Recently I finished reading the best selling book "Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" by J.D. Vance. This book has been much discussed in relation to the white working class voters that propelled Donald Trump into the Presidency. It's the true story of J.D. Vance, a Yale educated lawyer, and how he managed to escape the world of the poor working class of rural Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio.
J.D. Vance, whose mother struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and multiple marriages, was raised in a chaotic and unstable environment by his family who had moved from Appalachia Kentucky to Ohio. While his grandparents did manage to do better financially in Ohio than much of their extended family who stayed in Kentucky, many of the problems of rural Appalachia followed them. In spite of his mothers problems, Mr. Vance was fortunate enough to have a grandmother who took him in permanently in early high school. He credits his grandmother's stability, the Marines, a college education and his wife with helping him to overcome the cycle of poverty and abuse that surrounded his childhood.
Mr. Vance discusses how his first job at a grocery store in high school left him with the impression that the poor who received welfare and food stamps seemed to have more luxury items (such as cell phones) than the working class could afford. Regarding income taxes taken out of his paycheck he noted, "our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else." He also stated that it was at this point (age 17) that he began questioning the policies of the Democrats.
He spent a lot of time describing the chaos in his and neighbors everyday lives: the hitting, screaming, drug and alcohol abuse, the little emphasis on education, irresponsible money management, poor nutrition and exercise habits and the abdication of responsibility. He noted, "We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance-the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach."
Mr. Vance discussed how the working class have lost trust in the basic foundations of our society. They mistrust the news, the politicians, and the education system. This group mistrust has created a group mindset with a double edged sword. He stated that "If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try then why try at all?" Mr. Vance said that the message of the conservatives was that "it's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the governments fault." He further noted that his own father genuinely wondered where he had "pretended to be black or liberal" when hearing that his son had been accepted to Yale Law school.
This sense of mistrust has been cited as one of the reasons that the white working class voted Donald Trump into office. They desperately wanted change. It's always a risky thing to make generalizations about a broad group of people. However, from my seat as a moderate here in the heartland, this statement seems to hold some weight. I heard this mistrust echoed by friends and relatives on both ends of the political spectrum. Much of their distrust was and is directed at the media. This breakdown of trust is driving such a partisan wedge into our society that I'm not sure how we can overcome it.
The message that I took from this book was primarily that while the government can help many people with certain aspects of trying to build a nice middle class life, most things are beyond the control of the federal government. Toward the end of the book, Mr. Vance stated "These problems were not created by governments, or corporations or anyone else. We created them and only we can fix them." Amen Mr. Vance.
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