The Comical Fetterman Mystique
8th November 2022
“Not all of the white working class struggles,” writes J.D. Vance, Ohio Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Across his state’s eastern border in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman epitomizes this assertion, to the extent he can be called “working-class” at all. Fetterman, with a net worth of $800,000, would have to be elegized as a kind of “Main Line,” if not exactly “Beverly” Hillbilly.
LARPing as a steelworker cum coal miner, Fetterman has been elevated by the key Democratic establishment institutions—the media, corporate world, academia, and Hollywood—to the status of demigod; one might call it the Zelensky treatment. Having ignored the white working class for so long, these institutions are dedicated to the illusion Fetterman can restore these benighted voters to the Democratic fold. Fetterman allows Democrat elites the deluded self-assurance that they still speak for the working class and align with its interests. Now, after a debate performance that will enter the annals of American political blunders, they are doubling down in support of their man.
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Despite his “working-class” posture, Fetterman did not struggle, at least financially. His tattoos and Carhartt apparel don’t conceal his graduate degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School. His family’s wealth has allowed him to maintain his hobby of the mayoralty of a minuscule municipality, which didn’t fare well under his watch. Contrast him with North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who worked in a factory before his political career. Fetterman is a giant of a man who wears the right clothing and sports the right facial hair and tattoos, but he isn’t “blue-collar Pennsylvania” any more than Mehmet Oz.