Hillbilly Elegy

I just finished reading J. D. Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, a deeply touching memoir describing the author's voyage from a childhood of poverty and dysfunction to a fulfilling and successful adulthood.

J. D. describes himself as a "Scots-Irish hillbilly" with roots in Jackson, Kentucky who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, amidst extreme poverty, neglect, and dysfunction. His descriptions of Appalachian culture and the white underclass are poignant and disturbing. J.D., however, is a rare success story. After being held back a year at school, almost flunking out of high school, and barely escaping consignment to the foster care system (after his mother tried to kill him), he achieved a perfect score on his SATs, joined the marines for four years, returned to Ohio to complete an undergraduate degree summa cum laude at Ohio State University in under two years, graduated from Yale Law School, and achieved a happy and stable marriage. He attributes his success to the love and encouragement that his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, lavished on him while he was growing up. Mamaw was pregnant at 13, married to a 17-year-old at 14, and moved with her young husband from Kentucky to Ohio in search of a better life. However, as J. D. says, "in some ways, she never left Kentucky".

One of the themes of his book is that upward social mobility and improved social conditions are less likely to be achieved through political intervention than through cultural change and pulling oneself (and one's family) up by the proverbial bootstraps. J. D. quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan as saying, "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society."

As a liberal, I can't disagree. Some of J. D.'s stories resonate with my own experiences in London in the eighties. As a 26-year-old, he worked as a manual laborer to try to pay for his move to New Haven. His co-workers were frequently extraordinarily lazy, ended up being fired, and then complained they'd been mistreated. I temporarily shared a London flat with a group of unemployed but able-bodied young people who were illegally claiming the dole in three different locations and forging letters to social services from our landlord falsely complaining that they didn't have certain basic necessities (such as a 'fridge), meaning they would receive an additional welfare check. Although they lived very well by scamming the system, their favorite expression was, "Oi'm bein' exploited!" It wasn't that they couldn't get jobs. There were signs up all over London advertising positions. Theirs was, for the most part, a lifestyle choice. Eventually the Thatcher government limited the number of jobs people on the dole could turn down to three. This led to protestations of enslavement. "They are going to force us to work. That's slavery!!!" As I left the flat for work every morning, while they were still fast asleep after another late night at the pub or were off vacationing in Spain, I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't really people like me, who were paying the taxes that subsidized their unproductive lifestyles, that were really being exploited and "enslaved". The sad thing was that, after living this way for a few years, these people became unemployable. They became accustomed to doing nothing, they were not developing marketable skills, and they frequently, perhaps out of boredom, developed addictions.

While J. D.'s grandparents certainly helped him to develop and provided some much-needed support and stability in his life, I don't think he gives his innate abilities enough credit. He was smart enough to ace his SATs, despite the fact that he had had very limited exposure to educated people and had not been particularly engaged in school. He was an outlier in his community, but not merely because he had caregivers that could sort of function.

Part of his struggle was not just against the low expectations and depressing environment of his youth but against elitist bigotry. When he handed in a slipshod assignment at Yale, his professor not only criticized it harshly, but he let it be known that he felt Yale Law should only accept students from schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, as those from state schools too often needed "remedial education". I've read that students' standardized scores are a better predictor of future success than where they go to university. This would suggest that J. D. would have done as well in the long run if he'd gone to law school at Ohio State as he did by going to Yale. Perhaps that is true in terms of his earning potential. I'm not sure that he'd have had the same social and career capital, though. An OSU law graduate is not going to be considered for the Supreme Court, for example. I would guess that J. D. was probably one of the smarter students in his class at Yale, and yet this professor would have denied him the opportunity of Yale Law School on the grounds that he had been denied opportunities in the past!

J. D.'s book is, for the most part, garnering positive reviews. He cuts a sympathetic and appealing figure. A Washington Post article suggests the book explains Trump's victory and describes "poor, angry White Americans in Appalachia and the Rust Belt" as a "tinderbox of resentment". A New Republic article suggests that devious corporations are in part responsible for social conditions in Appalachia (which voted overwhelmingly for Trump) and that Vance's narrative of cultural blame is misplaced. This article claims that the book is "little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class".

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. To his credit, J. D. wants to help. He and his wife recently moved from San Francisco back to Ohio, where he hopes to contribute in some way, perhaps by helping to combat the opioid epidemic, to revitalizing Appachian culture.