In the run-up to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, J.D. Vance published 'Hillbilly Elegy', a book exploring the Appalachian values of his Kentucky-based family. As the subtitle indicates - “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” - Vance had set out to describe the roots and consequences of a breakdown. At a time when many observers were puzzling over why downtrodden working-class whites would have embraced a candidate whose conduct and origins seemed so alien to their professed values, it provided some easy answers.
The book became a sensation and that sensation in turn generated a deep, slow-burning backlash. There was no way Ron Howard’s project wasn’t going to be greeted with fusillades of rhetorical buckshot from one side or the other, particularly while everyone's emotions were still churning after Trump's loss to Biden during a catastrophic year for Americans.
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Mrmojo4700 (21718)
4 years ago
Thank you for shedding some light on this issue for me. I’ll have to do some reading on the subject now.
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