The War for America's Soul Read online

  Reading J. D. Vance’s story helps us to understand what harm the liberal establishment and a radicalized Left did to America, how they were largely held unaccountable until the election of 2016, and just how high the stakes are if President Trump is not re-elected and we really lose the cultural civil war. J. D Vance’s story may be only one man’s story, but in many ways it is America’s story—or at least a story of the heartland. As Vance says, “I am a hill person. So is much of America’s white working class. And we hill people aren’t doing very well.”2

  Hillbilly culture is different. And it’s not just about people with missing teeth who like banjo music. The hillbilly way follows a code of unwritten rules which revolve around the concept of honor.

  J. D. Vance was born into what he calls “hillbilly royalty.” In a world where violence was only a careless insult away—his grandmother was never without her .44 magnum revolver—his extended clan’s history was replete with stories of “white hats” and “black hats,” and his relatives and ancestors were always on the worthy side, the side that was serving something beyond parochial self-interest, be it the family, the nation, or God.

  J. D.’s clan was the Blanton clan of Kentucky. More specifically, the Blantons of Jackson, Breathitt County, or as the locals refer to it, “Bloody Breathitt,” an indication of how its inhabitants dealt with the malefactors in their midst, this being the hillbilly justice of the tough Appalachian people.

  But despite the pride this Blanton scion felt—and still feels today—for the community of his birth, Vance realizes that his home has suffered a traumatic social collapse. As Hillbilly Elegy opens, Vance tells of a recent trip back to Jackson, and the sorry sight he witnesses: “decrepit shacks rotting away, stray dogs begging for food, and old furniture strewn on the lawns.”3 With close to a third of Jackson’s population living below the poverty line, and that proportion rising to almost half among minors, with local education in such catastrophic shape that the state of Kentucky had to take over the county’s schools, there must be an explanation for this collapse, a collapse that is linked to American politics and a culture war.

  J. D.’s pride is indelibly mixed with sadness, sadness for a part of America that has lost its way. Badly. But why had this all occurred? It is easy to point at the epidemic of prescription drug abuse but that’s not an explanation. That is just a proximate cause. Any American, in any city or town, can become an addict. From the ritziest parts of Manhattan to the most impoverished areas of the rustbelt. So why Jackson? How could the spirit of what is arguably one of the toughest communities in America, of a people who for centuries worked with their hands and their backs, surviving in the very toughest of conditions without the luxuries most Americans take very much for granted, be so badly broken? Why would these life-long fighters surrender to the slow suicide of drug abuse, prescription or otherwise, and lose the will to function as before? This search for an answer is clearly the motivation for Vance’s writing Hillbilly Elegy, wherein he uses his own life and personal transformation to help find out what really has happened to the heart of America. In doing so he provides an inestimable service to others who want to understand why, for the first time since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, America chose a complete political outsider to be our president. This is why there is a direct line from the hills of Tennessee to today’s White House. President Trump’s election is a reaction against the Left’s all-out assault on all that is good and true in America, an assault seen perhaps most clearly in the impact the Left’s culture war has had on middle America—the patriotic, working-class Americans which the Left regards as both deplorable and dispensable.

  I am an American by choice. My perspective on our nation is that of the former outsider. My being American was a conscious and very serious choice, not a function of an accident of birth. And as such, for me being an American is an attitude, a state of mind. It has nothing to do with your appearance, your accent, your job, the color of your skin, or how much you earn. My appreciation of the egalitarian nature of America is probably amplified by my experiencing exactly the opposite for the first twenty-three years of my life, growing up in the class-ridden and incredibly stratified social system of the United Kingdom. In England, your future could turn on something as simple as how you pronounce the words “all right.” In the United States, you can rise to the highest office in the land even if you were raised by a single mother, the son of an African dead-beat father, and spent part of your childhood in Indonesia with an Indonesian stepfather, as Barack Obama did. (And yet his political party continues to proclaim that America is a land full of racism and oppression.)

  As such, I caution anyone who would preemptively draw the conclusion that a socio-economic, cultural, and political analysis of Appalachia is too tight an aperture through which to draw larger, more strategic conclusions about what has happened to America over recent years. Especially if you consider the demographic flows that knit this country together and the patterns of movement in what is, perhaps, the most internally mobile of populations anywhere in the world.

  Vance describes how this mobility, the search for work and for better pay, shaped the culture he was born into and how it resulted in hillbilly sensibilities spreading far beyond the hills where they were formed over the centuries. How the so-called “Hillbilly Highway” phenomenon witnessed millions of the Americans who shared his special culture travel north in search of jobs. How after World War II, almost 15 percent of rural Kentuckians left the state as part of a true exodus, so that by 1960 when the total population of Ohio stood at ten million souls, a million of them had moved there from the Appalachian communities of Kentucky, Tennessee, or Virginia. This is why the story of the Blanton Clan into which J. D. Vance was born, is not just the story of one corner of America. It is as American as any other community’s story about trying to live the “American Dream.”

  It is thanks to this internal migration, a pattern we have seen furrowed into the soil of our nation again and again, that Vance was born in 1984 in the town of Middletown, Ohio, where his grandparents had moved two generations earlier in search of gainful employment in what would become the biggest local employer, the American Rolling Mill Company, known as the “Armco” steel mill. This is where we must stake our first marker as we endeavor to explain “What did the Left do to America?” and “Why Trump?”

  In the mid-1980s, Middletown was an exemplar of America at work, of the postwar values that turned the United States into the richest and most powerful nation the world had ever seen. People had come to Middletown for work, and they found it. They were paid a decent wage, large enough to raise a family on comfortably, and for many it was the first time they had money to spend. No longer were their lives defined by subsistence, working the land just to stay alive. They now worked for Armco or another major local concern. They could pay their bills with ease, were contributing to pension plans, and then had money left over. This disposable income would become a driver for the local economy, as a shopping center was established, restaurants were opened, and eventually even two malls were built.

  In much of the upper Midwest, the story was the same. During World War II America had become a manufacturing powerhouse, and after the war, the bomber plants and tank factories gave way to Ford and GE plants that employed patriotic returning soldiers. We became the largest producer of manufactured products for the world. This meant jobs, it meant wealth creation, and it meant prosperity for those in Appalachia who were prepared to move to these factories and build new lives for themselves, including J. D. Vance’s grandparents.

  Yet today, the town they chose, Middletown, is an eviscerated shell of its former self. The once thriving community, with its manufacturing firms and abundance of small businesses has become a desolate place where jobs are few and low paying, and much of the town has become derelict.

  Why? How did a thriving town become what Vance describes as “a relic of American industrial glory”? How did its Main Street become “t
he place you avoid after dark”? This level of degradation and decline is unnatural unless a community physically leaves. But Middletown is no ghost town. Many of those who traveled the “Hillbilly Highway,” or whose ancestors made the journey, are still there. But many of them are now unemployed and on welfare. Some are drug addicts and essentially unemployable. We are wrong to think of poverty as something located primarily in the black ghettos of the inner cities. As one scholar notes: “Between 1970 and 2000 the percentage of white children living in high poverty neighborhoods increased from 25 percent to 40 percent.”4 Vance cites data from a 2011 Brookings Institution study showing that “compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005–9 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance.”5 These Americans would become the “forgotten men and women” so important to the eventual presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Such a radical change in the health of a community never happens in isolation, or by accident. There has to be a cause, and Donald Trump is a response to that cause. What is that cause? In short, it is the liberal culture war against middle America. Part of the culture war is the globalist economic war against its interests.

  The changes in postwar America, the components of its economic progress, when millions of rural Americans moved north to follow the boom in industrial and manufacturing jobs, were the epitome of the American dream. Vance’s grandparents moved to find jobs with Armco. Armco would become the beating heart of Middletown. As long as it could sell its steel and manufacture what American carmakers and power-generating companies around the world needed, this part of Ohio would be a magnet for workers and an engine for prosperity. But something happened along the way that seemed to end the American Dream for millions of Americans.

  By the end of the 1980s Armco was in trouble, losing out to foreign competition, and it was forced to partner with the Japanese firm Kawasaki Steel. In the decades that followed, the new firm, AK Steel, would move its headquarters to Pittsburgh, then struggle with enormous debt, only to move back to Middletown. Later investing hugely in a new plant in Rockport, Indiana, AK Steel struggled again with serious management problems and safety concerns. There were ten workplace deaths in less than five years.

  One such story, concerning just one town and one American company, should have been an outlier in a nation that had become the most powerful and economically healthy nation after World War II. But Middletown’s story became the story of America’s manufacturing and industrial heartland. Companies were run down or shut down, acquired for pennies on the dollar by asset strippers. Jobs were outsourced and millions of Americans were left unemployed. Entire communities faced economic decline, neighborhoods deteriorated, social bonds frayed, and into this environment of soul-crushing despair came an influx of drugs that made captives of hopeless people. And none of this was an accident. All of it was the result of economic decisions made by the political and economic establishment.

  Growth and prosperity had been something that Americans previously considered natural. In J. D. Vance’s words:

  [Y]our dad (or grandpa) was a man with a respected job. It never occurred to me that Armco wouldn’t be around forever, funding scholarships, building parks, and throwing free concerts.6

  Vance goes on to note that his generation, like every previous American generation, believed that they would do better than their parents.

  [F]ew of my friends had ambitions to work there [at Armco]. As small children, we had the same dreams that other kids did; we wanted to be astronauts or football players or action heroes.… By the sixth grade, we wanted to be veterinarians or doctors or preachers or businessmen. But not steelworkers.… We never considered that we’d be lucky to land a job at Armco; we took Armco for granted.7

  The reason that the people of Appalachia had upped sticks and moved far from home for a better life may have been remembered by their children and grandchildren, but that reality was never deemed fragile or potentially transitory. In any case, hillbillies are the toughest of the tough. If the conditions in “Bloody Breathitt” couldn’t break these Americans, nothing could. In the hardest of times they would survive, as the family, as the clan closed together to protect its own. They may not have had much social capital or savings in the bank, but they had each other, and they had their own hillbilly honor code to provide predictability and justice.

  In J. D. Vance’s case, the code was passed down by his grandparents who taught the rules of hill country comportment, whereby a careless insult could lead to violence in the blink of an eye. Vance received his first bloody nose at the ripe old age of six, in the classic scenario of another child insulting J. D.’s mother, which led to fisticuffs. The rules were simple. A man’s honor was sacrosanct. It was inextricably linked to the sense of his dignity within the community. Any surrender to forces that led to his disgrace would mean his friends and family would see him as less of a man, as someone who didn’t deserve respect. And this code applied to women as much as men, with Vance’s grandmother having the high reputation she had within the community because of stories that she had once killed a man who dishonored one of her relatives.

  This is not to say that these communities were typified by capricious or indiscriminate violence. No, hillbilly communities were the very opposite of an amoral, anarchic society. The honor code of the hills had a foundation, a point of reference that provided the filter through which others could be judged consistently. That filter was faith, the Christian faith that Vance described as providing the “center of our lives.” There was a greater yardstick for justice, one that existed outside of the family and the clan. You always did what was right, but “rightness” was not amorphous or subjective; the moral compass was in the Bible for all to read and internalize.

  So even the Appalachian transplants to Ohio should have been insulated from the buffeting world around them by their own rules for survival and the surety the Good Book provides. But no. In fact their fate became an indicator of a spreading rot within American society, within the soul of a nation that had prided itself from its inception on the “rugged individualism” of its founders, on the spirit of adventure and iconoclastic self-realization that Tocqueville described so evocatively in his seminal text On Democracy. But this sickness had been planted and encouraged by those Americans who do not believe in the eternal truths upon which our nation had been built.

  In the life of J. D. Vance, this cultural breakdown was expressed at the micro level by the tailspin his mother spiraled into when he was but a child. An intelligent woman, a trained health worker, she nevertheless found it impossible to deal with the stress of trying to maintain a middle-class life. She succumbed to alcohol abuse, then prescription narcotics, and finally the addiction of hard drugs, which culminated in a wrenching episode Vance describes, in which he saw his mother, out of control, bloodied, and screaming in the front yard, before being placed in the back of a patrol car, only to be eventually admitted to an addiction treatment facility. This left a thirteen-year-old J. D. to fend for himself with the help of his seventeen-year-old sister who was still in high school. In the following months, as they would try to survive in between the visits to see their mother in rehab, he and his sister would be introduced to what the author calls “the underworld of American addiction,” to a world where more and more Americans “used drugs to escape the stress of paying bills,” bills they couldn’t pay because the America they believed in was being deliberately dismantled.

  This is where we must stop for a moment and step back from Hillbilly Elegy to ask the macro question. How did Vance’s mother arrive at the point where taking drugs was even an option, an alternative to paying your bills? Not paying what you owed would have been deemed dishonest, dishonorable by her community’s code just a few years prior. How did her story become the story of so many Americans that today more than 70,000 of our fellow citizens die of drug overdoses each year, more than the total number of lives lost in comb
at during the entirety of the Vietnam War? Such a massive cultural shift never happens in a vacuum, it never happens just by accident. For an answer to this question, which is crucial for us to grapple with if we are to understand how a complete outsider like Donald J. Trump became our president, we need to turn to his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

  Steve Bannon is an incredibly misunderstood public figure, in part because in the past he has deliberately cultivated a persona to confuse and frustrate his rivals in the media and politics. Variously described as the “Darth Vader of the Right” and “Trump’s puppet master,” he is neither. In fact, the misrepresentations of my old boss are in part malicious, but in part a function of how unique a path he has trodden.

  His life trajectory does not fit into any established and easily comprehended category or taxonomy that a lazy observer may want to force upon him. Born into a Southern, working-class, Irish Catholic family from Richmond, Virginia, Bannon served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, with the Fleet and at the Pentagon, then attended Harvard Business School, ending up as a very successful mergers and acquisitions expert at Goldman Sachs. Later he was a film producer, and eventually a cultural warrior, friend, and business partner of none other than Andrew Breitbart. But most important of all, he is the man who, six weeks prior to the presidential election of 2016, took candidate Trump from a 16-point deficit behind Hillary Clinton, in the middle of the explosive release of the Billy Bush tapes, to a stunning electoral victory. He, more than anyone else I know, can put the millions of stories like J. D. Vance’s, into the correct strategic and political context and explain how the “forgotten men and women” were the most important reason for Donald Trump’s success.