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 election victory surprised me — and a lot of other voters — in 2016, 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 like “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.”
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