XPost: alt.home.repair, rec.arts.tv, sac.politics   
   XPost: or.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: X@Y.com   
      
    J.D. Vance's book 'Hillbilly Elegy' was a con job. Don't let it slide   
      
   The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a   
   direct result of the political media’s failure to understand class in   
   America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by   
   many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-   
   overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero.   
      
   Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic   
   victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive   
   moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes   
   to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by   
   economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump’s retrogressive   
   campaign.   
   MILWAUKEE, WI JULY 15, 2024 -- Former US President Donald Trump, left, and   
   J.D. Vance during the first day of the Republican National Convention at   
   Milwaukee, WI on Monday, July 15, 2024. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)   
      
   Politics   
   Trump picks Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author, as running mate   
      
   July 15, 2024   
      
   This distortion, in turn, widened a real divide by alienating many   
   Americans, fueling support for Trump and even veneration of Vance.   
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   Lauded by David Brooks as the interpreter of some mythical “working-class   
   honor code” that could illuminate the motivations of the core Trump voter,   
   Vance was praised in reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post and   
   a host of other publications, and he became the go-to guy on the working-   
   class perspective. CNN hired him as a political pundit.   
      
   This was no better than the “parachute journalism” of upper-middle-class   
   reporters who would visit an Appalachian tavern for one afternoon and then   
   presume to tell the nation what the working class was thinking.   
   Still shot from (and courtesy of) the 2024 documentary "Bad Faith:   
   Christian Nationalism's Unholy War on Democracy." The photo is of an   
   unidentified protester on Jan. 6, 2021, outside the Capitol, where Trump   
   supporters tried to derail Congress as it counted and certified the 2020   
   electoral college results.   
      
   Opinion   
   Column: The once-secretive right-wing ideology emerging as an overt threat   
   to American democracy   
      
   July 14, 2024   
      
   So who actually is the working class? Consistent data has shown that, in   
   the words of the Center for American Progress, “Black, Hispanic, and other   
   workers of color make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-   
   Hispanic white workers comprise the remaining 55 percent. Nearly half of   
   the working class is women, and 8 percent have disabilities.” Media   
   portrayals that equate this group with uneducated white men elide most of   
   the people who actually fit the definition.   
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   A few contemporary reports called out Vance’s misrepresentations and the   
   media’s fallacious thinking. In October 2016, writing for the Guardian,   
   journalist Sarah Smarsh pointed out that exit polls and surveys showed that   
   Trump supporters had a higher median income — $72,000 — than supporters of   
   Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Vance himself, she reported, had been   
   raised in a middle-class household. By ignoring such realities, Smarsh   
   argued, “Media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply   
   an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are   
   dangerous idiots.”   
      
   Another journalist, Elizabeth Catte, also notably called out national media   
   misrepresentations, including in her 2018 book, “What You Are Getting Wrong   
   About Appalachia.” It should have been required reading as a reality check   
   for anyone who heard Vance on TV or read his book.   
      
   A brilliant work like Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir, “Maid,” became the   
   basis of a Netflix series, but even as journalists praised the book, they   
   failed to feature her as a pundit. Kerri Arsenault’s “Mill Town,” a memoir-   
   history of a small town in Maine, was reviewed, but again, her expertise   
   didn’t appear in mainstream political commentary. Worst of all, when   
   historian Steven Stoll’s masterful history of Appalachia, “Ramp Hollow,”   
   was published in 2017, the New York Times allowed Vance himself to review   
   it; he criticized Stoll’s “polemical” views of the market economy and   
   dismissed the author as “earnest.”   
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   The voices of Black historians were largely ignored, because Black voters   
   of a certain kind were being ignored. Historian Blair LM Kelley published   
   “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class” last fall, linking the   
   Black working class to America’s history of slavery. It received scant   
   media attention. Joe William Trotter’s “Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in   
   the Making of America” suffered a similar fate, although it earned academic   
   awards.   
      
   Ironically, before he abandoned his distrust of Trump and joined the right-   
   wing-fringe circus, even Vance thought the media had gotten it wrong in   
   various ways.   
      
   The news media must not fail the working class again. The stakes are too   
   high. Trump has made clear his desire to dismantle the authority of the   
   federal government, turn social policy over to Christian nationalists and   
   take away any regulation of industries that contribute to climate change or   
   that devastate communities and land through extractive practices such as   
   fracking.   
      
   But I’m not optimistic that critics and journalists have learned much since   
   the debacle of 2016.   
      
   When Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “Demon Copperhead” came out in October   
   2022, I described the book’s perspective as pitying toward the people of   
   Appalachia while also intimating that “falling into drug abuse, rejecting   
   education, and ‘clinging’ to their ways are moral choices that keep them in   
   their dire circumstances. Appalachia becomes the region of the damned.”   
      
   But “Demon Copperhead” received near-universal rave reviews and won the   
   Pulitzer Prize for fiction.   
      
   The privileged class learned all the wrong lessons from Vance’s book, if   
   they learned anything from it. I hope more journalists will do better now   
   that he and Trump are headed for the ballot as a package deal.   
      
   Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Eugene, Ore   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)