They who hold the cards

"These mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this country's wars. We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam. Now we're wondering what they were dyin' for."--Bruce Springsteen, in the song "Youngstown."

A new book called Hillbilly Elegy provides a smart young man's vivid and loving story of growing up poor and dysfunctional in the white working class of rural Kentucky and decaying industrialized Ohio.

Thus it's a timely tale of Donald Trump voters, if I might be permitted a stereotype based on polling and the obvious.

The author is J.D. Vance, who wended his way from an at-risk childhood to Marine service in Iraq, to Ohio State, to Yale Law School, and now Silicon Valley employment in the financial investment sector.

His "hillbilly" family fled the desperate poverty of Kentucky before he was born. It headed north to the good steel-mill wages of Middletown, Ohio. He spent summers back in Kentucky with his large and colorful extended family.

In a couple of decades, hard times caught up again with these who were white, working and under-educated.

Middletown began to wither economically. It became a place of broken families, heroin overdoses, domestic abuse, divorce, remarriage, single-parent families, declining church-going, failing schools and a general sense that, as Vance put it in a recent podcast interview with Slate, "the entire world has fallen apart."

In the Slate interview and others, Vance likened Trump to heroin, "a salve for the pain," he said.

The book is in no way a political polemic. It's an engaging human narrative, laced with richly complex and lovably flawed characters. It is, as the subtitle says, "A memoir of a family and culture in crisis."

Politics has been imposed on the book mainly by politically wired readers who thought they could see the Trump phenomenon in the pages. Vance has been agreeable to that premise.

The book describes Vance's family and friends this way: They are proud. They keep their problems within the family. They don't want anything from anybody except a fair shake. They abide by a kind of honor code through which they prefer to settle scores themselves without involving law enforcement. They carry weapons. They'll fight you. They drink a lot. Their kids use drugs. They love Jesus, even if they're not in church on Sunday morning.

In interviews, Vance has revealed his family members and townsfolk in a political context as disdainful of everybody currently on the scene--except Trump.

The disdain is for those on the left who live their happy meritocratic lives with their Ivy League educations and perfect families and recession-proof incomes, and who condescend to them.

That means Barack Obama, describing them as clinging to God and guns because they don't have anything else, and Hillary Clinton, saying she wants to run their coal-dependent jobs right out of existence.

And the disdain is equal, or maybe greater, for those on the right who pay allegiance to tax cuts for the wealthy and wars that take disproportionately the working poor's children, but without ever achieving any outright military victories anymore. That means George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

Vance said in an interview that the people of his raising are plenty smart and understand that Trump is a rich Manhattan-ite who is "playing them." But they appreciate, he said, that at least he has the instinct and aptitude to know how to play them, and to speak a language that relates to them.

That seems to be the key concept: relating. It's more powerful than any policy proposal because, truth be known, there are no evident federal policy ideas that would provide a quick fix to the pain of a global economy.

Obama, for all his soaring oratory, can't relate to these people. Hillary can't.

But Vance says Bill Clinton could, talking slow that way, feeling pain and growing up with a drunken and abusive stepfather. At times ol' Bill of Arkansas could seem almost as Kentucky as Vance's great-grandparents.

So what Bill was trying Tuesday night at the convention was to make Hillary relatable to rural Kentucky and Rust Belt Ohio.

It might have been too late. The ability to relate cannot be transferred. Hillary's nomination acceptance speech appealed more to white suburban professionals than white working-poor folks.

So she took off from her convention in a Bill-styled bus tour bound for the white working regions of rural Pennsylvania and rural Ohio.

She must carry those states to win the presidency. Winning them can be done in the cities--Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland--without these white working people. But it's iffy.

She needs to relate without seeming to pander. It's an aptitude she lacks.

And it's a market Trump seems in this season to have cornered.

I'd say you can't fake it, but Trump has managed by a ball cap and slogan.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 07/31/2016

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