Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, published already in 2016, got a running start on what has become since a familiar path. Vance used his own childhood— even his mother and his grandmother—and “the hillbilly culture” in which he was reared, to help readers understand how a mega-millionaire who never knew an hour of poverty drew extraordinary appeal from men and women, mostly white, who’d lost everything when coal mines and factories closed up and left for greener, foreign pastures. J. D. Vance began an explanation of the grievance politics that now characterize so much of Trump’s continuing appeal.
Vance’s people were left behind by the “elites.” When they were, there was nowhere left for them to turn for dignity but escape; hence, the rush of opioids. Vance showed readers forgotten men and women totally abandoned by academia, by government, by politics, by the media, but highlighted by Donald E. Trump.
Oddly enough, J. D. Vance is presently running for a U. S. Senate seat from Ohio [make that Vice President of the country] and has become almost exactly the kind of politician Trump himself appears able to clone. Whatever he is today, he was the first to alert the public to Trump’s beloved reception among those men and women aggrieved by tribal politics and the virtual disappearance of jobs that pay enough to raise a family. They were left behind, and Trump knew it. They became his people.
Evan Osnos’s Wildland: the Making of America’s Fury travels much farther and deeper into our national saga. Osnos’s book is bigger and broader in its judgments and research than anything in J. D. Vance. It’s an encyclopedia of our time, specifically the focus which ex-President Trump has brought into all of our lives.
Osnos, who spent a decade abroad as a writer for the New Yorker, is well-positioned to do the work he’s done in Wildland. Using his significant journalistic powers (an earlier book, The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, won the National Book Award) examines in persistent detail how life has changed, during his absence, in Greenwich, Connecticut, his hometown; in Clarksville, West Virginia, where he worked at a newspaper, his first job after college; and in Chicago, where he worked later, for the Tribune.
What Osnos mines from each of these locales is as comprehensive as his arguments are convincing. By his analysis, Donald Trump didn’t really create Donald Trump. Cultural movements he identifies and examines in detail combined to deliver the ex-President to a segment of the American public who were happy to have a Donald Trump lead them into the future.
As the title suggests, Evan Osnos is not taken with American society at this moment. His compendium of facts and cultural analysis paints a picture of a nation under siege by a variety of ills, piloted along by a government that is, as we all can see, mired down by divisions all but impossible to transcend. If hope appears anywhere on the national landscape, for Osnos it appears only in little, private worlds created by individuals of courage and will, who work hard and work stubbornly at doing little things to make the world a better place.
Chris Arnade is a journalist/photographer, which means his Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America doubles as an album of photographs of the men and women he’s interviewed, most of them set within the worlds in which they have their being. Aiming a camera at the men and women who appear on his pages—people with issues and often at the bottom of economic and social registers—is risky business because such portraits can feel like exploitation. Maybe that’s just me—I don’t know; but I couldn’t help assessing the gallery of stunning photographs in Dignity to be of marginal benefit to the book. I listened to much of it, and when I did, I didn’t miss not seeing the pictures. Evan Osnos’s Wildland is far more comprehensive, by design, than either Elegy or Dignity. Osnos lays out an encyclopedia of the last several years—right up to and including January 6, 2020. If you’re going to read one such book this year, Wildland’s comprehensive look at the state of our union today is most helpful.
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Conclusion tomorrow
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