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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources
Rod Dreher, “Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People”
The
American Conservative
Interview with
J D Vance, author of
Hillbilly
Elegy: |
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I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a
Culture in Crisis by
J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of
an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony
to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one
of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s
The Fractured Republic, for
Americans who care about politics and the future of our country,
Hillbilly Elegy is the most
important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first
reading J.D. Vance. His book 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.
This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the
final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.
RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of
years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s
common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state,
and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain
it to people who haven’t yet read your book.
J.D. VANCE:
The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and
there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in
a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.
What many
don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking
about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a
significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin
addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths
from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average
kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a
constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the
family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a
bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or
grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on
top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors
to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.
The two
political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few
decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an
exasperation
that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of
social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a
few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.
From the
Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free
trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth.
Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are
many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very
real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone
deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory
owner who just fired their brother.
Trump’s
candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping
jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the
ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of
people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.
The last point
I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big
chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the
Scots-Irish
honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our
fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen
fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites
enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the
humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign
policy? My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I
think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself:
I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched
that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.
I’m not a
hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do
come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and
career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast,
and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean —
have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible
to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today?
I know exactly
what you mean. My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively. She
said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive
about it. “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have
to be ashamed to look down upon.” During my final year at Yale Law, I took a
small class with a professor I really admired (and still do). I was the
only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a
young woman looked at me and said, “I can’t believe you were in the Marines.
You just seem so nice. I thought that people in the military had to act a
certain way.” It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real
introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my
neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in
the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian. I bit my
tongue, but it’s one of those comments I’ll never forget.
The “why” is
really difficult, but I have a few thoughts. The first is that humans
appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic
tribalistic impulse in all of us. And if you’re an elite white
professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel
guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the
hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without
violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe. So your own prejudice
is never revealed for what it is.
A lot of it is
pure disconnect—many elites just don’t know a member of the white working class.
A professor once told me that Yale Law shouldn’t accept students who attended
state universities for their undergraduate studies. (A bit of background: Yale
Law takes well over half of its student body from very elite private schools.)
“We don’t do remedial education here,” he said. Keep in mind that this
guy was very progressive and cared a lot about income inequality and
opportunity. But he just didn’t realize that for a kid like me, Ohio State
was my only chance–the one opportunity I had to do well in a good school.
If you removed that path from my life, there was nothing else to give me a shot
at Yale. When I explained that to him, he was actually really receptive.
He may have even changed his mind.
What does it
mean for our politics? To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s
appeal. He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities,
whether they’re good or bad. I remember when Hillary Clinton casually
talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed
working class whites clinging to their guns and religion. Each time
someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are
the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon. The people
back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and
they’ve been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the
condescenders. If nothing else, Trump does that.
This is where,
to me, there’s a lot of ignorance around “Teflon Don.” No one seems to
understand why conventional blunders do nothing to Trump. But in a lot of
ways, what elites see as blunders people back home see as someone
who–finally–conducts themselves in a relatable way. He shoots from the
hip; he’s not constantly afraid of offending someone; he’ll get angry about
politics; he’ll call someone a liar or a fraud. This is how a lot of
people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many
elites recognize how refreshing and entertaining it can be! So it’s not
really a blunder as much as it is a rich, privileged Wharton grad connecting to
people back home through style and tone. Viewed like this, all the talk
about “political correctness” isn’t about any specific substantive point, as
much as it is a way of expanding the scope of acceptable behavior. People
don’t want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate
meaningfully in politics, because most of us don’t speak like Obama or Clinton.
On the other
hand, as Hillbilly Elegy
says so well, that reflexive reverse-snobbery of the hillbillies and those like
them is a real thing too, and something that undermines their prospects in life.
Is there any way for it to be overcome, other than getting out of the bubble, as
you did?
I’m not sure
we can overcome it entirely. Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some
financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they’ve
become “too big for their britches.” I don’t think this value is all bad.
It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no
substitute for common sense and humility. But, it does create a lot of
pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let’s face it: when you
grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a
better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good
job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.
I’m a big
believer in the power to change social norms. To take an obvious recent
example, I see the decline of smoking as not just an economic or regulatory
matter, but something our culture really flipped on. So there’s value in
all of us—whether we have a relatively large platform or if our platform is just
the people who live with us—trying to be a little kinder to the kids who want to
make a better future for themselves. That’s a big part of the reason I
wrote the book: it’s meant not just for elites, but for people from my own clan,
in the hopes that they’ll better appreciate the ways they can help (or hurt)
their own kin.
At the same
time, the hostility between the working class and the elites is so great that
there will always be some wariness toward those who go to the other side.
And can you blame them? A lot of these people know nothing but judgment
and condescension from those with financial and political power, and the thought
of their children acquiring that same hostility is noxious. It may just be
the sort of value we have to live with.
The odd thing
is, the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse
snobbery. It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into
the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism. Like I said,
it keeps you grounded, if nothing else! But it would have been incredibly
destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.
I live in the
rural South now, where I was born, and I see the same kind of social pathologies
among some poor whites that you write about in
Hillbilly Elegy.
I also see the same thing among poor blacks, and have heard from a few black
friends who made it out as you did the same kind of stories about how their own
people turned on them and accused them of being traitors to their family and
class — this, only for getting an education and building stable lives for
themselves. The thing that so few of us either understand or want to talk about
is that nobody who lives the way these poor black and white people do is ever
going to amount to anything. There’s never going to be an economy rich enough or
a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family
and the absence of self-discipline. Are Americans even capable of hearing that
anymore?
Judging by the
current political conversation, no: Americans are not capable of hearing that
anymore. I was speaking with a friend the other night, and I made the
point that the meta-narrative of the 2016 election is learned helplessness as a
political value. We’re no longer a country that believes in human agency,
and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting. To hear
Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they
have no power to affect their own lives. Things have been done to them,
from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help. And
without that help, they’re doomed to lives of misery they didn’t choose.
Obviously, the
idea that there aren’t structural barriers facing both the white and black poor
is ridiculous. Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white
people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a
hard-noses willfulness: “never be like those a–holes who think the deck is
stacked against them.” In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman.
She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought
against it.
There’s good
research on this stuff. Believing you have no control is incredibly
destructive, and that may be especially true when you face unique barriers.
The first time I encountered this idea was in my exposure to addiction
subculture, which is quite supportive and admirable in its own way, but is full
of literature that speaks about addiction as a disease. If you spend a day
in these circles, you’ll hear someone say something to the effect of, “You
wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so why judge an addict for drug
use.” This view is a perfect microcosm of the problem among poor Americans.
On the one hand, the research is clear that there are biological elements to
addiction–in that way, it does mimic a disease. On the other hand, the
research is also clear that people who believe their addiction is a biologically
mandated disease show less ability to resist it. It’s this awful catch-22,
where recognizing the true nature of the problem actually hinders the ability to
overcome.
Interestingly,
both in my conversations with poor blacks and whites, there’s a recognition of
the role of better choices in addressing these problems. The
refusal to
talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached
elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really
understand. At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a
little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way.
Since Hillbilly Elegy
came out, I’ve gotten so many messages along the lines of: “Thank you for being
sympathetic but also honest.”
I think that’s
the only way to have this conversation and to make the necessary changes:
sympathy and honesty. It’s not easy, especially in our politically
polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that
so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you
risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.
On the other
hand, as a conservative, I grow weary of fellow middle-class conservatives
acting as if it were possible simply to bootstrap your way out of poverty. My
dad was able to raise my sister and me in the 1970s on a civil servant’s salary,
supplemented by my mom’s small salary as a school bus driver. I doubt this would
be possible today. You’re a conservative who has known poverty and powerlessness
as well as wealth and privilege. What do you have to say to your fellow
conservatives?
I think you
hit the nail right on the head: we need to judge less and understand more.
It’s so easy for conservatives to use “culture” as an ending point in a
discussion–an excuse to rationalize their worldview and then move on–rather than
a starting point. I try to do precisely the opposite in
Hillbilly Elegy.
This book should start conversations, and it is successful, it will.
The Atlantic‘s
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I often disagree with, has made a really astute point
about culture and the way it has been deployed against the black poor. His
point, basically, is that “culture” is little more than an excuse to blame black
people for various pathologies and then move on. So it’s hardly surprising
that when poor people, especially poor black folks, hear “culture,” they
instinctively run for the hills.
But let’s just
think about what culture really means, to borrow an example from my life.
One of the things I mention in the book is that domestic strife and family
violence are cultural traits—they’re just there, and everyone experiences them
in one form or another. I learned domestic strife from the moment I was
born, from more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends I encountered, to the domestic
violence case that nearly tore my family apart (I was the primary victim).
So predictably, by the time I got married, I wasn’t a great spouse. I had
to learn, with the help of my aunt and sister (both of whom had successful
marriages), but especially with the help of my wife, how not to turn every small
disagreement into a shouting match or a public scene. Too many
conservatives look at that situation, say “well that’s a cultural problem,
nothing we can do,” and then move on. They’re right that it’s a cultural
problem: I learned domestic strife from my mother, and she learned it from her
parents.
But to speak “culture” and then move on is a total copout, and there are public
policy solutions to draw from experiences like this: how could my school have
better prepared me for domestic life? how could child welfare services have
given me more opportunities to spend time with my Mamaw and my aunt, rather than
threatening me—as they did—with the promise of foster care if I kept talking?
These are tough, tough problems, but they’re not totally immune to policy
interventions. Neither are they entirely addressable by government.
It’s just complicated.
That’s just one small example, obviously, and there are many more in the book.
But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues—or worse, to pretend
they’ll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets—is a significant
failure of modern conservative politics. And looking at the political
landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement
as we used to know it.
And what do you have to say to liberals?
Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a
structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see
a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop.
They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress.
Undoubtedly, that’s partially true. Some of these family problems run far
deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money
(despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and
ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, “They want us to be
shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by
wolves.” Again, they’re not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly
funded. But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral
agents in their own right. In some cases, the best that public policy can
do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences
through better family policy (like my Mamaw).
There was a huge study that came out a couple of years ago, led by the Harvard
economist Raj Chetty. He found that two of the biggest predictors of low
upward mobility were 1) living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and 2)
growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of single mothers. I recall that
some of the news articles about the study didn’t even mention the single mother
conclusion. That’s a massive oversight! Liberals have to get more
comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire
their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can
become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.
In Hillbilly Elegy,
I noticed the parallel between two disciplined forms of life that enabled you
and your biological father to transcend the chaos that dragged down so many
others y’all knew. You had the US Marine Corps; he had fundamentalist
Christianity. How did they work inner transformation within you both?
Well, I think it’s important to point out that Christianity, in the quirky way
I’ve experienced it, was really important to me, too. For my dad, the way
he tells it is that he was a hard partier, he drank a lot, and didn’t have a lot
of direction. His Christian faith gave him focus, forced him to think hard
about his personal choices, and gave him a community of people who demanded,
even if only implicitly, that he act a certain way. I think we all
understate the importance of moral pressure, but it helped my dad, and it has
certainly helped me! There’s obviously a more explicitly religious
argument here, too. If you believe as I do, you believe that the Holy
Spirit works in people in a mysterious way. I recognize that a lot of
secular folks may look down on that, but I’d make one important point: that not
drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of
willpower when you didn’t grow up in privilege. That feeling—whether it’s
real or entirely fake—that there’s something divine helping you and directing
your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.
General Chuck Krulak, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, once said that
the most important thing the Corps does for the country is “win wars and make
Marines.” I didn’t understand that statement the first time I heard it, but
for
a kid like me, the Marine Corps was basically a four-year education in character
and self-management. The challenges start small—running two miles, then
three, and more. But they build on each other. If you have good
mentors (and I certainly did), you are constantly given tasks, yelled at for
failing, advised on how not to fail next time, and then given another try.
You learn, through sheer repetition, that you can do difficult things. And
that was quite revelatory for me. It gave me a lot of self-confidence.
If I had learned helplessness from my environment back home, four years in the
Marine Corps taught me something quite different.
The other thing the Marine Corps did is hold our hands and prevent us from
making stupid decisions. It didn’t work on everyone, of course, but I
remember telling my senior noncommissioned officer that I was going to buy a
car, probably a BMW. “Stop being an idiot and go get a Honda.” Then I told him
that I had been approved for a new Honda, at the dealer’s low interest rate of
21.9 percent. “Stop being an idiot and go to the credit union.” He then
ordered another Marine to take me to the credit union, open an account, and
apply for a loan (the interest rate, despite my awful credit, was around 8
percent). A lot of elites rely on parents or other networks the first time
they made these decisions, but I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. The
Marine Corps ensured that I learned.
Finally, what did watching Donald Trump’s speech last night make you think about
this fall campaign, and the future of the country?
Well, I think the speech itself was a perfect microcosm of why I love and am
terrified of Donald Trump. On the one hand, he criticized the elites and
actually acknowledge the hurt of so many working class voters. After so many
years of Republican politicians refusing to even talk about factory closures,
Trump’s message is an oasis in the desert. But of course he spent way too
much time appealing to people’s fears, and he offered zero substance for how to
improve their lives. It was Trump at his best and worst.
My biggest fear with Trump is that, because of the failures of the Republican
and Democratic elites, the bar for the white working class is too low.
They’re willing to listen to Trump about rapist immigrants and banning all
Muslims because other parts of his message are clearly legitimate. A lot
of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia
that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse.
The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire
political conversation. It’s not just that he inflames the tribalism of
the Right; it’s that he encourages the worst impulses of the Left. In the
past few weeks, I’ve heard from so many of my elite friends some version of,
“Trump is the racist leader all of these racist white people deserve.” These
comments almost always come from white progressives who know literally zero
culturally working class Americans. And I’m always left thinking: if this
is the quality of thought of a Harvard Law graduate, then our society is truly
doomed. In a world of Trump, we’ve abandoned the pretense of persuasion.
The November election strikes me as little more than a referendum on whose tribe
is bigger.
But I remain incredibly optimistic about the future. Maybe that’s the
hillbilly resilience in me. Or maybe I’m just an idiot. But if
writing this book, and talking with friends and strangers about its message, has
taught me anything, it’s that most people are trying incredibly hard to make it,
even in this more complicated and scary world. The short view of our
country is that we’re doomed. The long view, inherited from my
grandparents’ 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still
control some part of our fate. Even if we are doomed, there’s reason to
pretend otherwise.
—
The book is
Hillbilly Elegy.
You really, really need to read it.
UPDATE:
Best e-mail I’ve yet received about this interview:
Mr Dreher, I am writing to thank you for the impressive and thoughtful interview
of JD Vance on his book. I am not a conservative. I am a black, gay, immigrant
who has been blessed by the dynamic and productive American society we live in.
So I am not the average reader of the American Conservative. I came to your
article through a friend. So I just wanted to share how refreshing I found to
have two white men being able to speak about class, their family experience and
acknowledging an experience that is often not visible in our society. The poor
rural south that you described and the communities that Mr.. Vance write about
are familiar to me. Born in Haiti, growing up in Congo, Africa. I recognize that
poverty, I recognize the marginalization and I SO APPRECIATED the conversation
about individual agency! That is ultimately where the American dream (if it
exists) lives. That deep belief that I as an individual am not a victim and can
engage with the world around me! That has been my American lesson. That is the
source of the dynamism of this society! Thank you!
UPDATE:
Y’all might know that we draw from Shutterstock, a provider of stock
photography, for most of our illustrations. That one above was the only one I
could find on short notice that showed a normal-looking person at a Trump rally,
up close. I thought, “You watch, in real life, that lady is probably rich.”
Sure enough! A reader just wrote:
Your article is excellent and I enjoyed reading it. The woman whose photograph
you used is [name, hometown], a friend of my family. She is a multi-millionaire
and her daughter went to Mar-a-Lago for birthday parties many years ago. I love
the irony of this and thought you would get a laugh.
I did!
