The choice of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a direct result of the political media’s failure to understand social class in America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was revered by many journalists and literary critics as a powerful voice representing long-ignored Americans. But he is not a working-class hero.
Vance portrayed this group: 35% of AmericansIncidentally, as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness, and their own self-destructive moral failings, journalists seized on that idea and brought with them their own stereotypes to portray the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump’s retrograde campaign.
This distortion, in turn, widened a real divide by alienating many Americans, fueling support for Trump and even veneration of Vance.
Praised by David Brooks as the interpreter of some myths “Working class code of honor” that could shed light on the motivations of Trump's core constituency, Vance was praised in reviews in the New York Timeshe Washington Post and a number of other publications, and became a leading light for working-class perspectives. CNN hired him as a political pundit.
This was no better than the “parachute journalism” of upper-middle-class journalists who visited an Appalachian tavern for an afternoon and then dared to tell the nation what the working class thought.
So who really constitutes the working class? Consistent data has shown that, in the words of the Center for American Progress, “Black, Hispanic, and other racial workers make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-Hispanic white workers make up the remaining 55 percent. Nearly half of the working class is made up of women, and 8 percent have disabilities.” Media depictions that equate this group with uneducated white men omit most of the people who actually fit the definition.
Some contemporary reports denounced Vance's misrepresentations and the media's fallacious thinking. In October 2016, writing for The Guardian, the journalist Sarah Smarsh He noted that exit polls and surveys showed Trump supporters had a higher median income ($72,000) than supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Vance himself, he reported, had grown up in a middle-class home. By ignoring those realities, Smarsh argued, “media creators present the white working class as a monolith and insinuate an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that poor people are dangerous idiots.”
Another journalist, Elizabeth CatteHe also called out national media misrepresentations, including in his 2018 book, “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.” It should have been required reading as a dose of reality for anyone who heard Vance on television or read his book.
A brilliant work as Stephanie's LandHer 2019 memoir, “Maid,” became the basis for a Netflix series, but while journalists praised the book, they did not present her as an expert. Kerri Arsenault’s “Mill Town,” an autobiography-history of a small town in Maine, was reviewed, but again, her expertise did not appear in mainstream political commentary. Worst of all, when historian Steven Stoll’s masterful history of Appalachia, “Ramp Hollow,” was published in 2017, the New York Times allowed the masterpiece of Appalachian history, “Ramp Hollow,” to be published. Vance himself to review it; he criticized Stoll's “polemical” views on the market economy and dismissed the author as “serious.”
The voices of black historians were largely ignored, because black voters of a certain kind were ignored. Historian Blair L.M. Kelley published “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class” last fall, which links the black working class to the history of slavery in the United States. It received little media attention. Joe William Trotter wrote “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.”Workers upon arrival: Black labor in the making of the United States” suffered a similar fate, although he did win academic awards.
Ironically, before leaving His distrust of Trump and his joining the far-right circus had even Vance thinking the media had gotten it wrong in a number of ways.
The media must not fail the working class again. The stakes are too high. Trump has made clear his desire to dismantle the authority of the federal government, hand over social policy to Christian nationalists, and eliminate any regulation of industries that contribute to climate change or devastate communities and lands through extractive practices like fracking.
But I'm not optimistic that critics and journalists have learned much since the 2016 debacle.
When Barbara Kingsolver's novel “Demon Copperhead” came out in October 2022, I described the perspective of the book as compassionate toward the people of Appalachia, while implying that “turning to drug abuse, rejecting education, and ‘clinging’ to their ways of life are moral choices that keep them in their dire circumstances. Appalachia becomes the region of the damned.”
But “Demon Copperhead” received almost universally favorable reviews and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The privileged class learned all the wrong lessons from Vance's book, if they learned anything from it. I hope more journalists do better now that he and Trump are heading into the election as a single candidate.
Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Eugene, Oregon. @BerryFLW
