Above photo: Maddie McGarvey/ New York Times.
The Class Antidote to Hillbilly Elegy.
40-year-old Ohio native JD Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy shows us the misery, but ignores the source.
NOTE: This is the fourth installment in a weekly series by Professor Danny Shaw. Read Part I here, Part II here and Part III here.
The poor boy didn’t forget where he came; He never knew to begin with. Vast structures of violence and poverty have our mothers, sisters and daughters trapped in a vortex of abuse and low self-esteem. We are not junkies, winos or bums; We are fighters and survivors. Vance is all image, no heart. Vance is all Hollywood, no Middletown. Vance is venture capital, not steel. The GOP brass used Vance’s story as their own antidote to the pandemic of early deaths ravaging our families.
Sellin’ Our Souls
Quite naturally, the rich would prop up a fake. Black America has their uncle Toms and Latinos have their vendepatrias; We too have our booklickers and asskissers. The bootstrapper-extraordinaire, Vance, laments his own individual memories but ignores a society that has produced millions of us survivors. Unfortunately, Yale and the mega billionaire Peter Thiel‘s firm, Mithril Capital didn’t have room for all of us, just sellouts like Vance willing to abandon the rest of us behind in Kentucky, West Virginia and across Appalachia! The ruling class flexes its handful of rags-to-riches stories to impress upon us that there is room for millions of Vances in their board rooms, firms and Oval Offices. Lies! Vance like all the corporate politicians sold us out, using his own elegy to gloss over ours. Anyone who would use his own trauma to consolidate a traumatizing system is a careerist and opportunist. Vance is not welcome in Jackson, Eastern Kentucky, Middletown Northern Ohio nor Brockton, Southern Massachusetts. We the American people don’t need artificially elevated celebrities; We need friends. We don’t need egos; We need jobs. The only melancholic and heartwarming redneck, hillbilly or poor white trash elegy we need is one that grants us a fair, peaceful place under God’s great sun.
How can you cancel the canceled? Long ago, we were canceled. Politicians only care about us every four years when they need to cash in our unenlightenment. We are out of sight and out of mind for most of America. Exiled in our own land, we make common cause with the most dastardly of enemies, who most of the time hate us as well. As the 1677 Bacon’s Rebellion and 1787 Shay’s Rebellion showed us, the aristocracy’s worst fear is that we unite with the red man and the black man on the basis of our common impoverishment. And it was then, at this historical moment when we made common cause with our fellow man that our overlords rechristened us as “white.” De jure laws written into the Virginia colony are the first time the word “white” appears on the law books as a social category enshrined as superior to other “racial groups.” “Whiteness” became the psychological mechanism to wed us to our czars and emperors and divorce us from our fellow man. Three centuries later we continue to take the bait.
Shunned and canceled as “deplorables,” the offensive poor white trash has no liberal baggage to shed. For we were born dispossessed and disposed of long ago. Our wrath and lack of horizons are inherently illiberal. Our fate is unknown.
We are Joe Biden‘s “garbage” people. We have no political home. Nobody wants us. Not the jackass or the elephant. We are only good for our votes and many of us cannot even organize ourselves to do that. We are the defuturized, the disaffected and the spiritually homeless.
The liberals high five for Hillary, Kamala, Joe, Bill, Barack and Michelle. The poor whites’ only wish is to spit in their fake faces and call them by their true first names, “fakes and bitches.” My family members’ words are offensive but at least they are real. It is telling that the very way we speak causes outrage among the upper strata. Has anything changed in history? The Politics of Resentment by political scientist Katherine Cramer examines the anger among working-class families across Wisconsin at “being looked down upon by the big-city elites in Madison.” Working-class chauvinism, pride in making due with no outside help, is not just a concept, but a way of being.
“Rich Men North of Richmond”
Former factory worker Oliver Anthony wrote our 2023 national anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The Farmville, Virginia, native whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford speaks for all of us with his opening lyrics:
I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away.
It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten toFor people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is.
Although the song reached over 200 million people, the woke twitterati expressed nothing but disgust for Oliver Anthony’s work. They hyper-focused on one line:
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re five-foot-three and you’re three-hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down
One “offending” line spurred phalanxes of commentators to condemn “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The liberal loses sight of the forest because of one “bad” or misunderstood tree. His line about Americans “milking welfare” pushed all the liberal buttons. They denounced this rare, algorithm-solving, working-class hero as “fat phobic” and other non-politically-correct labels. Anthony’s popular outrage sparked other anthems like “Poor Men South of Portland” by Jon Reep. But because we are not perfect enough for the liberals and do not express things like them, they cancel us and our anthems. The poor white does not have the benefit of a dialectical materialist bird’s eye view of class society and its infinite contradictions. Yes, we get it wrong sometimes. In the trenches and on the shop floor, it behooves us to have thick skin or we will annihilate one another as the banksters laugh all the way to D.C., just north of Richmond. It is true that “the obese” are just as much victims and survivors of this moribund, late capitalist society as the anorexic, the cutters and the fentanyl fiends. It is true. We have swallowed tropes about “black welfare queens” and “lazy Puerto Rican families exploiting the system.” Does that make us “chuds” and “incels,” two derogatory words used by Compact Magazine to describe Oliver? Yet Oliver was clear on where he stands and who his enemies are, stating: ““It’s aggravating to see people on conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them.”
No one from the working class is going to be a ready-made, flawless cadre of the revolution. Malcolm X cautions us against judging and canceling others: “There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.” Is canceling us and dismissing us the way forward or is it counterproductive? Is there no way to meet us halfway? Are these petty bourgeois forces in firm control of the left interested in forming a true working-class army? History has proven that only real, everyday struggle can unite us and wash away these distant tertiary contradictions that exist among the people.
We are not the problem. The problem is that dialectics are the kryptonite of liberals.
‘The Most Dangerous Thing in the Western Hemisphere’
At Harvard University, which costs an average of $76,763 to attend, in 2016, 91 percent of faculty donations went to Hillary Clinton. 80 percent of Harvard students vote for the Democratic Party and 6 percent for the Republicans. How could it be that the flyover states see the world so differently and vote the polar opposite way?
The “cultured” vs the uncouth
The snooty vs the real
Behold the
Salt of the Earth
Breaking balls
over sarcasm and beer
No airs
Humble as dirt
A man’s man
A woman’s woman
A guy’s guy
A gal’s gal
…..
Balls to the wall
To the radlib, I am nothing beyond my appearance, “a white cis male.” To the liberal, it is of little consequence that my siblings, cousins and I have picked up three generations of our loved ones from the callous concrete, overdosed and discarded. No amount of generational trauma undoes our “whiteness,” “cis-ness” and “toxic and hyper masculinity.” To those who peddle in virtuousness, our “deplorable-ness” is unforgivable. Poverty was our birthright; abandon, our middle name. We speak a language unintelligible to the liberal, the dialect of survival. We are as alien and offensive to one another as foxes are to chickens. All your arrogance and guilt are foreign to us. We have too little to feel guilt. You want attention and validation; we want survival and dignity.
This is why Malcolm called liberals “the most dangerous thing in the Western hemisphere.” They do not act out of conviction; they act out of convenience. They think so highly of themselves and what they perceive as their uprightness that they frame themselves as part of the solution. They deplore the deplorables, but do not question the deplorable social, cultural and economic conditions that give birth to us.
The liberal white is a most excitable creature. He is fully capable of ignoring all the poor whites’ obnoxious cries for help — the school shootings, the overdoses, the xenophobia, the hate crimes — but the moment the poor white scapegoats the fleeing Mexican or the refugized Somalian, they make a PBS news special about us. That is the only time we are worthy of any sociological attention. How strikingly similar to how the Southern historians describe us as pursuing nothing but black death for the span of American history. Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels urge us to question: Which class would have a material interest in narrowly focusing on the worst of our attributes and actions? Is it fair to think that at no point we poor whites pursued our own collective goals? Has it occurred to anyone that the liberals’ disdain for the working American plays right into the hands of the billionaires?
And here we are, under the liberals’ microscope, a petri dish of immiserated whites run afoul.
We carry out our executions in circles, the puppet master dangling the strings from above and beyond. We are preoccupied with every type of alien, except the one with the knife in our neck.
Liberals enjoy nothing more than making fun of Donald Trump and his lack of enlightenment. Trump’s racist and asinine comments are more devastating for the liberal than the ten Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombs dropped over the Gaza Reservation. Complaining and fretting is their pastime. At no point do they take responsibility for having rubbed this white supremacist genie warmly out of his bottle. It is your neglect, your deindustrialization and your forked tongue that abandoned the other white America to the MAGA movement. You turned your back on us yesterday! Today you have no right to rebuke and mock us! The sleek liberal politician never offered us anything but despises our decisions in a decisionless world.
The racist conservatives mislead us equally successfully, but that is their job and they are more honest about it. The wolf in the grass pretends to be nothing other than the ravenous beast that he is. The liberal fox and snakes in the grass double deal in passive aggression.
We are a resentful breed, hellbent on leveling the American playing field.
PTSD
We are the 9-year-old bedwetters. We are the 10-year-olds who smear our shit all over the walls, screaming for help but never heard. We are the sexually condemned. We are the generationally doomed.
Trauma is not being seen and not being heard.
Our fathers are torches in the street and darkness at home. Our mothers are survival, personified. We had “step fathers” and new boyfriends that mom brought over for a holiday. They were like Christmas presents, they came and went with the season. We asked our moms, mas, and mamas once after decades: “What percentage of your existence has been survival? What percentage has been living?” “80-90 percent survival and 10–20 percent living my son” was the most common response. We carry the legacy of single mothers who taught us: “Fight through the tough moments, savor the rest.” Our fathers were so busy chasing manhood and dopamine, the corners and alleyways raised us.
We are the children sexually abused by uncles, basketball coaches and priests. We are the latchkey kids who fall asleep in first and eighth period. Read our medical files. We were robbed of a chance before we were conscious of what life was. Instead of listening to our truths, you label us as ADHD, anxious and autistic. Everyday your psychiatrists and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have fresh diagnoses and fresh pills for us. We are the little wanderers you see at the Welfare and Food Stamp offices. Social workers, guidance counselors and doctors collect their six digit salaries, building up our files without ever questioning the roots of our trauma. Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD), Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) and Social Communication Disorder (SCD) are your latest diagnoses. How much easier is it to label us than to take a hard, non-liberal look at the social forces that hatched us? “Special Education” for us was always an empty, high-falutin euphemism for the special violence delivered onto us. Physical, mental, emotional and sexual violence were our families legacies, dating back to Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool. We and our siblings were called “idiots,” “assholes” and “retards” so much, it was more common than being called Mikey, Danny or Greg. We strike first and ask questions later. The violence you deposited in our being and the hatred you surrounded us with now comes home to roost from Columbine, to New Orleans to Las Vegas.
For some of us, it was a baptism by fire, for others it was baptism by incest.
We were told it was our fault. We were told not to tell anybody. We were told we were dirty. We discovered we were only as unhealthy as our secrets.
We were Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”), full of aggression and self-hatred lashing out at everyone around us. Very few of us in real life had a therapist like Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams) to tell us, “It’s not your fault.” If ever in cinematic history, there were four words that speak to us, it was those spoken by one of the world’s most beloved artists and actors.
We trust no one. We internalized your sins, never to be spoken of again. The alcohol and the crystal meth dredged up more truths than any social worker or sexual education class. We wandered the halls of your schools, DYS offices and the homeless shelters, the guardians of the greatest secrets. Here within these cold stares and heavy left hooks, are secrets no one dares to utter. We bear secrets you would not even dare to place on the shoulders of gods. You guarded all your secrets right here within us. We are a well-balanced breed. We carry a chip the size of the mighty Redwoods on both shoulders. We are the precise accumulation of all your transgressions. Like Chris Herren, our heart and heartlessness are unprotected and “Unguarded.” We are the survivors of your cowardice and broken system. It is true that most of us do not know anything other than your racist tropes about Haiti or Palestine. And what we know least of all, is that we have an eternal Palestinian and Haitian flame burning within. It is only the discovery and organization of that blaze that breathes revolutionary optimism into future global winds…
We Don’t Need Your white Saviors
Bussing inner-city children out of the ghetto and into the suburbs brings the liberal unadulterated elation. He is liberating another child for the capitalist journey, all the while ignoring the nefarious social terrain upon which we seek to eke out an existence. In his house of mirrors, the progressive fashions himself the most advanced of his species. Masters of niceties and pleasantries, the liberals roll out the red carpet of identity politics for all to apply. Except the poor whites. For they are identityless. Despotic. Hopeless. Barren. The embarrassment of the nation. They search in the liberals’ soul for scraps of sustenance and find denial. Terminally online, our children search for belonging in a cesspool of algorithm-reinforced fear and identity narcissism. Too craven and uncritical to dig deeper, liberal parents embrace the dogmas of pharmaceutical companies and government agencies.
Before the liberal’s affirmative actions programs, the poor white anxiously opens up an envelope with a bad check.
Liberals are all-knowing, ignoring the alienation they’ve contributed to creating.
The liberal needs to be needed. This is colloquially referred to as “the white savior complex.” They are the perennial missionaries, gallivanting across the globe with their Bibles and Ford Foundation grants. They promise the “uneducated” and “backward” natives of Bangladesh and Haiti that they will send them aid, but only if they adopt foreign priorities. They define the human rights of Nigerians and Chinese, and the humanitarian causes most deserving of attention.
You poisoned us. Your heroes are John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama and Ellen. Our mentors were alcoholics, womanizers and child molesters.
Many of us have unknowingly made mistakes that stem from liberalism. But most of our sins are of the illiberal variety. It is ok. We learn as we go. Unless we were born and raised in an alternate communist universe, it is inevitable that we internalize liberal ideology. The ruling class would not be the ruling class if they did not have full or close-to-full ideological control over us. And as the screws tighten on the Gaza coffin, they fasten the bolts of Western democracy.
The sons of Bacon’s Rebellion, the daughters of Shay’s Rebellion: only those who are not invested in the system can step outside of it, question it and turn on it. Malcolm X offered up his antidote to white liberal hegemony. His name was John Brown.
John Brown, rifle and torch in hand, burned down every liberal illusion, reminding his rivals, haters and enemies: “These men are all talk. What we need is action — action!”
Notes:
Vendepatria in Spanish means sellout, as in one who sells their homeland.
There are now arguments emerging that Bacon’s Rebellion aimed to wipe the Rappahannock and the Pamunkey native people off the map. Local historians also confirm that the settler violence was against the Doeg and Susquehannocks peoples. This “evidence” which has just recently emerged also made me question what class forces would benefit from discrediting the quintessential story of multiracial class rebellion in America?
A chud is a man who holds sociopolitical views seen as reactionary and there are strong connotations of being an incel with low emotional intelligence. An incel is an involuntary celibate or living in the state of being not sexually active despite wishing to be.
Susan Guillory. “Harvard University Tuition and Fees.”
Harvard’s Class Gap,” Harvard Magazine, April 2017.
Chughtai, Alia and Muhammet Okur. Al Jazeera. “One year of Israel’s war on Gaza.” October 8, 2024. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
See my article “Snakes in the Grass: The Fake Left, the 2024 Elections and Identity Politics” for more on who is the more effective danger in the U.S., the Democrats or Republicans?
The Grayzone, “US Plot to Destabilize Bangladesh Exposed,” The Grayzone, September 30, 2024.