My book Hillbilly Elegy is really an exploration of the American Dream as it was experienced by me and my family and the broader community in which I lived.

It chronicled a real decline in the American Dream, not because people weren’t consuming as much as they have in the past – if you look at the trend lines, we’re certainly able to buy more stuff today than we ever have been able to. It’s a story about family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector, and all these senses of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it.

When I was growing up, what the American Dream meant to me was that I had a decent enough job to support my family, and I could be a good husband and a good father. That’s what I most wanted out of my life. It wasn’t the American Dream of ‘the striver’. It wasn’t the American Dream, frankly, that I think animates much of Washington DC. I didn’t care if I went to Ivy League law school, I didn’t care if I got a best-selling book, I didn’t care if I had a lot of money. What I wanted was to be able to give my family and my children the things I hadn’t had as a kid.

That was the sense in which the American Dream mattered most to me. Now, that American Dream is undoubtedly in decline, what should a conservative politics do in response? I think a first and preliminary step is that we have to distinguish between conservative politics and libertarian politics.

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I don’t mean to criticise libertarianism. I first learned about conservatism as an idea from Friedrich Hayek – The Road to Serfdom is one of the best books that I’ve ever read about conservative thought. But I believe that conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians, and because that’s such a loaded word, and because labels mean different things to different people, I want to define it as precisely as I can.

What I’m going after is this view that so long as public outcomes and social goods are produced by free individual choices, we shouldn’t be too concerned about what those goods ultimately produce. An example: in Silicon Valley, it is common for neuroscientists to make much more at technology companies like Apple or Facebook, where I think they quite literally are making money addicting our children to devices and applications that warp their brains, than folks who are neuroscientists trying to cure Alzheimer’s. I know a lot of Libertarians who will say ‘Well, that is the consequence of free choices. That is the consequence of people buying and selling labour on an open market, and so long as there isn’t any government coercion in that relationship, we shouldn’t be so concerned about it.’

What I’m arguing is that conservatives should be concerned about it. We should be concerned that our economy is geared more towards the development of applications than curing terrible diseases, and we should care about a whole host of public goods, in addition to that, and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish some of those public goods.

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I want to tell a story, one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard since my book came out. A woman I met in southeastern Ohio — which is really ground zero for the opioid problem and so many other social problems that all of us care about in this country — was telling me about a young patient she had who had become addicted to opioids. He was eight years old and he was already addicted to Percocets. The way that this kid became addicted to opioids is that he would do drug runs for his family. Because they didn’t have a lot of money, if he made a successful drug run, they would actually give him a Percocet as a reward. That was how this kid, at the tender age of eight, became addicted to opioids.

I think there’s a tendency in our politics on the right to look at this kid and say ‘You know, it’s a tragedy what’s happened to him, but it’s fundamentally a tragedy that political power can’t touch. Parents need to make better decisions. This child, God willing, needs to make better decision when he grows up.’

I think that ignores the way in which human beings actually live their lives – the cultural, economic, and environmental contexts in which this kid grows up. It ignores the fact that this kid lives in a community that has too few spare dollars to spend and too many spare opioids. That is a political problem. That is something that we decided to do using political power. We allowed commercial actors to sell these drugs in our communities. We allowed our regulatory state to approve these drugs and to do nothing when it was very clear that these substances were starting to affect our communities. That was a political choice and political power can actually fix it.

That kid lives in a community where even if he makes good choices later on in life, he lives in a place where there are virtually no good jobs for a kid of his educational status and his social class. If he wants to earn a decent wage, if he wants to work at a good job, those jobs in his community have largely gone overseas thanks to forces of globalisation that we unleashed because of political choices. We made the choice that we wanted that kid to be able to buy cheaper consumer goods at Walmart instead of having access to a good job. And maybe that was a defensible choice – I don’t think it was– but it was a choice and we have to stop pretending that it wasn’t.

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I’ve been blown away by some of the research that I’ve seen in the past year about the way in which pornography warps young adults’ minds, and how they interact with their environment, and how they interact with their own sexuality. We know that young adults are marrying less — they’re having less children. They’re engaging in healthier and productive relationships less and less, and we know that at least one of the causes of this is that we have allowed — under the guise of libertarianism — pornography to seep even into our youngest minds through the channels of the Internet.

Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage and family and happiness. We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice, and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.

And even if this kid marches through an opioid epidemic in an environment and a community where there are very few good jobs, and even if he finds himself in a healthy relationship and wants to do the thing that I most defined as core to my American Dream – start a family and have happy, healthy children – he will confront a society and a culture and a market economy that is more hostile to people having children than maybe at any period in American history.

There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the way that I measure a healthy society, or I think the most important way to measure healthy society, is whether a nation – whether the American nation – is having enough children to replace itself.

Do people look to the future and see a place that’s worth having children? Do they have good enough jobs so that they can make the necessary sacrifices so that one of the parents can be home with that kid most of the time? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a roof over their kid’s head, put food on the table and provide that child with a good education?

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By every statistic that we have, what we see is that people are answering ‘No’ to all of those questions. For the first extended period in the history of the American nation, our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us. Now I know some libertarians will say “Well, that choice comes from free individuals. If people are choosing not to have children, if they’re choosing to spend their money on vacations or nicer cars or nicer apartments, then we should be okay with that.”

I think there is a good libertarian sympathetic response to that. We can point out, for example, that areas of the world and areas of the country with fewer children are less dynamic. We can point out that we have a social safety net that’s entirely built on the idea that you will have more workers and more people coming into the system than retire, and to do that, you need to have children being born. But I think to make this about economics is to concede too much of a premise that we don’t want to concede.

When I think about my own life, the thing that has made my life best is the fact that I am the father of a two year-old son. When I think about the demons of my own childhood, and a way that those demons have melted away in the love and laughter of my eldest son; when I see friends of mine who’ve grown up in tough circumstances and who’ve become fathers and have become more connected to their communities, to their families, to their faith, because of the role of their own children, I say we want babies not just because they’re economically useful. We want more babies because children are good.

Libertarians aren’t heartless, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are. I think they also recognise many of the same problems that we recognise. But they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it to solve or even to try to help address some of these problems.

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If people are spending too much time addicted to devices that are designed to addict them, we can’t just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something to stop it. If people are killing themselves because they’re being bullied in online chatrooms, we can’t just say parents need to exercise more responsibility. You have to accept that parents live and swim in the same cultural pond as the rest of us.

It is one thing to be a good parent who monitors your kids screen time. It is another thing to tell a kid whose entire environment, whose school friends, whose school bullies, whose teachers, whose work friends all use these technologies and use them in a way that is increasingly causing social problems and say, “we can’t do anything about that other than let our parents be better about screen time.” We live in an environment and in a culture that is shaped by our laws and public policy, and we can’t hide from that fact anymore.

The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish these things?

I serve my child, and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and it will be used to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbours without any consequence, because those people chose to take those drugs.

It is time, as Ronald Reagan once said, for choosing, and I choose my son. I choose the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life for him, and I choose a healthy American nation so necessary to defend and support that civic constitution.

This is an edited version of a speech entitled ‘Beyond Libertarianism’, delivered by JD Vance at the National Conservatism: Founding Conference in Washington DC on 16 July

You would struggle to find a pithier encapsulation of elite disdain for the working class. But perhaps it is unfair that the comment should so define her; by the standards of her tribe, it is fairly mild. This is especially true when it comes to the white rural poor, who are widely regarded in refined circles as a benighted pox upon the country, a deluded and potentially violent mob fortunately doomed by demographic trends to extinction, though, alas, not soon enough. Indeed, I have lost count of the number of articles lamenting that the American electoral system gives rural populations too much say over how the country is run.  

The freewheeling contempt shown by those with much towards those with little is especially galling when you consider the harshness of life in America’s impoverished rural communities. The most famous example is Appalachia, which is home to the first people to be labelled and characterised with the infamous stereotype, “hillbillies”: it has lagged behind its neighbours economically since at least 1850. “Diseases of despair” are endemic among the region’s 26.4 million residents: according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, “overdose-related mortality rates for people ages 25–54” were “72% higher in the region than the rest of the country”. Yet when opioids were flooding the region, executives at one pharmaceutical company derided those addicted to their products as “pillbillies”.  Indeed, there is no end to the epithets: hillbilly, hick, yokel, white trash, redneck. But don’t worry, none of them will get you cancelled. 

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Meanwhile, as the election approaches, the media continues to warn us that the threat level from Hillbillystan is “red”. “White rural Trump supporters are a threat to democracy,” declares The Daily Beast. “White rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it,” says Paul Krugman. These particular warnings owe much to White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, which was published earlier this year. Its authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, marshalled the data to demonstrate that when it comes to the awfulness of rural whites, the science is settled. In an interview on MSNBC, Schaller described them as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country”. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they are also “anti-democratic” “white Christian nationalists” prone to conspiracy theories who are also “the most likely to excuse or justify violence”.

See? I told you Hillary Clinton was being nice.  

Admittedly, White Rural Rage was a bit much even for The Guardian and The Atlantic, and the book was criticised by the very researchers whose work was cited in its pages. But none of that stopped it from hitting The New York Times bestseller list. 

Although contemporary in form, White Rural Rage is only the most recent expression of a contempt that dates back to before the American Revolution, when Appalachia and the Ozarks were settled by a population Americans refer to as the “Scotch-Irish” — i.e. lowland Scots who had traded border raiding against the English for colonising Ulster in the days of James I, before undertaking a much greater voyage across the Atlantic. In 1765, Charles Woodmason, a visitor to the North Carolina colony wrote of its Scotch-Irish inhabitants: “The Manners of the North Carolinians in General, are Vile and Corrupt — The whole Country is a Stage of Debauchery, Dissoluteness and Corruption.” 

The reputation of the “Scotch-Irish” for clannish behaviour, violence, drinking and general deplorableness grew over the next century. In the 1860s, the Hatfields and McCoys began their famous feud, which was still raging in the early 20th century. It was around this time that the people of Appalachia were christened “hillbillies”, a word said to derive from Scottish “hill folk” and “billy” (alternately a Scots term of endearment or reference to William of Orange). However, given that the term didn’t appear until 300 years after the “Scotch-Irish” had left Scotland, this seems debatable, at the very least. 

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Following on from these murky origins, “hillbilly” eventually spread from Appalachia and today is used as a catch-all insult for any member of the rural white poor. But there is an ambiguity to it: America has a rich lore of outlaws and renegades, and the hillbilly — stubbornly self-reliant, wilful and loyal to his family — also fits this archetype. This ambiguity is reflected in popular culture: Hank Williams Sr, widely regarded as the greatest songwriter in the history of country music, was known as “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” not because he feuded with his neighbours but for the primal eloquence of his pain songs. The Beverly Hillbillies made fun of its family of yokels turned millionaires, but the characters were good-natured and moral and much more likeable than their scheming banker neighbour. The Andy Griffith Show was full of homespun wisdom, and featured a hillbilly band called The Dillards which introduced many Americans to Bluegrass music. This is also where Ron Howard got his start as a child actor, little realising that 60 years later he would tell a very different version of rural life in his film adaptation of J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. 

In the Seventies, shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard still portrayed hillbillies in a favourable light, but this is also when horror movie tropes about depraved, inbred yokels sexually assaulting, torturing, killing and eating urbanites who had wandered off course became entrenched in the culture. In 1972’s Deliverance, Ned Beatty’s character was instructed to “squeal like a pig” by his hillbilly rapist. In 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a group of college students stumble upon a house where Leatherface murders and carves up his victims while wearing a mask made of human skin. In 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes (purportedly inspired by the legend of the Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean) a family headed out on vacation are attacked by a clan of mutants with a taste for human flesh. The old monsters — mummies and ghouls and werewolves and the like — had lost their ability to scare. True evil was a demented hillbilly. 

The visceral loathing that today’s US elites have for the rural poor shares a psychic undercurrent with this realm of fantasy. I once knew a Russian psychoanalyst who argued that to feel hatred was inevitable, and that if you denied yourself an outlet for so powerful an emotion you would become ill. The important thing was to be careful who or what you chose to hate, how much, and for how long. This can help us understand much of the vitriol that is aimed at the rural white poor today. Most of the groups it was formerly acceptable for American elites to despise are now off limits, and there are severe social and legal consequences for attacking them. But the Hillbilly Trump voter exists in a state of exception. Compassion is not forbidden — you will recall that Hillary Clinton argued that some form of “deprogramming” might be possible for deplorables. But it is not compulsory: you are free to deride, abuse, even to cheer along their ultimate extinction if you feel like it. The hate is liberating.

Needless to say, we can expect to see a lot more of this style of liberation as the election approaches, even more if Trump wins, and still more if he selects J.D. Vance as his vice president. The Hillbilly Elegy author turned senator is an especially potent hate symbol as, although he is of Appalachian stock and experienced serious familial trauma in his youth, he subsequently studied law at Yale before becoming a successful venture capitalist: the insults write themselves. However, this makes Vance a more interesting figure. He could have left his roots behind and adopted the mores and shibboleths of the elite society to which he had gained access, but instead he chose to stay loyal to his original tribe. He is the hillbilly at the gates, albeit in a well-tailored suit.

Sometimes, when contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory in November, I wonder how the media and elites will respond. The first time around, there was a brief moment of self-reflection when they considered that perhaps they had misread the country, and that they ought to stop condemning the evildoer and go out there and try to understand him. But as Dostoevsky pointed out, that is difficult, and so these efforts at empathy lasted about five minutes before they went back to condemning.

So, I am sceptical that it will be any different this time around. But then I ask: are they really going to just repeat the same tropes over and over again for four years? How can they bear it? And then I remember that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is now up to nine films, and that there are many, many, many variations on the hillbilly horror theme out there. So of course they are. Like the producers of low-budget slasher fare, they don’t want new ideas — the ones they already have work just fine. 

But they protest too much, these Hollywood liberals. In terms of end-product, Hollywood is the propaganda factory of American conservatism. Periodically, some opinionator will complain that the right-wing point of view is censored, barred, banned in popular culture today — perhaps pointing to some (largely market-driven) decision to cast a non-white lead in a superhero franchise, or some bit of awards ceremony handwringing. The counter-evidence would be: Fast & Furious 9, Toy Story 4, Avengers: Endgame, The Star Wars saga, Die Hard, Rocky I-V, Wonder Woman, Working Girl. Every western, every war movie, every film in which a determined individual rises above a mediocre/corrupt/unbelieving collective to impose their will upon their fate — usually with some homilies about the importance of family, an insistence on absolute Truth, and a bit of ultra-violence along the way.

Ron Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy — streaming on Netflix from Tuesday — is quintessential. It’s the sentimental tale of a bright kid from a bad town who lifts himself, by his bootstraps, no less, to personal success. In her role as “Mamaw”, the foul-mouthed heart-of-gold Appalachian matriarch, Glenn Close even commits to wearing bad teeth — which means she is now seen as a dead cert for an Oscar nod. In fact, the only thing that distinguishes Hillbilly Elegy from basic Hollywood fare, other than its off-the-charts Ron Howardian mawkishness, is that its source material is explicit in its conservatism. For the real-life Vance is a proud representative of the white working class, who once described Donald Trump’s message as “an oasis in the desert” for his people.

Back in the 1960s, Vance’s hillbilly grandparents (Mamaw and Papaw), became internal immigrants, moving 100 miles from rural Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, in search of work at the Armco steelworks. Even when work was plentiful, violence, alcoholism and a general cussedness were features of daily life. When the jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 80s, poverty, drugs and despair were added to the mix. But one child believed… and Vance made it out, first becoming a Marine, then a Yale Law School graduate, then a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, then a bestselling author at 31.

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Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t mention Trump — but the timing was apt. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Vance was presented as a sentinel of not only the hillbillies (whom he describes as his people; quite specifically Scots-Irish farmers who settled in the Appalachians), but also the white working class en masse.

“You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading JD Vance,” wrote Rod Dreher in an interview that crashed the American Conservative website. “His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.”

So Hillbilly Elegy became a set text for modern conservatives, the book that — as a commenter on the Times website recently put it — “explains exactly why Trump was needed and is still needed”. Vance toured the news channels as a sort of thinking person’s deplorable and helped reframe identity politics for the only minority in America (as Mamaw had taught him) whom it was socially acceptable to insult. And for liberals, back in 2016, reading Hillbilly Elegy became an act of imaginative penance.

The book is deeply moving. Vance writes with clarity and empathy and captures, as few are able, the experience of family dysfunction from the perspective of a child. You cannot help but root for him — and wince at the bloody noses and black eyes, the Pepsi that his mother put in his bottle from nine months, the dim comments from the privileged people he meets when he finally breaks into those elite coastal enclaves. Hell of a family, the Vances. Mamaw literally set fire to her husband as a punishment for falling asleep drunk on the sofa — and she was the stable one. Vance’s father abandoned the family to become a Christian fundamentalist; 15 stepfathers came and went. When JD was 11, his drug-dependent mother (Amy Adams in the movie) lost her temper while driving and floored the accelerator, threatening to kill them both. When the case eventually arrives before a family court, JD looks around and realises that all the other families look like his.

The scene is presented a little differently in the film, but in the book it’s where the personal becomes political. “They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed ‘TV accents’ — the neutral accent that so many news anchors had, the social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.”

But having written about the litany of failures in education, healthcare, the labour market, the justice system and wider American culture, Vance makes a fairly unconvincing turn. I read hoping to find out what lies beyond terms like “white trash”; Vance seemed to be saying to me — yeah, we are kind of trash. The fact that Vance is honest about his conflicted feelings doesn’t really help to iron them out. He sets great store by “hillbilly justice” (i.e. pointing guns at family members) — which “never failed me”. But he also wonders. If family honour is so important in his community, why are domestic abuse and family breakdown so rampant? If hillbillies are so hardworking, why do we give up on good jobs and moan about the economy on Facebook? And despite his purported pride in his people, he proves deeply resentful when any of his peers receive any crumbs of his success.

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It would be inaccurate to characterise Vance as a cheerleader for Trump. He’s actually smarter than that. In his interview with Dreher, Vance warned — prophetically — that while Trumpism offered a cheap thrill, the man himself offered nothing to treat the root causes of American despair. He’s the OxyContin of Presidents. At best, he made people understand that their pain was economic as much as cultural. But Vance’s real disappointment with Trump — “the tragedy of his presidency” — is that he encouraged white working class voters to blame others for their problems.

The book turns out to be rather more old-fashioned: a diatribe against what Vance terms “learned helplessness”. Its broadsides at “welfare queens” have been mainstream in American politics since at least the Nixon era (when they were commonly directed against African-Americans). And its celebration of individual uplift is pure Hollywood. If he could change one thing about his community, Vance says, it’s the feeling people have that their choices don’t matter. They do — I am living proof of that, he says. “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”

Well, sure. We all need to feel that our choices matter. But the fact that Vance only made it out by the skin of his teeth — and hillbilly VCs remain a rare breed — suggests that merely exhorting the people of Middletown, Ohio, to make better choices isn’t going to do much. As his book makes clear, a poor kid only needs to make a handful of bad choices to fail and 100 good choices to become a success. The opposite is true for rich kids: three of four decent choices all-but guarantee success; you need to continually mess up to truly mess up.

Instead of questioning the nature of those choices, Vance doubles down on those who made bad choices. That is, who lack his combination of intelligence; a hard-as-nails Mamaw; Amy Chua — the actual Tiger Mom of legend — stepping in as his mentor; and so on. Luck in other words. You need luck. Can’t we do better than luck?

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The part that conservatives often quote with a triumphal “YOU SEE?” is where Vance dismisses naive attempts to improve his people’s lot through education — despite the fact that education provided his own route out. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.’”

But that’s not the end of the conversation. It’s the beginning. OK, so what can be done to improve parenting? Infrastructure investment, job creation, paid parental leave, basic healthcare, nutrition programs, wage protection, income support? The sort of protections that American politicians have systematically dismantled over the last 40 years or so? Might be worth a try? And maybe a problem like the opioid epidemic was created by governments and corporations. This isn’t to deny the agency of Vance’s mother, who fell prey to heroin-addiction. It’s merely to admit that fixing it might involve more than just telling people to make less trashy choices. It may not turn wolves into lambs. But it might save a lot of kids unnecessary pain.

The message I took from the book was rather darker than the one that Vance purports to offer. What he seemed to be saying is: these people neither want nor deserve your sympathy or your help. And what a comforting message that must be for those who have outsourced jobs, dismantled social security and widened the economic divide over the years. And there’s a further implication too. These opiate-ridden post-industrial communities may hate big city liberals; but not nearly as much as they hate Billy down the road, who cheats on his food stamps; or Marcie next door, who has five kids by five different fathers; or Duane who pulled his gun on his wife in the restaurant.

It’s hopelessness internalised. Easy to stir up if you’re a cynical enough politician. It’s often forgotten that Tories only really started making in-roads in the “Red Wall” towns not with Brexit but with George Osborne’s “Skivers vs Strivers” speeches circa 2013 which went down a storm in post-industrial British towns.

As for the movie. I suspect conservatives will hate it as it does that thing Didion describes, of pretending irreconcilable political differences don’t exist. Liberals will hate it too as it does  that “sickeningly irresponsible” thing (as one review had it) of asking audiences to sympathise with a conservative. But let’s not pretend its combination of schmaltz and violence, of myth and identity is anything other than purest Hollywood, the absolute mainstream of American culture. It’s the water and we are fish — we don’t even notice it.

For the more reflective there was another option: embarking on the long, slow process of trying to understand their fellow countrymen.

For obvious reasons, the medium of the book is almost perfectly positioned for such people. Rightly or wrongly, books bestow a seriousness of purpose on the reader as well as on the part of the author. They are not merely conveying “I saw something on the telly about that”, but an expression of intent: a promise that the participant really wants to get to the root of something. And since distractions in our societies are now legion, and reading has become a rarity, the idea of ‘the book’ to explain a particular social or political phenomenon is freighted with a certain attraction.

In the wake of the Trump election, Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance assumed this weightiness in the US and abroad. Proclaimed as 2016’s “political book of the year” by The Sunday Times, it was lauded across the right- and left-wing press. The New York Times described it as “essential reading for this moment in history”. The Economist recommended it to its readers as the book to help them understand America. And The Independent proclaimed it “a great insight into Trump and Brexit”.

For anyone who has read the book, these descriptions may seem overstretched. Hillbilly Elegy is an elegant and hopeful memoir written by someone from an inelegant and hopeless world onto which he shines unsparing insight. Set in the poor Rust Belt of America, it is a story of marital disharmony, wider family chaos, joblessness, drink, drugs and poverty.

It is also a memoir of the people who transcended and transformed the situation they had been given. Vance’s grandmother, Mamaw, comes across as a woman of such strength that she is able not just to keep herself alive, but to protect, nurture and see into flight those members of her family who might otherwise never have taken off.

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Vance goes into the Marine Corps where he acquires some of the habits of discipline and pride that his upbringing had failed to impart. From there, he makes it to Yale Law School. His is a terrific – and terrifically American – story of success against many odds.

Nevertheless, to assume that Hillbilly Elegy explains the election of Donald Trump – let alone the British choice to vote for Brexit – gives the book a weight it cannot carry. Sure, as a memoir, it certainly provides an insight into a world most Americans – especially most book-buying Americans – know little of. But an explanation for the Trump phenomenon?

There are books that certainly do that (The Great Revolt by Salena Zito and Brad Todd being one of the best), but if Hillbilly does some of that, it certainly cannot do it alone.

Still the desire for the memoir that explains the oddity of the majority would seem to remain attractive, for publishers and readers alike. And a far more curious – and far less viable – candidate has just appeared in a new English translation.

Retour à Reims (Returning to Reims) was first published in France in 2009. It is part memoir, part reflection, part typically Gallic intellectual detour written by the author and sociology professor Didier Eribon (whose previous work includes a biography of Michel Foucault).

The book gently accumulated readers upon publication, but interest soared (hence the latest English translation) after Marine le Pen made it to the last round of the French Presidential elections. Since when, Returning to Reims has been published in multiple translations across Europe, and adapted into a widely praised stage-play. It has assumed the mantle of ‘the book you need to understand the rise of the far-right’.

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If Hillbilly is typical, in many ways, of American literature – a story of struggle with a happy ending; then Rheims reads like the work of a typical Francophobe. Ostensibly the story of a man’s return to his impoverished home town, the supposed political insight comes from his realisation that his estranged family, has, during the decades of his absence, moved from voting for the political Left (including the communists) to voting for the Right (including the Front National).

These family members remain largely voiceless as Eribon himself chooses to ‘explain’ them.

And whereas JD Vance comes across at all times as a thoroughly decent and respectful figure, Eribon seems content to portray himself – accurately it would appear – as a shit of the first order. His explanation for abandoning his family is two-fold: that the world he became interested in (of political theory, of Paris, and of books) was completely removed from them; and because he is gay.

Further flyover reading

What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

He leaves to go to university and does not even return to attend his father’s funeral. Eribon neglects to stay in touch with his siblings, has not spoken to his elder brother and, by his own admission, did not bother to help up his younger siblings to escape – as he managed to do – from the working class poverty that clearly repelled him as a youngster.

Of his elder brother (who is still alive), he writes: “What I wanted could be summed up like this: not to be like him.”

Of his father, he reflects “My relationship with my father seemed to me to be only a biological and a legal one: he had fathered me, and I bore his name, but other than that he didn’t much matter to me.”

Since this is the work of a French sociologist, these moments of unlovable self-revelation are interspersed with pretentious diversions. There are endless laudings of Sartre. On any subject, on every occasion, Eribon is on team Sartre. If anyone ever said anything mean about Sartre, or dared to contradict him they go into the enemy camp and are attacked.

Whenever he needs to analyse a sociological issue Eribon eschews speaking to people (such as his own family) and instead comfortably coats them – from a distance – in a thick layer of sociology-ese. For instance no sooner has he finally raised the question of immigrant youths in the banlieues than we are given this:

“I know people will accuse me of falling into the realm of conspiracy theories, ascribing hidden purposes to certain institutions and even inventing evil intentions. This is the same criticism Bourdieu offered of the Althusserian notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’. Such a notion involves thinking in terms of a ‘pessimistic functionalism’. An apparatus, he writes, would be ‘an infernal machine, programmed to accomplish certain purposes’, adding that ‘this fantasy of the conspiracy, the idea that an evil will is responsible for everything that happens in the social world, haunts critical social thought’. Of course, he is right! It is undeniable that Althusser’s concept returns us to an old-fashioned Marxist dramaturgy – or better, an old fashioned Marxist logomachy – in which entities…. Etc etc’ [p.114]

Elsewhere, there is a long diversion describing the novels he has never finished writing. And towards the end, the memoir retreats again into Eribon’s personal comfort zone. The last fifth of the book is a turgid and uninteresting diversion on homosexuality and society. This has been covered by Eribon before, in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. But what emerges by the end is the clear realisation that he is not in the slightest bit interested in working out what made his family and others move to the political Right.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

Instead, he is focuses on himself, and his own right to position himself as callously as he likes away from them and their world. One of the only times Eribon allows his mother to describe, in her own words, her world as she has experienced it is when she describes how the housing estate the family lived on had become – in Didier’s absence – overwhelmed by people of immigrant backgrounds. The Eribon family ends up applying to move elsewhere because they no longer feel safe or at home in the place that had once been theirs.

Eribon’s mother describes some of the indignities and embarrassments of this life and here is what he has to say:

“Did her descriptions really correspond to the reality around her or only to her fantasies? Most likely both at once. I no longer lived with them and never visited them, so I have no way of judging. When I would say to her on the telephone – for she would talk of nothing else – that she must be exaggerating, she would reply: ‘It’s obvious that you don’t live here and that it’s not like that where you live.’  What could I say?  Still I ask myself about how certain discourses come into being, discourses that serve to transform platforms… etc etc.’ [pp.138-9]

In a way it is appropriate that Returning to Reims should continue to hold the reputation of a book which explains why the public are voting the ‘wrong’ way.

The idea that a single life story could explain the indignities, frustrations and legitimate grievances of millions of people is a presumption in itself. But Returning to Reims – and its ongoing critical acclaim – adds an extra layer to the whole phenomenon. For here is a book which is meant to explain the politically wandering working classes. And a person has been found who comes from that background and ought to be able to understand it.

How perfect that the person is Eribon. This is a man who not only dislikes the people in question (and these are kin, not just countrymen) but who is more interested in interpreting the people, or correcting the people, than – even at this late stage – simply listening to them.