“Hillbilly Elegy—The Culture of White American Poverty”, 2018-12-31 (; backlinks; similar):
I’ve written a couple of book summaries on here over the past few months, and this one for Hillbilly Elegy will be the most difficult. J. D. Vance’s autobiography is a sociological summary of Appalachian American culture, and by extension the culture of poverty across America, which uses his own life as a case study. The book is basically a series of linked anecdotes with only occasional introspections thrown in, so I’ll try my best to lay out Vance’s story, and integrate his claims and arguments.
…You know that classic Republican straw man about poor people? It goes something like—
“In the glorious modern American capitalist economy, all people can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and make a good living if they really want to. The only way to fail is to not try hard enough. Poor people are all lazy loafers who would rather take drugs, rack up illegitimate children, and become welfare queens, than work an honest day in their lives. It’s their own damn fault they’re poor.”
Vance argues that this straw man is basically true.
Yes, of course it’s more complicated than that. There are external factors at play that makes the lives of his fellow hillbillies in Appalachia worse, like the collapse of American industrialism. But underlying the depressed economies, high unemployment, underfunded schools, and shoddy welfare networks, are simply a lot of bad decisions made on an individual level…Only a very select few hillbillies “make it” in the sense of achieving a stable, middle-class lifestyle. J. D. Vance is one of those few. He starts off the book saying that he feels ridiculous writing a memoir because his “greatest accomplishment” to date was graduating from Yale Law School. Yet, as he walks the reader through his life, it becomes more and more apparent just how amazing that feat is…I was aware of all these stereotypes before reading the book, but seeing them so fully fleshed out really brought home how scary it is. These people probably aren’t evil… but a lot of them are kind of bad. Or at least foolish. Or at least make really stupid decisions all the time. Somehow, that’s even scarier than being evil, or at least it’s harder to fix.
…Vance consistently stresses that by raw material standards, nobody in Middletown was doing that badly. Yet they were miserable, depressed, addicted, and hopeless anyway.
For instance, when Mom was with her first husband, the toothless hillbilly guy, they could be considered solidly middle-class. Mom was a nurse, her husband was a truck driver, and together they made over $100K per year with two kids in a low-cost-of-living region of America. And yet financial problems were always one of the biggest triggers of family screaming matches. They were deeply in debt because both Mom and the husband bought multiple new cars per year, they ate out every day instead of cooking, and they purchased a below-ground swimming pool. The house was already mortgaged, but was falling into disrepair due to lack of upkeep, while they repeatedly crashed new cars, and burned through meager savings with credit card fees. Vance’s family could have been fine. His parents could have lived comfortably, had good savings, and started a college fund. And maybe if they did, the stress wouldn’t have driven Mom and husband to break up, and Mom wouldn’t have turned to drugs, etc. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Throughout the book, I had a question that I wished Vance would have answered directly. Are hillbilly values the problem, or hypocrisy against these values?
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