Required Reading: Hillbilly Elegy
Photograph Source: college.library – CC BY 2.0
I doubt that many progressives in the United States have read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Being based in the Philippines, a country located on the outer fringes of the empire, I certainly was unaware of the book even when it began to rise on the bestsellers’ lists at the beginning of the first Trump administration.
But since the author is likely to become president if something happens to Donald Trump, I figured I would choose for my airport reading the book that made his name and skip the reviews that have revisited it ever since he was nominated to be Trump’s running mate last August.
I was not prepared for how well-written it was. And as a sociologist, I really appreciated how Vance articulates the contradictions of the white working class in the Rust Belt Midwest and Appalachian region as he personally experienced them. This is an “us” versus “them” narrative by someone who finally got to become one of “them.” He vividly recounts his hurdling the many visible (being poor) and invisible (cultural) barriers that separate the working class from the upper and upper-middle classes. They really are worlds apart, in Vance’s view, and he attributes his being able to finally cross class lines to four things: luck, a grandmother that forced him to develop the grit to rise above his surroundings, his stint in the Marine Corps, and an upper-middle-class wife, who initiated him into what was an alien, stable, upper-middle-class family life. The excruciating combination of poverty, drugs, violence, and disorganized family life represented by a mother who’s an addict and floats from one man to the next are, he claims, common elements of a working-class culture that prevents the vast majority of his proletarian peers from leaving their milieu.
When Vance enters law school at Yale, despite his having graduated summa cum laude at Ohio State, he is completely at sea in an alien culture. The way people act is different, the way they speak is different, they are completely confident, not suffering the psychological injuries of working-class life. To him, there is really no such thing as meritocracy for the rich or nearly rich. While working class folks have to fill out forms that allow those in institutions to which they apply to see if they are “qualified,” the kids at Yale, Harvard, and other Ivy League haunts rely on their parents’ networks to get them into college and a good career that serves as a channel to the summits of business and government. The two tracks begin at birth and they increasingly diverge and go separate ways as people pass through life, one leading to permanent working-class misery, the other to upper-class nirvana.
Interestingly, Barack Obama, the president when Vance was writing the book, becomes the representative of “them,” and here it is worth quoting Vance: Obama, he writes, “feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color [a dubious proposition]. Recall that none of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor…Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up. His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense American metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him.”
The problem, Vance writes, was that Obama’s coming across as so completely alien to the white working class became fodder for conspiracy theorists like Donald Trump (not named as one such theorist in the book) to depict him as a genuine alien. Although the mainstream press (even Fox News, he claims) always said Obama was a red-blooded American, this was of little relevance since most of the white working class feels that the media is in the pocket of the rich and increasingly rely on far-right echo chambers on the Internet.
Vance did not vote for Trump in the 2016 elections, but “despite all the reservations about Donald Trump…there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for the ‘elites’ and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base.
Vance eventually became part of the MAGA movement that captured the Republican Party and drove traditional Republicans like former vice president Dick Cheney from the fold. His move from being a discontented young Republican to MAGA chieftain exemplifies a trend that Thomas Piketty captures in hard numbers in his book Capital and Ideology: that both the highly paid and wealthy “merchant right” traditionally represented in the Republican Party and the highly educated and economically well compensated “Brahmin left” that affiliated with the Democratic Party are seen from below as one “elite” with interests radically different from theirs. After capturing the Republican Party, Trump, Vance, and MAGA overwhelmed the other wing of the elite, the Democrats, in the 2024 elections.
Vance has, of course, evolved since he wrote the book into a firebreathing, fearmongering Trumpista. But sometimes Vance, the thoughtful author of Hillbilly Elegy, emerges, as when he and Tim Walz engaged in relatively respectful exchange during the vice presidential debate. For a friend who read Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, it was hard to reconcile the early Vance that she claims wrote “honestly” about his troubled family history and the later demagogical Vance.
I think there is no Chinese wall between the early Vance and the current Vance. The way I read it, three contradictions run through Hillbilly Elegy. One is love for the solidarity of the working-class family and community and fear and anger at the multiple dysfunctions that pockmark them. The second is visceral suspicion and disdain for elite culture with a grudging recognition that “they” live much better lives and “are beating us in our own damned game.” The third is a yearning for the patriotism of the Saving Private Ryan type (Vance admits he “tears up” every time he sees the movie) and a realization that there is little in a contemporary America that is falling apart that can foster that nationalistic fire.
These were troubling contradictions that were seeking both a personal and a political resolution, and although he was initially dismissive of Trump, the latter eventually provided for him, as for many, that resolution—one that was, of course, facilitated by a not small dose of political opportunism on the part of an ambitious, up-and-coming politico. But it is important not to see it, as many liberals do, as simply as a case of opportunism.
At the risk of oversimplifying, I think what makes MAGA so appealing to many in the white working class is that, however flawed some of its premises are, it promises to bring about a “reinvigorated” and “renewed” America free of these contradictions. And it is a movement that thrives not only on resentment but on hope, no matter how misplaced that hope may be when it comes to who is seen to represent it. Reading the wrenching personal experiences Vance relates in Hillbilly Elegy gave me a sense that MAGA is more than a far-right political movement. It is one of those millenarian movements that anthropologists talk about that tie individual redemption to collective salvation.
I would say that under the principle that one must know thine enemy, Hillbilly Elegy must be required reading for American progressives, for it provides important insights for the massive task of reconstructing the broad left after the 2024 catastrophe.
