J.D. Vance, the up-from-ruins author of the book Hillbilly Elegy that has come to define the neglected and resentful working-class white people who elected Donald Trump, has written a farewell tribute to Barack Obama.
In a column headlined “Barack Obama and Me” in the Monday edition of the New York Times, the Republican-leaning Vance lamented the lost opportunity of the Democratic president he didn’t trust at first, or ever much agree with, but came to admire.
First, about Vance’s uncommon perspective: He is a child of Kentucky poverty and Ohio steel-town misery, which have much in common with the condition of white rural Arkansas. His mother was a drug addict and his grandmother a colorful and unlikely saint. He parlayed a Marine stint into studies at Ohio State and Yale, then to work in high finance. He achieved best-selling authorship last year with the aforementioned book about the crude and disaffected people of his family and community. They’ll wreck a car on Thursday, beat someone up on Friday, get drunk on Saturday, stay high throughout and probably miss church on Sunday, although they swear their God-fearing conservative Protestant religion provides their very essence.
They voted for Trump because Democrats had blown them off for global economics and worried more about blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and homosexuals than these simple white folks who had once worked proudly for their livings. They would work still, darn it, if the politicians wouldn’t keep letting their manufacturing jobs vanish while telling them with cold condescension that they needed to get over to the community college, wean themselves from demeaning unskilled labor and learn something smart and modern and respectable for a change.
They’re just racists and bigots, blaming their self-inflicted woes on “them,” meaning blacks and Mexicans and gays, many liberals say. But they voted for the blackest white man, Bill Clinton, and some of them voted at least the first time for Obama. Racism might be true of many of them. But it’s a too-easy dismissal of the greater class dilemma and economic chasm.
These people are caught in a cycle of deprivation much like the one long besetting poor black people in the Delta. When jobs and daddy are long gone and momma is on drugs, and when the schools are declining from dwindling resources, and when there is nothing to do except get high, then you’re lucky to make it out of high school, much less go to college.
Chris Arnade is a photojournalist who spent last year traveling among these people, producing essays that supplement and complement Vance’s book. He has written that we’ve constructed an economy that creates and serves elites and sacrifices those who stay in dying communities. The Trump candidacy, he has deduced, provided a way for those folks to think they were standing up for their homes that everyone else was telling them to leave.
Democrats, better at the Washington-based policy than the small-town connection, will tell you that extending health insurance to these people was the most substantive accomplishment of a generation. But young out-of-work people in dying towns, healthy except for the fact that they’re high, proved not responsive to a mandate to go on a computer and buy subsidized health insurance or pay a penalty on their annual taxes on incomes they didn’t have.
From that culture and perspective, Vance wrote Monday that, as a middle-schooler in a dead Ohio town, he liked Clinton because he identified with his poor and dysfunctional background and admired the way he’d transcended it. But then he was let down that Clinton undid much of that with stereotypically trashy behavior.
Obama came from somewhat similar circumstances but seemed too perfect, and phony, or so thought Vance as a young adult. He waited for the myth of Obama as a strong family man to be destroyed by scandal. But it never remotely was.
Instead, Obama revealed himself over eight years as a good man from whom an upwardly mobile child of despair could truly find hope, even as Vance wished Obama’s health-care plan was different, his foreign policy tougher and his leadership style less cerebrally detached and more engaging.
“It is one of the great failures of recent political history,” Vance wrote Monday, “that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man.”
He wrote that, while he would now look forward to policies he found more agreeable, his “core will feel something different. … I’ll miss him [Obama] and the example he set.”
The nation has a modern history of making antithetical presidential changes — from steady old Eisenhower to bold young Kennedy, from corrupt Nixon to chaste Carter, from the blue-blooded first Bush to the earthy Clinton, from the anti-intellectual second Bush to the thoughtful “no-drama Obama,” and, now, from an admirable man who was cerebrally detached to a loathsome man who will engage you with a wild tweet any moment now.
We’ll see how it goes, there being no alternative.
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.