The most important book of 2016, in terms of its impact on American politics, was probably “Hillbilly Elegy,” by a man named J.D. Vance. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen several reviews of it, and I’ve also read several of his op-ed columns in the NYT, so I’m reasonably confident that I understand his point.
By all accounts, Vance paints a fairly harrowing view of life in Appalachia after the exodus of mining jobs, including rampant drug and domestic abuse. In spite of the odds, he managed to get out and thrive, but he empathizes with those who remain, and he anticipated Trump’s victory over the allegedly insensitive cosmopolitan elites.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, I’ve been writing on this subject since I started this blog in the middle of 2015. The Republicans offer people in Appalachia genuine cultural respect and b.s. about getting their mining jobs back; the Democrats only propose government spending. As I’ve said before, it is no surprise that the people prefer the GOP package; the issue that the Democrats are confronting now is how to win the votes of people like this without losing a greater number of minority supporters.
Three observations are pertinent:
- There really isn’t any hope here until the GOP discredits itself by failing to bring the old mining jobs back. If and when (well, when) Trump’s faux populism doesn’t deliver the goods, the public should be more accepting of the real thing.
- We know from the campaign that there are lots of establishment Republicans who view Vance’s hillbillies as losers: period. The Democratic Party actually wants to help them, but hasn’t figured out how to do it yet.
- There is plenty of room in the Democratic vision of a mosaic America for the white people in Appalachia. For their own good and the good of the country, the Democrats need to make a genuine and sustained effort to show that they respect the culture of rural white Christian America. What they cannot do, for both moral and electoral reasons, is accept the Palinesque notion that rural white Christian America is America, and everyone else is, at best, an interloper. Vance’s hillbillies are going to have to get over that idea before progress is possible.