"The narrator of #HillbillyElegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, #Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white people and added some about being called to public service. [..] The billionaire investor #PeterThiel [..] doesn’t appear in the book, though he’s listed in the acknowledgments."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/deborah-friedell/short-cuts

#JDVance #2024election #USpol #USpolitics #GOP #NewRight #bootstrapism #PoorBashing #Trump

#books

"#Vance’s willingness to radically revise and overwrite the lessons of his life story is by now a well-documented reflex; what’s more pivotal to his odyssey through public life is the voyeuristic liberal fascination with the tale of heroic uplift he spun in his reputation-making memoir."

#ChrisLehmann : How the Liberal #Media Gave Us #JDVance

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jd-vance-cnn-liberal-media/
#2024election #USpol #USpolitics #USmedia #bootstrapism #PoorBashing #Appalachia #poverty #prolowashing #HillbillyElegy #books

"So eager were critics and pundits to find an apologist for the White working class who was not blatantly racist that they overlooked #Vance’s fatuousness, his willingness to play up his hokeyness for the benefit of his liberal audience and the ultimate banality of his message."

#BeccaRothfeld on how #JDVance gulled liberals about #Appalachia with #HillbillyElegy, and on his Faustian bargain with Trumpism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/23/hillbilly-elegy-jd-vance-vice-president-nominee-review/
#USpol #USpolitics #bootstrapism #PoorBashing #poverty #books

"Vance’s argument that white rural poverty stemmed from a culture of laziness and welfare dependency simply took age-old racialized tropes about Black and brown people and redirected them to poor whites."

#DavidAustinWalsh on establishment liberals' early boosting and prolowashing of #JDVance

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/liberals-are-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-j-d-vance/
#2024election #GOP #USpolitics #USpol #FarRight #NewRight #bootstrapism #PoorBashing

#ElizabethCatte - writing in 2017 - on the dangerous myth purveyed by #JDVance in #HillbillyElegy

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/elizabeth-catte-mythical-whiteness-trump-country/
#USpol #USpolitics #GOP #RNC #2024election #Trumpism #NewRight #Appalachia #poverty #PoorBashing #bootstrapism #books