‘Welfare money was spent on T-bone steaks’

the Middle East, thought the Marines were red-neck idiots who enjoyed butchering Iraqis.

Yet Vance knew that many of his Marine comrades had been decent, liberal-minded people, trying to do their best in an appalling situation.

He thought of his friends who had been injured or killed — ‘and here was this dips*** in a spotty beard telling our class that we murdered people for sport’.

Nothing, I think, better captures the gulf between two different kinds of America.

On the one hand, Vance’s America: conservative, religious and intensely patriotic, devoted to family, faith and flag.

On the other, the America of his classmates at Ohio State and Yale Law School: the liberal, metropolitan, hand-wringing world of Edward Snowden (the former National Security Agency employee who leaked top-secret government information), the Left-wing activist group Black Lives Matter and transgender toilets. Against this background, is it really so shocking so many bluecollar Americans turned their backs on Hillary Clinton and the Washington elite?

Is it surprising so many of Vance’s community, trapped in welfare dependency, drug addiction and family breakdown, cast their vote for the aggressive, boorish but hyper-patriotic Donald Trump?

It is telling that Vance did not. Instead, he voted for independent conservative Mormon Evan McMullin, who has worked for the CIA and Goldman Sachs, and won just 0.5 per cent of the national vote.

And given the lessons of his book, I am not surprised.

Hillbilly Elegy describes a social, cultural and economic disaster that can’t be fixed by a single politician, no matter how loudly he boasts about his greatness.

Indeed, Vance repeatedly argues that family is more important than the state. Too many white workingclass Americans, he believes, look to Washington for help when they