Author lectures on culture crisis

Society’s out-of-date message led to Trump victory, he says

FAYETTEVILLE — People who have experienced the loss of good jobs and wages will fail to embrace a political message stuck on repeat, said J.D. Vance, author and political commentator.

“In a country where more and more people realistically expect that their children are going to do worse than they do, in a country where the American dream is increasingly in crisis, there are people who are going to be frustrated and they’re going to be upset,” Vance said. “And if you promise them the same thing that people have promised them for 20, 30, or 40 years, they’re going to say, ‘Buzz off, I’m going to vote for somebody else.’”

Vance spoke Thursday at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville about Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, a chronicle of his family’s economic and personal struggles.

The best-selling book has been praised for providing insight into working-class white Americans, a group viewed by many political observers as key to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Vance said that while he’s a Republican, he never supported the candidacy of Trump. Trump and Bernie Sanders each tapped into the sentiment of struggling voters, he said.

“That impulse almost made Sanders the nominee of the Democratic Party, and it made Donald Trump president of the United States,” Vance said.

Vance, 32, said his grandparents moved to southwestern Ohio in the 1940s from eastern Kentucky coal country, leaving a life of extreme poverty to ride the wave of new manufacturing jobs to a middle-class life.

He described how the shrinking factory work in Ohio and other parts of the Midwest took away more than good jobs and wages.

Also lost was “the stability, the social networks, the cultural capital that a lot of those jobs provided,” said Vance, going on to describe the importance of culture in his life and in understanding people from communities like his own.

Vance joined the Marine Corps after high school before earning degrees from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He’s worked as a corporate lawyer and recently moved back to Ohio to work on funding startup businesses. He’s also started a nonprofit to battle opioid addiction, he said.

His family’s story is “relevant to a much broader conversation that we need to have in this country, and it’s about what is the American dream and what’s happening to it.”

With the loss of factory work, his grandparents’ family “started to fall apart pretty soon,” Vance said. “And I think that falling-apart process previewed what would happen to a lot of other families in the community.”

Growing up, Vance said he experienced his mother’s abuse of prescription drugs and addiction before being taken in by his grandmother and living in poverty. Neighborhood families experienced similar struggles, he said.

“You start to think that doing well is something for other people, it’s not for you,” Vance said.

He described research showing how others had experiences similar to his own.

“There are a lot of different things under the umbrella of culture that are happening in these communities,” Vance said.

He told the audience that data show childhood trauma is much more common “among families like mine” than middle- and upper-class families. As those children mature, these past experiences shape how they approach conflict, he said, describing how as an adult he’s had to address the roots of his own problems.

More generally, Vance also said religious participation is less among lower-income Americans.

But research shows that church, as a civic institution, is “really important for people on the bottom,” Vance said, adding, “it provides social support when they really need it.”

He said opioid abuse also has taken a toll on communities, contrasting the rapid spiral of addiction to alcohol abuse. He said his grandfather struggled with alcohol and at one time “was a pretty mean drunk.” But Vance added that the devastating effects of alcoholism take decades to manifest, unlike with opioids.

An overflow crowd at the 247-person capacity Arkansas Union Theatre heard Vance say that, regardless of political party, “we’ve got to worry about the fact that we’ve got an incredible crisis in the American dream right now.”

Unless problems are addressed, “it’s also going to be bad for a political culture that is increasingly isolated and disconnected, that is increasingly rancorous and frankly, is increasingly unstable,” Vance said.

The public lecture was sponsored by UA’s Center for Multicultural and Diversity Education. Vance was paid a $13,000 appearance fee.