The Obama parallel is especially telling here, since for a certain kind of impressionable well-heeled white liberal, the 44th president was also a designated interlocutor from a similarly unknown, and potentially threatening, subculture—the African American community. Obama, like Vance, came bearing the good news for well-off white liberals that the same social order that lavishly rewarded them wasn’t really the culprit behind his identity group’s despair and dysfunctions.

No, retrograde cultural attitudes and mores were holding these stubbornly unassimilated groups back—and, importantly, redistributive policies could do nothing to alter this set of self-undermining behaviors, steeped as they are in what Senior called “fatalistic belief.” It’s the same fable of cultural determinism that shaped Obama’s signature race initiative, the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, an ostensible response to the racist Trayvon Martin shooting that was, in reality, a multibillion-dollar, corporate-backed effort to revive the culture-pathologizing handiwork of the Moynihan Report for the 21st century.

This pundit lullaby amounts to sizing up the genuine despair and anomie wrought by decades of deindustrialization and public neglect in the American interior with a weary, wised-up shrug. The overlapping economic grievances of the displaced white and Black working classes get reduced to the same self-insulating refrain: It’s their culture—a real shame, but nothing else to see here.

And so it went throughout Hillbilly Elegy’s long and dreary conquest of the liberal media. The Washington Post, no doubt hard-pressed to outdo the Times’ opening volleys of Vance sycophancy, elected to bypass the niceties of a formal review and published an excerpt from Vance’s memoir, limning the lost traditions of hillbilly patriotism, and exhorting the country to win back the sympathies of these scorned lovers of America.

A separate author interview had him making the same argument for the evangelical faith tradition he was reared in. In his no-less-inevitable star turn with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Vance reprised the same basic culture-of-poverty refrains, along with some titillating asides, such as his youthful suspicion that UN General Secretary Kofi Annan could well be the Antichrist. Vance racked up so many interviews on MSNBC that he could have been mistaken for a daytime host. (He eventually landed a CNN contributor contract from 2017 to 2018, in his then-expedient guise as a thoughtful Never Trumper.)

This dismaying track record has now gone down the media industry’s memory hole, as many of the same outlets who championed Vance’s truth-telling brio are frantically racing to document his exposure as a bigoted, misogynistic, natalist—and now xenophobic—fraud. But Vance’s fraudulence was always hiding in plain sight for anyone who hasn’t already bought into the liberal media’s self-serving discourse of class exoticism.

Sarah Jones, who also came of age as an evangelical believer in a depressed rural community, wrote in one of the rare real-time dissenting reviews of Vance’s memoir that it was founded on a glaring lie about conditions in Appalachia and other redoubts of white-working class suffering. “In Elegy, Vance complains about hillbillies who he believes purchased cellphones with welfare funds. But data makes it clear that our current welfare system is too limited to lift depressed regions out of poverty,” she wrote, saying further on:

If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America. How do you get off the dole when there’s not enough work to go around? Frequently, you don’t. Until you lose your benefits entirely: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), passed by Bill Clinton and supported by Hillary Clinton, boots parents off welfare if they’re out of work.

Most of the media industry was, to say the least, badly placed to handle such discomfiting truths. But all those rich liberals proved to be perfect marks for Vance’s narrative, which, by doting on family dysfunctions and short-circuited work ethics, fell cleanly into the broader template of the adversity memoir—which, as I wrote long ago for this magazine, had unleashed a slew of fraudulent accounts of personal, racial, and economic despair redeemed by Vance-like striving and tough love.

Indeed, Hillbilly Elegy’s own origin story bears eloquent testimony to such ineluctable market forces. Vance was reportedly put on to the project of writing his life story by his Yale Law School adviser, Amy Chua, who after an initial middling tour as a policy intellectual, hit it big with a tell-all memoir about the draconian child-rearing regimen she mastered as an Asian “Tiger Mom.” Her follow-up book was a joint effort with her husband, another Yale Law School prof, purporting to—yes—explain the success of various ethnic groups by virtue of their cultural allegiances.

On the off chance that the American culture industry wants to set out on the long path toward rectifying its endemic class and racial blind spots, it so happens that the Vance saga offers a perfect opportunity. At the outset of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance provides a thumbnail history of his clan’s migration from Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. The leaders of the local steel industry recruited Appalchian transplants there to work as steel rollers, largely on the basis of their storied work ethic and piety. That’s also how Springfield, Ohio, wound up serving as the home of the Haitian migrant community that is now being so despicably traduced by Vance; the city’s leaders invited them to move there, in many instances to work in the self-same southwestern Ohio steel industry.

So let’s do the math here: One group of migrant workers comes into the region, sets down roots, and, in spite of a regional history of violence and substance abuse troubles, gets lauded as the forgotten tribunes of a Real America, whom our social order must accommodate down to the particulars of its worship habits and imperfectly requited love of country. The other group becomes the subject of a vicious blood libel, is forced to stay indoors and pull its kids from school for fear of vigilante retribution, while the leaders of a major political party call for more, and now demand their mass deportation—even though the vast majority of them are in the country legally. Gee, what do you suppose the cultural reason for that might be, Jennifer Senior and Terry Gross?