Capitalism’s Forgotten Soldiers

by Saurabh Jha (September 2016)

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

by J.D. Vance

Harper (June 28, 2016)

272 pages

One is never too old or too young to write a memoir. J.D. Vance’s memoir about growing up in a working class white American family is aptly timed for this year’s presidential elections, and explains the support for Donald J. Trump in a constituency which feels disempowered and frustrated about the future.

Vance is an unapologetic “Hillbilly.” Hillbillies are working class whites who inhabit the Appalachia and coal belt. Less politely called “white trash,” or “rednecks,” hillbillies are known for their Christian faith, industriousness, loyalty, patriotism, and an honor code that has a low threshold for violence.

Vance, a Marine and a graduate of Yale Law School, had the social deck of cards stacked against him. He was barely tended to by his mother, a nurse suffering the maladies of hedonistic intemperance, which started innocuously with opiate painkiller use, progressing to dependence, and then spiraling to such a high level of dependence that she stole to maintain her addiction. The lowest point for Vance was as a teenager, when his mother asked for a sample of his urine to pass the urine test her hospital asked her to submit to, because they suspected substance abuse.

Vance’s mother married several times and with each stepfather Vance experienced hope, fear and disappointment. Vance’s biological father was a mellow man and a devout Christian, but did not feel that supporting his child financially was enough of a religious calling. Vance’s future was, but for the grace of his grandparents, careening towards the abyss. “Mamaw and Papaw”, as Vance called them, were orthodox Hillbillies, who despite being working class, knew that education, and education alone, could emancipate their grandson from the stagnation they faced.

Hillbilly Elegy is the story of once optimistic and proud people who now reside in an economic cul-de-sac of despair. The bigger story, an untold story, is the story of capitalism. Capitalism in America evokes images of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, and Uber, or such titans as JP Morgan, JD Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. They are only the tip of capitalism’s iceberg beneath which is an army of unsung heroes. The German political economist, Max Weber, felt that capitalism owed its success, in large part, to the Protestant work ethic. This famed work ethic seems to be of a bucolic past, an industriousness so extreme that it was said that if the effort didn’t hurt, you weren’t working hard enough. The Hillbillies are capitalism’s forgotten soldiers.

Work ethic strikes me as a quintessential American virtue. Americans in general, and the white working class in particular, disdain laziness. The disdain has divided the poorer whites into the working and the nonworking poor. The working view the nonworking, and the government which supports their welfare, derisively. The fracture is significant because the Hillbillies support policies which are often not conducive to the infrastructure they need.

The party of bigger government, the Democrats, has increasingly distanced itself from poor whites. In the circles I frequent, of educated, liberal and affluent whites, expression of white guilt is fashionable and the poor whites are scorned as gun-toting, xenophobic, anachronistic, climate change-denying simpletons. It is a double blow to the poor whites who, not only endure economic stagnation, but are felt undeserving of the sympathy given to other ethnicities in similar economic conditions.

Like other working class migrants, Vance’s grandparents flocked to a city where a corporate giant had a foothold. They moved from Jackson, Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, where Armco, a giant steel manufacturer, offered jobs, healthcare and hopes for a better future. Armco got the workers it needed, many of whom were migrants, but the relationship was symbiotic. Armco established a community, built parks, created steady income source and a stable middle class for the arts to flourish, for small businesses to grow, and for restaurants to proliferate. Armco did in Middletown what the state does in Luton, England. It is American exceptionalism of sorts that corporations assume the responsibilities of the state.

But corporations don’t last forever. In fact, they barely last a generation. Middletown’s fortunes were linked to the fortunes of Armco. Armco merged with Kawasaki. When corporations merge, more often than not, jobs are lost, not gained and the merger is the knell of more job losses. As jobs bled from manufacturing in Middletown, like elsewhere in the country, the city lost its soul. Restaurants became empty, then derelict and then closed. The city center, once the heart of community activity, became a cesspool of social decay. Used needles lay on the ground where vibrant families once walked. Those rich enough to leave Middletown left Middletown for greener pastures. Vance’s grandparents stayed. Middletown faced its Great Depression even as Silicon Valley saw its boom days and the country recorded unprecedented economic growth.

Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would deliver a revolution in which the workers clashed with the capitalists. Instead, capitalism has delivered consumerism. To be fair, it’s hard to fight the capitalists when the capitalists desert your town, move off shore, or get swallowed by the ephemeral New York Stock Exchange. Manufacturing, the most tangible product of capitalism, has been outsourced. Thus, the workers in Middletown did not turn against the factory owners, but against themselves.

Middletown’s people had access to cheap painkillers (though not necessarily cheap healthcare), cheap alcohol, and cheap consumerism. However, Middletown could not give its people an existential purpose, which hung precariously between faith and country. Vance said of his grandmother, “Mamaw always had two Gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America.” The contrast between the Appalachian and Acela corridors could not be starker. In the latter, God is dead and the United States of America seems more mortal than ever before.

The marriage between existential despair and consumerism has bred a cycle of self-destruction which is cheap to indulge in but expensive to propagate. America has all but conquered absolute poverty. But the relatively poorer white Americans, fed on a diet of hamburger and fries, caressed by oxycontin, alcohol and heroin, are marching to their graves faster than any group in the United States. Why were these foot soldiers of capitalism abandoned?  

Vance does not wallow in self-pity. He accepts that the odds are against people like him from achieving the American dream, but he does not rob his people of moral agency. Self-belief and ambition grow in stable, loving families with continuity of care, which the Hillbillies lack. Yet the decline in the family cannot be the sole explanation for the plight of working class whites.

It is significant that Vance’s family wanted him to become an educated professional, a doctor or lawyer, not a builder or a mechanic. The working class do not aspire for their children to be in the working class. This is not surprising. I have seen this in migrants from India and Pakistan, who worked in factories in North England. I recall a medical student in London whose family came from a village in Kashmir. His parents were factory workers and could not speak English. He grew up in a rundown council housing for the working class. He had it drilled in him that only education could liberate him.

However, this means that membership in the working class should, therefore, be transient. The first existential struggle is escaping absolute poverty. The second existential struggle is escaping the working class. Even if manufacturing jobs had not fled Middletown, the cycle of despair may have arisen if a job in the steel industry was life’s sole job prospect.

The economic woes of the white working class reflect a deeper economic issue, which is both the Achilles’ heel and the genius of capitalism. Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter recognized that capitalism progressed in quantum leaps in which the old methods of production were made obsolete by newer methods, thus creating a regular constituency of unemployed, as capitalism incessantly mutated. Schumpeter called this the “gale of creative destruction.” The Hillbillies are casualties of the changing old order. Capitalism’s loyal soldiers were deserted when their generals were replaced.

Help comes from unexpected quarters in these parts of the world. Vance was rescued, in part, by one of America’s most respected (and maligned) institutions – the army. Once he enlisted in the Marine Corps, he discovered purpose, responsibility and self-confidence, which eventually led him to Yale Law School.

What could the state have done differently for the Hillbillies? Vance recognizes that there is no magic bullet. If the solutions to the woes of the Hillbillies are greater prudence and better choices these solutions will come from the individual, not the state. Yet it is hard to believe that investment during business cycle downturns (when jobs were bleeding) by the state would not have stabilized some of Middletown’s families. As manufacturing was declining, Middletown could have been introduced to the next wave of production. When the US was importing computer programmers from India, the state, with the help of the private sector, could have scouted for talent in the Middletown schools, to train a generation of American computer programmers.

Working class whites dislike welfare recipients and feel that the government is intrusive. To them, the government is both a busybody and a Robin Hood, but a cowardly Robin Hood, because instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, the government, they feel, steals from the working poor to give to the nonworking poor. But excessive suspicion of government, in shifting discussions about the scope of government to discussions about the size of government, shields the state from introspecting how it can better deliver economic flow to the needy. For example, the Obama administration spent $30 billion on electronic health records. It was largely a forlorn endeavor. There is not even a whiff of contrition that not so much a breeze touched America’s poor from this gale of public spending.

In reading Vance’s memoirs it is hard escaping an element of inevitability. Americans seem aspirational people, and with aspiration, migration to places with better economic opportunities is a perpetual reality. Migration dislocates cultures anatomically, and mixes people who have fundamentally different values, as Vance notes of himself: “I am the patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at.” But, crucially, not everyone migrates; the boldest do, the meekest stay behind. The plight of the Hillbillies is the plight of those who stay behind.  

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