November 22, 2016
“The classic heartland [‘the Northeast and Middle West’] of American capitalism is now, almost all of it, caught in that self-reinforcing, downward spiral that was thought only a decade ago to be the problem of hill folks.” In Chapter 6 “The United States of Appalachia,” p.184, Decade of Decision: The Crisis of the American System (Touchstone, 1980) by Michael Harrington
My local newspaper here in Central Kentucky recently referred to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and the “memoir’s status as a national cultural touchstone.” In announcing his appearance at the annual Kentucky Book Fair in these terms, the writers in no way were challenging the state and regional connections Vance has highlighted. No, they were extolling the “local boy who has made it” in the nation’s Infotainment Sector. Perhaps the mainstream media reception of the book and the mainstream readers of the book do provide a “touchstone” test of our political culture’s quality and the deep crisis it has generated.
Michael Lind’s 1995 book typologizing national mythologies named our current ideologized “nation” as a multicultural republic. It is a dazzling mainstream stage on which to hide the ugly, dangerous realities of a Financial Elite-led Corporate State bending a pliable liberal-democratic polity to its needs and whims. Global cheap labor and resource markets are tapped at bargain rates for a Global Investor Class. This core process of globalization has been a disaster for our middle and working classes now glimpsing, as infrastructures around them decay, the horizon of Global Serfdom and Climate Catastrophe.
Mark Dudzic and Adolph Reed for several years worked for a Labor Party that would keep these productions off-stage. But the transnational corporate state drama is now upon us and with unprecedented vengeance. As Dudzic argued at First of the Month for August14 in “The Origin of the Species,” “the trope of the angry white working class attempts to extract white workers from these class dynamics and present them as a demonized and marginalized natural group.” Nancy Isenberg’s new book on White Trash provides an important account of the naturalizing, biologistic language of evolutionary decline essential to the class politics so weakly engaged in the political mainstream. Dudzic refers to Reed’s work who observed in his Class Notes (2000) “just how thoroughly racialist thinking…has been naturalized in American life” (140).
This is documented in depth as Racecraft in the 2012 book with that title by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields. The Fields sisters explain why racism is real but “race” is not an idea but an ideology.” Their book offers a brilliant but challenging explanation of why “straightforward talk about class inequality is all but impossible, indeed taboo” in USA. Isenberg pulls the veil off 400 years of trashing the white working class. Her study is clear that ignoring the oppressive class history of poor southern whites is no way to understand their involvement in racism or the elites that dominate the South including its mountain region.
That region is usually called “Appalachia” although it makes little sense to exclude the Ozarks as my memoir in progress will show. Very few of these mountain families don’t have their complex stories of economic migration. J.D. Vance’s bestseller book draws upon his family roots in a Kentucky mountain county. Hillbilly Elegy, he tells the reader, is “about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it” (7). In the next paragraph he is clear he wants to treat the problem or question of agency as “distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America” (ibid.).
Yet a dozen pages later he chooses to comment on an ABC News report (2009) about “Mountain Dew mouth.” If “too much sugary soda” is not a deliberate product of Food, Inc. then what is it? No one familiar with critical studies of food politics would expect ABC to even mention this. Two pages later he refers to the “many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.”
So this is how Vance leads us into the story of ARMCO Steel’s creation of Middletown as its company town. Actually this is the ideological bog of culturalism into which the reader is expected to follow. (More on this later). One of the book’s reviewers commented that Vance is “aware” of what happened to Middletown, Ohio. How could anyone growing up in that de-industrialized rust belt town not be aware of such a development? ARMCO’s 1986 moves to undermine the United Steelworkers of America is not ancient history. “Being aware” does not necessarily imply or carry a critical, analytical account. The question for the reader must be what do we get in its absence?
By the time we get to Chapter 9 he is telling us how he became an “amateur sociologist.” But his learning at Dillman’s grocery store about “America’s class divide” brings his resentment “toward both the wealthy and my own kind” (139). Gaming the welfare system is his problem with the latter. Two chapters later his references to sociology and psychology heighten the puzzle as to why the human experiences he recounts in bloody detail seem so distant from that economic landscape that is also a hierarchical field of power and inseparable from issues of inequality and justice.
Why the blindness? There may be a clue in Vance’s description of the version of patriotism he learned. J.D. says “Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth” (190). In fact he drew upon this for a Washington Post op ed that was picked up and printed July 30 by the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette-Mail “How the White Working Class Lost its Patriotism.” The book offers no hint of the price paid for that ticket, for that weak little candle that never lit up much of history and politics. There is no connecting this flickering light with all its leaping shadows of mistrust, alienation, and fear with the political isolation and vulnerability of the white working class. Ending the chapter describing his “optimism,” we begin to wonder if Joel Osteen is not about to walk on stage with his prosperity gospel.
J.D. knew that wouldn’t go over at Yale Law School. Chapter 13 offers insights into the confluence of ambition, opportunity, mobility and that unfathomable mystery “American meritocracy.” Nevertheless, we are advised that “upward-mobility is never clean-cut” (237) and our escape may still have its nightmares.
Hillbilly Elegy’s subtitle is “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” A back cover blurb from a National Review editor claims that while it is about a “forgotten corner” of USA it is an amazing explanation of the rage of “America’s working-class whites.” The editor certainly is not implying that the book has been written for a regional protest movement. I also think he knows the most likely audience for the book itself. Indeed Vance’s book in my view exemplifies what Philip Mirowski’s formidable study of neoliberalism calls the “modern privatization of protest.”
The question arose in my initial reading this summer whether the book’s internal evidence suggested that the manuscript’s marketing began even before it was finished. Since the book’s publication there have been many confused readings and reviews. My question now carries more than a whiff of tragedy. If the book’s ideological genealogy is so difficult to decipher it must relate to the neoliberal identity politics that hindered the political discourse sought by Senator Sanders and obscured by Trump’s demagoguery. Sometimes these problems merely multiply the political detours pointing to depoliticization endorsed daily by neoliberalism.
Vance identifies 3 mentors, networkers, or heroes at .pp217-221 (see also 259). Yale law professor Amy Chua stands out along with David Frum and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.
I’ve implored friends to check them out and to start with the bestseller that swept the corporate state mainstream awhile back called The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Doing this will help understand the back cover blurb by a wealthy hedge funder named Peter Thiel who advises prospective readers that there are no “academic abstractions” here. Then you can wonder who the “elites” are Thiel says “tend to see our social crisis in terms of ‘stagnation’ or `inequality’”!
For a long time, the old white men of Big Business have tried to trade in this cult of experience that hides their own second-rate theories which permit only certain “facts” selectively ordered. It reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon where several of them are standing in a New Jersey field because one has seen the Free Market’s “Invisible Hand.” Never mind the odor of Ayn Rand’s cigarette smoke sometimes hovering over the experience.
The model for Vance’s book is that Tiger Mother/tough love bestseller by his Yale Law mentor Amy Chua. His Tiger Mamaw is given an ideological home on the Right with Governor Daniels, the National Review crew, and the billionaire for whom he now works. The New York Times reviewer Jennifer Senior was on cue in her August 10, 2016 piece that proclaimed the book offers “a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump.”
In late August Vance gave a telephone interview to Dan Sewell of the Associated Press. To Sewell he said: If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay…then not as many people would pay attention to it because they would assume I was just another academic spouting off, and not someone who’s looked at these problems in a very personal way.” Besides an anti-intellectualism which belongs to the Right, there are other things going on here. When Vance invokes his “very personal way,” he appeals to a popular but mistaken American notion of “authenticity” that includes evasion of any writer’s intellectual responsibility. Decades ago, Albert Camus said it simply: “Freedom is the right not to lie.” Vance’s “way” is not able to conceal the neo-liberal individualist core to his thinking where it converges with marketing strategy. Sadly, some reviewers and commentators don’t ask what his political philosophy is. Perhaps this is because they generally agree with how he explains himself, for example, when “welfare” or “alcohol” come up.
Vance’s “very personal way” of presenting his story is a hook that works with some readers in the Appalachian region and elsewhere. In the neoliberal framework selling a book and selling a car with corporate ads are comparable enterprises and readers are no more passive in the process than car buyers. If we examine this bestseller from the reader’s side we get a fuller view of its political significance in this society besieged like few others by neoliberal capitalism. Some readers are approaching it as a more serious form of “infotainment.” But what this means is that they have fallen into the traps it sets.
These system traps are longstanding sub-ideologies of subjectivism and culturalism promoting the neoliberal illusion of the market. Academic criticisms of the book as another example of the victim-blaming theory of the “culture of poverty” do not go deep enough. The ecological threat of the corporate state entails a way of life configured by its disastrous dualisms that silence nature and darken the intrinsic visibility of the world. It is in this context that nature is prepared for domination or what is called “modernization.” The hillbilly icon is an otherizing tool for discrediting one allegedly “primitive”group supposedly standing in the way. But the hillbilly icon also works as a toggle switch that in the larger culture rationalizes the destruction of place and the primacy of economic (commodified) space. This is why educational institutions in resource extraction regions are highly pressured to keep the Political out of what is passed off as “culture.”
In Recovering the Commons, Betsy Taylor and I argue that our corporate state’s dualist horizons don’t just operate in the field of power; they are crucial for its maintenance. Selected American prejudices such as feeling vs. intellect reinforced by capitalism are recast in the “consumer culture” constructed by the corporate state. The corporate state wants us to confuse it with “democracy.” But it is hardly that since it does not engage citizens so much as produce and maintain consumers. Both the dualism of “reason and emotion” and the hillbilly icon become toggle switches in the culture some of us wish was exempt from illicit power’s influence without our effort.
Alas, this toggling process of corporate consumer “culture” uses these traditional mainstream prejudices or dualisms to insert a corporatized “we” into everyday and intimate life practices in ways that enclose or obscure the commons we share and privatize care itself. That is why serious political thinking and action have to include what we call “de-toggling” ourselves from the consumption dreamworlds essential to the corporate state.
A refugee from both Appalachia and the Rust Belt, Vance takes as given the “modernization is inevitable” talk in the elite narrative of corporate globalization. But the romanticization of “culture” in the field of Appalachian Studies has the same effect. On AppalNet, the association’s site open to anyone interested in the region, the excellent climate change posts get much less discussion than hillbilly stereotypes. “Culture” becomes a way of not talking about political economy. Stereotypes are split off from sweatshops and the global jobs crisis. And yet at the first Appalachian Studies meeting in March of 1978, John Gaventa gave a paper posing the political challenge: It was called “Which Side are We On?: Appalachian Inequality in the Appalachian Studies Industry.” This challenge still resonates for many in the field. But it is also regularly undercut by the identitarian functions typical of the ethnic movements that came out of the 1970s.
In the Journal of Appalachian Studies for 2002, Taylor and I argued that the ideology of culturalism operated in the field to block critical regionalism and democratic professionalism. To celebrate difference, while acquiescing in its political impotence and irrelevance, is to turn regionalism over to the powers that be. Nevertheless, as Adolph Reed keeps insisting, identity politics is a class politics. However, culturalism is by no means the whole story in Appalachian studies. The field has always had an unusual number of scholar-activists working to help strengthen several durable civil society organizations seeking for regional communities a just transition to a post-carbon future. Highlander Center in the hills of Tennessee symbolizes this modern history of democratic struggles for justice.
J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is one more “tough love” tale of how the only way up is capitalist individualism disguised as the “American Way.” At the altar of the market-machine God, Appalachians are said to have failed because they refuse to put on the robe of the Competitive Directive serving the Free Market. They are not told that the price of this ticket to class mobility is denying reality to others, their brothers and sisters “choosing” to remain “White Trash.” Yet some of us keep hearing from the region’s young and old something quite different. It is that we all come from the clay of the earth and the sense of our places and landscapes. We will have a habitable world when we have learned to live into our world-in-common a sacrament of coexistence. It is past time to forge a new politics in these terms.
