe Biden trying to kill MAGA voters with fentanyl to rehashed wingnuttery about undocumented immigrants. And nowhere in his campaign or his platform is any of the feigned compassion for the region that propelled him to national prominence.

Coates, meanwhile, after a few years writing Black Panther and Captain America comics… is now working on a Superman movie.

In other words, one man used his power to become a more influential version of who he already was. The other either used it to became someone antithetical to who he used to be, or to reveal that he’d been a shameless charlatan all along.

I do not know which is worse, and I do not care.

This is why it’s become impossible to check my cynicism, in both writing and in person. This is why my patriotism is scattershot with pessimism about those who most loudly proclaim themselves to be patriots. This is why the grace with which I’m supposed to regard others, lest I be written off as an Angry Black Man, is harder and harder to summon. This is why people with the privilege to either opt out of politics entirely or who check in during election season, no matter what shade of what wing they’re coming from, telling me that both sides and parties are essentially the same is so offensive.

And this is why I resent people like J.D. Vance, and the people who prop up the J.D. Vances of the world, so much that I can barely see straight.

Because when people like me — those irritating college-educated leftishs who made the foolish mistake of taking the words of a protofascist bigot seriously — were banging the gong about Trump’s movement and the horrors it was gearing up to unleash, it was people like Vance on both ends of the spectrum telling us that we were making mountains out of molehills. That while Trump might indeed be deplorable, the people fueling his rise weren’t. That America had survived worse, even if Americans would suffer.

And now that everything we were told we were crazy for saying was going to happen has happened, or is happening, or will happen soon, it’s people like Vance who have taken it upon themselves to try and make things worse.

Imagine if you didn’t have to wait for a cop to kill a nigger the wrong way in public for people to suddenly decide you were worth listening to.

Must be nice, eh, J.D.?

Every time you give the Vances of the world some rope, they will hang you with it, and then use it to pull themselves higher. They will choke you out with the cord of your compassion, they will sell out their apocryphal principles for thirty pieces of power, and they’ll smile as they do it, because they know as well as you do that in a country with the political memory of an amoeba, there will never be an accounting for it.

By definition, elegies are a lament for the dead.

How fitting, I suppose, that a man whose claim to fame is writing a preemptive elegy for the American Dream is now well-positioned to help kill what little is left of it.

Hallelujah.