“Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance is much talked about at the moment. It is both a critic’s darling and a popular success, number two on the “Times” non-fiction list at the moment.
This seems surprising for the memoir of a thirty-two-year-old money manager whose story describes his escape from a bleak childhood of Scots-Irish Appalachian dysfunction to the charmed circle of Ivy League law school and Silicon Valley prosperity.
Yes, Horatio Alger tales always play to the American fondness for success won through a combination of luck, pluck and the fairy tale intervention of helping hands, and Vance’s book has all of those. But it has also benefited from fortuitous timing.
Tastemakers, political pros and pundits have glommed onto Vance’s book because it offers those prosperous, educated, Acela corridor winners an inside glimpse of a world they have never seen. Their distance from the reality of the hardscrabble lives of blue-collar, white, working-class men has made the rise of Trump befuddling to many.
I have been caught less by surprise, perhaps. My Rust Belt grandmother lost her mother at seven and by her early teens was no longer in school but in a silk mill. I spent summers as a kid at her Kentucky sister-in-laws shack complete with outhouse amid tobacco fields. I have thirty years experience with my wife’s North Carolina Scots-Irish relatives whose distrust of “The Man” is bone deep. And I remember well my Dad’s blue-collar bowling league, thick with Archie Bunkers.
They all are reminiscent of the people Vance grew up with — tough, proud, clannish, bound by a code of honor, and ill-adapted to the hurtling changes of modern times. These are the Trump voters. They were New Deal Democrats once. Many became Reagan Democrats in part because of Johnson’s Civil Rights Act.
And they have felt increasingly disenfranchised by both parties as the American economy has evolved, leaving them behind. In a society characterized by multiculturalism, they feel their culture, one of America’s earliest strains, has been forgotten or devalued. Black people, Hispanics, Asians, hyphenated Americans of all sorts have champions and defenders, but they feel themselves abandoned, marginalized and disrespected.
Most of Vance’s book is about his own struggles with an often married, frequently addicted, unreliable single mother and how he was saved by the few props in his life — a grandmother and grandfather, an aunt and uncle, an older sister, and eventually the Marine Corps. Until he met his Ivy League wife-to-be, he was unaware that family disagreements could be settled without screaming, crockery throwing, hair pulling and, in some cases, gunfire.
But occasionally Vance steps back from his personal hell to consider the context of the dystopia he inhabited. His grandparents left a killingly hard life in Kentucky coal country and moved up the so-called Hillbilly Highway to an Ohio steel town which gave people like them a chance at middle class wages. But by the time Vance came along, the life was rusting away and the dream of upward mobility based on physical labor and Union pay-scales was vanishing. In its wake came increased family dysfunction, declining schools, rising crime, addiction and a self-defeating blame game.
Vance is not a liberal who believes in government cures for cultural ills. He believes the people he loves have been too quick to blame handy scapegoats for their plight and too slow to adapt. Instead of moving to places with greater opportunity, taking the need for more education seriously, or changing mores better suited to the 17th century than to the present global economy, they have hunkered down and blamed others for being left behind.
Trump was made for them with his politics of grievance and victimization. It’s not their fault, he tells them, it’s the Mexican rapist, drug-pushing immigrants, it’s the price-cutting Chinese, Wall Street, banks, a rigged system, crooked politicians. Though he does not address Trump directly, Vance believes from his own experience that the kind of rationalizations Trump peddles are self-defeating.
Promises of easy solutions and a return to a past that’s gone forever give those who need to hustle hardest to escape from a cultural, social and economic cul-de-sac grievances to nurse, scapegoats to blame and an excuse for giving up or waiting for the demagogue to deliver pie in the sky. And so, the less-educated, blue-collar Trump voters collaborate in their own marginalization and lack of ability to compete in a changing world.
This can sound like blaming the victim, but Vance is quick to admit that he would not have escaped this vicious circle either if not for a lot of luck and plenty of helping hands. Amusingly, he seems not to credit another factor that the reader can’t miss. He is smart, ambitious, curious, and winsome and probably was from an early age. He undoubtedly attracted friendly attention because he was likable and his lights were on.
What becomes of the less gifted and lucky? Nothing good. And no candidate for president has actually proposed a plausible cure for the dysfunctional and marginalized millions in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, black and hispanic ghettoes, and rural towns in every state that have lost their economic viability. The elegy in the title is not a metaphor, but a real lament for a way of life that has outlived its usefulness, and the people who are dying for lack of a way to escape.