Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy was never just a bad film. It was an artifact of a broader failure — the inability of America’s dominant elites to speak across the country’s fracture lines.
Howard brought his Blue America toolkit: polished narrative arcs, Oscar-ready casting, and the belief that empathy is itself a cure. His film told the story of JD Vance as the hero who overcomes trauma, escapes dysfunction, and finds salvation in Yale Law School — the ultimate Blue meritocratic fantasy.
But this was empathy delivered in a condescending painting by numbers accent. To Red America, the message wasn’t “we see you.” It was: leave your world, assimilate into ours, and be rewarded. Recognition wasn’t the prize; cultural surrender was the price. Everyone else it just rolled their eyes.
Red America
Red America’s suffering is real, not imagined. It’s written across the empty factories, the pill mills turned ruins, the shuttered main streets where Dollar General is the last neon glow. It’s in stagnant wages, in the diabetic amputations that spike in counties where doctors leave, in the opioid funerals where two generations stand around the same coffin size. Deindustrialization wasn’t an abstract trend; it was a bulldozer. Corporate consolidation didn’t just rationalize markets; it hollowed out small towns until there was no one left to sell to.
And yet: its ideological toolkit makes these problems unspeakable.
Rugged individualism reframes systemic dispossession as personal weakness. You can go to a Trump rally and complain you lossy your job to a private equity carve-up; but deep inside you believe you just didn’t hustle hard enough. You scream about NAFTA but deep inside you believe your factory town didn’t collapse because NAFTA gutted it; it’s because the people here lost their grit. The whole town can die, but the myth insists you must save yourself alone. The free-market myth protects the monopolists who destroyed local economies. Walmart and Tyson can gut a region like a fish, Amazon can turn logistics hubs into worker hellscapes, but the catechism of capitalism remains untouchable: markets are freedom, regulation is tyranny. The same invisible hand that stole the farm is worshiped as if it were the hand of God. Religious revival offers moral renewal but no structural change. Pastors can rail against abortion or drag queens, but not against the billionaire landlord buying up foreclosed homes on the edge of town. Prayer circles can salve addiction, but they cannot rebuild a hospital that shuttered when hedge funds stripped it for parts. Punish the undeserving keeps focus on scapegoats instead of oligarchs. The immigrant, the welfare mother, the coastal elite—these become villains in a morality play where the actual villains (billionaires, monopolists, the people who buy politicians two at a time) sit unmentioned in the wings.
Here’s the cruel twist: dependency. For all its anti-government posturing, Red America is lashed to the state. Roughly a third rely on programs like SNAP or Social Security Disability. FEMA disaster relief rolls in after floods rip through trailer parks. Federal highway funds pave the roads that trucking monopolies use to leave them behind. The farmer cashes a subsidy check. The veteran depends on the VA. The small-town hospital keeps its lights on with Medicare reimbursements.
But to admit this openly would betray its core myths—rugged self-reliance, free markets, moral desert. So instead, it must remain unspoken. The contradictions pile up but cannot be named.
Thus, the paradox: Red America suffers from oligarchy but cannot confront it. Its own commitments tie it to the very system that bleeds it. The pain is real, the rage is real, but the outlets are fake. Culture war becomes morphine, a drug that numbs without healing, keeps people angry enough to march but never free enough to rebel.
Many of the complaints Red America levels at immigrant communities are revealing. They call Mexican or Central American cultures “honor societies,” accuse them of favoring family or clan over abstract fairness. And yet, Red America itself is an honor society — just dressed in different symbols. Its code of belonging is racialized and moralistic: who counts as a “real American,” who gets respect, who can be excluded without shame. Its unwritten rules of loyalty, tradition, and hierarchy are every bit as binding as the codes it mocks abroad.
This is the cruel irony: Red America derides others for clannishness while maintaining its own racialized clannishness at home. It treats immigrant honor cultures as obstacles to assimilation while failing to recognize its own culture of deference, loyalty, and exclusion. The mirror image is striking — the difference lies only in what symbols enforce the code.
It’s as if Red America is chained in a burning house, but instead of running for the exits, it insists on fighting the firefighters because their truck flew a rainbow flag.
So the energy gets displaced into culture wars. Hollywood, pronouns, kneeling athletes — arenas where Red America can still imagine itself winning,. One can still boycott a beer, cancel a football game, scream at a school board. It gives the illusion of agency, the intoxication of victory, while the actual structural fight against oligarchic capitalism is impossible without ideological suicide.
Blue America
Blue America correctly diagnoses the sickness: oligarchic capitalism, climate collapse, racial injustice, health care inequity. But its dominant tools are hopelessly misaligned with the scale of the crisis.
Meritocratic technocracy reduces systemic breakdown to easily gameable propositions. It imagines that a new dashboard, a new algorithm, or a new set of data-driven interventions can “optimize” away structural decay. The result is that the deep, corrosive failures of late capitalism are packaged as management problems — tinkering with levers on a machine that is no longer functional. Worse, those levers are gameable. The very people presiding over the crisis quickly learn how to manipulate the technocratic criteria in their favor: emissions are “offset,” diversity is “benchmarked,” GDP growth is “inclusive.” The spreadsheet shows progress even as the material world rots.
Market-friendly solutions once promised pragmatic compromise, a way to enlist capital in the service of reform. But now, they function as facilitators of extraction. Every “green” investment vehicle becomes a new avenue for speculation. Every “socially responsible” fund preserves corporate dominance while nibbling at the edges of inequity. The logic of shareholder value still rules, just with softer branding. And so what was once a bridge to reform has become an elaborate system for laundering exploitation, allowing elites to feel righteous while consolidating power.
Cultural signifiers—representation, language policing, virtue statements—become substitutes for material change. A rainbow logo in June substitutes for workplace equity in July. A corporate statement about “solidarity” replaces actual commitments to labor rights. A TV show with diverse casting substitutes for schools and hospitals that actually serve diverse communities. Symbol becomes currency, and currency displaces substance. Representation matters, but without redistribution it curdles into spectacle: the surface is polished while the foundation crumbles.
This is the paradox of Blue America: it knows the diagnosis, but it cannot prescribe a cure. Its toolkit is not designed to confront oligarchy, because in practice it must constantly negotiate with oligarchy to maintain itself so many of the proposed reforms — “stakeholder capitalism,” “inclusive growth,” “green transition” — are designed in boardrooms and amount to nothing more than rebranding.
And so the most urgent crises — planetary, racial, economic, civic — are met with instruments designed not to solve them but to manage perceptions of them.
The results are predictable: DEI programs while wages stagnate, ESG filings while oil companies drill, health care tweaks while medical debt soars. Blue America wins symbolic battles inside its own bubbles, where its myths still feel intact. But it cannot build a coalition broad enough to confront oligarchy head-on.
Even the self-styled indies — the contrarian Substackers, the heterodox podcasters — fall into the same trap. They recycle early-’90s “third way” solutions dressed up as rebellion: free speech absolutism, deregulation with a smirk, “intellectual diversity” that collapses into brand management.
This isn’t radicalism. It’s a nostalgia act. Fiction-lite arguments, also largely funded by the same oligarchs they claim to critique, juggling flaming teacups on the deck of a ship that’s already liquefied beneath them, whispering polite applause to themselves for staying busy.
Both Red and Blue America are running someone else’s software.
Neither side wrote the code. The operating systems were built by think tanks, media conglomerates, political consultants, and billionaire patrons. Red America runs a program heavy on nostalgia, grievance, and manufactured enemies; Blue America runs a program heavy on technocratic fixes, consumer ethics, and curated moral superiority. Both packages are riddled with bugs, but the most important bug is the same: the programs redirect popular anger away from oligarchic power and toward safe, scripted conflicts.
The interface looks different — Red’s console runs on culture war graphics, Blue’s on identity dashboards and climate-friendly branding — but the back end is identical: extractive capitalism humming along without interruption. Each update patches over discontent with distractions: a new scandal here, a new symbolic victory there. And the more you tinker with the settings, the more you’re reminded you don’t actually have administrator privileges.
By design, the operating systems prevent full consciousness of the underlying power structures. They instruct users to blame the wrong actors, to celebrate the wrong victories, to organize around narratives that serve oligarchic continuity. Every bug, every glitch, every illusion of freedom is intentional — it keeps the machinery running smoothly while the extraction proceeds in the background.
And yet — by design, the software can be altered. It is not immutable. It can be hacked, rewritten, or replaced entirely. The architects left the code flexible enough that it could, in principle, be liberated from its pre-installed priorities. But doing so requires two things simultaneously: the recognition that the system is not natural, and the willingness to risk the entire interface collapsing to regain agency.
In other words: the trap is visible, but the key is also visible. Both sides can choose to remain users or to become programmers. By design, they have the tools to change the script — if they are willing to see the code for what it is and override it.
Both camps manage discontent rather than confront its causes. Both are fed crumbs to keep fighting each other — while oligarchs tighten their grip on the table itself.
Howard’s film failed not because it was sloppy but because it was perfectly sincere in its Blue American logic. It saw trauma, pathologies, and grit, not oligarchs, power, and capture. It offered the solution of escape and assimilation, the very thing Red America resents most.
Hillbilly Elegy became the mirror of America’s political trap: each side armed with a narrow toolkit, each locked inside its own myths, both prevented from striking at the true antagonist. The system isn’t hidden. It isn’t misunderstood. It’s simply unchallenged.
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