Manu Joseph: Lessons from Donald Trump’s ‘Hillbilly’ running mate

Being poor, being truly poor is when your papa is poor, when your “people" are all poor. It is like being ancient in a generation racing towards the future. The mind of the poor is the brooding background in Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of J.D. Vance, the running mate of Donald Trump.

The book, published in 2016, brought national prominence to Vance, and launched his political career. He draws the portrait of his formative years as a poor White American growing up among those of his kind, people who are called “hillbillies", and his eventual escape into the American dream through higher education. 

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He shows a community that is in despair, intoxicated, poor and violent, and holds far less hope for the future than the Hispanic migrants and the Blacks, who are poorer. 

The book accuses the hillbillies of blaming their plight on everything outside them, including president Barack Obama, instead of finding a way to exploit one of the greatest nations on earth. Only an insider can say this sort of thing about his tribe, just as only an Obama could have asked America’s Blacks to take some of the blame for their condition.

When the book was released, the Republicans hailed it because it framed the problem of its core base—the White working class that was not doing very well. ‘Donald Trump’ appears only in the afterword, so the book probably never mentioned him in the early editions. 

Yet, it tries to solve the political mystery of why poor Whites loved and still love Trump. That was why the Democrats too loved it. Because they saw in it what they wanted to see—that Trump was popular among country wastrels with a twang as they were jealous of the good boys and girls who worked hard and went to college.

Vance came from a poor and unhappy home, headed by an intoxicated, unstable mother, and transient men who tried to take the place of his father. Often, he was a witness to violence at his and in other homes.

He was saved by his grandparents who had done better than their daughter. They became an emotional island that protected Vance from his deadly environment. 

The most lethal toxin in the air was negativity, a sense of hopelessness. “Never be like these…losers who think the deck is stacked against them," his grandmother often told him, “you can do anything you want to."

Also read: JD Vance Stumps as Pro-Family But Skips Vote on Child Tax Break

Vance talks of the economic fall of the average White family. Extreme poverty was rising. They were becoming more unhealthy, and dying younger. The pride in old-fashioned factory work had vanished, and there was prestige attached to professions that were said to require the mind, and for which one had to go to college. 

But the average hillbilly didn’t get sucked into the banal rituals that took one to college. They began to suspect that higher education was rigged against the average White by the “Blacks and liberals".

Vance blames the hillbillies for what has happened to them. “Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith." 

He talks about scores of neighbours and friends who never held jobs, who gamed the social security system, who were on drugs and in violent marriages, and their children in the middle of all this who were doomed to fail.

“This was my world: a world of truly irrational behaviour. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads…thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans…We purchase homes we don’t need…Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class…We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study…We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs…We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing…But tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese."

Vance is persuasive in his efforts to show that he understands American poverty. Once when Salvation Army gave him a list of gifts to buy for the poor, he found faults with “nearly every suggestion". Pajamas was on the list. 

But, he says, the poor don’t wear pajamas. And “toy guitar" reminded him that in homes with too many people living in too little space, it might be too loud to bring any joy. He found “learning aids" condescending, they made it seem as if the only thing the poor needed was to learn and reform.

Even so, is his memoir compassionate, or is it just a work of a lucky man, who has not revealed the source of luck, who is essentially telling everyone, ‘why can’t you be like me’. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance implores America’s White poor to be better people, to work harder, and to stop being gluttons of unhealthy things. 

There is compassion because Vance says he himself was from a doomed home. He says he worked hard and used the ladders that America placed in its deep holes for people to climb out. But there is a problem with such stories.

Also read: Inside JD Vance’s short-lived career as a venture capitalist

The world is filled with people who have worked hard but not got anywhere. That too is the nature of the world. They feel there is something wrong with them because those who succeeded keep extolling their “hard work" but hide the elements of luck. Every escape story has one thing that makes almost all the difference, and it is usually never revealed, as it is almost never hard work.