The media continue to agonize over the fact that white working-class America voted Trump in by flipping blue Rust Belt states to red. J.D. Vance, the author of a fascinating book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, is not surprised. Vance is a true hillbilly son of Appalachia, with a family history of poverty and abuse dating back generations, including a relative who was a Hatfield – as in Hatfield vs. McCoy. Vance is 32 and a most unlikely graduate of Yale University Law School. Not incidentally, the book has some eye-opening comments about getting into this prestigious Ivy League school, where he thrived, more than he would have, he says, had he gone to Harvard, because of the close attention.
Don’t look for clear or reductive answers about the election, though, because Hillbilly Elegy is essentially a memoir, not a political analysis. Still, it’s instructive about the people Vance grew up with in a failing Ohio steel mill town. The people in such impoverished and insular regions feel left out, ignored, looked down upon. No news, of course, given everyone’s desire to explain the electoral college vote. But Vance, who has read the academic literature about Appalachia and agrees with its sociological findings, knows these people intimately and knows it’s not all about jobs, jobs, jobs.
He’s grown up with their anger, racism, sexism, violence and most of allprofound sense of hopelessness. Many see no real reason to work. They take menial jobs, then quit because they never get anywhere. But they also despise government handouts which Vance says “increasingly encourage social decay instead of counteracting it.” And yet they are deeply committed as well to honor, family, community. Many say they are religious in spite of the fact that Alabama, Georgia and southern Ohio have lower church attendance than most other parts of the country. In other words, there’s a culture of contradictions in such regions, a disconnect, as we say, between the world “we see and the values we preach.”
Vance got out because he had an incredible grandmother and grandfather, his very own “hillbilly terminators,” he calls them, to whom he’s dedicated this book. Mamaw is a wonder – foul mouthed, gun-toting and violent. She pushed him not to blame the government or society if he gave up on himself. He came close. What with a mother who married five times, was addicted to alcohol and drugs and almost beat him to death one day when he was still a child. His father? Which one? Biological, legal, come-and-go informal? There were so many stand-in fathers and so much instability and violence. As he says ”everyone in his family could go from zero to murder in an [effing] heartbeat.” He was a runaway, a rebellious poor student, but after high school, he was aware enough to know he wasn’t ready for adulthood. He enlisted in the Marines, and they completed what his grandmother had begun, showing that he was responsible for his own life.
Hillbilly Elegy should be must reading for everyone, especially liberal intellectuals.
