Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 110

This discussion takes the form of a chapterlong diss of J. D. Vance's best-selling
memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (soon to be a major motion picture). The book, which came
out in the fall of 2016, described Vance's
troubled family members, their Appalachian roots, and his up-by-the-bootstraps
escape from Rust Belt Ohio to the military,
college, and ultimately Yale Law School.
Vance, according to Greenberg, suggests
that all the problems that beset his family and community-drug addiction, poverty, welfare fraud-were essentially the
result of poor life choices that bore little
relationship to larger economic or political forces. The book has influenced Republican economic rhetoric and made Vance
an unofficial spokesman for the white
working-class voter.
Greenberg is a credible critic of Vance's
tale, largely because he's been studying

of government, Greenberg notes, has re- so many of the people in his own focus
stricted Republicans' ability to do much groups can't even sit in the same room
for the very voters who helped put Don- with each other. After the 2016 election,
ald Trump in the White House. Once they pro- and anti-Trump focus group memwere in charge, he notes, Republicans' bers were so rude to each other that he ulmost significant policy initiative aimed at timately had to put them in separate spacthe working class was to add work require- es to have conversations with them. And
ments for Medicaid and food stamps. "Is it wasn't just the red-blue divide that prothat really all they have to offer working duced such strife. Greenberg describes a
people?" Greenberg asks. "What an insult." focus group where the moderator had to
This meager gruel is what helped fuel intervene to prevent a brawl between the
the blue wave election in 2018, Green- "Fox News Catholics" and the "Pope Francis
berg says. Republicans lost dramatical- Catholics." The latter group tended to side
ly all across the industrial Midwest and with a more compassionate pope on issues
the Rust Belt because it turned out that such as immigration and climate change.
the non-evangelical working class "want- "The Fox Catholic half," meanwhile, "reed more from Republicans than this anti- acted with enthusiasm to Trump's rallies
government trope."
and embraced the Fox News facts on issue
"Republicans would do well to unlearn after issue in his defense." The Fox News
the lessons of Hillbilly Elegy," he concludes, devotees were the ones "who said the ugif they want to remain relevant. Republi- liest things about immigrants, people of
cans, though, don't seem different races and religions, and multias interested in being rel- culturalism," he reports.
evant as in maintaining
The Pope Francis Catholics are potentheir grip on power, by tial swing voters, Greenberg suspects,
any means necessary. As and more likely to be won over by a DemGreenberg himself docu- ocrat on economic issues than any other
ments, the party has been group of Trump voters. But it's the Fox
creative and aggressive News types Trump has been playing to
in finding ways to ensure as he kicks off his 2020 reelection camtheir dominance through paign, with his attacks on immigrants
voter suppression and ger- and "the squad"-four women of colrymandering, even when or in Congress. More recent polls indithey can no longer capture the majority of cate that Trump's xenophobic and racist
the popular vote.
attacks are also shaping public opinion,
Minority rule is built into our democra- and not in the way Greenberg suggests.
cy. The same demographic trends Green- The Pew Research Center found in July
berg sees as the engine of a blue wave are that a growing share of Republicans now
also ensuring that a small group of con- believe that America risks its "identiservative Republicans will continue to ty as a nation" by being too open to forwield outsize influence in politics. By eigners. The number of Republicans who
2040, thanks to urbanization, 70 percent agree with that sentiment has jumped
of Americans will live in only sixteen ten points since Trump took office, dragstates, meaning that the Senate, where ging down the overall numbers to show
all good things go to die, will continue that the country as a whole is becoming
to be dominated by people who hail from less tolerant of immigrants and multisparsely populated rural states, and they culturalism, not more. That's why for all
will be largely white, conservative, and its sunshine-side-of-the-mountain talk,
probably male. The rising tide of diverse Greenberg's book is also a cautionary tale.
younger Americans won't mean much in Vanquishing the GOP is not going to be
national terms as long as it's concentrat- easy, or peaceful, if it happens at all.
ed in already blue states like New York
and California.
Stephanie Mencimer is a staff reporter at
It's also tough to see how Greenberg Mother Jones and a Washington Monthly concan be so sunny about the future when tributing editor.

The rising tide of diverse
younger Americans won't
mean much in national terms
as long as it's concentrated
in already blue states like
New York and California.
the working class for nearly fifty years.
After the urban riots of the late 1960s,
Greenberg was hired to undertake a national evaluation of the War on Poverty.
For his research, he studied a community
of Appalachian migrants from Kentucky
who, like Vance's family, had relocated
to southwestern Ohio. He also studied
working-class neighborhoods in Detroit
and Philly, including those populated by
black and Hispanic residents. In the mid1980s-when Vance was born-Greenberg embedded with "Reagan Democrats"
in Macomb County, Michigan.
What bothers Greenberg most about
Hillbilly Elegy is that many of Vance's Republican enthusiasts (though not Vance
himself) have concluded from the book
that nothing can be done about the social
collapse. Their takeaway, he says, is that
"government activism is ineffective and
counterproductive." That crabbed view
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