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Draft:Hillbilly Elegy

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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 city’s 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 one’s 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.
—Becca Rothfeld[1]

Hillbilly Elegy is a 2016 book by Republican politician J. D. Vance. It is his memoir about growing up poor in the Appalachia region of the Eastern United States. The book was widely reviewed. It was adapted into a poorly received film.

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