THE favoured candidate of the white working class in the presidential campaign is a man who travels on his own private aircraft and gives interviews from his penthouse in a building emblazoned with his name in gold letters. When he started out in property it was with a “small loan of $1m” from his father. Among white voters without college degrees, Donald Trump holds a commanding lead over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. (“I love the poorly educated,” he crowed after one of his many primary victories.)
How did Mr Trump pull this off? The same way unscrupulous people often succeed: he saw an opportunity and exploited it. White working-class voters felt abandoned by both parties. As unions grew less powerful, Democrats became the party of educated coastal voters and minorities. This divide was cemented by eight years of Barack Obama; white working-class voters attracted by Bill Clinton’s folksy charm were repelled by a black president with a foreign-sounding name and a chilly, cerebral manner.
Republicans, meanwhile, consistently argued for free trade and deregulation, policies that, whatever their general merits, left some working-class voters still worse off. Meanwhile, coal is in decline and automation has made secure low-skilled manufacturing jobs increasingly rare. Life at the low end of the income scale has grown more tenuous: the inflation-adjusted income of households headed by a non-college graduate fell by 19% between 1999 and 2014. Also during that period, death rates for middle-aged whites without college education crept up, even as they plunged for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics. The cause was not disease, but suicide and the effects of substance abuse.
Mr Trump has courted these voters as assiduously as he has insulted everyone else. He promises to bring manufacturing jobs back while keeping immigrants out. To minorities, many women and gay Americans, his slogan—“Make America great again”—sounds like a promise to bring back a social order that oppressed them. To white working-class voters, it sounds like the opposite. America’s political system and the white working class have lost faith in each other. J.D. Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”, offers a starkly honest look at what that shattering of faith feels like for a family who lived through it. Not all white working-class voters are rural Appalachians, as Mr Vance’s family is, but the problems he describes are widespread. You will not read a more important book about America this year.
Mr Vance’s family comes from Jackson, a small town in Kentucky’s coal country. In a culture that prizes toughness and honour, his family was “hillbilly royalty”: his grandmother came from “a family that would rather shoot at you than argue with you”. One day when his grandfather came home drunk, his grandmother, having threatened to kill him if he ever did that again, doused him with petrol and dropped a lit match on his chest. He survived with only minor burns after their 11-year-old daughter put out the flames. Mr Vance’s great uncle once heard another young man make a crude comment about his sister, the author’s grandmother; the man said he wanted to “eat her panties”. Mr Vance’s great uncle forced the young man to do just that—at knifepoint.
For his family, as in many others like his—ethnically Scots-Irish, rural—“poverty is the family tradition”. In the southern slave economy they were day-labourers and sharecroppers. Eventually many became miners or millworkers. In the 1940s his grandparents, like millions of other poor white Appalachians, left to find better jobs (this overlapped with another mass migration—of African-Americans, out of the rural South to cities in the north, West, Midwest and north-east). The Vances ended up in Middletown, a steel town in south-western Ohio so full of people like them that it was known as “Middletucky”. His grandfather worked in the Armco steel plant, and raised a family on his salary.
But then things started to go south. Mr Vance’s mother abused alcohol and prescription pills, and had a steady stream of unsuitable male partners; Mr Vance barely knew his father until he was almost in his teens. The relationship lessons he learned from his mother included: “Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do…it’s okay to slap and punch, so long as the man doesn’t hit first; always express your feelings in a way that’s insulting and hurtful to your partner.” Steady jobs for workers without college degrees grew scarce. In the 20th century Appalachians mined the coal and made the steel that built America; in the 21st, however, the divide deepened between Appalachia and the flourishing coasts, and few people in Middletown knew quite how to bridge it.
Mr Vance figured it out. He joined the Marines, and then graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School. Today he works at an investment firm in San Francisco and is happily married. What did he have that others didn’t? His grandparents made sure he studied hard; along with his older sister, they gave him some semblance of stability.
But he also had grit. He refuses the easy consolation of excuses. Addiction may function as a disease, but believing that it is one makes it that much easier to take the next drink or pop the next pill; the user can cede responsibility for his own actions. Government may have let Appalachians down, Mr Vance argues, but government does not make them skip work, smack their kids or turn every disagreement into a blood feud. Mr Vance is a conservative in the oldest and best sense, and his prescription is a bracing tonic for the poison being sold to his people by the pandering huckster seeking the presidency: “We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” he urges. “It starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”
