Mini-Cast #1: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance - Final Draft

Liberal journalists rejected a Republican coming to them, bearing a gift we've sought from any eminent Republican at all, long before a Donald Trump presidency was possible - that what animates Trumpism is not the language of the unheard, what animates Trump supporters is nihilism; pessimism in no small part self-inflicted, a culture of grievance; a refusal to practice their espoused values, and a belief contrary to reality that the world is out to humiliate particularly them. Beware of critiques bearing gifts I suppose...

It should be music to liberal ears, yet since its first ecstatic reception, left-liberals closed ranks against a book everybody else knows is a masterpiece of personal memoir for which politics peppers only the slightest flavor, flavors easily excised if you're warned about the few pages upon which JD Vance uses conservative political cliches with admirable frugality. There are millions of American stories like Hillbilly Elegy. I don't think it fair to say that there are equivalent numbers of white stories to black stories, or male stories to female, but I do think it  fair to say that for every two stories, not even per capita, like Between the World and Me, or The Other Wes Moore, there's at least one story like Hillbilly Elegy. 

I have no doubt that rejection of the book is traced to the pundit JD Vance became in the years following his celebrity as the Republican talking head who explains Trumpism. And to a certain extent, Vance's soundbite interpretations of Trumpism differ from the anecdotal thoughtfulness of his book; but I believe what people resent in Vance's TV persona is not his explication of Trumpism but rather his explanation of why Trumpists resent those who resent Trumpists. He raises all manner of David Brooks-like straw men about the pseudo-sophistication of elites like me and you, but come on...

I could throw statistics at you, but there are only so many ways to quantify classism. Search your mind for anecdotes. There are moments in every liberal life when a later-to-be-Trump supporter wanted a friendly conversation, and sensing this person would be an annoyance who'd take an hour, or a day, or years, to get rid of, you did everything you could to ignore him. I have on multiple occasions. There are two sides to this story, and I guarantee that every person who shouted at a Trump rally has just as many stories of the humiliation of being on the other end of his reluctant monologue.

Humiliation is part of life's cycle; a mind that does not feel humiliated creates events about which to be humiliated. Those seeking to understand internet flamewars, look no further. We gain our self-worth by the adversity we overcome, and therefore, I believe that when there is insufficient adversity, the mind invents adversity, and by overcoming adversity, we feel pride. Therefore the mind is programmed to be more assertive on issues of pride than on issues of survival.

And as I see it,, this is why thousands of rural Trump supporters are so much more assertive than other Americans. They're more threatening and potentially more violent to those who disagree than urban African-Americans whose basic survival is continually challenged, and yet whose violent elements direct themselves mostly at one another--often for slights of pride, rather than threaten violence upon the millions of more fortunate whom they believe do not understand their mentalities. Disproportionate policing of African-Americans cannot alone account for such a wide disparity.

The disparity can only be explained through that overused, constantly misused term, culture. Whatever a person's culture, it is their cultural pride that makes their life worth living, and therefore worth dying and killing for. The American Culture Wars are the ultimate wars of pride, but forget pride for a moment: who has more reason for rage? A white liberal flirting with radicalism - entertaining that free speech is a manifestation of privilege, or a black resident of urban blight? The average resident of urban blight is too busy trying to survive to focus on their humiliations, they have no time to focus on their opinions. 

 Perhaps it's selfish, but most of us would rather die than go through life in constant humiliation. The more pride we have, the more pride we can lose. And who has lost more pride than a person who was once able to feel himself better than others merely by virtue of his identity? 

Again and again in these podcasts, I will bring up Eric Hoffer, and in the book The True Believer, for which my esteem approaches true belief, he writes: 

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause."

So why then reject the Vance diagnosis? The only reason I can think of is that it casts an unflattering light on our own culture. A light which shows that we claim excellence for values we lack in ourselves; a light which already shines every time we write off all forms of capitalism as evil, append censorship into the classroom, make so little distinction between forms of sexual misconduct, reject the relatively often necessity of military involvement, and... of course, espouse liberalism and equality only to clearly view those who disagree with us with contempt and hatred.