Hillbilly Elegy Revisited: Class Struggles, and the Tariff Politics of Trump’s America–Europeans24 скачать в хорошем качестве

Hillbilly Elegy Revisited: Class Struggles, and the Tariff Politics of Trump’s America–Europeans24

The current Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, wrote an autobiographical work called “Hillbilly Elegy” that vividly depicts the economic hardships, social issues, and cultural conflicts that the lower working class faces in the context of industrial decline in the Appalachian region’s “Rust Belt.” Vance’s story of growing up in a working-class family in Ohio and Kentucky is told in a very detailed and poignant manner. Following its publication, the book garnered significant attention during the 2016 US presidential election and turned into a representative work for the outside world to comprehend Trump’s key supporters at the time, who were the American white middle and lower working class (non-college blue-collar workers). Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate and went on to become a vice presidential candidate in 2024. Since then, he has been elected as a federal senator from Ohio. He was sworn in with Trump on January 20, 2025, after winning the vice presidential election in November. As the first millennial to serve as vice president, Vance was widely considered Trump’s “political successor”. Trump released an executive order on March 26, 2025, declaring a 25% tariff on automobiles built outside of the United States. He also said that he would begin enforcing reciprocal tariffs on nations worldwide on April 2, 2025, which he euphemistically refers to as “Liberation Day.” We may gain a more profound understanding of Hillbilly Elegy by looking at Trump’s tariff “big stick” approach during his second term as president. Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of how Vance entered Yale Law School through education and personal struggle in an environment of poverty, domestic violence and drug abuse and finally achieved a leap in social class. The real power of this book lies in that it is not only a personal success narrative but also a collective portrait of the plight of the American working class. The “hillbillies” described by Vance – the white working class in Appalachia – were once the backbone of American industrialisation but were marginalised in the wave of globalisation and fell into poverty, drug abuse, crime and social and economic difficulties of class solidification. There are differing views on Hillbilly Elegy among the American intellectual community. Supporters think that Vance effectively reveals the structural causes of the poverty cycle in the “Rust Belt” by fusing human experience with macro-social concerns. However, the book’s subjective aspects of the “hillbilly class” are overemphasised, and the structural and systematic inequalities of the American political and economic system are overlooked, according to critics. In reality, “blaming the victims” is a way of supporting the neoliberal political and economic agenda. Notwithstanding the conflicting opinions, Hillbilly Elegy’s societal impact cannot be denied. The book became a key resource for comprehending the mindset and character of Trump’s political followers when it was released in 2016, the year that Trump was first elected president. Through a nuanced depiction of working-class life, Vance subtly alludes to the central problem of the American manufacturing sector’s demise against the backdrop of globalisation and free trade internationalisation in Hillbilly Elegy. Throughout the book, he makes it clear time and again that this generation has seen industries close, jobs vanish, and families and communities fall apart. The demise of the American manufacturing sector started in the late 1970s when American businesses heavily outsourced their production to foreign countries in an effort to cut costs and increase profits as globalisation accelerated. The number of manufacturing employment in the United States decreased from around 20 million to 14 million between 1980 and 2020. The “Rust Belt” states—Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which were formerly the hubs of manufacturing for the American coal, steel, and car industries—were most affected by the trend. The stark disparity in labour costs between the US and other countries is the primary driver of manufacturing outsourcing. Companies relocated their operations to China and Mexico in the 1970s in order to drastically lower production costs because labour expenses there were around a tenth of those in the US. At the same time, after World War II, US policy shifted to services and innovation, manufacturing was marginalized, and the rise of asset-light companies weakened manufacturing investment, causing manufacturing capital to flow into real estate and finance. With technological progress and automation, the manufacturing industry has higher requirements for skills, but workers’ skills cannot keep up with demand, resulting in an increase in job vacancy rates.