Trumpism as Grief Culture
In our loss of rituals, something has taken their place
I have not read Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of J.D. Vance, a son of Appalachian culture whose successful escape from that world (and from his troubled family) put him on track to political fame. The book’s fate has been to become an insider’s explanation of Red America, the Heartland and its forgotten-man culture of Trumpism.
From what I can tell, the book does not sound like an elegy. It is not, I take it, a nostalgic reflection on lost folkways and the joys of mountain dulcimer music. It will not put anyone in mind of Wendell Berry’s writing about community and membership in Port Royal Kentucky. As reviewers have noted, it sounds a bit more like a new politico establishing his policy chops.
A better title might have been Hillbilly Makes Good, given the self-congratulation which apparently leaks through the story of Vance’s ascent to Yale Law School and then on to a Silicon Valley venture capital fund. It is telling that the author credits his Yale law prof (and “Tiger Mom”) Amy Chua as the “authorial godmother” of the book.
And yet I want to suggest that an even better title—and a better analysis—might have been called Hillbilly Grief. I would argue that a culture of unacknowledged grief lies behind the three generations of the Vance family described in the book, born out of living through, like millions of others in post-industrial America, several decades of economic devastation, opioid overdoses, cultural demonization, and deaths of despair.
Not that the gradual collapse of middle class life in the heartland since 1980 is our only instance of foregone occasions of communal grief. An additional spur to this shared condition, reaching far beyond the heartland, was the Covid pandemic and its toll of one million dead, many without funerals and all without national rituals of mourning. (One exception was the In America: Remember installation of 700,000 white flags, many with the names of loved ones inscribed on them, on the National Mall in September 2021.)
To bolster my claim as a witness, I want to insert a small item of biography here. My hometown of Henderson Texas, population 13,000, is only slightly larger than when I grew up there in the 1950s. It resembles Vance’s Jackson Kentucky (the place he calls home) in some ways.
The local culture in my town today is still more Southern than Texan. (Shreveport is only an hour away.) The poverty rate in Henderson today is 13% with an additional 33% of the population classified as ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed), which means almost half the town is not making it, economically speaking.
Like Vance, I always knew I had to leave town. But I recall it was once in better shape before neoliberal extraction took a toll on its main street and families as well. So I’m familiar with Vance’s childhood world and its citizens.
On the condition of our country, I once heard the wonderful writer Bill Kauffmann describe the stakes this way: You can have your hometown or you can have empire—you can’t have both.
In his fascinating book on Greek tragedy, Simon Critchley reminds us that this art form’s peak was a single century of plays, largely about wars, performed mostly by veterans, before audiences comprised largely of veterans. Greek tragedy was in fact “a theater of war”, the metaphor made real. War was the life of the city and its pride, as the Athenian leader (and general) Pericles asserted in his famous Funeral Oration.
Critchley adds—and here I think of the heartland today—”tragedy might be defined as a grief-stricken rage that flows from war.” Ancient Greek has at least thirteen nouns for words describing grief, lamentation, and mourning, the emotions at the center of so many Greek tragedies. And the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, unlike our theater today, were civic occasions in which thousands of Athenians came to witness a brilliant, if still mysterious (to us) cultural practice around shared death and its meanings.
But neither our endless wars, decades of middle-class decline, nor even the one million dead in the pandemic have been national-scale occasions for anything like the public rituals by which the Greeks (and other cultures) reconciled themselves to what Judith Butler has called the “grievability” of existence.
This historical backdrop must include the erosion of community stemming from the disappearance of our rituals, as described by philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In a ritualistic society, Han notes, much is implicitly understood by its members in what is effectively a “community without communication,” while the reverse is true of American society today, where there is a prevalence of “communication without community.”
Trumpism, this strange metapolitical phenomenon which has finally come to the surface of our public life, is a transmuting of grief, first into anger (the January 6 attack on the Capitol) and then into a new and celebratory form of community (the Trump rallies), bringing the closure which resembles tear-filled but happy singing at the wake just after the funeral.
For whatever world is coming next, we had better learn to understand this grief community. Especially by looking harder at—and facing up to—its origins.
See you next time—peace.
Hi Elias. Thank you for this. I was working on some research for another project and came across this which resonates so much. It seems also to relate to some of the work that David McIvor did in Mourning in America. If you haven't seen it, you may find some resonance with your own thinking. Thanks for all you do!