Opinion: J.D. Vance�s book �Hillbilly Elegy� was a con job. Don�t let it
slide

The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump�s running mate is a
direct result of the political media�s failure to understand class in
America. For his 2016 memoir, �Hillbilly Elegy,� Vance was venerated by
many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-
overlooked Americans. But he�s no working-class hero.

Vance portrayed this group � 35% of Americans, by the way � as tragic
victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive
moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes
to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by
economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump�s retrogressive
campaign.

This distortion, in turn, widened a real divide by alienating many
Americans, fueling support for Trump and even veneration of Vance.

Lauded by David Brooks as the interpreter of some mythical �working-class
honor code� that could illuminate the motivations of the core Trump voter,
Vance was praised in reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post and
a host of other publications, and he became the go-to guy on the working-
class perspective. CNN hired him as a political pundit.

This was no better than the �parachute journalism� of upper-middle-class
reporters who would visit an Appalachian tavern for one afternoon and then
presume to tell the nation what the working class was thinking.
Still shot from (and courtesy of) the 2024 documentary "Bad Faith:
Christian Nationalism's Unholy War on Democracy." The photo is of an
unidentified protester on Jan. 6, 2021, outside the Capitol, where Trump
supporters tried to derail Congress as it counted and certified the 2020
electoral college results.

Opinion
Column: The once-secretive right-wing ideology emerging as an overt threat
to American democracy

July 14, 2024

So who actually is the working class? Consistent data has shown that, in
the words of the Center for American Progress, �Black, Hispanic, and other
workers of color make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-
Hispanic white workers comprise the remaining 55 percent. Nearly half of
the working class is women, and 8 percent have disabilities.� Media
portrayals that equate this group with uneducated white men elide most of
the people who actually fit the definition.

A few contemporary reports called out Vance�s misrepresentations and the
media�s fallacious thinking. In October 2016, writing for the Guardian,
journalist Sarah Smarsh pointed out that exit polls and surveys showed that
Trump supporters had a higher median income � $72,000 � than supporters of
Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Vance himself, she reported, had been
raised in a middle-class household. By ignoring such realities, Smarsh
argued, �Media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply
an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are
dangerous idiots.�

Another journalist, Elizabeth Catte, also notably called out national media
misrepresentations, including in her 2018 book, �What You Are Getting Wrong
About Appalachia.� It should have been required reading as a reality check
for anyone who heard Vance on TV or read his book.

A brilliant work like Stephanie Land�s 2019 memoir, �Maid,� became the
basis of a Netflix series, but even as journalists praised the book, they
failed to feature her as a pundit. Kerri Arsenault�s �Mill Town,� a memoir-
history of a small town in Maine, was reviewed, but again, her expertise
didn�t appear in mainstream political commentary. Worst of all, when
historian Steven Stoll�s masterful history of Appalachia, �Ramp Hollow,�
was published in 2017, the New York Times allowed Vance himself to review
it; he criticized Stoll�s �polemical� views of the market economy and
dismissed the author as �earnest.�

The voices of Black historians were largely ignored, because Black voters
of a certain kind were being ignored. Historian Blair LM Kelley published
�Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class� last fall, linking the
Black working class to America�s history of slavery. It received scant
media attention. Joe William Trotter�s �Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in
the Making of America� suffered a similar fate, although it earned academic
awards.

Ironically, before he abandoned his distrust of Trump and joined the right-
wing-fringe circus, even Vance thought the media had gotten it wrong in
various ways.

The news media must not fail the working class again. The stakes are too
high. Trump has made clear his desire to dismantle the authority of the
federal government, turn social policy over to Christian nationalists and
take away any regulation of industries that contribute to climate change or
that devastate communities and land through extractive practices such as
fracking.

But I�m not optimistic that critics and journalists have learned much since
the debacle of 2016.

When Barbara Kingsolver�s novel �Demon Copperhead� came out in October
2022, I described the book�s perspective as pitying toward the people of
Appalachia while also intimating that �falling into drug abuse, rejecting
education, and �clinging� to their ways are moral choices that keep them in
their dire circumstances. Appalachia becomes the region of the damned.�

But �Demon Copperhead� received near-universal rave reviews and won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The privileged class learned all the wrong lessons from Vance�s book, if
they learned anything from it. I hope more journalists will do better now
that he and Trump are headed for the ballot as a package deal.