‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and parallels with N. Ireland’s working class Protestant community…

JD Vance has been in the news since Donald Trump selected him as his choice for VP. Vance has been surprisingly popular among unionists in N. Ireland over recent weeks with Ruth Dudley Edwards writing on 18/7/24, in the Belfast Newsletter, citing the choice of Vance as being the reason she now backs Trump for President. She interprets Vance’s memoir ‘A Hillbilly Elegy’ as a tale of how loyal, working-class, Protestant Scots-Irish Americans were betrayed and mocked as white trash by the American political elite. Other writers in the Newsletter indicate that unionists should seek further links with the Scots-Irish Hillbilly community that Vance comes from.

As I read ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ I was already primed to look for parallels with N. Ireland’s working class Protestant community and indeed, my own background. Like Vance, I started life in a rural working-class Protestant community and similarly, my life was changed once I went to university. Vance became a successful lawyer, while I became a teacher. He had a much tougher childhood than my stable Presbyterian background and thus far, no-one has invited me to run for Vice-President.

Parts of his book are interesting, but Vance is surprisingly inconsistent in how he views his background and the lessons he seems to draw. Very early on (p17) he describes his childhood admiration for the sense of family loyalty and community justice within his society. But it is disturbing to find a man who studied law seeming to praise those who threaten at knifepoint neighbours who insulted his sister, or an uncle who uses an electric saw to hospitalise a man who called him a ‘sonofabitch’. The examples of vigilante justice even include a light hearted report of the execution without trial, of a local man accused of rape. The parallels with our own gruesome history of paramilitary beatings being imposed as a replacement for normal policing and justice are obvious.

Stories of his grandfather smashing up a pharmacy because a sales assistant was perceived as being rude to his son come across as thuggery, as do the stories of poisoning a neighbour’s dog because it behaved aggressively towards his grandmother. Sometimes it is the turn of phrase that jars; on pages 26/27 he describes how his ‘Mamaw’ was made pregnant at 13 by his then 16-year-old grandfather and subsequently loses the baby. My wife almost exploded with outrage when I read her the line ‘Mamaw’s first foray into adulthood ended in tragedy’. She rightly pointed out that trying on your mother’s makeup at 13 is a ‘foray into adulthood’, being made pregnant by your best friend’s older boyfriend is statutory rape.

A Culture of Victimhood

It will have taken courage for Vance to have been so honest about how the misery and social problems within his community come as much from a poverty of hope and self-belief, as from a lack of money. Across the chapters there is a clear pattern where he describes a culture that encourages social decay, reacting to bad circumstances in the worst possible way, with people believing themselves to be victims of forces beyond their control. They have a lack of agency, and feel both powerless and angry at the economic wrongs they have suffered.

Throughout the book there are stories of relatives displaying poor impulse control, reacting with anger and violence to the sort of trivial insults that schoolteachers encounter every day. There multiple stories illustrating that a lack of home stability has a much worse effect on children than even economic deprivation and Vance rightly condemns Protestant churches as being heavy on emotional rhetoric, while being light on social support for poor kids. (Is there a lesson here on why Catholic schools outperform the largely Protestant state schools here?)

Local Lessons?

Having read this book, I am surprised that the political lessons Vance draws from his background lead him to support Trump and I worry when I see unionists coming to the same view.

Everything Trump stands for seems to reinforce the culture of reacting to bad circumstances in the worst possible way. Trump encourages people to blame other for their problems; usually immigrants or the political elite are held responsible for problems. Trump does not ask his voters to look to their own flaws, to work harder and support their neighbours. In every Trump speech we get a long whine about how ‘bad people’ have destroyed ‘our country’ and how dealing with them, rather than changing ourselves will be our solution.

There is a real danger that this will resonate within Loyalism. Admittedly, two Trump-supporting DUP MPs lost their seats in the last election, but there are others with similar views, willing to fill the gap. We have ambitious political activists who seek power by telling working class unionists that the reason things are not going well for us is because we have our own ‘bad people’.

We are told that our communities are threatened by Irish on our road signs and schools teaching Irish in Protestant areas. We are encouraged to obsess over a few marches being rerouted and to forget about the enormous gap in educational attainment between our schools, or the fact that ‘our paramilitaries’ are largely financed by those selling drugs to our kids.

At the time Vance wrote his Hillbilly Elegy, he was a strong opponent of Trump’s politics. He wanted to see working class people accept that government cannot fix all our problems. In his last few pages, Vance encourages us to ‘look ourselves in the mirror’, to identify conduct that harms our children, to build churches that encourage children to engage with the world, rather than withdraw from it. Perhaps, this is the best lesson we can draw from this book.

Arnold is a retired teacher from Belfast.