Photograph Source: college.library – CC BY 2.0

I doubt that many progressives in the United States have read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Being based in the Philippines, a country located on the outer fringes of the empire, I certainly was unaware of the book even when it began to rise on the bestsellers’ lists at the beginning of the first Trump administration.

But since the author is likely to become president if something happens to Donald Trump, I figured I would choose for my airport reading the book that made his name and skip the reviews that have revisited it ever since he was nominated to be Trump’s running mate last August.

I was not prepared for how well-written it was. And as a sociologist, I really appreciated how Vance articulates the contradictions of the white working class in the Rust Belt Midwest and Appalachian region as he personally experienced them. This is an “us” versus “them” narrative by someone who finally got to become one of “them.” He vividly recounts his hurdling the many visible (being poor) and invisible (cultural) barriers that separate the working class from the upper and upper-middle classes. They really are worlds apart, in Vance’s view, and he attributes his being able to finally cross class lines to four things: luck, a grandmother that forced him to develop the grit to rise above his surroundings, his stint in the Marine Corps, and an upper-middle-class wife, who initiated him into what was an alien, stable, upper-middle-class family life. The excruciating combination of poverty, drugs, violence, and disorganized family life represented by a mother who’s an addict and floats from one man to the next are, he claims, common elements of a working-class culture that prevents the vast majority of his proletarian peers from leaving their milieu.

When Vance enters law school at Yale, despite his having graduated summa cum laude at Ohio State, he is completely at sea in an alien culture. The way people act is........

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