I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” That’s how J. D. Vance begins one of this campaign season’s saddest and most fascinating books, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” (Harper). Vance was born in Kentucky and raised by his grandparents, as a self-described “hillbilly,” in Middletown, Ohio, home of the once-mighty Armco Steel. His family struggled with poverty and domestic violence, of which he was a victim. His mother was addicted to drugs—first to painkillers, then to heroin. Many of his neighbors were jobless and on welfare. Vance escaped their fate by joining the Marines and serving in Iraq. Afterward, he attended Ohio State and Yale Law School, where he was mentored by Amy Chua, the law professor and tiger mom. He now lives in San Francisco, where he works at Mithril Capital Management, the investment firm helmed by Peter Thiel. It seems safe to say that Vance, who is now in his early thirties, has seen a wider swath of America than most people.
Had “Hillbilly Elegy” been published last year, or the year before, it still would have found readers: it’s a detailed and moving account of American struggle. This year, though, the book has been adopted by an unusually large and passionate audience. The name Trump never appears in the book, which was written, presumably, before his capture of the Republican Party. Still, anti-Trump conservatives have responded to its largely empathetic portrait of poor, white Americans, which they see as an alternative to the less sympathetic theories about Trump’s least affluent supporters—“They’re all racist,” essentially—that have become popular on the left. Earlier this summer, Rod Dreher, the intellectually restless American Conservative columnist, wrote that “Hillbilly Elegy” “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” Liberal readers may bristle at the comparison—Vance, to be clear, is a white conservative—but Dreher has a point. Just as the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, persuaded many non-black people to read “Between the World and Me,” so the success of Donald Trump has persuaded many people who have never visited the wrecked towns of the Rust Belt to read “Hillbilly Elegy.” Dreher’s interview with Vance—“Trump: Tribune of Poor White People”—was so popular that it crashed The American Conservative’s servers. “Hillbilly Elegy” is now in second place on the Times nonfiction best-seller list.
[For more of this story, written by Joshua Rothman, go to http://www.newyorker.com/cultu...of-poor-white-people]
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