On an awakening – A.O. Scott in NYT:

‘“I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,” J.D. Vance wrote on the first page of “Hillbilly Elegy,” by way of establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016, when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with “a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively dogs.” His memoir reads a little differently now.
This is partly because Vance is, in fact, a senator, and also, as of Monday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Much has been made of his political evolution over the past eight years, from never-Trump conservative to MAGA loyalist, from analyzing right-wing populism to embodying it. While Vance’s critics view this as brazen opportunism, he has explained his ideological shifts (including in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times) as a result of a twofold intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse.’

(…)

‘Part of the message of this kind of memoir is humble and aspirational: If I can make it, the writer suggests, anybody can. But that encouraging moral is accompanied by the somber acknowledgment that many people don’t. The plucky, lucky protagonist is at once representative and exceptional, a paradox that gives personal reflection the weight of social criticism. What’s stopping everyone else? Why do so many of Vance’s peers seem destined for joblessness and underemployment, substance abuse and domestic chaos, poverty and despair?’

(…)

‘The harshness of this judgment — and the cultural determinism underpinning it — drew some criticism, including from writers with backgrounds like Vance’s. At the same time, the idea that members of a marginal or disadvantaged group have caused their own misfortune is music to the ears of those in power. If those people are just that way — lazy, uncooperative, sexually promiscuous — then any policy designed to help them is useless.’

(…)

‘There is a tension in “Hillbilly Elegy,” a dissonance between the way Vance celebrates his family and the way he sells them out, othering them in the service of a dubious argument. I say dubious because it’s clear now that he doubts the thesis that the American working class is to blame for its own troubles, or at least doubts the political utility of saying as much. He is more apt to blame China, NAFTA, Mexico and certain corporations, and also the political and cultural establishment that he was once determined to join.’

Read the article here.

The Ross Douthat interview is worth reading. MAGA + Yale = Vance.

What’s missing in this appraisal is what makes the genre so typically American. I overcame my own nothingness and turned myself into a success.
The more European version would be: I saw my own nothingness, but I saw the nothingness of other people as well. (The dirty secret is that this lurks behind American optimism in the style of Vance of many others, it’s just suppressed. And no wonder that Houellebecq was missing on the list of the 100 best novels of this century according to NYT. See here.

Destroy what you were once determined to join. What else is true ambition? Let’s call it upwards social mobility with some benefits. Not for others though.

Also, promiscuity is the enemy of productivity.