A hillbilly’s plea to the white working class

By Amanda Erickson

Amanda Erickson?is an assistant editor of Outlook.

In recent months, J.D. Vance has become a spokesman for the white working class, explaining why many of his “hillbilly” friends will vote for Trump but why he won’t. “These people — my people — are really struggling,” he said in a recent American Conservative interview. “And there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.”

In his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” the politically conservative Vance focuses more on the personal than the polemic. Still, he wants people to understand something he learned “only recently — that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of a life we left behind continue to chase us.” For those who never achieved it at all, the demons — the anger, the depression and more — are hard to shake off. Trump, Vance said in the interview, taps into that. “His apocalyptic tone,” he said, “matches their lived experiences on the ground.”

Vance grew up in what his memoir describes as “an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” His mother struggled with addiction; he was raised by his grandparents, neither of whom graduated from high school.

“The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.” Vance himself nearly failed out of high school.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-hillbillys-plea-to-the-white-working-class/2016/08/04/5c1a7a56-51ca-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1