30 Jan. 2017
As Donald Trump’s presidency rolls on there will be much vitriol, much emotion and much jumping to ill-informed conclusions. JD Vance is in no way an apologist for Trump – far from it – but reading this book will help you understand where the Trump came from and you’d have to be a lump of rock not to feel some sympathy.
The disenfranchised, disillusioned white American working class that Vance describes are the source of heat that swept Trump to victory. As Vance says, they need a voice but, as he also says that the answer is not in the kind of tub-thumping rhetoric coming out of the current administration. In his words (or actually the quoted words of a rust-belt politician) they need a ‘thumb on the scales’ – that’s a thumb Donald, not a 5lb masonry hammer. And whilst on the matter of the ‘thumb’, a large part of the excellence of this book is its honesty; Vance is at pains to point out that the solution for those suffering from the American Dream turned nightmare lies within themselves. Hand-outs, grants, social programmes and ‘thumbs on the scales’ are all very well, but these alone won’t re-galvanise the ferociously proud and deeply loyal folk of the Appalachians. Just like Vance did, they need to find the drive from somewhere to pick themselves up, dust themselves down and start believing in themselves again – and that surely aint going to be nurtured on a diet of introspective, racist claptrap Donal Trump style.
Continue reading “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”