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-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)