It is easy to tell a story about deindustrialization — as most of our politicians of both parties have for the past generation — that presents it as another episode in a perennial sequence of economic development. The old is traded out for the new once again. Those who can’t keep pace by acquiring new skills or transplanting themselves to a new place get abandoned — a tragedy, to be sure. But this is how capitalism works and its casualties are worth it. In more recent discontented times, a rival narrative responds that this was not a necessary outcome but a globalist conspiracy, resulting not from any inner logic of capital but from the corrupt decisions of politicians and financiers; if not for them, everything might have stayed the same. In the course of Vance’s brief public life, he has swung from the first of these positions (the neoliberal) to the second (the populist-conspiracist).

Seemingly opposed to each other, both accounts share a disinclination to assign, or even imagine, any active role for the working-class people who bear the consequences of abandonment. Either they are self-sabotaging social detritus or passive victims of the elite. What they are not, in any way, is capable of making sense of their historical situation and exerting agency upon it — a concept unintelligible to Vance, who in his conversion narrative describes the “economic left” as a coldly compassionate Mandarinate:

[...] Vance is committed psychically to not seeing the third possible position in relation to the cruel power of capital: the inner logic of capital is implacable and punishing, but it can be made sense of and resisted if its agents are specified and comprehended as bearers of larger structures rather than malevolent shadow creatures. Such an act of comprehension is possible because capitalism forces proletarians to depend upon each other and therefore develop capacities beyond and against the violence of capital — capacities for solidarity, courage, and understanding. These are the working-class virtues. They have been modeled for Vance more than once, but he always mistakes and eventually reviles them.