It's hard to imagine the author, a Appalachian hillbilly, Iraq veteran, and Yale law alum as the same person that is a barely more accurate sniper away from the presidency. This book is a soul-searching, human, honest and sometimes beautifully written look at the struggle of a large Trump-voting segment of America's poor and the reasons for their struggle as something more complex and more culturally situated than a simplistic explanation of dwindling job opportunities, closing coal mines or steel mills. While he begins by explaining that the book's purpose is not research, the comparisons to Detroit's black population and other segments of America rushes with understanding and, possibly, empathy. In his re-telling, frustration at a classmate's characterization of Iraq war vets as uneducated ne'er-do-wells is driven by the care with which he observed local customs (as much as we know that not to be the general case). Aside from the humanity that the book conveys, it might also explain his tolerance of current White House dysfunction, but not his hostile views toward academia (other than a convenient band-wagon boarding politically-motivated anti-establishment angle, or that, as he says, "I am a tall, white, straight male. I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale." Maybe we've misread his views as something other than a lashing out against intact, relatively well off families on behalf of Middletown). He tells the story of meeting a woman wearing a Yale sweater at a gas station. He lies to her about attending Yale law as a "pathetic attempt at cultural defiance." While the encounter was relevant enough to recount, his views then seem to have stuck. How relatable is he as VP?
What's strange is that he seems to bemoan the lack of central figures like the 'brilliant' Barack Obama, causes like the space race, strong combat personnel like George S. Patton, but, since then, has attached himself to what consensus among serious human beings and future historians will, without any doubt, view as one of the most damaging (and less puzzling in hindsight, I'm hoping) causes in American history. It's hard to imagine the author's work since this book to be anything but the result of as-yet-undetected head trauma.
He does a commendable job of explaining the dissonance between Middletown folks and Barack Obama, why they suspect him of being foreign born or having Muslim ties. His language, brilliance, credentials, Ivy League pedigree, career in the great metropolis of Chicago, each contribute to greater distance and inability to understand for Middletownians. "The modern meritocracy was not built for them." He even lists various conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories that help to explain the mindset of small town folks rather than ideas to be entertained. I thought "if only more Trumpers read this book" more than once.
"Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family."
"But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.”"
"When I was 16, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so." Losers and suckers.
One of the more heart-wrenching accounts is toward the end of the book where he uses the story of 'Brian's' mother's death to describe the personal cost of survival for the poor: "He hadn’t lived with her in years, so outsiders might imagine that her death was easier to bear. Those folks are wrong. People like Brian and me don’t lose contact with our parents because we don’t care; we lose contact with them to survive. We never stop loving, and we never lose hope that our loved ones will change. Rather, we are forced, either by wisdom or by the law, to take the path of self-preservation."
As a late addition to these notes, the Atlantic published an article title "The Talented Mr. Vance" that begins with a description of J. D. Vance's turn, hard right, as the moderate middle road seems to have entirely vaporized in the last decade: "In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance."
And:
"With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe."