The Revolt of the Rust Belt
3rd August 2024
sense. The Rust Belt kid turned Yale graduate is an ideal figure to both troll America’s elites and woo its working-class whites. It is the Rust Belt states, after all, a collection of what was once America’s industrial core, that will decide the race. Stretching from the Upper Midwest to the Northeast, this is Vance’s cultural backyard.
The Rust Belt is my backyard, too. And in Erie, Pennsylvania, where I live, Vance’s schtick plays well. Folks here feel left behind — because they are. In their despair, they want a scapegoat.
In 1950, the Rust Belt was home to 43% of all American jobs. In Vance’s lifetime, industrial jobs have plummeted by 35%; in his early adulthood alone, 5 million factory jobs vanished. Deaths of despair filled the vacuum. Suicide in slow motion, the Rust Belt’s white working class leads the nation in early deaths caused by alcoholism, addiction and risky life choices. Before the term was even coined, Vance wrote in his 2016 Hillbilly Elegy memoir: “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.”