JD Vance regaled the attendees of the Republican national convention on Wednesday with stories of his childhood – a life of poverty and struggle, surrounded by people who he said had found themselves at the mercy of economic downturns and forgotten by the country’s governing elites.
It was a remarkable departure from his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance recounted childhood hardships but also laid out the bracing argument – articulated in the opening pages of his book – that “culture” and laziness, not economic circumstance, “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.
The steel mill, which remains a major local employer in the city of 50,000, once drew thousands of workers who migrated from the coal country of Appalachia, which encompasses mountain towns from south-western New York to northern Mississippi, to the industrial midwest throughout the 1900s.
The day after Trump shocked the world by winning the presidential election in 2016, Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal, a charity with the mission of working “with like-minded organizations” to “enhance economic opportunities [and] the common good of the community”.
On one hand, Vance has lined up alongside far-right firebrands such as the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on a bill that would see certain gender-affirming care for minors criminalised, and another banning the federal government from instituting mask mandates in places such as schools or public transportation.
“Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where ‘people are hardworking, except of course for the many food-stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work,’” Neema Avashia wrote last week, “allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.”
The original article contains 2,287 words, the summary contains 277 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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JD Vance regaled the attendees of the Republican national convention on Wednesday with stories of his childhood – a life of poverty and struggle, surrounded by people who he said had found themselves at the mercy of economic downturns and forgotten by the country’s governing elites.
It was a remarkable departure from his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance recounted childhood hardships but also laid out the bracing argument – articulated in the opening pages of his book – that “culture” and laziness, not economic circumstance, “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.
The steel mill, which remains a major local employer in the city of 50,000, once drew thousands of workers who migrated from the coal country of Appalachia, which encompasses mountain towns from south-western New York to northern Mississippi, to the industrial midwest throughout the 1900s.
The day after Trump shocked the world by winning the presidential election in 2016, Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal, a charity with the mission of working “with like-minded organizations” to “enhance economic opportunities [and] the common good of the community”.
On one hand, Vance has lined up alongside far-right firebrands such as the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on a bill that would see certain gender-affirming care for minors criminalised, and another banning the federal government from instituting mask mandates in places such as schools or public transportation.
“Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where ‘people are hardworking, except of course for the many food-stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work,’” Neema Avashia wrote last week, “allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.”
The original article contains 2,287 words, the summary contains 277 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!