Left Behind: White Trash, Hillbilly Elegy

• PSA: Don't be like JD Vance and leave your Venmo public

"White Trash" historian Nancy Isenberg on J.D. Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy," and class in America

(Democracy Now!) July 18, 2024: American historian and the author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg, calls Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance a peddler of the "self-made man myth." Isenberg criticizes Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir that propelled him to fame, as a deceptive way of selling this myth and the conservative politics it comes with.

"Much of what his memoir says tells us nothing about real class conditions," Isenberg says, pointing to her own historical and sociological research on the rural poor in the United States.

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