Michael Fiorillo sent this follow-up piece on the poor white working class.
from the American Conservative. Michael who is left gets credit for his wide-ranging reading. Vance grew up poor white and ended up at Yale law school after serving in the marines. This is the follow-up interview where so many interesting points about both white and black poor are made. The Trump appeal he points out while including elements of racism, not in the least bit inspired by the fact that the white poor are often totally ignored, also touches on some things that resonate. Like the arrogance and condescension of liberals and people on the left. I actually saw an example of that at the MORE retreat yesterday. And this article reminds me of Mike Schirtzer who entered MORE 4 years ago with a white working class mentality and how some people rolled their eyes. Mike has gotten to see a lot of angles he was not aware of before but he also has maintained his gut level white working class instincts. While I never viewed myself as coming from white working class roots - both my parents were ILGWU garment workers - but Jews never seem to feel they would get stuck and not be able to rise out like the despair described in these articles.
An interesting thought on my part: Is it ever possible to unite the black and white poor? Maybe an FDR type but we always seem to need a massive crisis. Obama looked to be a possibility but as a neo-liberal and also being black made that impossible. He talked FDR but was more Regan.
Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People
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.
—
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!
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