CLARENCE PAGE: ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author throws hat in the ring — and it’s a MAGA hat
Ever since I first wrote about bestselling author J.D. Vance as a “Trump translator,” people have wanted me to be a Vance explainer. That’s OK. I explain things for a living.
A little background: After Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory surprised me — and a lot of other voters — Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” became a must-read for readers looking for insights into MAGA voters’ minds.
What a surprise it was for me to learn that Vance spent his growing-up years in Kentucky and Ohio, mostly in Middletown, the same Ohio factory town where I grew up.
Now he’s running for retiring Buckeye State Republican Sen. Rob Portman’s seat in a crowded field and hoping, no doubt, that the state has lots of voting book lovers.
Vance’s book is not about Trump but about his own coming of age in our struggling factory town plagued by unemployment, disinvestment, welfare dependence, opioid addiction and a pessimistic disrespect for education among teens.
I appreciated his candid, poignant account for telling hard truths and cutting through what I called the “colorization of poverty,” a media-driven narrative for the past half-century that has tended to treat poverty as a “Black problem.” Vance’s portrait of working-class struggle in the Rust Belt describes a disappearance of jobs and hope that is by no means limited to any one race or ethnic group — or state.
Vance’s candor proved to be a problem. With tweets and in interviews, he jabbed Trump with unflattering terms such as “moral disaster” and “cultural heroin,” a narcotic to which voters were turning to avoid their real problems. But by the time Vance threw his hat in the ring, it had turned into a MAGA hat. He apologized for misjudging the former president, deleted anti-Trump tweets and came out as a full-throated speaker of Trump’s populist attack-speak.
I began to hear from my readers after Vance and I appeared together in a video stream for the Woodson Center, a conservative Black think tank. What, they asked, did I think of Vance’s defense of his very conservative friend Tucker Carlson against the Anti-Defamation League’s call for the Fox News commentator’s dismissal?
Carlson had offended the ADL — and me too — by arguing on his show that Democrats were “trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the Third World.” The ADL accused Carlson of embracing “a foundational theory of white supremacy.”
Vance responded to me patiently that he was not “concerned about” non-white people replacing whites, and “I’m sure that’s not Tucker’s concern either.” Rather, Vance said, he was concerned only with too many new people coming into the country at once, not because the newcomers are good or bad, but simply “too much too quickly.”
Inflaming his concerns — and those of many others on the right — were people on the left boasting about projections of a “new Democratic voting majority” that he said he heard “repeated all the time from mainstream Democrats.”
“I don’t think most Americans see their identity in racial terms,” he said, “but eventually you tell people they’re always going to lose elections because young people and immigrants will swamp their vote, they might start feeling replaced.”
Maybe, especially if enough people encourage them to feel that way. Anxiety is a centuries-old issue in this land of immigrants.
With the rise of Trump, little wonder that projections of a possible Democratic majority, often touted optimistically by some on the left, cause consternation and heated politics on the right. “The U.S. is becoming more diverse, Census data shows,” said the Chicago Tribune’s headline on the release of 2020 census data Thursday, “and the country’s white population is shrinking.”
I’m optimistic, as I believe most Americans are, about this country’s ability to absorb new immigrants as we have in the past.
But as political polarization grows, immigration is back as an issue that increasingly defines our parties, along with questions of voter suppression on the left and exaggerated fears of voter fraud on the right.
Vance’s early pokes at Trump may yet doom his Republican primary campaign. But the issue lingers on. Once again our national ethnic melting pot threatens to boil over. For the long-term good of our nation, we need candidates who are ready and willing to turn down the heat.
Email Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune at cpage@chicagotribune.com.
