SCOTS-IRISH AMERICANS: A CULTURE IN CRISIS, OR BEING WORKING-CLASS WHITE IN AMERICA

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016) ("The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, 'In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown m mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that's occurred nearly everywhere else.' This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits--an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country--but also many bad ones, We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart." Id. at 3 (citations omitted). "Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown's temptations--premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: 'It's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault." "My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my application, I had 'pretended to be black or liberal.' This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen. We should hardly be surprised that as attitudes like this spread, the number of people willing to work for a better life diminishes." Id. at 194.).