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I remember reading this book review of Hillbilly Elegy on /r/slatestarcodex years back. Hard to believe this guy is now the favorite to be vice president of the United States out of nowhere. From the review, Vance sounds like a smug liberal; rural Americans just seem to suck on a deeply personal level. I’m also seeing on Twitter that he had some choice words for Trump back in the day. I can imagine that Washington changes people.
There is exactly one question that matters for any Trump running mate. Will he count the votes on January 6, 2029?
Sometimes this can actually resonate with the target audience. It's kind of a classic in self-help seminars: Life isn't hard! life is easy, you suck!
I think the draw is, if someone's problems are their own fault for sucking, at least that's something that they can understand and change. It's a weirdly hopeful message- you have the power to stop sucking and turn things around! If you tell someone instead that their problems are from deep socio-economic issues that screwed them over before they were even born, well... it can feel nice to know you're not the one to blame, but it's also deeply depressing to think there's nothing you can personally do. That's more of a message for politicians and other influential people, who can think like "oh the problem with rural appalachia is that they just don't good schools, but if I fund $1 billion of education there I can save them!"
Right. He spends much of the book complaining about his mother being a dysfunctional addict (and life being made much harder than it had to be by bad financial decisions rather than real poverty), but apparently she sobered up (Maybe the book was a wake-up call?) and they reconciled. He brought her to the RNC and bragged to the crowd that she's nearing 10 years sober, suggesting that she should celebrate her 10 year anniversary at the White House.
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I wonder if this is one of those red/blue tribal divides. Something like, the Red Tribe wants to be told you suck because then they can stop sucking, whereas the Blue Tribe wants to be told society sucks because then they can stop blaming themselves.
Not a whole worked-out theory here or anything, just something that sprang to mind upon reading your comment.
Probably some correlation there, yeah. Also somewhat related: the famous Bertrand Russel quote: "While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make." Probably not a coincidence that economics is more right-wing while sociology is more left-wing.
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No, the smug liberal would at least insist that they sucked but it's an understandable or unavoidable result of various material forces and structures.
Vance just thinks they suck because of who they are.
(In light of that, it's actually interesting that this book picked up steam post-2016 election)
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Reading that it’s interesting to note that Armco Steel was the mill in Vance’s town and Butler.
On Scott’s notes of Vance being relatively clean and not doing a lot of bad things - I think in that area the smart kids realize they just need to put their head down until their 18 then run off somewhere.
The book tries to draw up something more complex -- his grandmother being his primary caregiver and if she had been a hellion in her youth she'd at least tempered with age; his biological father got enough religion to take enough responsibility to provide some anchoring force not long after; having moved or been moved from some of the more hillbilly areas -- but I think for the most part he didn't get out clean, so much as the space between clean and dirty is a gradient with a steep slope :
((This is also part of why I'd caution against operating solely from reviews. One person's take on a story won't be the same as the story. For another example, "Bob" in Vance's example ends up having a different set of problems than listed in the review, likely as a result of going offhand: he misses fewer days a week on average but spends much longer in restroom breaks, and dormin1111's "nearly physically assaulting the boss" is just "he lashed out" verbally in the original. Maybe they mean the same things, but they're not the same statements.))
There's a view where these aren't the Real Sins.
Vance had to lie to keep his biological mother out of jail (allegedly threatening him with vehicular murder-suicide at 12), but he always had a different house to fall back to. He had a crappy GPA, but never flunked out of a grade. He had to forge a parent's signature to keep from being found truant in a legally-fraught way, but he was never kicked out of a school. He fought, viciously, with not!family who didn't buy into the borderer culture and could have gotten arrested over, but he never was so violent that someone tried to have him charged over it. He drank and smoke pot, but he didn't get addicted to narcotics. His mother saw him as useful for little more than piss (literally, to pass a drug test), but his grandmother pressed him to keep a passing grade.
The view Vance is pushing -- whether or not he believes it -- is that there's a very narrow step from one side of that gradient to the other, and that while he never recognized the slope in his youth, he sees it now. It's pretty explicit:
((Though I think to an extent, Vance did benefit by having distractions. Hillbilly Eligy only mentions the TI 89 calculator and trading cards and television, but the man entered high school in 1998, and turned 18 several months after 9/11. It's quite possible that his version of 'acting out' was watching banned television shows, plinking with a BB gun, or passing around bootleg cassettes and nudie mags and beer and pot, because he had too many better things to do with his time: much of his worst behaviors were opportunistic. Similarly, modern-day borderers can kill someone three-dozen times for making fun of their mom, and then do it all again with laser swords-only: if it's in Halo the cops don't care. But sometimes that just puts off some of the issues.))
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