Both before and after the election, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was widely cited, and sometimes even fetishized, as the key to understanding Donald Trump. The book, which highlights Vance’s upbringing in a dysfunctional “hillbilly” culture, is certainly worth reading as a window on a group of Americans, many of them Trump voters, who are too often overlooked. But it doesn’t explain the conservative suburban mother of four who voted for Trump. It doesn’t explain the upper-middle-class Trump voter, socked by Obamacare surcharges and hoping for a tax cut. It doesn’t explain the religious voter horrified by Health and Human Services rules — recently overturned in court — that could penalize doctors for refusing to perform gender-transition procedures.
A week after the election, noting Trump’s surprising performance among college-educated voters, The New Republic’s Eric Sasson declared that these Americans might be “the most deplorable of them all.” The educated had absolutely no excuse for opposing Hillary Clinton, he wrote: “They’re not suffering or desperate, and have no concrete reason to hate the status quo or to feel like they are in decline.”
There it is, folks. You’re either an ignorant hillbilly, or you had no sane reason not to vote for four more years of left-wing lockstep and a lady who might go down in history as the worst political candidate of all time. (If you’re feeling an urge to e-mail me and dispute this, please remember: She lost. In the 2016 election, that alone took some doing.)
But seriously, even if it’s accurate and troublesome that a huge group of “elites” in “the Acela corridor” are tremendously out of touch, when it comes to Trump’s victory, couldn’t it be that Obama’s presidency just wasn’t that great — sometimes even disastrous! — and that Hillary was even worse? Couldn’t it be time for some serious reflection on the part of the political Left?
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