Manu Joseph: Lessons from Donald Trump’s ‘Hillbilly’ running mate

livemint.com:

₹10 in my pocket." Being poor, being truly poor is when your papa is poor, when your “people" are all poor. It is like being ancient in a generation racing towards the future. The mind of the poor is the brooding background in Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of J.D.

Vance, the running mate of Donald Trump. The book, published in 2016, brought national prominence to Vance, and launched his political career. He draws the portrait of his formative years as a poor White American growing up among those of his kind, people who are called “hillbillies", and his eventual escape into the American dream through higher education.

He shows a community that is in despair, intoxicated, poor and violent, and holds far less hope for the future than the Hispanic migrants and the Blacks, who are poorer. The book accuses the hillbillies of blaming their plight on everything outside them, including president Barack Obama, instead of finding a way to exploit one of the greatest nations on earth. Only an insider can say this sort of thing about his tribe, just as only an Obama could have asked America’s Blacks to take some of the blame for their condition.

When the book was released, the Republicans hailed it because it framed the problem of its core base—the White working class that was not doing very well. ‘Donald Trump’ appears only in the afterword, so the book probably never mentioned him in the early editions. Yet, it tries to solve the political mystery of why poor Whites loved and still love Trump.

That was why the Democrats too loved it. Because they saw in it what they wanted to see—that Trump was popular among country wastrels with a twang as they were jealous of the good boys and girls who worked hard and went to college. Vance came