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In 2016, the well-meaning liberals who would later display in-this-house signs on their lawns were in the market for a certain kind of book. They needed a primer on that enigma, the White working class, but the guidebook they envisioned was subject to several requirements. For one thing, it had to make them feel magnanimous and broad-minded for even bothering with the demographic they held accountable for the stunning political success of Donald Trump; for another, it had to be conspicuously folksy, a reflection of their romantic preconceptions about shotguns and twangy accents in the sticks. Above all, this book could not demand too much. It could not contain political theory or, God forbid, economics. At its most intellectually ambitious, it could venture some light psychologizing, perhaps a few simple statistics, but it could never stray far from the safe and sentimental territory of the emotional appeal. In short, right-thinking liberals wanted an emissary from the heartland to assure them that Trump did not oblige them to change their lives or reexamine their politics.

Enter J.D. Vance, a recent Yale Law School graduate and self-proclaimed hillbilly with a knack for telling liberals what they wanted to hear. Vance hailed from the rapidly deindustrializing city of Middletown, Ohio, and he presented himself as a seasoned MAGA whisperer. Although he was critical of Trumps crass nativism he was in the liberal-placation business, after all he billed himself as an interpreter of rural languages that cosmopolitans did not speak. In his best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he explained that Mamaw was his affectionate moniker for his grandmother and that holler is the regional term for a hollow between the hills.

Hillbilly Elegy was a sensation, less because of its alleged merits than because it appeared at an auspicious moment. It occasioned a number of excellent critiques including rebuttals in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and the Guardian but for the most part, it was beloved. In nearly all the legacy media outlets, including this one, it was hailed as an eloquent and nuanced explanation for Trumps otherwise baffling allure. The Wall Street Journal described it as a beautiful memoir that doubled as a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America. The Economist raved: You will not read a more important book about America this year. In the New York Times, where it was allotted two glowing reviews, it was tellingly celebrated as a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election.

Eight years later, Vance has grown uncivilized, our electoral politics more uncivilized still. The writer Irving Kristol famously characterized a neoconservative as a liberal who has been mugged by reality; Vance is a liberal-pleaser who has been mugged by the prospect of power. In 2016, he was calling Trump Americas Hitler in private messages to a friend; now he is the former presidents running mate and most sycophantic defender. But the signs of his eventual pivot were legible all along, at least to those who cared to read them.

In some ways, the liberal fixation on the White working class and thus on hillbillies and their elegies was always misguided. Trump was not elected exclusively by poor White Appalachians. As Sarah Jones pointed out in the New Republic, wealthy enclaves also played an outsize role in his victory, but these locales commanded far less media fanfare, probably because they were less of a curiosity to the urban elite. Still, Appalachians have weathered their fair share of injustices, and the impulse to understand their plight was (and is) admirable.

The problem, then, was not that liberals hoped to learn about hardship in the holler but the way they went about it. There can be no single emissary for the more than 80 million people who make up the White working class nationwide (not all of whom have ties to Appalachia, itself a wildly heterogenous region). Force of personality or in Vances case, rustic kitsch is no substitute for research. In his recent book Elite Capture, the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo warns of the eponymous phenomenon, whereby privileged members of oppressed groups become spokespeople for those groups and, in so doing, co-opt them. For instance, the members of the black bourgeoisie who are so often the face of movements for racial justice emphatically do not speak for the majority of Black Americans. In Taiwos words:

[Those with] power over and access to the resources that get used to describe, define, and create political realities in other words, elites are substantively different from the total set of people affected by the decisions they make As the part of the group closest to power and resources, they are typically the part whose interests overlap with the total groups the least.

This is one problem with identity politics, with its mania for electing envoys: The members of a marginalized group who enjoy enough of a public platform to speak on its behalf are often not representative. Vance, who went on to land a lucrative job at Peter Thiels venture capital firm after law school, is hardly a typical hillbilly, and there is no guarantee that he has the interests of his less fortunate peers at heart.

But in 2016, he had no compunction about generalizing quite ungenerously from his limited experiences. Because he observed acquaintances using cellphones that he believed they could not afford, he concluded that many working-class Appalachians habitually spend beyond their means; because one of his neighbors in Middletown chose not to work, then took to Facebook to complain about President Barack Obamas economic policies, he asserted that many hillbillies are jobless out of laziness. There are several academic disciplines dedicated to gathering reliable data about why people are in fact jobless, but Vance was disdainful of attempts at more rigorous study. He preferred to gesture sheepishly at what struck him as common sense, insisting that he knew whats what not because some Harvard psychologist says so but because I felt it. At least the Harvard psychologist might have conducted a poll. No wonder there is an entire genre of articles and indeed, several entire books dedicated to demonstrating that Vance does not speak for all Appalachians.

Hillbilly Elegy, then, was never a good-faith sociological foray. It was always a performance, a conspicuous display of homey authenticity. In her incisive corrective What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, the historian (and fellow hillbilly) Elizabeth Catte described Vance as someone with tired ideas about race and culture [getting] famous by selling cheap stereotypes about the region. The gun-toting characters in Hillbilly Elegy are cartoonish, and so, too, is the prose. Take, for instance, the first line. My name is J.D. Vance, the memoir begins, and I think I should start with a confession: I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd. It is this aw-shucks affectation not Vances wispy arguments that was the source of readers initial fascination.

After all, the contents of Hillbilly Elegy are not much to write home about. The book is a mush of reminiscence and ill-founded speculation about a part of the country that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for decades. Vances family is from Jackson, Ky., a town whose inhabitants say hello to everyone, willingly skip their favorite pastimes to dig a strangers car out of the snow, and without exception stop their cars, get out, and stand at attention every time a funeral motorcade drives past. Despite Jacksons small-town charms, Vances grandparents, the fiery but lovable Mamaw and Pawpaw, moved to Middletown, where Pawpaw secured a lucrative job at Armco, a steel company.

Though the pair eventually managed to muster some measure of stability, Vances mother, Bev, did not. During a short-lived stint as a nurse, she became one of the many Americans in her cohort to get hooked on prescription opioids. Father figures paraded in and out of Vances youth and adolescence as Bev spiraled, sometimes violently. Her deterioration mirrored Middletowns: As Armco shrunk, a once-bustling downtown dwindled into a block of fast-food restaurants and pawnshops. Vance tries his darnedest to sound humble about prevailing against the odds. He recounts how he joined the Marines, hauled himself up by his bootstraps, excelled in college and got into Yale Law School.

Hillbilly Elegy is an entry in the pantheon of uplift narratives, a kind of appendage to the self-help genre, and it is characteristically cheesy. Vance goes so far as to admit to a corny love of America, the greatest country on earth, and he tells us that every time I learned to do something I thought impossible I came a little closer to believing in myself.

There is no greater vindication of the suspicion that poor taste is a form of moral deficiency than the initial reception that greeted Hillbilly Elegy. So eager were critics and pundits to find an apologist for the White working class who was not blatantly racist that they overlooked Vances fatuousness, his willingness to play up his hokeyness for the benefit of his liberal audience and the ultimate banality of his message.

For at its core, his was a standard-issue conservative screed, riddled with the familiar contradictions. Vance acknowledged that jobs in Middletown were in short supply, but he ascribed the Appalachian predicament to a culture of learned helplessness and insisted that many of the citys residents choose not to work. He claimed that our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave just pages after noting that fast food is the only fare available in many Appalachian towns. When the poor took out high-interest credit cards and payday loans, he faulted them for engaging in irrational behavior without sparing any scorn for predatory financial institutions. He even debated whether his mother was responsible for her addiction and determined that no ones circumstances give him or her a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card but made no mention of the pharmaceutical giants that deliberately flooded the region with painkillers.

For the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, baseless claims were yet another means of evading responsibility. We cant trust the evening news. We cant trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateways to a better life, are rigged against us. We cant get jobs, he mocked. You cant believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Instead, he counseled hillbillies to pull their pants up and apply for the jobs that did not exist.

It certainly seems, on the face of it, as though Vance has changed his tune. The evening news, the politicians and the universities are precisely the villains he has since made a career of reviling and not very subtly at that. (The Universities Are the Enemy is the title of a speech he delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021.)

At points, Hillbilly Elegy reads like an artifact of merely archaeological interest. In a 2016 so remote that I can barely recall it, Vance lamented the bizarre sexism of hillbilly culture; five years later, he went on Tucker Carlsons show to call the Democrats a bunch of childless cat ladies. The Mamaw of Hillbilly Elegy practiced a deeply personal (albeit quirky) faith and could not speak of organized religion without contempt; as of last week, when Vance eulogized her onstage at the Republican National Convention, she had morphed posthumously into a woman of very deep Christian faith.

Perhaps most importantly, Vance was once a proponent of old-fashioned, laissez-faire conservatism of the Cato Institute variety. In 2016, conservative blogger Rod Dreher wrote that one of the most important contributions Vance makes to our understanding of American poverty is how little public policy can affect the cultural habits that keep people poor. Now, Vance has embraced the MAGA movements nationalistic populism, which paints poverty as the product of open borders and globalist scheming.

Maybe Vances transformation is genuine; maybe it is calculated. It is certainly convenient that his ideological trajectory aligns so closely with that of the Republican Party. As journalist Simon van Zuylen-Wood remarked in a prescient piece in this paper in 2022, the GOP has long been creeping toward post-liberalism, a political orientation that is anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbn. (Dreher, for his part, has become such a fervent champion of strongman Orbns interventionist tactics that he immigrated to Hungary.)

Post-liberalism seeks to rewrite not just the law but the whole of American ethical life, and in some ways it is a natural extension of the pessimism about political solutions that pervaded Hillbilly Elegy (and the corresponding libertarianism that dominated the GOP not so long ago). If culture is to blame for Appalachias decline, you might conclude that politics, as traditionally understood, cannot fix what ails us. Alternatively, you might conclude, as Vance apparently has, that the usual political remedies are not intrusive or authoritarian enough.

Hillbilly Elegy anticipated the self-effacing tone that Vance would take when he concluded his Faustian bargain. From the first, he was practicing the art of having it both ways: In 2016, he pronounced himself an everyman, even though the existence of the very book in which he feigned modesty belied his pretensions. Now that he is a politician tasked with charming a crowd that loathes politicians, his strategy is much the same. He goes on claiming outsider status by making a spectacle of his chumminess, even as he becomes more and more of an insider. This, too, is a performance, one that rivals and perhaps surpasses his performance of homespun simplicity in Hillbilly Elegy.

I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from, Vance assured the audience at the Republican National Convention. They erupted into cheers. I wonder how those followers will cope when they realize that it is precisely by winning that he and they have lost. The cost of their electoral success is that they have become what they most despise: They are the establishment now.

A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Harper. 272 pp. $18.99, paper

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Hillbilly Elegy and J.D. Vances art of having it both ways - The Washington Post

Over the last few decades, America has witnessed a substantial decline in religiosity. Although the United States remains relatively religious compared to other nations, it is markedly less religious today than it was thirty years ago. However, a recent study published in Advances in Political Psychology uncovers an important nuance: secularism is distinct from mere nonreligiosity. The findings reveal that secularists form a unique group within the American electorate, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of secular trends is essential for grasping contemporary political dynamics.

While the increase in nonreligiosity, often termed the rise of the nones, has been widely documented, the new study sought to delve deeper into the distinctions between secularism and nonreligiosity. By doing so, the researchers aimed to clarify the political implications of these trends and how they might shape the future of American politics.

The researchers drew on data from several large-scale surveys, including the General Social Survey, Gallup Poll, Pew Research Center, and the Public Religion Research Institute. These data sources provided a robust foundation for examining trends in secularization and religiosity in the United States over the past several decades.

The studys findings provide evidence that secularism is not simply the absence of religion but a distinctive identity characterized by specific beliefs and orientations. Unlike nonreligiosity, which denotes a lack of religious affiliation or belief, secularism involves an active identification with principles grounded in empirical evidence and rational thought. Secularists, therefore, are defined by what they believe in rather than what they lack.

For instance, secularists exhibited strong opposition to conspiracy theories. The researchers found that secularists are less likely to believe in various conspiracy theories compared to nonreligious individuals. This skepticism towards conspiracy theories is consistent with secularists reliance on empirical evidence and rational thought.

By contrast, nonreligiosity did not show a consistent relationship with opposition to conspiracy theories. This highlights the importance of the affirmative secular identity, which actively seeks evidence-based explanations and rejects unsubstantiated claims.

One of the most significant findings of the study is the strong association between secularism and liberal political attitudes. Secularists are more likely to support Democratic candidates and align with liberal policies compared to their nonreligious counterparts. This tendency is evident across various policy areas, including social welfare, environmental protection, and immigration.

The study also reveals that secularists are staunch supporters of core democratic values. Secularists exhibit strong support for participatory democracy, advocating for the inclusion of all individuals in the political process and the removal of barriers to voting. They also emphasize the importance of freedom of expression, opposing censorship and supporting the right to express even unpopular or controversial ideas.

We suspect that having traditionally been the subject of political intolerance, secularists particularly atheists are highly supportive of extending political rights and civil liberties to other groups, even groups they dislike, the researchers remarked.

Interestingly, the researchers found that liberals, particularly those identifying as very liberal, are generally unsupportive of allowing disliked groups such as MAGA supporters, racists, or Muslim extremists to hold rallies, teach, or have their books in local libraries. On the other hand, secularists, despite having similar disliked groups, are more likely than nonsecularists to extend civil liberties to these groups, demonstrating a higher level of political tolerance.

It is striking that when the American right accuses secular liberals of trying to censor it or cancel it for expressing ideas they find distasteful, they are only half right. Ideological liberals do appear to support censoring and limiting the expression of some types of ideas and certain kinds of groups, the researchers explained.

However, when ideology and partisanship are held constant, secularists are just the opposite. They oppose censorship and limits on freedom of expression, and they support allowing all groupseven groups they find dangerous or distastefulto have a societal forum for expressing their perspectives.

Despite their strong secular identity and political engagement, secularists exhibit relatively low levels of participation in organized secular activities. The study found that while religious individuals often engage in regular communal activities, such as attending services and participating in church-related events, secularists do not have a comparable level of organized social engagement.

This finding suggests that secularism functions primarily as a psychological and ideological identity rather than a social movement with formal structures and regular communal activities. The lack of organized secular behavior highlights the individualistic nature of secularism, where personal beliefs and identities take precedence over collective action.

In American politics, religion has long mattered, the researchers concluded. The contours of American public opinion have been shaped by the nuances of religiosity, and religious appeals by candidates are commonplace. Now, secularism matters tooalthough its presence in the electorate remains largely hidden. However, as current trends continue, secularism will only be ignored at politicians peril. No understanding of the American electorate is complete without attention to the secular voter.

The study, The secular voter: Secularism and political attitudes in the United States, was authored by Geoffrey C. Layman, David E. Campbell, and Levi G. Allen.

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Secularists revealed as a unique political force in America, with an intriguing divergence from liberals - PsyPost

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Kamala Harris instantly ignited the Democrats. Will a leadership change do the same for the federal Liberals? - Toronto Star

The names change but the same challenges remain.

A president arrives in office during a time of great tumult and uncertainty, pledging to use the power of the government to solve problems the Founders intended the free market to manage and navigate.

Nevertheless, as promised, with resolve and even congressional cooperation, the chief executive muscles through the proposed legislation.

One problem: A conservative Supreme Court majority balks, blocking many of the major policies and declaring them unconstitutional.

The presidents response?

We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself, the president tells the nation. We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution and not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.

President Franklin Roosevelt uttered those words from the White House on March 9, 1937 his first Fireside Chat since beginning his second term. Unshackled from reelection worries, FDR ignited a controversy that would continue for months.

In short, President Roosevelt was frustrated by the number of conservative justices on the High Court. Knowing he couldnt fire them from lifetime appointments, he proposed to do the next best thing: dilute their authority and vote by packing the court with more justices.

The proposals name was the Judicial Procedures Reform Act.

Sound familiar?

FDR explained his rationale:

What is my proposal? It is simply this: whenever a Judge or Justice of any Federal Court has reached the age of seventy and does not avail himself of the opportunity to retire on a pension, a new member shall be appointed by the President then in office, with the approval, as required by the Constitution, of the Senate of the United States.

That plan has two chief purposes. By bringing into the judicial system a steady and continuing stream of new and younger blood, I hope, first, to make the administration of all Federal justice speedier and, therefore, less costly; secondly, to bring to the decision of social and economic problems younger men who have had personal experience and contact with modern facts and circumstances under which average men have to live and work. This plan will save our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.

Only those werent his reasons at all. In truth, FDR was desperate to continue rolling out his New Deal proposals many of which taxpayers today are still paying for. The nine-member Court assured the president they were well capable of handling the caseload in an efficient matter. And the president wasnt looking to save the Constitution he was trying to expand and reshape it to accommodate his own plans to enlarge the governments role.

In the end, FDRs scheme was rejected, and the American people saw it for what it was a gross overreach of executive power. The Senate Judiciary Committee wrote:

The bill is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country. It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government.

It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.

We know efforts are underway in liberal circles to likewise reform the High Court but how and to what degree remains to be seen. If history is any guide, though, we know the word reform is just another way of calling for fewer conservative justices and more liberal ones. Lets hope and pray that when it comes to such a campaigns conclusion, that history will once more repeat itself.

Image from Shutterstock

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Supreme Court Reform is Code for Putting More Liberals on the Bench - Daily Citizen

The American people expected Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring an end to the Great Depression. But his administration struggled to do so and like most politiciansand FDR was shrewder than mosthe found ways to blame others for his failure.

One particular bogeyman was the United States Supreme Court, which kept finding FDR's recovery measures unconstitutional and was, therefore, easy to blame for the continued economic difficulties.

By 1937, FDR had had enough. He proposed a plan to "pack the Court" with new Justices he would appoint and whom the Senate would confirm to serve alongside those already on the Court.

In the short run, this gambit failed. The public reacted to it adversely and, at election time, gave the Democrats their worst electoral results in nearly a decade. Voters recognized that changing the number of Justices on the Court to change the thrust of their decisions was cheating. The Constitution, as they understood it then and as is still true today, says what it means and means what it says. FDR's attempt to load the Supreme Court with members who would rubber-stamp his legislative program, regardless of its constitutionality, violated the precepts on which the nation was founded.

In the long run though, FDR won. The Justices who stood in the way of New Deal reforms started to retire, and were replaced by men who found the market interventions at the heart of the New Deal more constitutionally consistent than their predecessors had.

History does have a way of repeating itself. The progressives who've now seized control of the Democratic Party see the current Supreme Court as standing in the way of what they want to accomplish. To them, the Court is a bastion of conservatism and originalist thinking that will use its power to defeat all efforts to expand the size and scope of the modern American welfare state.

The only way around that obstacle is to pack the Court with liberals who agree that the Constitution is a living, breathing document open to interpretations that must change with the times.

There are two ways progressives can do that. One is to enlarge the Court, as FDR tried and failed to do. The other is to discredit the Court or at least enough of its sitting Justices to force resignations or impeachments.

That's why Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has promised to file articles of impeachment against the Justices who sided with the majority in the Court's limited ruling on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. She and her allies have distorted the impact of that ruling to the extreme so they can argue the Court has abandoned its responsibilities or has become hopelessly corrupt.

If they can do this, Ocasio-Cortez and others likely reason, then they can open up a few seats Joe Biden can fill with new Justices who will vote to overturn Dobbs v. Jackson, District of Columbia v. Heller, Loper Bright v. Raimondo, and all the other decisions they don't like.

We've seen this before, too. Conservatives didn't like Chief Justice Earl Warren and often talked of impeaching him. They even wrote songs about it, but none of that went anywhere. The Court finally changed, adopting a more originalist philosophy, but only after a long and arduous process that took decades.

Liberals can't wait that long. They feel they have a moral imperative that allows the ends to justify the means. Rewriting the rules is okay, just like rewriting the Constitution through judicial decisions rather than using the amendment process is okay. It's quicker and easier, and they do it well, while going through regular channels often doesn't get them where they want to go.

Don't be surprised if you soon hear crowds of leftists calling for Chief Justice John Roberts' resignation. One way or another, count on them to subvert existing democratic norms to try and get their way. They'll either drive public confidence in the Court down to a point where they believe the public will demand the appointment of three or four new Justices, or they'll try to follow through with their threats to remove Justices Thomas, Alito, and Roberts so they can establish a liberal majority with new Justices of Biden's choosing.

They can try, but most Americans who are not part of the coastal elite still value things like rules and fair play. They'll recognize these efforts to change the Court's composition for what they are. In this country, we don't let people win by cheating.

Newsweek Contributing Editor Peter Roff is a veteran journalist who appears regularly on U.S. and international media platforms.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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With Calls To Expand Supreme Court, Liberals Hope To Skirt the Rules | Opinion - Newsweek