It would reverberate globally, with white nationalists using social media platforms to share his worries about America being invaded by Muslim terrorists. The white nationalist who murdered fifty worshippers in the New Zealand mosque in 2019 described President Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”8
President Trump successfully used his campaign rallies and Fox News to mobilize his Evangelical, Tea Party, and Catholic conservative base, and they also reached secular conservatives who got more on board with Trump at the close. About half of those groups watched a rally on TV or watch Fox News frequently. By comparison, only 26 percent of moderates watched a rally and only 18 percent watch Fox News frequently. A not inconsiderable 7 percent of Republicans attended a rally, but one quarter posted on social media, 11 percent displayed a sign, and 9 percent wore a shirt or hat. Among Evangelicals, one fifth discussed politics at church or Bible study.
President Trump and the Republicans’ off-year campaign increased the polarization within the party on abortion and gay marriage. The Evangelical conservatives, Tea Party, and Catholic conservatives ended up much more favorable to pro-life, anti-abortion groups, while moderates and secular conservatives became much more negative.
The polarization around the Tea Party was even more dramatic and meaningful. The Tea Party symbolizes the take-no-prisoners, partisan campaign championed by President Trump. The proportion of secular conservatives viewing the Tea Party negatively jumped ten points to 55 percent and negative views of the Tea Party jumped twenty-three points with moderates. In the election week poll, over 70 percent viewed the Tea Party negatively. That gives you a view of the profound fractures in this Trump-led GOP.
* * *
Big stuff happened on Election Day. Nationally, a noticeable 12 percent of conservative Catholics and secular conservatives did not vote. Among the moderates, one quarter of the GOP, just 69 percent voted Republican, 12 percent defected to the Democrats, and 19 percent stayed home. The “persuadable GOP”—a group of targetable Republicans developed by Democracy Corps—was 40 percent larger than the moderates and may have played an even bigger role in this wave: one quarter voted for Democrats and 14 percent stayed home.
Those Republicans who considered voting for a Democrat said they were motivated “to make the economy work for everyone, not just the rich and corporations” (48 percent), to “send a message that we need decency and honesty in government” (48 percent), and to have a “check on Donald Trump” (38 percent). That sentiment has blended into the tough message to the GOP that emerged from this election.
The Democratic wave exposed Mr. Trump’s vulnerability and suggests a less polarized country. His divisive campaign lost parts of rural and working-class America and peeled off those parts of the Republican Party that are looking for something less divisive. I thought it would take Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020 for America to be liberated from this suffocating polarization, but it may have already begun.
7 IS THIS ALL THEY HAVE TO OFFER WORKING PEOPLE?
J. D. VANCE’S HILLBILLY ELEGY was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, and deservedly, given how improbable was his struggling free of abuse from an untold number of men, broken marriages, a drug-addicted mom, family teenage pregnancies, alcoholism, violence and fatalism, and distrust and anger all around him to write this memoir at age thirty-one. Vance eventually went into the Marine Corps, then to Ohio State and Yale for his law degree, and on to Silicon Valley before moving back to Columbus, Ohio, to tip the scales a bit, as his conservative mentor David Frum urged him. He owes his life and survival to loving grandparents who protected him and believed in hard work and education.
The problem is that Republicans, conservatives, and Vance are wrong about the lessons we should take from his memoir. And they believe this powerful personal story confirms the centrality of bad personal choices and the inefficacy of government in our current troubles. Those lessons are the principal intellectual foundation of the Tea Party GOP’s assault on government.
The book’s cascading errors begin with the failure to appreciate how exceptional is Appalachian white history and culture and how dangerous it is to equate Vance’s hillbillies with today’s white working class, particularly in the industrial Rust Belt. But that is the equation Vance makes himself when he begins the memoir: “You see, 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.”1
And that equation allows conservatives and President Donald Trump to focus on coal mining, West Virginia, and Appalachia as the epicenter of America’s working-class life.
The pace of Vance’s cascading errors grows with his classless and benign history that erases the role of the powerful business actors who upturned timber and mineral rights and fought the coal-mining unions. They actively recruited labor from the hill counties to work in the great manufacturing centers and shaped the poor and working-class neighborhoods in the small and large cities all across the Midwest. Outside companies had long since taken over timber rights above the land and mineral rights underneath, leaving the native Appalachian whites very poor and dependent on the coal companies and company towns, who fought the United Mine Workers. Employment in the coal mines stalled during the Depression and crashed during the 1950s, falling across Appalachia to a mere 122,243—six decades before the current debate.2
Vance’s story begins in Harlan County, where one third of the population left between 1940 and 1960 along the Hillbilly Corridor, which took people to Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati, but also to Dayton and small industrial cities along key riverways, like Middletown and Hamilton, built along the Great Miami River. The migrants formed “Little Kentuckys” in most of the major cities of the industrial Midwest, and Vance’s family settled in Dayton and Middletown.
America’s industrial infrastructure had been built by and employed mostly Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, with Protestant immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia, Jews from the Pale of Settlement (Russia), and the Chinese and Japanese playing key roles, but the United States legally ended immigration right after World War I. America’s industrial leaders mobilized for World War II and the postwar boom by recruiting blacks, Mexicans, and Appalachian whites on a massive scale from the poorest rural areas of North America.
Vance’s story pretty much ignores this history, the working-class battle to get its share of the pie, and the racial turmoil, riots, and struggle for civil rights that would shape the politics of America’s cities.
The country invested in these workers’ education, subsidized their home ownership and mobility, and they grew into America’s proud middle class in the three decades after World War II. But their legs were kicked out from under them by foreign competition and ownership, technology, globalization, and trade agreements like NAFTA that undercut American jobs—all of which Vance describes as understandable: “I might have done the same.”3 He is sympathetic to company executives who didn’t want to be cramped by unions. And his story makes no mention of the staggering loss of wealth, home ownership, and wage levels among working people after the 2008 financial crisis, which were front and center during his whole adult life. Stagnant wages and rising prices for health care, childcare, housing, and education are the new normal for working people.
Vance is just blind to the big developments in his short lifetime that stalled the ascent of hardworking working-class people up the socioeconomic ladder. Vance’s story gives no insight into what is happening today with the white and non-white working class who dominate our cities, suburbs, and the smaller towns of the Rust Belt, which are really the epicenter of working-class life, and where life is indeed challenged.
These people are struggling and many of them are on the brink. That is why politicians and intellectuals of all stripes now are trying to figure out how to deal with the breakdown of the working-class family, men dropping out of the workforce, so many young men on an unc
ertain trajectory, the pathologies and inequalities that come with so many children raised by a single parent, and the opioid crisis that has taken so many lives. How much of this exceptional American problem is due to the attitudes and culture of the working class itself? How much is due to the disappearance of decently paid, secure jobs that allow working people to provide for their families and the withering of opportunities for their children and subsequent generations? And how much is due to a failure of public policy to evolve to meet the needs of the modern working family?
Vance shines a spotlight on the destructive culture in families like his that are “a hub of misery.”4 Vance’s grandpa and grandma had married as teenagers and settled quickly in Middletown because his grandfather got a good job at Armco Steel, where he worked all his life. It enabled him to own a pretty big house by Appalachian standards and to live in a part of the town with neighbors almost exclusively from back home. But Vance’s family was looked down on by their neighbors, who were not comfortable with the slaughtering of chickens and the openly toted guns and with seeing the drunken violence that was all too frequent.
Vance’s grandparents felt guilty about leaving and abandoning the folks there and in Harlan County, Kentucky, where family remained, and went back many weekends and holidays. Vance and his grandparents were always comfortable there.
That family connection is important and unique among the various streams of migrants to the cities during World Wars I and II, as blacks went to Chicago to flee a segregated South that had attacked the recruiters promising a better life in the North. While extended family ties remained strong for African Americans, the culture of the Black Belt did not have the same kind of ongoing influence on blacks in the cities, as millions broke ties with the rural South. But the culture of rural Kentucky was ever present, including the Evangelical churches and ministers who worried about the triumph of secularism.
When they were young, everything about their poor neighborhood, Harlan County, and their family conspired to leave the Vance kids a mess, Vance wrote.5 His mother was a drug addict for virtually his whole life, went through untold numbers of partners, and shuttled J.D. and his sister about to different towns. She had violent fights with the kids, was taken away in handcuffs by the police, and nearly got herself killed in an auto accident. She neglected her kids, Vance wrote, though at least she felt guilty about it.6
Increasingly, he and his sister stayed with his grandparents, whose marriage had been violent and Grandpa was an alcoholic; that had all been sorted before J.D. was born. He went to schools that were pretty modern. His grandparents demanded he get good grades, help Grandma with her chores, and get a job. He worked in a store and warehouse and took many lessons. The adults believed in hard work and the American Dream and made sure the kids had a stable place to live. Vance believes that a loving home accounts for everything good that followed.
Vance applied to attend Miami University (where I went) and Ohio State, but chose instead to enlist in the Marine Corps to show his family he could survive boot camp and learn the kind of discipline that you get only in the military. After that, he went through Ohio State in just two years and then on to Yale Law School. And that is where he came to understand the big culture clash between white working-class and meritocratic America.
And what is that white working-class culture? For Vance, it is “pessimistic” and “socially isolated” and it passes that “social isolation on to our children.”7 It is a culture in which you “blame everyone but yourself.”8 He watched his neighbors abuse food stamps, disability benefits, and Section 8 housing and saw few of his friends from the warehouse willing to take up work even when the shifts were offered.9 Vance famously observes, “I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.”10
So, “what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south [is] about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”11 It is a culture in which people make bad choices and try to avoid the consequences.
If you think, as I argue, that job prospects have changed dramatically over the past decades, you might think that change would impact both the prospects and attitudes of the white working class, “But experience can be a difficult teacher, and it taught me that this story of economic insecurity is, at best, incomplete,” Vance writes.12 He is skeptical that if these workers had more job opportunities, “other parts of their lives would improve as well.”13
Maybe Vance’s hillbillies would not be helped by serious training and free education, new job opportunities, higher wages, and an upward employment ladder, less outsourcing and more American-based jobs, sustained long-term investment in building infrastructure, expanded child tax credits and income supports, food stamps, housing vouchers, nutrition programs, unpolluted rivers and air, consumer protections, early childhood programs and preschool, parenting education, sex education and family planning, affordable childcare, paid family leave after childbirth, and universal health insurance because of the persistent culture, but a lot of other working people end up with more secure families, less drug addiction, and more hope. America doesn’t get the answer from Vance’s story.
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES REACT
Nearly all the reviews of this powerful book were respectful of Vance and were sure it provided some insights for elites who needed a “genteel way” into these working-class communities where Trump ran up the score. Larry Summers tweeted, “Anyone want to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it.”14
In a deeply polarized country, Jennifer Senior wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans.”15 In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman gave Vance credit for putting the spotlight on family disintegration, addiction, and domestic violence in white working-class communities and showing us how complex is the problem of poverty—he “advances the conversation.”16 With a full schedule of media punditry, Vance has emerged as “unofficial spokesman for the white working class.”17
Well, that spokesman has an understandable and strong point of view. Many of the poor and working class lived off the dole as a life choice. They had no consciousness of their lack of industriousness. They blamed others for their plight. His mother gets no “perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card.”18
And that was the starting point for nearly all the conservative reviewers. In the liberal establishment, “there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.”19 The liberal politicians, therefore, should “stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside.”20 The divorce rate will not be reduced by having less economic stress, Vance concluded in an interview with Rod Dreher in The American Conservative.21
The signature liberal policies of the Great Society are no match for the deep poverty it confronted.22 The powerful conclusion from Vance’s book is that government policies are ineffective and counterproductive.
Conservative reviewers use Vance’s book to show empathy for the poor, yet conclude we are totally powerless to construct any policies to change life’s trajectory. Geoffrey Norman applauds Vance’s writing with “affection, pity and candor,” but it leaves analysts puzzled, “What, if anything, can be done?”23 Reviewers applaud Vance’s refusal “to moralize or pretend there are pat solutions to the problems he and so many other people in his circumstances have faced.”24 These “problems of family, faith and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube,” Mark Hemingway writes, “and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist.”25
EXPLORING WORKING-CLASS CULTURE
Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker review reminds us that America has had this debate before: to what extent is poverty rooted in culture and norms that lead peop
le to be more fatalistic and pessimistic, isolated from civil society, and feeling powerless to change their lot and control their destiny. The Moynihan Report in 1965 set off debate over whether poverty is determined mainly by culture or by economics, a distinction mostly ultimately rejected by those who concluded they were “entwined and equal power.”26
I became a graduate student and professor during that debate and examined this very question. I conducted surveys and in-depth interviews in five poor neighborhoods, including a poor Appalachian community called Belmont in Hamilton, Ohio, just a few miles down the Great Miami River from Middletown, at about the time Vance’s mother was approaching her teen years. I also conducted similar research in three very different poor black neighborhoods in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta and a Mexican-American neighborhood in San Jose.
Ironically, I wrote at the time that Belmont was the only community I studied where a culture of poverty played a major role in explaining attitudes and civic behavior. There is an ascendant “fatalism, personal impotence, limited time perspective, disorganization and apathy that combine to suppress any collective political urge.”27
Vance’s description of hillbilly culture was painfully accurate, but it was also isolated. It was very different from the dominant culture and attitudes in poor black neighborhoods in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and poor Mexican-American neighborhoods in San Jose. And importantly, its thinking and politics would be very different from those in the white working-class communities that would evolve across the Rust Belt that I would study a decade later.
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