re: #172 Dangerman

One weird thing about all this is that Hillbilly Elegy - which I actually quite liked as a book - is deeply reactionary and basically makes the case - sometimes explicitly sometimes implicitly - that the people Vance grew up with are indolent and left behind for a reason.

I liked the first part of Hillbilly Elegy, just because I recall that growing up in the Industrial Midwest in the 60’s, those folks from Appalachia who moved to our neighborhood really were a separate ethnicity, distinct from the other WASP or Central/Eastern European whites who made up most of the rest until the blacks and Latinos started moving in.

And say what you want about “economic anxiety”, the people I grew up with during the Golden Age of the American Worker were racist as hell, even with steady jobs and relatively high incomes.