COALITION OF THE IRRESPONSIBLE:

Ever since J.D. Vance became the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, journalists and pundits have been preoccupied with how Vance's politics have shifted since the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The book brought Vance fame and a platform that he used, among other things, to criticize Donald Trump. Since then, Vance's positions on polarizing issues like immigration have lurched to the right and he sought -- and won -- Trump's endorsement. Vance now also dabbles in conspiracy theories and has taken on a belligerent, Trump-like tone.

What the pundit class isn't talking about, however, is an important consistency between 2016 author Vance and 2022 politician Vance. In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other--those who work versus those who don't. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the "settled" working class versus the "hard living." A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits.

Vance has not renounced that divisive message. He no doubt hopes to garner the support of the slightly more upmarket of the two factions--which, probably not coincidentally, is also the group more likely to go to the polls. While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic, Vance's competitiveness in the Ohio Senate race can be explained in no small part by his ability to politically exploit this cleavage.

As a scholar studying working-class and rural whites, I have written about this subtle but consequential divide. I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher's aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the "settled" side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion.

We lived in an all-white corner of the Arkansas Ozarks, so my parents weren't fretting about the Black folks Ronald Reagan would later denigrate with the "welfare queen" stereotype. They were talking about their lazy neighbors. They called these folks "white trash," the worst slur they knew.

Though Vance described this divide in Hillbilly Elegy, readers unfamiliar with the white working class may not have picked up on it. Vance's beloved grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, represented hard work. Papaw had a steady job at the Armco steel mill--one good enough to draw him and hundreds like him out of the Appalachian Kentucky hills to Middletown, Ohio. Indeed, it was such a good job that Mamaw could stay home and take care of the kids. Though they were crass and unconventional by polite, mainstream standards, Papaw and Mamaw's work ethic positioned them in the settled working class.

From that perch, Vance's grandparents harshly judged neighbors who didn't work. They even judged their daughter, Vance's mother, Bev. Though she'd trained for a good job, as a nurse, Bev's drug use and frequent churn of male partners led to the instability associated with the "hard living." Indeed, at one point Vance uses that very term to refer to his mother: "Mom's behavior grew increasingly erratic," Vance writes. "She was more roommate than parent, and of the three of us -- Mom, [my sister], and me -- Mom was the roommate most prone to hard living" as she partied and stayed out 'til the wee hours of the morning.

Given the childhood trauma associated with his mother's behavior, it's perhaps not surprising that Vance came to emulate his grandparents' judgmental stance toward the hard living. This is illustrated by his condemnation of shirking co-workers at a warehouse job and those who used food stamps (SNAP) to pay for the groceries he bagged as a teenager. (It seems that Vance also inherited his family's pugilistic tendencies, which have come in handy with his conversion to Trumpism; words like "scumbag" and "idiot," which readers of Hillbilly Elegy can easily imagine coming out of Mamaw's mouth, have become staples of Vance's campaign vocabulary). [...]

Like Vance, settled white workers tend to see themselves living a version of the American dream grounded primarily -- if not entirely -- in their own agency. They believe they can survive, even thrive, if they just work hard enough. And some of them are doing just that. Because they lean into the grit of the individual, they tend to downplay structural obstacles to their quest to make a living, e.g., poor schools and even crummy job markets, just as they downplay structural benefits. They also discount "white privilege" because giving skin color credit for what they have achieved devalues the significance of their work. This mindset is also the reason that when Obama said in 2012, "if you've got a business, you didn't build that," the remark landed so badly among the settled working class. They're not accustomed to sharing credit for what they have -- perhaps especially when they don't have much.

Vance and my parents are mere anecdotes, yes, but scholars have documented the phenomenon they represent. Kathryn Edin of Princeton University, Jennifer Sherman of Washington State University and Monica Prasad of Northwestern University have studied folks like them in both urban and rural locales. What "settled" and "hard living" express as cultural phenomena, Edin and colleagues express quantitatively as the second-lowest income quintile dissociating from the bottom quintile -- the very place from whence many had climbed. Edin described that disassociation as a "virulent social distancing" -- "suddenly, you're a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person."

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