Elegiac Dreams
JD Vance and the return of the king
I haven’t read Hillbilly Elegy. On a recent trip to the thrift store I almost added it to a haul of cheap paperbacks I had picked out but decided not to at the last minute. Maybe on some level I would have felt slightly embarrassed to look the blue haired ultra-Portland cashier in the eye as I handed over the money. Isn’t he kind of….fash? I like to think I’m above that level of self stigmatization, but it’s 2024, and I live in one of the most liberal enclaves in America.
I would like to read it though. After hearing of Vance’s nomination, I wondered if the book would still be sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, or if it would have been taken out of circulation by some zealous culture warrior, viewing it now more than ever as an actual implement of the poison being secreted by the Christian fascists who want to bring about an Atwood-level dystopia. I remember when it came out a lot of my leftist friends went out of their way to denounce it and point out that people interested in the white working class should really just be reading Marx, or Noel Ignatiev, or at least Barbara Ehrenreich.
But even though I haven’t read it, and I don’t share the author’s paleoconservative ideology, I’m willing to believe that his concern for the poor white working class of America is genuine. He did come from that world, raised out a broken home by his grandmother, and I have no reason to think that his embrace of Trumpian populism is not a logical extension of that concern, conveniently packaged in a way that also happens to be increasingly palatable to the Ivy League blue bloods that he so loathes but to whom he is most certainly beholden on some level, being a Yale man himself.
Years ago, on tour with my band, we somehow got a gig at the Yale Women’s Center. It was a small and sparsely attended affair in the basement of said institution, there couldn’t have been more than five people there, but since it was funded by Yale we got a $200 guarantee. We ate well that night, living it up on the streets of New Haven where one has to step over the comatose bodies of homeless drunks and addicts in between the many bars and restaurants that cater to the well heeled future leaders of the American empire. This was around 2004, when Bush was president, and I remember a drunken visit to the black doors of the Skull and Bones society, where me and my bandmates took turns showing our backsides to the famed incubator of warmonger presidents, our country then embroiled in the Iraq war, and the Abu Ghraib scandal fresh in the news. Vance wouldn’t have been among the student body at the time, but I wonder what his impression of the opulent decadence of the place would have been, coming from the lineage of Scots-Irish Appalachian folk, those who have had the boot of the business class on their necks since the days of the company store, the brutality of the Pinkertons, and the Battle of Blair Mountain.
By the time he got to Yale, it was a different America from the one presided over by the aforementioned Skull and Bones protegee. Barack Obama was president, and the wheels of the Tea Party revolt were already in motion. I understand that Vance was making connections as much with lefty intellectuals during this time as he was with the world of the venture capitalist conservatives, but I wonder if he saw the writing on the wall, even then, of the coming of Trumpism and the political realignment that relentlessly undergirds our culture today.
I saw it, but not until the wheels had just about run us over. I bought my first home in 2014 in a rundown stretch of southeast Portland, where the homeless epidemic that has now overwhelmed the city was making its first iterations. A liberal friend from out of town remarked of our new neighborhood that it “looks like Sons of Anarchy down there.” I liked it. I worked construction and I could set up shop out in the backyard and run my Skil saw all night without worrying about offending fancy neighbors. It reminded me a little bit of the working class neighborhood in northeast Baltimore where I grew up. There was a chop shop behind us where guys would fix up old cars and burn trash and tires while they cussed each other out in a vernacular that would horrify most liberals (there was a salt and pepper pair who relentlessly shouted N-bombs at each other, in a way that can sometimes be agreed upon by poor folks of either color but which runs afoul of the current racial zeitgeist). I didn’t mind the brashness or or bravado but I did get into it with them on occasion about the trash fires-our neighbor was an older woman confined to a wheelchair who needed to breath through a tank and I tried to appeal to her health concerns to get them to stop, with mixed results. She was the type of woman whose ancestors might have rubbed shoulders in the coal mines with those of Mr. Vance’s back in the eastern mountains. She was a kind woman who had obviously had a tough road behind her who was living in a dilapidated moldy sponge of a house with her daughter and two granddaughters in the trailer behind it. My daughter was close in age to the girls and when I would walk over to their yard to bring her home for dinner I was always a little shocked by the how raw it was. There was a lot of trash piled up and hordes of flies circled the inside and outside of the house. There were two pit bulls in the yard that seemed chill but could turn on you in a heartbeat. But they were good people. In 2016, she was the first to put up a campaign sign, and she had a Bernie placard in her yard before I had ours up. Our neighbors across the street had a truck with a bunch of Trump stickers, so there were a lot of interesting conversations to be had between all of us. It’s strange to say so now, but in the days before Trump won and the pandemic further polarized the country it seemed like it wasn’t so difficult to have those conversations. Our Trump supporter neighbor conceded that if the Orange One was not in the race, he would probably be supporting Bernie.
Of course, we all know how it turned out. And because we seem to be stuck in some sort of horrendous time loop hell bent on repeating our arduously fraught computer simulation, we find ourselves headed straight for a repeat of 2016, this time with Mr Hillbilly Elegy himself on the ticket and the Democrats taking another stab at running a female candidate, this time a woman of color, against a man they call the end of democracy, in a battle of identities sure to act either as confirmation of America’s virulent racism and misogyny or the power of the woke Illuminati to rig the election. Either way, it is the working people of America who will continue to suffer, who will continue to be asked to sacrifice blood and treasure to oversea wars, and who will continue to be degraded by racism and classism while being told that their candidate is a champion of said identities based on hollow proxies of identity and showmanship.
If I could break the fourth wall of our juvenile computer simulation and voice my displeasure to our capricious overlords, it would go something like this: We, the majority of Americans of all races who are stuck holding the leavings of the obscenely wealthy techno-feudalists who are ruining our beautiful country and driving wedges between us, deserve better than this. My neighbor, a poor white woman helping to raise her grandchildren in the failing health of her waning years, was probably not so different from the “Mamaw” who JD Vance is so indebted to, but she also is not so different in many ways from the black grandmothers in West Baltimore who are raising generations of children left orphaned by the drug war and the incarceration of black fathers. If women hold up half the sky, it is poor women of all colors who form the base of the triangle, while Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton seize the limelight as they chip away at the glass ceiling.
Donald Trump on some level transcends this kind of elite performance, effectively wielding the illusion of authenticity in service of a dangerous personality cult, a movement that has now ascended to the realm of the mythic after his shockingly cinematic defiance of death in a hail of bullets. A man who survives such an attack in view of millions is someone who will appear to his followers as a warrior, so we could understand his pick of Vance in that moment as a fevered stab of vengeance at the priestly class who he believes work against him and who his followers now call his failed executioners. It’s another chapter in the compelling narrative that Trump has constructed to illustrate his rise to power, so it’s fitting that he chose a writer to help spin the tale of his return to the throne.
Perhaps I will one day read Mr Vance’s memoir. But I hope he does not become vice president in 2025. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that Kamala can outrun the callous careerism of her past and assume the mantle of a true champion of the working class. As Cornel West would say, “We may have been born at night but we weren’t born last night.” West himself would no doubt appreciate the parallels between our current moment and the attempts of his beloved ancient Greeks to hold on to their fragile democratic experiment. Amid the monarchistic yearnings emerging on the right and the stale reupholstering of Obama-era optimism that the Dems continue to adhere to, I am reminded of a quote from the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey1
In sleep we dream of only two forms of government- anarchy and monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics and never plays fair. A democratic dream? A socialist dream? Impossible.
Its not hard to imagine that quote being written by the likes of Steve Bannon or Curtis Yarvin, actually. The thinkers and strategists of the right seem to understand better than their counterparts how to translate politics into the language of mythology, even if the substance of their promises are no more tangible than scant remnants of the fables they recreate. The tepid and reluctant embrace by the Democrats of their upstart progressive flank has resulted in some small policy victories for working people, but in an era of fear and uncertainty, pathos often triumphs over logos. And since no reasonable person can imagine an anarchist revolution taking place anytime soon, we are left with the choice of defending the dreamless corpse of the democratic experiment or surrendering to the feverish visions of fascist demagoguery offered by the right. Between the two, I will make no secret of my preference for the status quo at this current juncture, but given the ways that the Democratic Party has conducted its affairs in the last few decades, I would not fault you if you chose a different path.
Just don’t be fooled by the promise of solidarity from these would-be monarchs. For while the drab and bloodless bureaucrats may offer little to lift the spirits of the people as they dole out our meager rations, the benevolence of kings is never more than the stuff of dreams.
Bey, Hakim T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
Great post. I DO remember when we could have those kinds of conversations. I remember the day Trump was elected and EVERYONE was having those kinds of conversations. For a couple weeks, even. The guy who owned the Indian Restaurant down the street voted for Trump, and he argued with one of his regulars about it, a white woman. (He wanted low taxes and a good business environment.) Two white suburban teenagers were arguing with a bunch of other people at a bar. (Incredibly, one of their reasons was ‘we don’t want to be poor like the people in Europe. Have you seen how they live?’ I had been to Europe so this comment perplexed me until I hit up google and found out that people in Europe do have somewhat lower disposable income than Americans (only on average). Yes, they live longer but as I can’t ask these people I assume they were big fans of disposable income and not so into longer lives. Another woman (white again, senior citizen, on social security) was talking about immigrants and how to get rid of them.
I said to my students, who didn’t seem especially eager to talk about the election but who were bummed overall—‘whatever you think about the election, the future can work out for all of us, as long as everyone doesn’t start to hate everyone else.’ And bingo—it was like I had jinxed America. I know that isn’t what happened, obviously. My guess was that the hate was the biggest danger of all. This was the main thing I wanted to prevent, and also did not want the situation to change me as well. I think most people don’t even remember what we lost. Almost nobody talks about it. If you do talk about it—the shrinking possibility of non-pigeonholed, less mediated human connection that was easier to find across various social gulfs—they say it wasn’t real or think you are an enemy, corrupt or a fool for valuing such a thing.