Hillbilly Elegy was once regarded as “the key to understanding the disaffection of the white working class that had swept Trump to his shocking victory.”
Now it is seen as “poverty porn” that “paints him as an opportunist and the place he came from, and claims to represent, as a sinkhole that no self-respecting person would be caught dead in.”
/1 🧵
https://slate.com/culture/2024/07/hillbilly-elegy-jd-vance-movie-netflix-trump-vp.html
When I learned in another article that Vance’s grandparents had moved out of Appalachia to find work in the steel mills of Ohio, I thought how his background is really no different than part of my famiy’s— they moved out of coal mine country to find work in the midwest.
Major differences: 1) No one in my family wrote about how they managed to escape the supposed hellhole, 2) No one went off and made a fortune after as a venture capitalist or became a politician after
/2 🧵
