Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: while the Democrats hold their convention in Chicago, the Number One nonfiction bestseller in America is  “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance.  Luckily for us, Becca Rothfeld has read it, so we don’t have to. We’ll speak with her about it later in the show.
But first: Trump himself still seems disoriented and unsure of what to do next, a month after Biden dropped out of the race. We’ll have analysis from Marc Cooper — in a minute.
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While the Democrats meet in Chicago to celebrate their chances of winning with Kamala, we want to look at the Trump campaign. It’s not going well right now. For comment and analysis, we turn to Marc Cooper. He’s a journalist who’s worked for everybody from The Nation to The Guardian, from The LA Weekly and The Village Voice to Harper’s and The New Yorker.   He’s published three nonfiction books including Pinochet and Me, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. For 15 years he taught journalism at the USC Annenberg School. And he’s also known for his youthful work as translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende, and for his escape from Chile eight days after the 1973 coup. His terrific weekly column, The Coop Scoop, appears at Substack. Marc, welcome back.

Marc Cooper: Thank you, Jon.

JW: It’s been a month since Kamala replaced Biden, and Trump seems to still be knocked off his bearings, disoriented, and unsure of how to take her on. That’s what Maggie Haberman said last week in The New York Times.
First of all, there’s his schedule. Trump has been doing about one campaign event a week. In August 2016 by comparison, he held 27 rallies in 15 states. That’s closer to one a day than one a week. When he was asked last week why he was doing so few this year, he said, quote, “Because I’m leading by a lot.” Close quote. 

MC: Yeah.

JW: Is he leading by a lot?

MC: Well, he said just the other day, last week, he actually said, “I’m at 93%. Why do we even need an election?” That’s a direct quote.
So what state do I think the campaign is in? Clearly, the Trump campaign at this moment is completely befuddled. It is definitely losing, not by much, but it’s the first time where it is definitively losing.
More important than the two-or-three-point differences in polling — if you look at the trend lines. And that’s really the way to look at polls. Because 42, 43, 44, 46, they don’t mean very much, especially when there’s 50 elections to be had through the states. What you’re looking at is the trends. So if you look at the swing states, for example, where I think Harris is now ahead in four or five of the swing states by a point or two. But if you look at, for example, Georgia and Nevada, where she’s a couple points behind, the trend is still upward. And his is downward.
As we now move into the post-convention period, we should be seeing a six- to eight- to 10-point lead outside of the margin of error by Kamala Harris. If we don’t, then the race is going to be much tighter, it could be, and that does not rule out a Trump victory.
I will say this: Trump doesn’t know what to do at this moment. They’re relying on the golden oldies. Actually, the week before the convention and preparing for the convention, the Republicans rolled out the old anti-communist stuff from the Cold War, which I don’t think resonates with more than 11 John Birch Society members out there. I think you have a bit of a problem convincing people that Kamala Harris is a communist, especially given Trump’s buddy-buddy relationship with fellows like President Xi.
However, they have a lot of money, the Republicans. And that will get spent in concentrated form in the last 60 days of the election.
I am optimistic. I am not a doomsayer. I think Kamala Harris is going to win. However, I will remind folks that at the end of July in 1988, Michael Dukakis was leading George Bush by 14 points. 

JW: Oh boy. Thank you for that.

MC: Yeah, you’re welcome.

JW: Thank you.

MC: But we just don’t want Kamala Harris to put on a tank hat, and she’ll be okay.

JW: I think she knows.

MC: Yeah.

JW: Maureen Dowd had this wonderful line last week that when Trump speaks, it’s “like a blender going at full speed with the top off, goop splattering everywhere.” It’s certainly worse than four years ago, and it’s a whole lot worse than eight years ago. And when he does make a point, it’s usually crazy or it’s ridiculous or it’s weird. I wonder if you think he’s just getting old and tired, like I am, or is he actually losing his marbles and it’s more serious than that?

MC: Oh, all of the above. I mean, you asked a few minutes ago why I think he’s only doing one event a week. I’ll address that first. I think that’s because he’s tired.
I think he’s also afraid, not of getting shot necessarily, because they’re going to put a bubble around him, I heard. No, I mean he’s afraid of crowds not showing up.
Look, Jon, I’m not trying to be snide or superficial or partisan. I think it’s obvious that he has some level of mental confusion. What the diagnosis is, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s early dementia or if it’s just basic slow impairment, but there’s no question. I mean, why do we even ask the question? And I think we ask the question because I’m not very comfortable blaming the media for any politician’s problems. But in this case, I would say the way that the big media, and specifically The New York Times, covered the Biden impairment is not the same way they’re covering Trump. I think that the coverage that The Times gave Biden on the mental issue was – I don’t want to say it was excessive. It was abundant. You could argue that it was excessive. But then again, that’s the job of The New York Times. The New York Times’ job is to be relentless in its coverage of what it thinks is important. So we’ll grant them that if the president is impaired and not fit to serve another term, that is a legitimate concern.
However, where’s the other half? It’s obvious that Trump, if he’s not impaired, then he’s the most imbecilic man on Earth. He has no answer to any question. And the answers he gives drift and meander and go all over the place, and eventually turn into personal insults. And I think that he doesn’t know what to do.
He has his two professionals, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who the press claims are these wonderful professionals. These are the wonderful professionals, by the way, who ran the Swift Boat Campaign against John Kerry. But they are professionals. And they are probably giving him better advice than he’s taking.
But he brought in Corey Lewandowski a couple of weeks ago, and Corey Lewandowski is a mad dog. That’s who he’s listening to. He’s listening to Lewandowski. He’s listening to Elon Musk. He’s listening to his son. He’s listening to the really crazy people in his inner circle who will never contradict him.

JW: So to be polite here, we would say Trump is a diminished candidate.  But his support is shockingly high. Right now, the 538-polling average has him at around 44% with Kamala at 46.

MC: Yes.

JW: And that’s about where he’s been for months. Here’s the situation. Everybody knows what they think about Trump. This is his third time as running for president. He’s been in the news for eight years. So all my friends are asking the same question: “How can so many people still support him?”
And I have a theory. I have a theory about this. It’s not his personal qualities as a candidate. It’s not his position on the issues. It’s what he represents in the biggest sense. He is the white man’s candidate. He’s the candidate of a Christian America.
The Republicans have been the white party for a long time now. But this year there is something actually new in American politics. The Democrats are running a woman of color, which kind of calls the question of, “Do you want to live in a white, Christian, male-dominated republic? Or do you want America to move towards a multi-ethnic democracy where women have equality?” So we need to step back from the individual candidates and their qualities and look at these larger underlying forces. That’s my theory.

MC: I could not agree with you more, and I have a companion theory.

JW: Good.

MC: What you said is absolutely correct. And this answers the other question that people ask is, “Why isn’t Trump trying to appeal to the middle? Why isn’t he trying to get these suburban voters? Why is he attacking other Republicans?”
And the answer, as far as I can tell, is that in the last presidential election, about 150 million people voted. I believe the number of people who did not vote, who could vote, are about 80 to 90 million; might be more. So there’s a gigantic pool of what are politely called low-information voters, low-propensity voters, low-IQ voters, I would add. I understand that everybody who doesn’t vote doesn’t have a low IQ. But in this election, they do, for sure. The Trump strategy is to scrape the bottom. His strategy: he doesn’t want the suburbans, he doesn’t care. He wants to pick up enough of that erratic, non-tuned-in, mostly white, uneducated male vote that is in that pool of 80 million who don’t vote regularly. That is a workable strategy if you want to win the Electoral College. You’re not going to win the popular vote, but you could win the Electoral College with that.
The problem with that for Trump is that he’s running out of time: because not only is the election relatively near – it’s not that easy to get those kinds of people registered, to find them, to register them, and to motivate them to vote. I definitely think that’s his strategy.
As terms of your theory: look Jon, I’ve lived through the coup in Chile. There were millions of Chileans who wanted a dictatorship. And anybody who believes that there aren’t millions of Americans who would want a dictatorship are wrong. I’m not saying that everybody who supports Trump wants that. What I’m saying is that people go, “Why don’t these people wake up?” But they did wake up, some of them. And they like it. They want it. They want to punish the people they don’t like. And they look upon Trump as the avenger or the punisher. And the worse his personal qualities are, the better. Because if you’re going to hire a killer, you don’t want one that’s compassionate.
On the other hand, I think the success of the Democrats owes very little to Kamala Harris. And that’s not a criticism of her, by the way. But my theory is that what we’re seeing is the backlash to a decade of depression, despair, and pandemic. We had a million people die. That’s 20 Vietnams, which we have not memorialized. We don’t talk about it. We don’t hold anybody accountable. All we have are a couple of fascist militias who want to put Anthony Fauci in jail, which I find fantastically absurd. But Trump has not been held accountable for the way he mismanaged that.
I think that the pandemic destroyed people’s confidence in life, with all sorts of subcategories. And I think Trump was part of that darkness.
I think that people are seeing that we can feel some light; we can feel some normalcy. We can feel a break in this despair and depression. And the fact is, I don’t have any problem saying it because I lived through it. I was an avid supporter of defeating Donald Trump, and therefore an avid supporter of Joe Biden. And when we turned on the debate, after two minutes, my wife and I looked at each other and said, “We’re dead. This is over.” And I think millions of people felt that.

JW: Yeah.

MC: Millions. And you remove Biden, and the sun came out.

JW: Yeah. Well, a great man once said that “We have the known unknowns and we also have the unknown unknowns.”

MC: Yes.

JW: And I’m impressed by the unknown unknowns in the last few months. Biden’s career-ending debate performance is something none of us would’ve imagined it would’ve been as bad as it was. We never anticipated there’d be an assassination attempt on Trump. Biden pulling out was an unknown unknown.  This series of unknown unknowns suggest to me the same thing. We don’t really know what’s going to happen in the next 80 days.

MC: No, we don’t.

JW: Still, it’s hard at this point not to be hopeful about November 5th. So I wonder where you end up between the lessons of the past about our ignorance, and our sense of hope?

MC: I’ll take the Fifth Amendment if you don’t mind.

JW: Okay!

MC: I’m very ambivalent on this because I’d like to say that there’s nothing more dangerous than hope. Unfortunately, I’ve been filled with hope again.
When Biden gave that debate, I was pretty much resigned to the fact that we probably would have a Trump presidency, but not just probably, right?

JW: Yeah.

MC: And there wasn’t much we could do about it. And that’s changed now, which means that on November 5th if Trump gets elected, I’m going to be really disappointed. 
But now talking in a very serious way, trying to draw to whatever degree I can on my 50 years of experience in looking at these political situations in elections, it’s really Kamala Harris’s election to lose right now. She has all of the momentum. She is either winning in every category, or her trend line is about to cross his.
People like us, people listen to this podcast, we’re very political. We go through all of the details. We read the newspapers. Most people do not. Some people don’t even know there’s an election this year. They certainly don’t know it’s in November. They make their decisions on criteria that’s very different than the way Nation readers decide whether they’re going to participate in the pro-Palestinian demonstration or not in Chicago. It’s more visceral for most voters, and it’s also more traditional. It also has to do with their family and their upbringing and how their mommy and daddy voted, right?

JW: Absolutely.

MC: It’s about a feeling, to a great degree. And the feeling right now, and of course the word that’s in vogue is “vibes.” And the vibes are good.
One thing to keep in mind: who gets elected every time? The upbeat candidate. The optimistic candidate. That was also true in 2016, except for 13,000 votes in Wisconsin. I think that’s what we’re seeing. And I don’t think much can change that between now and the election.

JW: The vibes are good. You can read Marc Cooper’s terrific political column, The Coop Scoop, on Substack. Tell us how we can do that.

MC: Oh, well, I do put out this newsletter, and I’m one of the few Substackers out there who keep it free for everybody. Anybody’s welcome to pay and subscribe, but every edition is free. So if anybody would like to be put on the mailing list for it, just send me a note to mcooper, like Marc, mcooper at IGC, Italy George Charlie, dot org. That’s [email protected]. Just send me a note and say, “Put me on your newsletter mailing list.” No cost, no charge.

JW: Marc Cooper of The Coop Scoop, thanks for talking with us today.

MC: You’re welcome, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time for another segment on summer beach reading. While the Democrats hold their convention in Chicago, the number one nonfiction bestseller in America is “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance. Luckily for us, Becca Rothfeld has read it, so we don’t have to.
Becca is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post. She’s written for The TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Art in America, Book Forum, The New Left Review and The Nation. Her essay collection, “All Things Are Too Small,” was published in April. The New York Times called it “splendidly immodest” and “exhilarating”. She’s also America’s most famous Philosophy PhD candidate. Becca Rothfeld, welcome to the program.

Becca Rothfeld: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be America’s most famous PhD program dropout – that is really what I am.

JW: When Hillbilly Elegy was first published in 2016, it got a lot of terrific reviews, and you did a tremendous public service in July by going back and rereading them. The New York Times, you reminded us, gave it two rave reviews. Jennifer Senior said it was “a compassionate, discerning analysis,” and David Brooks called it “essential reading.” Got lots of other great reviews. The Economist, for example, declared, “You will not read a more important book about America this year.”
None of these reviewers were Trumpers. The book got famous as an explanation for liberals of why the white working class in the Heartland fell for Trump, who won the 2016 election just a few months after the book was published. What was it about J.D. Vance’s explanation of the white working class that made the book seem, in your words, “to provide an eloquent and nuanced explanation for Trump’s otherwise baffling allure?” What kind of guidebook were liberals looking for?

BR: I think they wanted one that did a couple of things. One that absolved them of responsibility for changing anything significant about the political system. Something that’s notable about the J.D. Vance of 2016 is that he’s not blaming the elites for anything yet. He’s not a conspiracy theorist yet. Instead, he’s still in the camp of kind of traditional conservatives who are telling poor people that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and he blames poor people in Appalachia for their own impoverishment and their own predicament. He thinks it’s largely a psychological phenomenon or a cultural phenomenon. It’s largely because people are lazy. I think that that flatters liberal’s sense that they’re doing as much as they can.
I think that the book also gave liberals a sense that they’re compassionate, because they’re reading a book that’s written from the perspective of somebody in Appalachia, and so it allowed them to kind of engage in moral self-congratulation, and it’s not too heady, it’s not too intellectual. It’s really framed in this performatively kind of plainspoken, folksy way.
I think that’s because J.D. Vance didn’t want to really do research. He kind of just would say things and made things up. He makes huge claims, empirical claims, without really citing very much evidence. The book has astonishingly few footnotes. I think it’s 21. It has 21 footnotes for the entire book.

JW: Let’s talk a little more about his method for understanding poor whites in Appalachia. You write vividly about how he presented evidence for his conclusions. I wonder if you could just read us that passage.

BR: Yes. “Because he observed acquaintances using cell phones 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 Obama’s economic policies, he asserted that many hillbillies are jobless out of laziness. There are several economic disciplines dedicated to gathering reliable data about why people are, in fact, jobless, but Vance was disdainful of attempts at more rigorous study, insisting that he knows what’s what, ‘not because some Harvard psychologist says so, but because I felt it.’ His method is generally extrapolating from anecdote.”

JW: You say Hillbilly Elegy was always “a performance, a conspicuous display of homey authenticity.” Please explain a little more what you mean by “a performance”.

BR: I think that it reads not unlike campaign memoirs, which are really kind of just auditions, basically, for political celebrity. I think that he was auditioning for political celebrity, but he just kind of miscalculated what the trajectory of the Republican party would prove to be, and so now he’s kind of changed his calculation.
But, clearly, this is a book that’s supposed to mark him out as a respectable Republican, a respectable conservative voice. He’s not a neo-Nazi. He’s reasonable. He doesn’t like Trump. He’s really auditioning for the part of the person who will be called upon to go on MSNBC and explain the Trump phenomenon to liberals.
And he gets that part. That’s how he becomes a famous person, is because this book is successful. But it’s clearly written with this audience of affluent liberals in mind, and you can kind of imagine him at Yale Law School performing the same shtick.

JW: You also call the book “an entry into the pantheon of uplift narratives, a kind of appendage to the self-help genre, and it is characteristically cheesy.” I wonder if you could give us some examples of that.

BR: The book is basically him saying, “This is how I did it. This is how I got to Yale Law School.” He has this whole part about how he joins the Marines, and the Marines teach him that everything that he understood to be a limitation was really the product of learned helplessness, and if he had just set his mind to overcoming all these obstacles, he could always have done it.
And so he writes, “Every time I learned to do something I thought impossible, like climb the rope,” he’s climbing a rope in bootcamp, “I came a little closer to believing in myself. Psychologists call it ‘learn helplessness’ when a person believes as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes of my life.”
It’s this happy narrative where he kind of learns that if he just puts his mind to stuff, he can get it done. He also has lots of passages making the US military seem great but are cheesy.

JW: One of the things he criticizes about his neighbors and friends is that they rely on high-interest credit cards, and he says that this is foolish. Do you have something to say about that?

BR: Yeah. One of the most striking things about this book is that, on the whole, on this book, J.D. Vance is very hostile to the idea that any policy intervention could improve anything for anyone, because people at Appalachia are badly off because they’re lazy. They should just work harder. But pretty much the one policy institution that he commends in the book is predatory lending.  In this passage, he works for his senator in Ohio, and he writes, “My senator opposed this bill that would curb payday lending practices, and then he never explained why. I like to think that maybe he and I had something in common. The senators and policy staff debating the bill had little appreciation for the role of payday lenders in the shadow economy that people like me occupied. To them, payday lenders were predatory sharks stretching high-interest rates on loans and exorbitant fees for cash checks. The sooner they were snuffed out the better. To me, payday lenders could solve important financial problems by allowing him to take out loans even though he had bad credit.” I just wrote in the margin of the book, “Oh, God, no.”

JW: When the book was published, he was not a Trumper, as you have said. In fact, he was calling Trump “America’s Hitler”. So we have this problem of understanding his political transformation. Was it all just hypocrisy and ambition and abandoning his old positions? You say “the signs of his eventual pivot were legible all along.” What do you mean?

BR: I mean, I think that there’s two features that are kind of constant across J.D. Vance’s political trajectory, and one of them is that he thinks that culture is the primary problem. Even though now he has become more of an economic populist, he still seems to really be focusing on culture war-type concerns. I mean, most famously in recent weeks, his remarks about childless cat ladies, he’s obsessed with the trans issue, so I think that if you are a social conservative, convinced that culture is the primary problem, you can go two ways.
One, you can say policy can’t fix anything, so we should just bow out, and that was the route that J.D. Vance took in 2016. Or you can say, “We need to go full authoritarian, and we need to abandon liberalism, intervene into people’s private lives, and force them to adopt the cultural norms that we think are better.” And so that’s the path that he’s taken now.
The second thing that I think is kind of constant is that both in this book and in his subsequent political victories, he’s balancing this delicate tension where he needs to present himself as an everyman in order to be able to claim that he’s able to speak for poor people in the Rust Belt and in Appalachia as he does in this book. But he also needs to occupy these elite roles. It’s a delicate dance, where in 2016, he represented himself as the spokesperson for Appalachians talking to a liberal audience, and now he’s kind of just trying to ignore all the ways in which he’s now a powerful person in America, a member of the elite, by giving all these speeches in which he presents himself as still just a normal guy.

JW: Republicans were enthusiastic when Trump picked Vance because they thought of him as someone who could talk to working-class whites in the Rust Belt. The review in The Washington Post back in 2016 had a headline that described the book as, “A plea to the white working class.” Was the book addressed to white workers in Appalachia?

BR: No. I think not at all. Something that I mentioned in my review, which I think is a really insightful framework for thinking about this, is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. He has a book called Elite Capture, and the idea of that book is that one problem with identity politics is that when we elect somebody to be a spokesperson for a group solely because they are demographically of a piece with that group, we often select someone who doesn’t turn out to be representative of that group, because they’re somebody from that group who’s made it into elite sphere, and so they’re unusual.
I think J.D. Vance is a perfect example of that. He appointed himself spokesperson for poor, white Appalachians. But the reason why he was even in a position to do that effectively is because he was at Yale Law School, and he got a book deal with a major publisher, and he ended up going on all these talk shows. So, by that point, he was no longer representative at all. I think that you actually see that he’s terrible at speaking to the white working class. He’s extremely unpopular.

JW: Yeah, I looked up the election in 2022 when he first made it to the Senate. He got 52%, which was 10 points less than the Republican candidate for governor, so it seemed like Republicans in Ohio didn’t much like him.

BR: He is now, nationally, super unpopular. I mean, I think that really going hard on this culture war stuff in such offensive terms plays well on Twitter, but does not actually play well with ordinary people, even conservative ordinary people. I think that explains some of it.
But I guess, also, he’s just gotten into the habit of addressing this elite cadre of, initially liberals, and then I think he was addressing elite conservatives like Peter Thiel, who is his mentor and one of his big backers, and he worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm. I think when you’re addressing someone like Peter Thiel, and you’re representing yourself as a white, working-class spokesperson, the way that you talk is different than you would if you were actually talking to members of that demographic.

JW: Just a reminder that at the Republican National Convention, he said, “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.” Of course, at the convention he said that the people where he came from were all victims of Democratic social policy and Wall Street. But isn’t that kind of different from the story he tells about where he came from?

BR: This is the biggest difference, I think, and this, I think, can probably be chalked up just to his opportunism. In Hillbilly Elegy, he explicitly condemns conspiracy theories. He frames them as attempts on the part of poor people to evade responsibility for their own failures. He condemns Obama birth record conspiracy theories, some of which Trump has endorsed explicitly, and he says that people need to stop thinking of themselves as victims. And then in his speech at the convention, he explicitly said it’s the fault of these elites. They’re ruining your life. So he has really changed his tune on that issue in particular.

JW: Now, as you mentioned, J.D. Vance is famous for his argument that America is run by childless cat ladies, the most famous quote of the campaign. They’re not good for America, he thinks, and it’s the fault of feminism. What do you think?

BR: Sort of predictably as a childless person with dogs, but also just as a thinking person, I don’t think that that’s true. I mean, I’ve actually just written some stuff about this on my Substack, because this discourse really irritates me, this idea that the only way to be invested in the future is to have children. I think, in fact, I wrote on my Substack that having children is asocial. A lot of people are angry about that.
Obviously, in some literal, straightforward sense of social, you’re creating more members of society, you’re interacting with them, you might have more friends because you have children, and so on. But it’s a relatively private, should we say, way to contribute to society or a way to invest in the future of society. There are much more public-facing ways of investing in the future of society, engaging in political activism to improve society, for example. Or another example is creating art that assumes that people in the future will read it and will exist to be able to read it. I think that the premise that you have to have literal children that you birthed in order to care about the future of society is deranged.

JW: Deranged. Well, of course, on the left, the explanation for declining birth rates is the lack of support in public policy for childcare, for parental leave, for school lunches, and this is a big part of the Democratic campaign right now. What do you think about the left explanation?

BR: I definitely think that there should be more public support for childcare, for parents, for sure. I think that it’s really lamentable that there isn’t enough, and I think that surely some of the explanation for declining birth rates in America is the product of straitened economic circumstances.
However, I do think that if that were a large part of the explanation, then we would see maybe still declining, but at least higher birth rates in countries that have a ton of material support for would-be parents. Places like Hungary, where the populist reactionary leaders are actively incentivizing people to have children, but also places like Japan and Korea where that’s true. Even in those places, birth rates are declining.
I think that, at least not all of the left, some of the left, chalks this up to material explanation. I think that feminists have not forgotten that women can exercise their agency, and so I think that that has to be at least some part of the explanation. It’s just that for the first time in history, women have control – well, maybe not for long if the Republicans have their way – but women have some control over their reproductive trajectories, and there are social avenues available for women to do other things with their lives that are meaningful, contribute to society, invest in the future in other ways. And so it’s totally unsurprising that fewer people would choose to have children under such conditions, in my view.

JW: You’ve convinced me.

BR: I’m glad.

JW: Our topic here is Hillbilly Elegy, which has been on the bestseller list for 76 weeks.

BR: That’s so unjust. There’s so many better books people should be buying.

JW: Usually publishers of big bestsellers want a sequel. I wonder if you see a career for J.D. Vance as a hillbilly writer.

BR: I mean, I think that’s possible, but I kind of wonder if he will learn from his mistakes, because he’s such a protean figure. He’s clearly willing to say whatever he needs to say in order to be fashionable among the set that he’s trying to ingratiate himself to. I do think Hillbilly Elegy will present some problems for him, because we have it in writing, him saying all these nasty things about people from Appalachia, all these nasty things about conspiracy theorists. He even condemns the sexism of hillbilly culture. I wonder if that will come back to bite him in a way that will make him regret being so affirmative. I think one thing that you tend to see in politicians’ memoirs when they’re a little more seasoned is that they’re cagier. I think that he probably regrets that this book is not as cagey as it would be if he wrote it now.

JW: Becca Rothfeld – her book of essays, All Things Are Too Small, was published in April. The Guardian called it “bracing and brilliant”. She’s the nonfiction book reviewer for The Washington Post, where she recently revisited the success of Hillbilly Elegy. Becca, thank you for this week’s summer reading report.

BR: Thank you so much for having me. I hope that people will actually not read Hillbilly Elegy.