00:02:36.520All with kind words to say about Hillbilly Elegy.0.95
00:02:40.680That's worth noting because this is a book that maligns poor people.
00:02:46.220It's a book with very weird racial politics.
00:02:49.100So I want to pull some of these themes out,
00:02:51.780but also just talk about how and why this stuff gets laundered for mainstream consumption.
00:02:57.080And why this was such a hit with liberals.
00:03:00.200It's the weird like self-flagellation industrial complex.
00:03:03.960You know, the old quote that a liberal is someone who's too fair-minded to take his own side in an argument.
00:03:10.260It's like something about the sort of, I guess, over-analytical, centrist, relatively well-off liberals that it's like we have to understand this.
00:03:19.720And like basically keep digging until you find something sympathetic, which as a philosophical principle, I think is really good.
00:03:26.780right, being generous, being fair. But also when that is not matched by any similar impulse on the
00:03:33.640other side, what you basically have is an entire media where it's like the conservatives are
00:03:39.360bashing liberals and liberals are bashing liberals. Yeah, I think that's right. And I also
00:03:43.500think that another component of that is that when someone like Vance comes along and offers a
00:03:50.780criticism of like his own people, liberals eat that up because to them it seems like very thoughtful
00:03:56.580like right almost like self-critical and they're like oh this is fascinating this is a man who is
00:04:01.120reflecting on his own culture this is like when there's a like black conservative who's like
00:04:07.600the left is making too big of a deal about race these days and conservatives immediately elevate0.80
00:04:12.280them to like every talk show they should have put candace owens on the cover of this to give
00:04:16.500you the typology meemaw and my bootstraps so i will do my best to give you the the basic narrative
00:04:22.020here and you know we're not gonna spend too much time talking about the narrative itself but i
00:06:50.960And from there, he goes to Yale Law School.
00:06:53.980And there are just countless tedious anecdotes about all the ways in which he's not accustomed to fancy things.
00:07:00.320He's gawking at how clean the wine glasses are at cocktail receptions, how much silverware there is at nice restaurants.
00:07:08.300he spits out sparkling water because he didn't realize what it was and had never heard of it0.96
00:07:13.640some of this feels fake we all saw titanic there's a whole fucking thing about the silverware in0.97
00:07:19.080there that's like the the poor kid who doesn't understand upper crust society like starter pack0.97
00:07:24.920so by the end of the book he's lost any remnants of his folksy charm because like he is an elite
00:07:31.320at the end of the book by every material metric right yeah but he's still trying to do the same
00:07:35.440schtick. So it's like, I'm just a simple country boy from Ohio. How would I know which senator to
00:07:41.140work for? And it's like, I'm supposed to relate to this somehow. These kinds of political memoirs
00:07:45.900always have to kind of lie about their own level of ambition. Right. Because if you end up going
00:07:50.900to Yale, like you really wanted to go, which there's nothing wrong with that. But it's like
00:07:55.880in these books, I feel like they usually have to present these entrants to elite institutions as
00:08:01.480like something that just happens to you. Right. It's interesting because in the book,
00:08:05.900he's writing himself as if he literally stumbles into Yale Law. Right. And it's sort of like,
00:08:09.780I don't know, as someone who went through the law school application process, you didn't stumble
00:08:14.700your way into Yale Law. You worked insanely hard in college. You tried very hard on the LSAT. Right.
00:08:20.840He sort of will mention as he's getting older, like, oh, I took a job for this state senator.
00:08:26.320Yeah. He's sort of like acting as if he was just like, you know, taking a job so we can get by. But
00:08:30.880No, he's climbing up the political ladder so that he could build his way to this very moment when he's publishing this book trying to get popular so that he can eventually run for office.
00:08:41.360Oh, my God. It's like a Julia and Julia where the end of the movie is Amy Adams getting a call from Nora Ephron wanting to turn her book into a movie.
00:08:51.460So, like, what you've just watched is the final chapter of her arc.
00:10:29.660As an Acela Corridor guy, I do laugh at people like this.
00:10:33.760When I was 16, I vowed to always immediately assault any veteran that I saw.
00:10:38.220I keep a stack of small American flags with me at all times so I can burn them
00:10:42.160on the Acela Corridor in case I see anybody in uniform.
00:10:45.660So the biggest issue with this book is the way that Vance talks about poverty.
00:10:52.040One of the first things that he does is lay out his thesis about the people of Appalachia.
00:10:58.540He says that many people believe that the problems in the region stem from the lack of economic opportunity.
00:11:04.940He says that's part of it, but it actually gets the real problem backwards.
00:11:08.680The real problem is a decaying culture, which in turn creates or worsens poverty.
00:11:14.340He tells the story of working in a warehouse where there is a worker who was chronically late and would take multiple very long breaks every day.
00:11:23.980When the guy is fired, he lashes out at the boss saying, like, how could you do this to me?0.88
00:11:29.360Vance says that this experience taught him that the problems with the region, quote, run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy and that there are, quote, too many young men immune to hard work.
00:11:41.800I thought there were all kinds of statistics about social mobility in the United States,
00:11:45.560but it turns out that a lazy guy got fired and was mad about it.
00:15:43.980If we're building U.S. policy around, like, the cultural malignancy of certain societal groups, I would like to start at, like, the country clubs and work our way down.
00:19:01.440He basically says in so many words, racism is real. I'm not saying it's not real, but I want to talk about a kind of poverty that is experienced by white people. Right. And if you look at just the book, there's not much more than that.0.98
00:19:18.360But if you look at some of his other work, there are times when he trots out white poverty as sort of like a defense against claims of discrimination.0.55
00:19:30.140Right. Right. There are poor white people, too. So the relative poverty of black people isn't proof of anything.0.66
00:19:37.680That's like my favorite response to police brutality accusations that it's like, look, they shot this white guy.0.79
00:19:44.960Right. Like, I'm not owned by this at all.
00:19:51.300Vance does hedge quite a bit. He will say, like, look, we can't discount systemic issues that cause poverty. Right.
00:19:59.460I think that he's basically doing that to maintain an appropriate level of deniability.
00:20:04.800Right. Because he never dives into that meaningfully. It's always just sort of a disclaimer.
00:20:11.060Right. But of course, the primary thesis of the book, I mean, it's called a memoir of a family and culture in crisis. Right. Right. It's not called, you know, memoir of a region that has been systematically separated from the wealth of the rest of the country.
00:20:28.700It's also very funny because if you were looking at a foreign country and you saw like there's a really poor region of like Peru or something and someone told you that like there used to be all these mines where they employed a bunch of people and then all of those employers have like shut down and there's far fewer jobs.
00:20:44.460You'd be like, oh, well, yeah, that's probably why there's so much unemployment there.
00:20:51.180I mean, I think he has sort of like a combination of explanations.
00:20:54.160Yeah. One of them is a very bizarre ethnic explanation where he says that like the region is primarily Scots-Irish.
00:21:02.020Oh, my God. Really? He's going back to like 1800s racism where it's like, oh, there's too many swarthy Italians.
00:21:11.320The other the more sensible sort of explanation that he occasionally hints at is that you have systemic poverty causing these cultural issues to some degree.
00:21:21.520But then the cultural issues perpetuate, which I think is like sort of true in a vacuum, but it's also like the whole story. Like the systemic poverty needs to come first. It must come first. And the output is these cultural artifacts that are associated with poverty. Right. So he's sort of like skipping over the fact that he's getting it exactly backwards.
00:21:47.220Right. And also, even if you want to argue that it's like culture is the most important factor or whatever, what can we do about it?
00:21:54.940Right. What would fixing a culture even mean? I mean, that's just like lecturing people until they have different attitudes.
00:22:00.500Well, I think what he's actually advocating for, although he doesn't say it super explicitly, is fewer interventions by the government.
00:22:11.540Right. Well, that's always where it comes back to. Yeah.
00:22:13.140Right. To punish them for their laziness rather than reward, quote unquote, their laziness. Right. That's what he sort of hints at. You can see it in his other writings at the time, like he wrote for National Review at the time that he's publishing this book. And he's got pieces about how he thinks welfare in Appalachia has failed and is not productive. So that is the end game here.
00:22:36.160Right. The irony is that like the decline of Appalachia economically actually lines up really well with cuts to welfare. Right. Right. So, yes, if cutting welfare worked, you would think you would have seen some improvement in Appalachian poverty rates rather than what we've actually seen, which is a severe decline in standards of living across the region.
00:22:59.420Unfortunately, we have no choice but to keep cutting until I never see anyone at a grocery store with a cell phone.
00:23:04.140All right. I'm going to send you another quote.
00:23:07.420OK. He says, this was my world, a world of truly irrational behavior.
00:23:13.000We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads.
00:23:17.380Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high interest credit cards and payday loans.
00:23:21.540We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money and declare bankruptcy,
00:23:26.320often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.
00:23:30.460We spend to pretend that we're upper class.
00:23:33.260And when the dust clears, when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our1.00
00:23:36.840stupidity, there's nothing left over.0.99
00:23:39.120Nothing for the kids, college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy day1.00
00:23:58.600but the book is literally full of tales of him making wise financial decisions and like generally
00:24:04.780being responsible directly contrasted with those around him it's like here i was working hard at
00:24:10.700the grocery store while the poor people you know strolled by me with cell phones and beer right0.90
00:24:15.840it's gross and again just like another demand that poor people lead like punishingly frugal lives0.97
00:24:23.240Right. Or else we can write them off as moral failures. Right. Like, oh, you say you're poor, but you have a TV. Right. I feel like conservatives always reach for TVs when they're like, look how nice the lives of the poor. But like TVs are unbelievably cheap now. Right. I mean, there's the famous Fox News clip being like, did you know that 99 point something percent of people below the poverty line have refrigerators?1.00
00:24:48.460Right. It's very well established that lower income people spend a higher share of their
00:24:54.940income on core needs than higher income people. There were a couple of economists from Duke
00:25:00.100and University of Texas, Austin, that analyzed consumer expenditure data and found that lower
00:25:06.560income families, and that's families with income under two times the poverty line, spend about
00:25:12.24075 percent of their total income on food, transportation, rent, utilities, and cell
00:25:18.680phone service. The idea that there's this like big problem with frivolous spending in poor
00:25:24.320communities, it's just fiction. It's just bootstrap bullshit. They want you to write off1.00
00:25:31.140their suffering by imagining that it's the product of a series of terrible decisions that you don't
00:25:37.520have to have any empathy for. This whole thing is so weird to me because it's always blaming the
00:25:40.920people with the least amount of power. Like I think that some people probably did buy like way
00:25:45.160too much house in the run up to the 2008 crash. Sure. But also like that's because those people
00:25:50.160were being told systematically that that was a good investment and the housing market couldn't
00:25:54.340crash. Right. Who's the villain in that scenario? The person who should have known better who was
00:25:59.220fucking lying to them or the people who like believed someone who they thought had more0.99
00:26:03.260expertise. Right. And also, frankly, you shouldn't have to make a flawless series of financial1.00
00:26:09.000decisions to get through life. I will also say on the cell phones thing, if you're a poor person,
00:26:14.700getting a smartphone is probably one of the best investments you could possibly make.
00:26:18.600How would you get a job without one? Right. You either need email or phone like you need a phone.
00:26:23.860You need a phone to like function in our society these days. The idea that it's a luxury is just
00:26:28.420false. It's not it's like objectively not correct. So also note that he says our children wear nice
00:26:33.860clothes thanks to high interest credit cards and payday loans, particularly notable because
00:26:38.900later in the book, there's a weird digression where he defends payday lending, which is great
00:26:45.240because it's like he's sort of hiding the fact that like at the time of writing this book,
00:26:48.720he's a creepy venture capital guy now. Yeah. And then like payday loans are good. And you're like,
00:26:53.600oh, right. I forgot that he's a Silicon Valley asshole. Yeah. He's just defending whoever's in1.00
00:26:57.640power. I mean, this is just like the classic conservative thing of like whatever hierarchy
00:27:00.540exists in the world must be just and right. So of course you defend the payday lender and
00:27:05.540criticize the people who take out payday loans. Right. So Vance tells a story about how a payday
00:27:10.340loan once helped him avoid an overdraft fee. And then he says that government officials who want
00:27:16.320to ban the practice are ignoring stories like his. What? When I moved to Sydney when I was 19,
00:27:25.120I was all of a sudden like drinking age, which I hadn't been before. And I started going to gay0.98
00:27:29.780bars and I didn't know how to hit on dudes. So I would walk up to them. This is when you could0.98
00:27:33.640smoke in bars and restaurants, I would walk up to people and bum a cigarette because I didn't know
00:27:37.740how else to start conversations. And so I basically ended up making out with a bunch of like chimney1.00
00:27:44.040mouth dudes because I didn't know what else. And I could just imagine myself testifying at like a0.99
00:27:49.060congressional hearing and being like, when you regulate cigarettes, you're taking that experience
00:27:53.740away. You're preventing 19 year old me from having regrettable sex. This is disgusting.
00:27:59.920Oh, man. When this book first came out, it was very interesting to see the spate of great reviews
00:28:06.860and then a handful of people being like, this is gross and it's gawking and pointing at poor
00:28:15.000people. A lot of those reviewers were from Appalachia, right? And they could immediately
00:28:20.060clock this. Whereas I think a lot of mainstream sources that reviewed this book were relatively
00:28:26.800well-off journalists etc who are happy to believe this stuff if someone kind of gives them the right
00:28:33.580framing and the right sort of excuse but then did we skip over the part where like he's not even
00:28:38.960really from Appalachia so not only is he not really from Appalachia but even his grandmother
00:28:47.420left when she was sort of young right the the book sort of bounces between the Rust Belt and
00:28:52.540Appalachia because he's growing up in Middletown, Ohio, and he's often in Jackson, Kentucky.
00:29:00.300A big part of his narrative is that people moved from the mountains into the Rust Belts,
00:29:07.840and so a lot of the culture carries over. I guess. You could say that about anywhere in
00:29:12.140America, though. I mean... Yeah, it felt a little bit squishy, and I will note that there have been
00:29:18.400people who basically said he's not from there my dad is from ohio i wouldn't describe myself
00:29:23.880as like from the midwest i didn't know i was talking to a real hillbilly michael
00:29:27.940but which fork do i use peter which one which one's in front of me like there's just this weird
00:29:36.220sort of like stolen valor thing that's over all of this yeah i mean i think he would claim that
00:29:42.260he spent a lot of time there etc um and that he's basically familiar enough with the culture
00:29:49.220but i think it's safe to say that based on what we know about jd vance's opportunism and his
00:29:57.660relationship to uh the truth yeah it's more accurate to look at him as just sort of part of
00:30:06.920the let's all go into a rural diner and do some interviews style of journalism than it is to view
00:30:16.200him as someone who is really from there telling you the story, right? There are people from
00:30:22.740Appalachia who study Appalachia, who have all sorts of interesting and nuanced things to say
00:30:31.380about the region. There was more than one book that was written in response to this book.
00:30:36.920There is one called Appalachian Reckoning, which is like a collection of essays.
00:30:41.420And it's a good reminder that like there are academics who study this stuff, right?
00:30:47.180I think what J.D. Vance is, is a guy who is really in his soul a cosmopolitan type, right?
00:30:55.380This is someone who wanted to be in politics, who wanted to go to a snazzy law school, who wanted to do venture capital.
00:31:06.080Perhaps he exaggerated his association with Appalachia.
00:31:43.620He is describing the distinct ethnography of the region.
00:31:47.720And he's also consistently talking about the white working class.
00:31:51.860So there's like this implied racial discussion happening throughout the book.
00:31:55.640But whenever the question of race comes up directly, he is always downplaying it.
00:32:02.200As soon as page eight of the book, he says that he hopes people avoid, quote, filtering their views through a racial prism when they talk about poverty.
00:32:12.400OK, I'm going to send you a page of the book.
00:32:15.300He is talking here about negative perceptions of Barack Obama in the Rust Belt.
00:32:21.440He says, many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president.
00:32:26.220But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color.
00:32:31.360Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school.
00:32:35.600Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both.
00:32:38.600He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor, which of course
00:34:20.480There's a couple other areas where he just like downplays race in weird ways. He describes the racial makeup of his hometown as, quote, lots of white and black people, but few others. It's actually 85 percent white.
00:34:35.020I don't get why he would imply that it wasn't overwhelmingly white except to like avoid a
00:34:41.040conversation about race. Right. Early in the book, Vance lists a handful of academics who0.93
00:34:46.900he thinks have done valuable work on social mobility. And one of them is Charles Murray,
00:34:52.920author of The Bell Curve. Unfortunately, the IQs are just too low. The IQs just aren't there for
00:34:58.480people to have jobs. And it goes a little beyond that. In November of 2016, the American enterprise
00:35:04.940Institute, a big conservative libertarian think tank that employs Murray, hosted an event where
00:35:11.560Murray interviewed J.D. Vance about the book. Nice. At one point, they joked about Vance having
00:35:17.500pretty clean Scots-Irish blood, quote unquote. If there's one thing I love about this J.D. Vance
00:35:25.020guy, it's his skull shape and his brain pan. Now, there's almost no discussion of sexuality
00:36:52.600Even his firecracker grandmother didn't really care if you're gay or not.0.94
00:36:57.200But spoiler alert, J.D. Vance is a senator now.0.64
00:37:00.780So we might have some insight into his views about LGBT people that we didn't in 2016.
00:37:07.180God, over the last 15, 20 years, I've become so frustrated with the way that like being cool with gay people has become a cover for just like a huge iceberg of evil reactionary beliefs.
00:37:20.780of like people like Peter Thiel, who are just like straightforward, far right. But then it's
00:37:25.720like, oh, but he's gay. Oh, OK, well, it's complicated. And it's like this sort of stuff,0.81
00:37:29.720too, where it's like just because you're OK with gay people doesn't invalidate the other like 99
00:37:34.820beliefs that you're laying out. And also now there's like an extra asterisk where it's like,
00:37:42.480so let's talk a bit about the liberal response to this book again liberals and moderate mainstream
00:37:54.940media sources just loved it the new york times called it a compassionate discerning sociological
00:38:01.980analysis of the white underclass oh my god he spoke at the brookings institute vox gave him
00:38:08.400extensive coverage. There were only a handful of negative reviews of the book. Sarah Jones,
00:38:14.180who I spoke with to prepare for this, she was writing for The New Republic at the time and
00:38:18.200she wrote a critical piece. Jacobin published a critical review also by someone who's from
00:38:23.940Appalachia. And so I was sort of like, why? What is causing all of these libs to embrace
00:38:33.680such an obviously reactionary message. And when I asked people from Appalachia about this,
00:38:40.140their response first and foremost was like, well, this is just how mainstream Americans,
00:38:44.820liberal or not, have always talked about us. Poor people within Appalachia have always served as a
00:38:50.880bit of a punchline in American culture. And I do think that that helps explain why so many people1.00
00:38:56.360were comfortable with it. But I'm not sure that it explains like the media phenomenon of the book,
00:39:02.740It doesn't explain it getting so much attention and J.D. Vance being elevated to the degree he was.
00:39:08.800My best educated guess at what happened here was that at a time when liberals were so frustrated with the ascendance of Trump, it was cathartic for them in that political moment to hear these people who they associated with Trump disparaged and blamed for their own predicament.
00:39:28.500There's this sort of predisposition in American culture to disparaging the poor, right?
00:39:34.060It's just part of our culture that it's sort of their fault.
00:39:37.200But the political moment allowed liberals to sort of grab that with both hands.
00:39:42.360Because in their minds, this book was insulting to Trump voters.
00:39:47.920And it was telling them that what was really happening with Trump voters was that they
00:39:53.700were like society's losers and they're lashing out at you, society's winners.
00:39:58.240But then what's so weird is because, you know, I didn't read the book. But at the time, I always saw it framed as like sympathy for poor rural whites and almost like a distraction from the very obvious racism that drove Trump's victory in the election. There was this weird explosion after the election of looking for any explanation other than like the most obvious one.
00:40:20.480Yeah. Someone appealed to the racism of white people. Yeah. And so it's weird that the actual
00:40:25.440book is like blaming rural whites. But the framing of the book by people who didn't read it or people
00:40:30.840like me who just read reviews was exonerating rural whites. Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot0.88
00:40:36.120of that is the output of him doing that like faux empathy where he's, you know, we spend too much
00:40:42.360on TVs. Yeah. I think that that gave people just enough deniability. Right. I mean, the New York
00:40:48.860Times is calling it compassionate. It's not a compassionate view of these people. It's
00:40:54.160a sharply critical view. Right. One interesting thing about this is that as much as liberals
00:41:00.940read this and heard what they wanted to hear, conservatives did too. And when you read like
00:41:08.440national reviews, review of the book, it is embracing these like really reactionary aspects.
00:41:16.720They summarize the book by saying that it chronicles how white Appalachians have, quote, followed the black underclass and Native Americans, not just into family disintegration, addiction and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.
00:41:43.340A lot of what sort of slips under the radar to liberals is immediately clocked by conservatives and sort of held up as the crux of the book.1.00
00:41:54.080Right. National Review, as disgusting as that quote is, is correctly identifying the precise theme of the book.
00:42:00.200Right. You know, if you're a conservative, you've been blaming the black poor and Native American poor for their plight for decades.0.93
00:42:08.080And this is Vance doing the same exact thing to the white poor.
00:42:11.340It's very funny that he was cast at the time as like the conservative who's pushing back or like he's not like the other conservatives.
00:42:17.820And then actual conservatives were like, no, we like this guy.
00:42:28.480It's hard to say that the movie has a message because it's just sort of like taking the narrative portion of the story, removing everything else and holding it up and throwing Amy Adams and Glenn Close at it.
00:43:10.380Yeah. In the book, Mamaw is a fan of the Terminator. But in the movie, they add a line where she says, everyone in this world is one of three kinds, a good Terminator, a bad Terminator and neutral.
00:43:25.320What? That doesn't even make sense with the canon of the Terminator films.
00:43:29.500That doesn't make any sense. What is a neutral Terminator?
00:43:33.180What's a neutral? What would its mission be? Is that Andrew Yang? Is that who she's talking about?