Is America Possible?

My grandparents supported Trump.

Their simple white house sits on the sprawling plateau between Joplin and Springfield, Mo., just around a bend in the country road where their church stands. It’s not more than a mile from the old farm, where my grandpa raised chickens and tilled the soil until his body would no longer allow it, as the man who owned the land had promised he could. To me, he’s always been Papa, but in that remote part of the Ozarks he’s known as the “chicken man,” a name in which he delights.

Papa has never been a very good businessperson. When at first he went to sell the fruits of his labor, he would put out a can and ask people to pay what they could. Eventually he fixed prices to things, but when the woman who was raising her grandchildren alone would show up, she knew that whatever she could spare was enough. “Don’t try to outgive the Lord, because you can’t,” Papa told me on countless occasions. In order to make ends meet, he used to work at the nearby quarry. Now he cares for the church building next door and, in exchange, the congregation lets him and grandma live in the house.

When I was in high school, I spent part of a summer on the farm, where I learned all sorts of things firsthand: that picking okra is sticky work, that spiders have an unfortunate affinity for tomato plants, and that unvarnished racism is still acceptable in certain quarters. It was the first and only time I remember meeting my great-grandma. She brought her new husband, Joe, with her, and at one point in the conversation he made clear he was not happy about the “Oreo cookie” families moving into the area. Still to this day, if you bring Joe up in the presence of my grandma, she’ll tell you she never truly accepted her mother’s last beau. He was too “mean.”

My own mother grew up in this world, but I’ve never been more than an interloper, and so it took some time for me to see that the darkness was not just out there in the likes of Joe but was also deeply entrenched in my own extended family. As a child, I never noticed that the village in northwestern Missouri where my paternal great-grandparents long operated a store had no black residents. As of 2010, it still did not. I was dumbfounded when, in my early 20s, I learned that one of my great uncles was hoping for a revival of the Klan in his corner of the state.

In the years after we got married, my wife and I made a number of trips from Chicago to visit Papa’s kin in southern Indiana. As young urban professionals, we were something of a curiosity to my cousins, but they never failed to treat us like royalty, planning large family get-togethers while we were there and sending us home with jars of homemade strawberry preserves.

Despite our many differences, we found plenty—and at times, too much—to talk about. The last time we were there together, we found ourselves in a heated debate about the biblical view of interracial marriage. One of my cousins broke rank and confessed that she, too, worried about the prevalence of racism in her midst: In fact, she shared, when a black man had recently walked down the street where she lived, her father had called out to her uncle, in a voice loud enough for the passerby to hear, “Go get the rope.” The next year, my wife and I adopted our eldest son, who is black, and we have not been back since.

Understanding the Trump phenomenon

My extended family is hardly representative of all Trump supporters. Trump had a strong appeal among voters earning more than $50,000. He fared better with Latino, African-American, and Asian-American voters than Romney did in 2012. But there is no question that Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, failed to generate enthusiasm among poor and working-class white voters.

The Trump phenomenon has sent elites on both coasts and around the world scurrying to understand who these people are and what precisely is motivating their revolt against the establishment. Many have found their answers in a book by J.D. Vance titled Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which shot to the top of the bestseller charts earlier this year. More recently, it was featured in a New York Times piece titled “6 Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win.” But the truth is that, while Vance’s book is a good read, it does not help us to understand the fundamental dynamics underlying Trump’s victory.

Most of Hillbilly Elegy is devoted to tales of what it was like for Vance to grow up in poor, white communities in Kentucky and Ohio. One comes to know and love his rough-hewn Mamaw and Papaw, grandparents who turned out to be more like parents to him. In their younger days they had a volatile relationship. Vance recounts how, one night when Papaw came home drunk, knowing full well that Mamaw had threatened to kill him if he didn’t break the habit, she poured gasoline over his sleeping body and dropped a lit match on his chest. But by the time Vance entered the picture, they were a stabilizing force amid the ups-and-downs of life, with a mother who struggled with addiction and went through men like cases of cigarettes. Vance is a strong writer and his willingness to be brutally honest about his family’s travails, which he sets against a broader Appalachian backdrop, makes for a riveting narrative.

But when Hillbilly Elegy moves beyond the personal to the prescriptive, it falls flat. While Vance pinpoints some of Appalachia’s problems—poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, despair, and more—he does not truly understand from whence they came. Historians have written voluminously about intertwined stories of labor, race, religion, radicalism, business, environment, and more, and collectively this body of work underscores the major structural factors that have contributed to the region’s distinctive struggles and that help to explain its openness to a candidate like Trump. Earlier this year a group of publicly engaged historians pulled together “Trump Syllabus 2.0,” an invaluable guide to some of this literature. If you want to understand how we’ve arrived this moment, there’s no better starting place.

Swimming in turbulent currents

Had Vance stuck to memoir, then he might have credibly ignored this scholarship. But he aspires to more. Both in the book and in his broader cultural commentary, he outlines a way forward that stresses the importance of people’s choices and the need for communities to come together, in addition to a handful of minor policy recommendations. This approach is insufficient, at best, because it underestimates the deep structural roots of injustice. The worlds of the Ozarks and Appalachia may seem simple. But they have been no less shaped by the grand forces of our age than have New York and Chicago.

At this precarious juncture we must not lose sight of the past, nor of the larger systems and structures that impinge, whether we notice them or not, on all of our lives. Grandma, Papa, and the rest are swimming in turbulent currents that are not of their own making and to which Hillbilly Elegy is an inadequate guide. If we’re going to achieve a more just United States, then we must become better oriented to those currents even as we forge broader movements for structural change.

But if we’re going to be successful on that last front, then we do need to hear Vance out on one vital point: namely, that the temptation to demonize the white working class must be resisted. As I write, he is among those urging greater empathy. Others are insisting that, given the tenor of the president-elect’s campaign, not to mention his electoral triumph, we must focus our energies on protecting the vulnerable. The truth is that those of us who possess great privilege need to accept our responsibility to do both: love our enemies and stand with the oppressed.

There is no getting around the fact that, whatever the complex nature of their motivations, those who cast ballots for Trump threw their collective weight behind a candidate who has variously indulged and articulated a virulently racist, misogynistic, ethnocentric brand of American nationalism. The full consequences of their endorsement remain to be seen, though already there are signs that extremists have been emboldened.

Even so, we must recognize that if we choose to label all Trump voters racist, misogynist, ethnocentric nationalists and to withdraw back into our silos, we will foreclose any chance they could be persuaded to join our movements for justice. We must be resolute in joining hands with those who are vulnerable and, at the same time, we must find winsome ways to engage—yes, even love—our cultural enemies.

The burden of this engagement should not fall equally on us all. But as a white, middle-class Christian man, I consider myself very much on the hook. I am not ready to bring my son to a family gathering in southern Indiana. But if he’s going to inherit a better country than I have, it might be time for me to schedule another visit.