Hillbilly Elegy uses personal experience to promote stale bootstrap nonsense | Jessa Crispin

The Netflix film fails to recognize there are large parts of the US that have been abandoned by politicians, employers and educational institutions

Hillbilly Elegy the book came out at a weird time. Released just a few months before Donald Trump would be elected president of the United States, it was already on the shelves and gaining a respectable audience when those surprised by the results scrambled to find something that would explain these dangerous" white people they just remembered existed. It became a phenomenon.

Hillbilly Elegy the movie is also coming out at a weird time. Released on Netflix this week on the heels of the - slim - defeat of Trump at the polls, politicians and thinktanks and cultural elites that disguise themselves as just simple working folk in tune with the people" are trying to figure out what to do about his voters in regions like the midwest, the south, and the setting of the film, Appalachia. Mostly it's a scramble among Democrats and Republicans to see who can get their votes and dollars without providing them any sort of significant material support.