The wise-beyond-his-years commentator Ezra Klein in an interview on Fareid Zakaria’s show this morning noted the biggest mistake Trump has made in his campaign so far has been the selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate, because instead of someone who can appeal to a broader base in his party and the public, Vance, with his radical, cultish, extreme misogynistic Opus Dei views (my characterization) “scares people” more than even Trump..
Then there is the revealing profile of Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” book done by Becca Rothfeld in today’s Washington Post, entitled, “The Art of Having It Both Ways.” There, the author takes a closer look at Vance’s best seller to discover that, far from being a constructive insight into middle American culture at the time, it barely disguised the fact it was essentially, as Rothfield quotes historian Elizabeth Catte, “tired ideas about race and culture….selling cheap stereotypes,” being a “mush of reminiscence and ill-founded speculation about a part of the country that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for decades.” It carries forward the rightwing charge that hillbillies are jobless out of laziness.”.
