CHRIS THURMAN: A ‘Rust Belt’ memoir of myopic proportions

The best “Secret Santa” arrangements allow for careful whispers and WhatsApp messages to ensure that everyone gets what they want for Christmas.

One of my presents, ordered via a lovingly literary mother-in-law, was some holiday reading: JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It’s a book I’ve been wanting to read for some time. First published in 2016, a few months before the US presidential election, in subsequent editions Hillbilly Elegy has been billed as essential reading for those who want to understand how Donald Trump came to power.

This pitch is somewhat unfair on the author, whose “memoir of a family and culture in crisis” doesn’t mention Trump at all and barely dwells on the shifting voting patterns of the white working class that are commonly identified as a crucial factor in Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton (when Vance does discuss such shifts from Democrat blue to Republican red, they date back to Richard Nixon).

But Vance makes much of the phenomenon of internal migration — from Kentucky to Illinois, in the case of his family and thousands like them — and of the consequences of this Appalachian displacement, specifically in the context of industrial and economic decline in the Midwest. The “Rust Belt” states were crucial in the 2016 election, so you can hardly blame the book’s publishers for pushing this angle.

The front-cover shout on the edition I read (from British newspaper The Independent) went further, promising “great insight” not only into Trumpism but also into Brexit.

This connection relies on the received wisdom that the disillusionment of America’s white working class with the political establishment was more or less the same as that of Britain’s white working-class populations outside London, who have repeatedly voted against their own best interests in supporting the Tories and Britain’s departure from the EU.

With this framing, however, Hillbilly Elegy is doomed to disappoint — for it simply reproduces the structural racism that places the interests of white citizens front and centre. What misery must these white voters have experienced to make them act in this way? The question, which has spawned a thousand thinkpieces and features, takes it for granted that white people enduring hardship deserve more sympathy than black people. Black suffering is normative; white suffering is newsworthy. (In SA we know all about this.)

Vance skirts the question of race. At times he is at pains to emphasise that the disenfranchisement of his own family and community makes him feel that he has more in common with people of colour than with well-to-do whites. He even cites statistics indicating that things are worse for white hillbillies than for black and Hispanic Americans. Yet he only vaguely alludes to their crass racism.

Hillbilly Elegy fails to give a proper account of the circumstances that gave rise to Trumpism and Brexit because it hesitates to state the obvious: what binds Trump voters and Brexiteers across differences of class and geography is white fear of, and resentment towards, those whose skin colour is a shade of brown.

Vance has other blind spots that grate. He uses the word “conservative” as if it is ideologically neutral — as if his country hadn’t been divided by the culture wars for decades. He says Fox News is a legitimate broadcaster. He is critical of certain forms of Christianity in the US but has little to say about the brazen hypocrisy of the evangelical right. He writes about women who “give as good as they get” when it comes to domestic violence and decries mothers who have multiple children by different fathers as if slut-shaming passes for sociological critique.

His clumsy treatment of gender dynamics is based on tired notions of masculinity that validate “honour codes” and virile violence. As a former marine who saw action in Iraq, he mouths the predictable sanctimonious platitudes about veterans of the armed forces that reimagine American military aggression as a form of defence.

For me, reading Vance praising the virtues of militarism while reading headlines about his current commander-in-chief escalating conflict with Iran in fact confirmed that not much has changed after all since the 1950s.

Trump or no Trump, the US’s “perpetual war” will continue.