Must We Now Hate ‘Hillbilly Elegy’?
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Here’s a really punchy interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon, op-ed editor of the liberal-leaning Jewish newspaper The Forward, on the meaning of contemporary liberalism. Ungar-Sargon says that Covid has exposed a class divide:
There’s a huge Covid class divide. The economy has not just bounded back for upper income Americans; it’s given them higher housing values and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, 12 million service industry workers are still out of work. Small businesses are struggling. The affluent see Covid as a health problem, while for the working class it’s about economic survival. And liberals are doing the same thing they did with Trump: Clothing their class privilege as science and facts and morality.
The politicians are even worse. Instead of coming up with a clean Covid bill, Democrats are now trying to pressure Biden into student loan forgiveness. Can you believe it? What kind of society thinks it’s ok to ask 12 million people who lost their jobs to Covid to foot the bill for the student loans of the top 40% of earners? Sure, maybe it will accidentally help someone in a food line who dropped out of college. But college-educated Americans are back at work. The Covid recession is over for them. Why are the Democrats designing legislation to help the people who need it least, in the belief that some of the benefits might trickle down to help those who need it most?
In this passage, she expands on her claim that so much of Trump-hatred is really well-to-do white liberals hating the lower classes, and wishing to think themselves virtuous for it.:
In other words, digital media met an affluent liberal audience desperate to be told that the people they looked down on were evil racists and that we live in a white supremacy. So the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC, and CNN gave them what they wanted. And media companies went from being broke to making bank.
All of this gets to your really smart point about the Democrats, who are supposed to be the party of the people. There was a time when Democrats represented labor, while the Republicans were all about the rich. We’ve seen a reversal of that under Trump. Trump’s economic agenda was protectionist in nature, and very much geared at the working class. (Like many Scandinavian countries, he coupled this with a big corporate tax cut early on.) Meanwhile the Democrats have doubled down on a thirty-year trajectory of going all in on college-educated voters.
After decades of consensus between the two parties about a free market global economy that serves the top 20%, Trump represented the return of the repressed. And there’s nothing elites hate as much as having the masses impose their will. So much of the hatred of Trump is about class. We in the upper classes hate his infantile vocabulary, his needless lies, his gross, undignified brawling, his ignorant conspiracy theorizing. I hate that stuff, too. But a lot of it—not all of it, but a lot of it—is not about morality.
Trump made four or five racist statements throughout his presidency, and about the same number of antisemitic ones. The rest of the opposition to him wasn’t about values at all. It was about taste. Trump is gross. That spray tan, that hair, the golden toilet, the vainglorious pettiness: He didn’t fit with the vision upper class people have of a leader. But we in the media clothed our taste-based objection to Trump, which is of course a stand in for class, in terms of values: He’s anti-truth; he’s racist; he’s a Nazi.
That’s how you end up with an MSNBC host worth $25 million looking down her nose at a person without a college degree and sneering, “You voted for Trump? You racist!” and feeling like a hero.
Read it all. It’s really hot. I remind you that Ungar-Sargon is a liberal.
Gotta say that Ungar-Sargon’s point in that last passage explains to my satisfaction the overwhelmingly negative critical response to Ron Howard’s film of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. The movie debuts on Tuesday on Netflix, but I was able to see it early, on Sunday night, along with my daughter, who also read and loved the book.
Critics have absolutely savaged the movie. As an early champion of the book, and a personal friend of J.D. Vance’s, I hate to see that. True, having been a professional film critic for years, I know that film critics are strongly to the Left in their politics. But judging from the reviews, I could sense that Howard stripped the story of the political insights Vance brought out in his memoir. Maybe the movie really is bad, I thought, and worried about watching it.
Well, I finally did, and it’s much better than the critics say. Much, though I confess that I doubt I can separate my affection for the book and for J.D. Vance entirely from my opinion. I turned to my wife a couple of times during the movie and told her that the distance between the movie we were watching and the movie that the reviews told me we were going to watch was massive.
The performances are quite good. The script is the problem. It jumps back and forth in time, breaking storytelling rhythm, and at times confusing the viewer. Character development is seriously underdone. For example, my daughter and I were shocked when Mamaw’s death was treated almost in passing. I realized today, thinking about it, that I fell in love with J.D.’s Mamaw reading the book, but you don’t really sense in the film version why J.D. hero-worshipped that tough old bird. I can understand why Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor decided to blunt the cultural politics implicit in Vance’s memoir (for audience accessibility), but it was a mistake. Without it, you really don’t get a sense of why the book — which sold in the millions — was a pop culture phenomenon. Vance presented the white working class from which he came as both culturally disadvantaged and hard-pressed by structural economic shifts that closed down factories and mills, but also self-sabotaging, as the same cussedness that helped them survive also caused many of them to undermine themselves. Vance wrote an emotionally and culturally complex book, but the film version is simple rags-to-riches melodrama (though with fine performances, especially Glenn Close as Mamaw).
Having said all that, it’s still a pretty good movie, definitely worth watching. Having seen Hillbilly Elegy, and having spent the day thinking about it, I remain genuinely surprised by how much hatred the film has drawn from critics. I can’t read their minds, obviously, but I can’t shake the belief that they are venting their hatred of Donald Trump at the Hillbilly Elegy movie. J.D. Vance’s book came out months before the 2016 election, and though Vance, a Republican, was clear in his publicity interviews that he was not a Donald Trump supporter, he was also insistent that Trump spoke to and for people like the folks back home: those who had been left behind. Here’s what he told NPR’s Terry Gross in August 2016:
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