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The elites will not allow any sympathy for the poor whites
JD Vance’s new Netflix adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy” is devastating to the political narrative of the left. How do I know? Because so many leftists try to stop people from looking at it.
Critics complain that the film has too many peasant nobles – although neither Vance’s 2016 memoir nor the film version focuses exactly on the nobility as such. They even complain that the autobiography of a white man from Hill Country does not have large black characters. Well yes.
For a film made from a best-selling book by well-known liberal filmmaker (Ron Howard) and starring Glenn Close, Amy Adams and Gabriel Besso, the film looks surprisingly controversial. And why? Because, as I mentioned above, it’s devastating for the political narrative of the left.
As Robert P. George, professor at Princeton, noted, responding to a negative review, “Do you [those] who don’t want you to watch “Hillbilly Elegy” might have. . . I do not know . . . an agenda? . . . The campaign against the film – directed by standard liberal filmmaker Ron Howard, by the way – is purely political.
To be fair, anything from the left is political. But the reaction to that Netflix movie tells us something about how the left is feeling right now.
Writing of the reaction, Rod Dreher comments, “It’s now okay to hate Deplorables again, and maybe even mandatory.” He adds, “I think the talk of ‘privilege’ among educated, middle-class white liberals is mostly about reorganizing prejudices so that lower-class whites deserve the contempt of superiors.”
The old Southern Democrats maintained the allegiance of the poor whites by making sure that these poor whites felt they could despise blacks. The modern Democratic Party maintains the allegiance of upper-middle-class whites by ensuring that they can despise lower-class whites. By humanizing these lower-class whites, Netflix’s “Hillbilly Elegy” calls the whole business into question.
The humanization of the working class was once the goal of Democrats. But not anymore.
After World War II and the GI Bill, a new managerial class emerged in the United States. A university education has become not only a rite of passage for the well-to-do, but a necessary passport, economically and above all socially, for the upper middle class. In 1960, one could join the upper echelons without a university degree; in 2000, it was almost unheard of.
This meant, of course, that those who entered the upper ranks did what the insecure lower ranks of the aristocracy always do: devote a lot of attention to distinguishing themselves from the non-elite.
In America, class war is disguised as culture war, and culture war is often waged under the guise of fighting racism. Thus, the Deplorables had to be labeled racist, although it was not the working class that redefined neighborhoods or set university admission policies.
And that means they can’t be humanized or be victims. The sympathy of the upper classes is distributed in a prudent measure, to selected targets.
Of course, the consequences go beyond movie reviews. As Christopher Caldwell recently noted in The New Republic, Trump’s economy involved the first “egalitarian boom” in decades. In 2019, before COVID-19 messed things up, we had an unemployment rate of 3.7% (with a record unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanics.)
Compare that with the Obama part of the boom, where almost all of the economic gain went to the top 10% income bracket.
Under President Trump, meanwhile, “the net worth of the richest 10% has grown only marginally, while that of all other groups has surged. In 2019, the share of aggregate income for the poorest 90% of wage earners increased for the first time in a decade. “
And what is the most vaunted political initiative of the Biden crowd? The forgiveness of student loans, which will mean that the majority of the working class will subsidize the university debt of the better-off.
Most Americans do not have a college degree, and those with a college degree make more money on average over their lifetime.
On the net, the flagship political initiative of the Democratic Party is a transfer from the poorest to the wealthiest.
It’s easier to take things away from people if you pretend they don’t deserve better. The response to “Hillbilly Elegy” suggests that we will be hearing more of such things in the years to come.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and founder of the blog InstaPundit.com.
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