UNCLE TOMMING:

Rarely does a nonfiction book make the kind of splash Hillbilly Elegy did in 2016. I was part of the cheering section. At a moment when a thousand voices on the right were proclaiming that a failure to address the problems of the white working class was the root of Trump's rise, and conservative pundits were lining up to agree that the government had failed these people, Vance emerged as an authentic voice of the working class--a self-styled "hillbilly" no less--to declare that the problems of many working-class people were largely self-inflicted.

Or perhaps a better way to say it is that their problems are a matter of personal choices. Drug abuse, welfare dependency, domestic violence, irresponsible spending, and family disintegration were all omnipresent in Vance's family and community. He wrote of children suffering from "Mountain Dew mouth," because their parents plied them with sugary sodas, sometimes even in infants' bottles, to quiet them. "This book," he wrote, "is about . . . what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It's about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It's about a culture that encourages social decay instead of counteracting it."

The stories of his upbringing are harrowing. He described his home life as "extraordinarily chaotic." His grandmother once attempted to murder his grandfather by dousing his bed with gasoline and lighting a match (he survived). As I wrote in 2016:

Vance's mother was an addict who discarded husbands and boyfriends like Dixie cups, dragging her two children through endless screaming matches, bone-chilling threats, thrown plates and worse violence, and dizzying disorder. Every lapse was followed by abject apologies--and then the pattern repeated. His father gave him up for adoption (though that story is complicated), and social services would have removed him from his family entirely if he had not lied to a judge to avoid being parted from his grandmother, who provided the only stable presence in his life.

In a 2016 interview, Vance told Rod Dreher that his mother probably cycled through 15 husbands/boyfriends during his childhood. Family disintegration was the greatest handicap Vance and others like him were saddled with. "Of all the things that I hated about my childhood," he wrote, "nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures."

In contrast to the popular impression, Vance noted that working-class white people were not that religious. "In the middle of the Bible belt, active church attendance is actually quite low."

Vance himself gained self-command only after enlisting in the Marines. It was there that he learned to balance a checkbook, make his bed, eat healthy, keep his appointments, and avoid scams. He described it as a "four-year program of character development."

His depiction of working-class life wasn't a complete rejection of his origins. He stressed that he loved his family, and that a majority (even if just a bare one) of his community does work hard. For children trapped in dysfunctional homes, one can have nothing but sympathy. And he believed that elites did fail to evince much understanding for people who were struggling. On the other hand, he was keen to counter the pervasive sense of helplessness in the community he was raised in. "There is a lack of agency here--a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself."

In a sense, Vance was the anti-Trump. He was a true son of Appalachia striving to lift his community, in contrast to the faux populist from Manhattan seeking to flatter and exploit them. Vance felt that they needed hope and a generous dose of honesty. Trump offered fantasies and cunningly curated hatred.

During his 2016 book tour, Vance was not shy about his disdain for Trump. When NPR's Terry Gross asked how he planned to vote that November, he said, "I think that I'm going to vote third party because I can't stomach Trump. I think that he's noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place." In the course of a conversation with Vox's Ezra Klein, he readily agreed that Trump's rhetoric was racially incendiary. And appearing on the podcast I hosted at the time, Need to Know, Vance said that as the election year progressed, he became more and more convinced that Trump could win. He had texted his book agent, he told Jay Nordlinger and me, saying that, "If Trump wins it would be terrible for the country, but good for book sales."

Tweet   @brothersjudd