Here we are again. Thanks to Trump’s pick of Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as his VP running mate, we are knee deep in the pig shit of essay after essay about Appalachia and hillbillies. While most of it correctly notes that Vance cosplayed the role from the suburbs of Ohio, and that’s certainly critical for voters to know, I doubt it will do much for the hillbillies.

It’s like 2016 all over again, when the book was a smash hit that gave many Americans the chance to finally “understand” the region, and grapple with why the kind of poor white people Trump wouldn’t rub elbows with would vote for him. That merely allowed them to congratulate themselves and refuel their contempt. And it’s like 2020 all over again, when Hillbilly Elegy the movie debuted and was widely panned and then accused of being the biggest hand-wringing poverty-porn grift since Precious. That, too, only allowed some folks to double down on their assumptions.

Writers actually from Appalachia who didn’t LARP it for a book deal worked quickly to try to clear up the misconceptions Vance left in his wake. We had sharp works analyzing and debunking stereotypes that Appalachia is not just a bunch of slack-jawed coal miners who married their sisters. And collections of regional responses to the stereotypes followed. By the time the movie hit, a flurry of new writing appeared, my own included, where I shared my own recognition of the struggle depicted in Ron Howard’s film, in spite of the book’s galling failures. And there were more writers still, urging readers to educate themselves on the rich, often erased history of Black Americans in the region, often called Affrilachia.

Did everyone scramble to read it all and understand? Who knows. All I know is that today there are yet again Appalachian writers pleading with us to read their stories and to understand that this book does not represent them. And neither does Vance. Neema Avashia, for one, has written a beautiful piece about the erasure of South Asian immigrants in the region. And poor rural whites who grew up as I did and left are recognizing the dysfunction and struggle of Vance’s story but refusing in good conscience to draw the same cruel, bootstrapping conclusions that he does. It’s a patently noxious idea that the white poor must rise up on their own steam—and that if they don’t succeed, it’s because they’re lazy or unwilling.

Seeing this flurry of soul-baring essays, I almost let myself get excited that we might nudge this country into a more honest, compassionate discussion of the region. Hey, even People magazine is suggesting books other than Hillbilly Elegy to read! #FakeHillbilly is trending! That means people will actually want to think about what a real hillbilly is, and maybe that won’t automatically come with an incest joke! Then I saw it: Hillbilly Elegy is back on the best-seller list again, and the film is one of top streamed on Netflix.

Plenty of liberals gleefully call out Vance’s hillbilly schtick, but I see no evidence that they have any more understanding or appreciation of what the people of Appalachia are like or go through. It’s an easy talking point to denounce Vance, but what does it do for the region—and when does a new understanding stick? When do we stop using hillbillies as punching bags and start talking about the policies that harm Appalachians and the solutions they desperately need?

Here is a painful truth of my life: I’m a liberal, and I’ve never had to defend Appalachia more to any other group but liberals. For obvious and not great reasons, conservatives pretend to get it, because it serves their purposes. They look down on the rural poor too, but they’re more interested in how to exploit that. Liberals get to have it both ways: They get to righteously denounce Vance and also work in a social media joke about the yokels.

It’s heartening to see people point out that Vance is not just a poser, but worse: He is among the cruelest manifestations of bootstrapper I’ve come across, and I grew up in Southern Baptist churches during satanic panic and the right-wing nuttery of the 1980s. But seeing how the region never fails to stoke the liberal intellectual’s sense of superiority leaves me in a kind of deep political purgatory. Anyone who thinks J.D. Vance alone is responsible for the problem of how Appalachia is perceived is no more honest or educated than the suckers that liberals presume will vote for him. They’re not trying to help Appalachia or hillbillies. They’re just leveraging it to bring down Vance.

Vance has it coming. But the rebuke without the reckoning the region needs is a painful reminder of a second enduring truth about Appalachia: People don’t really want to understand it. It’s far easier to mock it, shake our heads, and walk away. It was in 2016, it was in 2020, and it is today.

I don’t live in Appalachia anymore. I left over a decade ago. My family remains and has been there for centuries. I have been its biggest critic and its biggest defender. But that’s how it goes with family and the things you love and leave. Many of the most intense debates about the region I have had with myself.

But over time I have come to reconcile it and see it for what it is: a complicated, beautiful place that has been pillaged and conned. The very reason its people survive and fight for it to this day is, as with any other marginalized group, out of a desire to preserve the beauty and culture of it, and to make it better.

Some of the things I see in my feed from people back home are certainly odious. But far more people post every day about fighting for gun safety laws, working to protect their LGBTQ+ loved ones’ rights, supplying the rural food banks, aiding women seeking abortions and reproductive care, encouraging inclusivity, sounding the alarm about environmental issues, or just posting incredible photos of their gardens and gatherings. And in many of these photos, hard-core Trumpers and liberals are pictured together, helping each other when disaster strikes.

They are all Appalachians. For a place so universally stereotyped, Appalachia actually defies stereotype. It is vast. It is 423 counties spread up and down 13 states. It’s over 26 million people, and it runs from the bottom of New York to the top of Mississippi. Whatever you think it is, drive an hour in any direction, and it isn’t.

The Trump-Vance ticket has pledged its allegiance to the working class, using Vance’s pseudo-hillbilly identity to peddle it. But Vance’s politics have already proven to be as protean as his backstory. He is not a hillbilly. He is a salesman. If he and Trump triumph, he’ll keep spit-shining himself into whatever kind of populist hero suits his needs. It’s exactly what he did in his memoir—pretend to be one of you, feign sympathy for your struggles, and then, after he’s got you, blame you for not bettering yourself. That leaves Appalachia where it’s always been: a political cudgel in yet another news cycle.