Rod Liddle writes a great review of the now-acclaimed but little understood Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance in the January 2017 edition of First Things.
Vance’s memoir has attained a degree of legend among those trying to understand the Trump voter, or more accurately, why the working class abandoned the Democratic Party in droves last November. Liddle’s penultimate paragraphs bear repeating in full:
I am roughly the age of J.D.’s witless and bereft mother and come from a background which has its similarities, although I suppose these should not be overstated. I was brought up not in the steel town of Middletown, Ohio, but the steel town of Middleborough, North Yorkshire, in the northeast of England. You can still buy a house just outside of the ‘boro for a little over one dollar. Yes, one dollar for a house in a country, though a garage in London will cost you three quarters of a million. It is impoverished and left behind; there are drugs, alcohol — oh boy, there is alcohol — and that same “learned helplessness” now that the steel works have closed down. My parents had much in common with J.D.’s Mamaw and Papaw, although they were a little better-spoken and were not habituated, so far as I know, to carrying guns with them everywhere they went. They were respectable working class, which meant they valued church (Methodist, of course), family, and country — roughly in that order. We were not starving, but we were not well off. I felt exactly the same astonishment when I eventually went to the London School of Economics as Vance experienced at Yale: The incredible affluence of my fellow students! It had never occurred to me that people could be that moneyed. The shock still resonates, all these years later, inside my head.
Speaking as someone who grew up in a lower-to-middle class household myself, the gulf between the trailer where my mother supported four children to the carpeted law firms in Washington D.C. where she worked was stark. It was income disparity, but of a sort… not a disparity between the 1% and the 99% that the Democrats talk about, but the disparity between the 25% and the 75% — and among whom the 1% simply lived a different life.
In effect, there was something more behind it. Behind the smiles and courtesies of those wearing the suits and the ties and putting in 14 hours a day was a certain distance, as if we might infect the rest. Among our own was the pull that one simply was trying to grow beyond one’s station… or worse, to become one of those slithering, feckless elites who were sponging off of everyone else’s hard work to cheat the working man while they lived very different lives, had different experiences, read different books and magazines, and spoke of affairs that to the commons sounded more highbrow and self-important than substantive.
As one climbs the ladder, you realize that there really is a gulf between the “two Americas” — a concept that has grown cliche in a sense, but can be best exemplified by arguments about burning the American flag. Elites see no problem in such an act, but to working class Americans this is perhaps the highest form of sacrilege, if for no other reason than Old Glory represented a certain sort of leveling in times of conflict or distress, where every American could rally to and all served as equals in a common struggle for human freedom. To burn that symbol? Was to burn one of the few threads of commonality that are seeing an inequality not of wealth or income, but in a basic opportunity for a better life. In that, there really are two sets of American values.
In a society and a culture that seems to mimic such lifestyles, we spend ourselves into oblivion trying to capture the life of our peers. Televisions larger than anything our grandparents might have imagined, phones, laptops, cable television, social media, and all the so-called conveniences that make life so very inconvenient.
And so a “learned helplessness” begins to creep into a nation where our defining creed is that anyone can work hard and achieve the American Dream, no matter what your background, beliefs, ethnicity, or culture. Yet the institutions that supported this apparatus — churches (now dwindling), civic societies (almost dead), public education (substandard at best), and a basic respect for the rule of law (under attack) — are almost universally under threat.
What the Democrats painfully learned in 2016 is that change cannot be imposed. What Republicans are about to learn is that nationalism is no antidote to globalism — not in a federal republic such as ours where “free ships, free goods” is an ethos older than the Founders that embroiled our early republic in the French Quasi-War and the ill-fated War of 1812.
If the problem is social change, Trump Republicans have effectively taken a problem of social change and mandated an economic antidote worse than the cure in the hope that more stuff will restore the cultural hemorrhage we have undergone since the 1960s and again over the last eight long years.
There isn’t enough stuff in the world to fill a God-sized hole. Vance and Liddle get this as they look over the divide between the working-class “us” and the contemporizing “them” squabbling over who has the best crocodiles in the swamp.
The question of how to match prosperity with the values of middle America remain to be seen, but the real art of crafting younger vocations amidst not just one but two rootless generations is a Herculean task — one that automation may accelerate in some ways (through joblessness) and help in others (reducing menial tasks).
Nor is it as simple as breaking loose the atomizing qualities of the postmodern age… rather, the ascendant class — as the Old Glory example demonstrates — has to be able to converse with the working class. These common threads and the institutions that make dialogue possible deserve their place in the public square, not as a matter of convenience, but as a sincere recognition that we are all co-equal shareholders in this grand American experiment.
Whether both sides will rush towards competing monologues in the face of this new poverty remains to be seen. Certainly the old temptation of rival monologues seems to be gaining speed, one side armed with facts; the other with fake news. Will America tolerate dialogue?
I don’t know. The Islamic historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun used to speak of social decline and revolution every four generations (roughly 80 years). If one thinks of the world in these grand revolutions of generations, America has experienced such things in 1780 with the American Revolution, 1860 with the War Between the States, and 1940 with the Second World War.
One will, of course, note a theme.
Each was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. If there is merit in the idea that freedom’s survival is based on warfare altering the arrangements between the powerful and the powerless, that does not portend well for the future. Hopefully, Old Glory will still be there to bridge the gap.