"White Trash" Historian Nancy Isenberg on J.D. Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy" & Class in America

A self made man is about as likely as a self laid egg. Mark Twain

The billionaire class views everyone who isn't them as dispensable.

72 year old Southerner here- I always heard “poor white trash” used to describe poor who were perceived as lazy and probably a little criminal. The “poor” could be hard working, honest people and would not be referred to as “trash”.

It’s not just the US tho, the entire human race is divided by how much you have no matter where.

Poor vs. Poor for a slice of the Pie has always been the strategy of the Rulers.

Vance was not chosen for Youth, Vance was chosen because of the support of The Heritage Foundation and the Money of Peter Thiel.

Meritocracy is an illusion. The rich live in isolated circles, get the best jobs handed to them sight unseen. They inhabit all of the positions of power. It is a rarity when a poor person breaks out of their class. The only way to move up is to suck up or attach to a person in the upper classes. Your chances of success at this are better if you attach to someone that also came from modest means. Old money rarely lets you in. JD Vance having connected with Thiel was handed high positions with no qualifications. For most poor people this scenario is unlikely. Most grow up never escaping their class level.

Part of the problem is that urban poor has been made more visible than rural poor

I grew up in a one-room shack and was dirt-floor poor. My dad was a WW2 disabled veteran and I barely graduated from high school. I went into the Navy in 1962 and used my GI benefits to attend college, and just like Vance, I attended law school and practiced law in Florida for 30 years. What many people fail to realize is that hundreds of thousands of us weren't born with silver spoons in our mouths, all we had was a nation that allowed us Hillbillys to achieve success. Merica

Hello!! "Hillbilly Elegy" was written in 2016 when Vance was a Trump hater... So yeah, it was praised by Liberals.

The idea that it’s black or white, right or left, up or down is where we can get caught. We’re all different. Some billionaires are despicable in their treatment of others some are not. There are so many in between cases in everything. We need to recognise our commonality and humanity. Stop blaming one or the other. America needs to wake up and see themselves as citizens of the world not apart from it like they tend to. Work together is the goal

"Thinking themselves wise, they became fools."

It has always been class.....so race is used to distract the victims of class.

He doesn't talk about self-made man at all in that book. He constantly references the help that he receives. She needs to reread the book.

My maternal grandmother used to call them "hillikins." Never mind that she and my grandfather were dirt poor. They lived until they died in a house with no internal plumbing. No bathroom, no kitchen faucets, no indoors toilets. Chamber pots and outhouses. Not all of my aunts and uncles lived this way, but one set of them did. My mother wanted desperately to put that life behind her. My sister and I adored our grandparents. It never occurred to us that living in a house with no indoor plumbing meant they were very poor. They lived in central Ohio, btw. They both had English ancestors who had come here close to the days of the Mayflower, etc. But my grandmother could look down on the hillbillies from Kentucky and Tennessee, people living in the Ozarks.

There was also back room wheeling and dealing, because his "out of nowhere", "meteoric" political trajectory was bank rolled by billionaire backer Peter Thiel, who he used to work for and funded his senate campaign, as well as other wealthy associates he made while working in venture capital, that basically made very strong suggestions that Vance was the "best" pick for VP. You can bet they're backing him because, they already own him, and he's happy to help them rig the game, not because of his "white trash" humble origin story, or his pretending to be interested in helping average working class people. He's simply a smarter, better liar than Swampy, with the added benefit of the common man origin story, and of course much younger, who they hope to position for even greater long term benefits for their autocratic dreams.

Rich people are awful around the world.

It's absolutely class warfare at this point.

I agree with the professor that Vance's best selling point is its youth. People are tired of 82- and 78-year-old men running for president. He is advertised as the best representative of the rural white poor class who can rise from poverty and reach greatness.

Perhaps America's problem is the educated urban elites and inability to understand anyone outside of their own group.