Taking J.D. Vance Down a Peg

 I read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy while in prison. All I can recall are the similarities between Ohio steel towns and Indiana auto factory towns, some Scots-Irish traits I recognized in my relatives (who would not have agreed to, or admitted to, playing the victim as did Vance), and the feeling of much ado about nothing. Then I watched him campaign for a Senate seat. The best thing about Ohio Republicans is they make Indiana Republicans look good.

n + 1 published Gabriel Winant's J. D. Vance Changes the Subject A senator from the unconscious, and enhanced my dissatisfaction with Vance and his book.

Vance did not get the care that he needed when he was young — and this, he thinks, is what’s wrong with the country. His non-explanations for both personal and social problems are, in the end, those of a child: Why did the mean person do the bad thing? Although there is a vulnerability buried somewhere deep and soft here — who can begrudge him some ambivalence about his mother? — he has armored that innermost wound in impenetrable layers of meanness. Whatever else changes in his public commitments, the ethic of culpability persists. He represents the poisonous idea that the very real traumas suffered by the American working class over the past two generations are without structural cause and therefore can be overcome by willpower and self-discipline; that those who fail to do so have themselves, or otherwise malicious phantasms, to blame.

In this sense, Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening. This massive new collective burden was piled on a society already stumbling under the weight of organized abandonment, environmental racism, for-profit health care, and mass incarceration. Vance, in the end, cannot abide the idea that what he suffered has to do with any of that disabling stuff. He will torture the rest of us until we agree to make him President to prove that there is nothing wrong with him. “Remembering,” as Freud says, “gives way to acting out . . . the patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself.” First Vance tried to remember — this was the book. But there was a market for his memories, an audience that wanted to hear that the poor are to blame. Having a poor person to blame ready to hand — his mother — he supplied this market, but it warped his account of himself. The remembrance succeeded commercially, but failed utterly to access any real truth. So he went looking for weapons, and now he posts pictures online of himself pointing machine guns at the sky.

For all the MAGA types talk about how bad America is, they really do not offer anything to the working class that seems enamored of them - except the promise of a fight. Progressive want to be nice to the rabid dog. What the MAGA followers do not understand, is that they will be the first victims of their leaders.

sch 4/20