Tag Archives: jd vance

WRT V, Part 3: Of Sorrow and Triumph

This is the third in a three-part series. | Part 1 | Part 2

On the second to last day of my road trip, I cross South Dakota from southwest to northeast, almost entirely on back roads. I start in the Pine Ridge Reservation, which I expect to be jarring. It is.

The first markers of the new world I enter are the roadside markers reading “Think” and “Why Die?” While they are part of a statewide program to memorialize drunken and other reckless driving deaths, they are legion on Pine Ridge. Trailers begin to appear alongside the road, almost all in a state of decay, some fitfully patched up, others crumbling into these hard, rolling hills. In the town of Oglala, they just densify, each yard collecting broken down vehicles, mined for parts to keep one running. Drivers honk at the stray dogs who run in front of cars. A few men walk down lonely stretches of highway with no obvious aim.

The town of Pine Ridge stirs to life on this Sunday morning, a few kids ambling up streets and a group congregating outside a church. The reservation’s schools and health center at least look shiny and new, and the town now manages to offer some basic necessities in business and a few apparent research operations or other outposts from the outside. But it is still a tenuous borderland, still struggling to resist the entropy and despair that hang like a pall over Pine Ridge. There is one growing type of business that shows sign of new entrepreneurship: cannabis shops.

A few miles further east, I come to Wounded Knee. Here, in December 1890, over 140 Sioux camped beneath a white flag were slaughtered by the US cavalry. The massacre was the final blow in the Plains Wars and the end of an era, the frontier closed and reservation life made universal. Whispers of a mobilizing ghost dance spooked the Army, and after a single mystery shot, the guns above the creek blazed indiscriminately, killing Native men, women, and children, along with a number of US soldiers through friendly fire in the bloodbath below.

Today, a single sign by Wounded Knee Creek marks the site of the massacre, and a still-active cemetery atop a hill hosts the mass grave at its center. All is quiet when I pull up, but my arrival sparks some activity. An older man walks up the backside of the hill, introduces himself as the cemetery’s caretaker, and shares its history. His great grandmother, he says, is the one who showed another Sioux chief the blood coating the snow a few days later. He is reverent, adds some words in Lakota, though he also laughs easily as he talks of his grandchildren, for whom he needs to buy some Pampers.

Next, a younger man in a well-loved Seahawks jersey joins him. He adds some details on the 1973 occupation of this site by the American Indian Movement and subsequent standoff with federal forces. He had broken out of here to go live and work in Pipestone, Minnesota, but he is home to help restore water to his mother’s trailer down below the hill. He sells me a dreamcatcher. As I leave the site, two women with a young child arrive and begin setting up a table to peddle additional wares. For a variety of reasons I normally avoid giving handouts, but I leave Wounded Knee with a lighter wallet and no qualms about it.

Over these past two hours I have borne witness to an American moral disgrace. In some ways the tales of Native resistance and a delicate dance with an unbeatable government power take me back to the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico, right down to the vendors profiting off queasy, sympathetic tourists like me. But the affluence not far up the road seems to have particularly perverse effects on Pine Ridge, where residents can buy into one or two of the markers of modern American life but none of the rest, or are left with the detritus of a throwaway consumer culture and the accumulation of failing junk. I could haul in statistics on astronomical unemployment or obscene maternal mortality or life expectancies in line with the bleakest corners of sub-Saharan Africa, but my eyes are enough to capture the depths of the perdition here. Forget becoming great again: the US will be great when it can prove Pine Ridge is not a permanent state.

When I drove west in 2020, I struggled with questions about the state of the world, wrote moody fiction about a struggling soul who brushed up against the horrors of Pine Ridge. This time I drive freely, unburdened by what has been. I have borne witness, know I will find the words to capture this time on the edges of American life, a solo traveler drifting through and blending in with different worlds. I have a job in which I help chip away at the troubles in these lands, such as an outsider can. I am easing through, in control, pushing at edges and turning my eye my one great looming doubt, the place where my pursuit becomes tentative, comes up short.

As I go I listen to Hillbilly Elegy, now as good a time as any. The politics slip in here and there but the book is fundamentally an account of a broken boyhood, of one kid’s escape from a predetermined fate. JD Vance is the grandson of migrants (the irony drips through here), uncouth Appalachian Kentuckians who lit out for opportunity in an Ohio factory town, endured culture shock and their own demons but found ways, built lives. Two of their children lit upon upward trajectories, but Vance’s mother was the exception, the one who ran through men like tissues and lapsed into drugs. Young JD endures a constant rotation of father figures, jerked from place to place, unstable (despite some clear, precocious talents) until he finally lands in the place that has always been his most stable home: in with his Mamaw, the no-bullshit grandmother who sets a standard and holds him to it. She gifts him a world stripped of its ambiguities, clear in its expectations, no fleeting figures drifting through.

I feel stories like this deeply, am fascinated by how scars in youth can imprint themselves upon people. My own childhood was much happier than Vance’s, punctuated by a few acute jolts of pain instead of the near-constant anxious dread that probably made him the reflexive fighter that he is. Some scars linger, though, and he and I are not unaligned in some of our loose theories around the need for stable guides in a fluid world, of raising children to high standards, of the utmost importance of family life. How we have lived out that belief is very different.

I do not know if Vance has found the stability he craved with the choices he has made, will make no effort to judge his success or failure. But for my part there is no policy platform I would seek to impose on Pine Ridge to cure certain troubles of the soul, no rant about people whose views are different than mine. For me, before I ask what scenes like this demand that I do, I ask how I should be. In this case, the answer is to be a witness, to listen first, and then an attempt to uphold a faith in humanity through steady, daily work.

I have more pride than ever in the work I do because of some of the steps my office has taken over the past year to two to make good on some of these promises of greatness for people who deserve it. But the ties closest to home are still the ones that matter most. Trips like this one with an extended family are part of that work, bonds forged with people who are often not physically close but are some of my favorite humans. This whole year has been full of those journeys, and I cherish them all. And then there is my life in Duluth with my parents. Forget all the philosophical blather, forget the various expediencies: the foremost reason for my homing instinct in early adulthood was to live in joy with the two people who birthed me, even though our family unit is no longer. On that front, I have succeeded.

My project, however, is an incomplete one, and a gnawing void still looms as I dream of my own family life, my own investment in a future. What does it mean to want what I’ve been unable to find more than anything? It means I will pursue it with ever more vigor, with all the hunger, the joy, the panache, with everything I’ve articulated across all these journeys I take. I had thought this phase of life of outward journeys over the past few years may have been a distinct phase but now I understand it is in fact the project of a lifetime, an insatiable thirst for my world that will course through everything I do. I have built many of the necessary habits, slowly and fitfully over time. Whatever I might have believed before, I was never really ready. Now, I believe, I might be getting there. With that revelation I turn off the audiobook and coast into a Western sunset, my peace complete.

Decline Porn, Duluth, and Love Amid the Ruins

J.D. Vance, in a review of Janesville: An American Story in Commentary magazine:

Having grown up in a blue-collar family that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, I have an unusually high tolerance for the many profiles of Trump voters in struggling industrial towns. Lately, however, even I have grown weary of what Noah Rothman calls “decline porn.” There are only so many words in the English language, and nearly all of them seem to have been used at least three times to help the denizens of Williamsburg and Dupont understand red-state voters and dying factory towns. Enough already.

Vance penned the most orgiastic piece of decline porn in recent memory, Hillbilly Elegy–apologies for my juvenile enjoyment of this metaphor–but there has been no shortage of titles in this genre, and a survey of this blog will find me devouring much of it, from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids to Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, from George Packer’s The Unwinding to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Brian Alexander’s Glass House. It need not even be American; I could carry on with examples for a while. Decline porn is a fertile ground in contemporary non-fiction, and its best works tell haunting tales of realities that anyone vaguely involved in the shaping of political or economic trends must wrestle with. They also tap into a into a lament for things lost speaks to a certain part of the human psyche and permeates my own writing at times. Someone who knows me well can probably psychoanalyze this wistfulness easily enough, but I come back to it for reasons that are philosophical as well as personal, and I could devote a lot of words to defending it in those terms. Meditations on loss go back to Eden and the early creation myths, as Paz so masterfully explains in the last chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude. It’s a near universal human trait.

Despite this, I don’t consider myself a declinist. That golden past usually had its own ugly features, and nostalgia and selective memory whitewash the worst of it. Coping with change is also one of the greatest engines of human ingenuity and heroism, and if noting else, it’s remarkably educational for those of us looking not to repeat past errors. If we fixate only on decline, we become depressing, tiresome people who are locked into a single lens and not much fun to talk to at parties.

Still, Vance likes Janesville. Despite the oversaturation of the genre–porn is everywhere these days, after all–its author, Amy Goldstein, gets to the heart of the flawed human stories, and instead of merely lamenting loss, looks to assess the responses to it. This one would likely strike home for me, too: my earliest memories are of the short stint my family spent living in a small town just north of Janesville, Wisconsin, and my mother worked there for a time. Unfortunately, Goldstein comes to fairly depressing conclusions. The basic tools of the trade in economic development, Janesville argues, have done little good to stem the tide of decline. Neither have worker retraining efforts, a rare point of bipartisan consensus on putting communities back to work. It adds up to a depressing summation of post-industrial America, with no obvious way forward for anyone.

Unless, of course, there might be any exceptions to the trend out there. I happen to be living in one.

Duluth, Minnesota is not heaven on earth. Its economy is not booming, its poverty rate is high, and there has been a rash of opioid overdoses, as in so much of the America exposed so ubiquitously in decline porn. But I will submit that it’s important to think about what it could have been, and that Duluth’s story is as much a triumph as any medium-sized Rust Belt town. In the early 1980s, its unemployment rate was second only to Youngstown, Ohio, which is not exactly great company to have. Population plummeted, manufacturing packed up and left, and a billboard asked the last person to leave to turn out the lights.

Most Rust Belt cities remain mired in the post-industrial swamp; the few that have broken free, like Pittsburgh, are the large ones that operate on a very different scale. And yet Duluth has charted a respectable course since it hit rock bottom in the 80s. Unlike every other Rust Belt city, its population has been stable since 1990, instead of continued shrinkage. (See the table on this page for comparison cities.) The city is basically at full employment. Income growth around the greater Duluth area, while not on par with the booming coastal metros, does outpace the stagnant national average since 1990. The median income within the city itself, while not stellar ($40-some thousand), is a clear step above the Eries, Akrons, South Bends, and Scrantons of the world. The city’s image rehabilitation has been thorough, as it now comes off as an outdoorsy playground for Twin Cities residents on vacation. The Trump tide made little headway in the city proper (though precinct-level data challenges some aspects of the dominant media narrative, and suggests Trump was largely a rural and exurban phenomenon in Rust Belt states, not something that happened inside its former industrial engines). Sure, “we’re better than Flint!” isn’t exactly a winning slogan, but it’s important to understand what the odds were, and what could have been.

There are two ways to explain this.

The first is one of leadership and vision and a certain Duluthian exceptionalism, which us Duluthians would certainly like to believe. A lot of credit in this line of thinking goes to Don Ness, the young mayor who served from 2008-2016 and brought the city’s debt under control and led a massive rebranding effort. But he had some strong forerunners. At the height of the crisis in the 80s, Duluth elected 29-year-old John Fedo. Unlike the consensus-driven and generally beloved Ness, Fedo was a warrior who wasn’t afraid to make enemies to push through his vision, but he also operated in a very different environment, and push through his vision he did. Fedo’s strategy was Keynesianism par excellence, with a junkyard reinvented as a tourist district and work crews set to work rebuilding streets for the sake of work and little else. Those efforts endure in obvious ways. His more market-oriented successor, Gary Doty, tried a lot of things to revive the economy, and while not all of them stuck, the general thrust was positive, as the city landed companies that are the cornerstones of the aviation and healthcare clusters that remain among its most promising foundations for sustained success. Beyond those three mayors, there’s the political influence of some clever longtime political operators who knew how to bring in the benefits like Jim Oberstar and Willard Munger, who were ahead of their time with ideas for building trail networks and capping freeways.

We can’t just credit the politicians, though. Duluth’s rehabilitation always had strong support from a loyal private sector, which continues to support changes through development and philanthropy. Pizza roll magnate Jeno Paulucci was a complicated figure with a complicated relationship with Fedo, but he did bankroll a lot of the changes in Canal Park. Several other big names in business left their mark, as did some of the legacy families whose early 20th century wealth continues to support local foundations and scholarships. That old money remains a boon to Duluth, as does a strong civic culture with its roots in Scandinavian immigration and a thriving arts scene that allows the city to punch far above its weight.

This, however, feeds into the other explanation, which has much more to do with structural factors than any brilliant maneuvering by the people in charge.

First off, geography has had its say. We call Duluth a Rust Belt city because it used to be a manufacturing center on the Great Lakes, and suffered the loss of that economic base and a drop in population comparable to other Rust Belt cities. But it’s isolated from the rest of them, and that may contain some spillover effects or a general sense that everything is going downhill. Instead, it sits in Minnesota, home to one of the wealthiest and most white collar metropolitan areas in the country in Minneapolis-St. Paul. As a regional center with a university and some hospitals, Duluth has some staying power that an Akron, just down the road from Cleveland, may not.

Local geography makes a difference, too. While Duluth isn’t overflowing with buildable land, it has had some pockets for new subdivisions that allowed for continued new home construction. Duluth has also proven somewhat resistant to the mass suburbanization of other Rust Belt cities; while there has certainly been growth beyond the city limits, it hasn’t come at major expense to the city’s tax base. A tour of the other Rust Belt cities will show that none of them has a Congdon: while some of the larger metro areas do have wealthy suburban neighbors, basically none of them have concentrations wealth of any size within the city limits. (The only real exception, surprisingly, is Charleston, West Virginia, which benefits from the machinery of a state government that most Rust Belt cities lack.) For that matter, precious few Rust Belt cities have many Lakesides, Woodlands, or Piedmonts, those stable, comfortably middle class neighborhoods that allow for upward mobility and keep perceptions of public schools afloat. Many of these neighborhoods (and even little nice blocks that don’t show up in census tract data) are fairly isolated, strung out along Duluth’s 27 miles of ridgeline and separated by streams and parks. Even though they are older, they feel fairly suburban, and the park-like nature of the whole city just makes it more resistant to changes that might march smoothly down more cohesive urban grids. It has so many different little pockets, and that diversity begets resilience.

Speaking of diversity, Duluth has always been a very white city–yes, a 1920 lynching probably played a role in that–and the relative lack of racial dynamics make it distinct from a lot of Rust Belt cities that convulsed with conflict in the mid-20th century.  White flight didn’t happen in Duluth on any meaningful scale, and while I wish I could claim this was due to some enlightened thinking on behalf of Duluthians, in reality there probably just weren’t enough people of color to set off that chain reaction. (Typically, this happens when the non-white population hits about 20%; Duluth remains over 90% white.) While the center of Duluth has hollowed out like basically every American city, Rust Belt or not, that probably had more to do with a declining old housing stock and poverty among white people. Other than perhaps some very recent school-driven outmigration, the growth in Duluth’s more suburban areas had much more to do with an abundance of buildable land and desire for space and newer homes than anything related to the people in Duluth itself. The city has been crawling toward greater diversity over recent decades, and if that trend continues or accelerates, Duluth’s response could well determine its future.

All of these factors are most likely intertwined in feedback loops, the causes impossible to separate from one another. There are few obvious lessons here, and some of Duluth’s strengths are accidents of geography in a city at the end of the line in the far north. But the relative successes are real, the leadership examples are real, and some of the things Duluth needs to do to remain an exemplar of Rust Belt success are clear, and cut across all such small cities. It needs to maintain its strong neighborhoods, keep its schools afloat, and prepare for an increasingly diverse future. Continued growth in diverse economic clusters will build a stronger safety net against future crashes. Concentration of poverty will only exacerbate divides and cut off pathways to eventual mobility. Duluth also needs to think on the level of a regional system, so that its future doesn’t devolve into squabbles between the city proper and the outlying areas. They’re all interconnected, part of one economy and one labor market, and their fates are intertwined.

As addicting as the decline porn may be, I’d much rather have an amorous adventure with something real, and with something that can learn from the past and grow into a future with me. It’s all right there before us.