European commentators love to pontificate about America, especially if they have never actually been to the United States. One weekend trip to New York in the late 1990s seems to confer “expert-level status” on these bloviators and you’ll often read their ill-informed nonsense (stolen usually from columns in the Atlantic Monthly or New Yorker) in the Sundays. If you spot the words “America’s febrile atmosphere” in the opening paragraph of one of these pieces, don’t trust it.
Oh dear, I see what I’ve done there ... damn.
To slightly misquote EB White, “consider no European commentator happy until he has explained America”. Especially after an assassination attempt or a political convention. When these intrepid explainers do venture outside of Manhattan their tedious Clarksonesque copy always mentions “guns” and “calories”. It’s like when foreigners write about Northern Ireland and somehow always talk about flags. Whenever I see a posh British hack anywhere that isn’t Brooklyn or Manhattan I’m reminded of Geraldine Chaplin’s hapless BBC journo in Robert Altman’s masterpiece, Nashville, so achingly desperate to show that she isn’t racist. (If you haven’t seen Nashville, well you should, not least because the late Shelley Duvall is typically great in it.)
For my first five years in America I lived in New York City and knew almost nothing about the United States. Manhattan is an island off the coast of North America that might as well be the Rive Gauche or north London or south Dublin. In the early 2000s I moved to Denver, Colorado and got a car and really began to see the place for the first time. The United States is a 4,500km-wide continent; Californians are as different from South Carolinians as New Mexicans are from New Jerseyians.
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There’s a famous story William Faulkner tells about getting lost in northern Maine. He stops to ask a local farmer the way, is curtly told the way and continues on his journey. About two miles further down the road he finds that the bridge is closed. Faulkner marvels at the differences between a Mainer and a Mississippian. A Mississippian, he says, would have explained about the bridge, offered an alternative route, maybe even a bed for the night, whereas the famously taciturn Mainer only proffers the information he was asked. My wife is from New England and I have spent a lot of time there, and no disrespect to Mainers but I have to say that this little anecdote rings true.
I have also spent a lot of time in Tennessee. Initially because I was a fan of Cormac McCarthy’s early novels and then just because I liked the place. Last week a blog post I wrote in February 2016 predicting a Trump victory in the then Republican primaries began to light up my inbox. In those heady days of the late Obama administration I suggested that “left behind Appalachia America” was not going to vote the way the elites of the Republican Party wanted them to. While New York and other cities had got rich, the Rust Belt had got poorer and more desperate. The opiate epidemic hit Appalachia hard.
Anyway, here’s part of what I said in early 2016:
“Who are these Trump supporters who hate elites, foreigners and Washington and who love guns, God and the Good Book? Many of them are, of course, what used to be called Reagan Democrats or yellow-dog Democrats. People from middle America and the middle South and Appalachia. These are the people known as the Ulster-Scots or ‘Scotch-Irish’. The history of the Irish in America does not begin with the potato famine but goes back a century earlier to the 1740s migration of Presbyterians from Ulster.
The best book about this history is Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer. As Hackett Fischer explains, these Borderlanders from Ulster loved liberty, read the Bible, were fiercely independent, loved to fight, hated central government, were suspicious of outsiders and they really loved to go to revival meetings to hear a preacher talk. These revival meetings are vividly described by Hackett Fischer, with the travelling charismatic preacher cajoling, enraging, joking with and entertaining his audience. Sound like someone we know?
But where did Donald Trump learn this trick? He’s not a McCoy from Kentucky, he’s a rich kid from New York, the son of a well-off German immigrant. The answer is to look at Trump’s Scottish Presbyterian mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, of the Clan MacLeod, who came from the island of Lewis-Harris in the Outer Hebrides. I grew up Presbyterian, too, but we went to the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, which is a dour, sensible, unshowy, deliberately boring faith. There were no charismatic preachers in my church and none would be tolerated by the Elders. But there was another Presbyterian Church in Ulster at that time: the Free Presbyterian Church, which was run by Ian Paisley.
Paisley, you’ll recall, was an evangelical demagogue suspicious of foreigners and bizarrely obsessed by the Pope (in Paisley’s eschatology Pope John Paul was the Anti-Christ). Trump and Paisley met several times and there are many photographs of them together. Trump comes from, or at least is channelling, this tradition. Exactly like Paisley, Trump loves Scotland, Israel and guns, says his favourite book is the Bible, is determinedly nativist and claims the elites are selling out the country ...”
Since 2016 I’ve spent quite a bit of time driving around rural Kentucky and Tennessee listening to local country stations and stopping at every pie stand (there are a lot of pie stands). And I feel that I know these people even better now. They are like my dad from Magheramorne, Co Antrim: self-reliant, dour, obsessed by music, often blackly funny. Trump’s blue-collar supporters seem to believe that this billionaire prep school graduate is somehow one of them, and if Hackett Fischer is to be believed it is because Scottish and Ulster clan solidarity is a “folkway” that is still a very important – if almost unknown – current in contemporary American life.
It was no surprise to me that Trump chose Senator JD Vance of Hillbilly Elegy fame as his vice-presidential pick. Vance is the local boy made good of the Ulster-Scots. Just like my favourite Appalachia novelist, Daniel Woodrell, the Marine Corps gave Vance a way out of endemic poverty and his family’s self-destructive ways.
[ Keith Duggan: America’s ‘most Irish county’: a Republican stronghold in fluxOpens in new window ]
Hillbilly Elegy was a publishing sensation but it rubbed me the wrong way when I first read it. This guy’s no “hillbilly”, I thought. He’s really a suburban kid from Middletown, Ohio, whose grandparents came from Kentucky. But I had forgotten that in America where your grandparents come from entitles you to name yourself forever as a child of that place. Third-generation New Jerseyians are “Italian” because one of their great-grandparents came from Naples. Joe Biden is somehow “Irish” because his great-great-grandfather hailed from Co Mayo.
This kind of exhausting lineage-chasing is America’s real national past-time. Watch any random half-hour of American television and you’ll be bombarded with ancestry researching ads. “Send us a DNA sample and we’ll tell you your whole family story,” says one of these companies. They’ll also tell the FBI if you or a relative is a serial killer. Google how they caught the “Golden State Killer” to unpack that disturbing little story.
The second time I was exposed to Hillbilly Elegy was via Ron Howard’s 2020 movie. Like many Howard movies, Hillbilly Elegy is unintentionally hilarious; to see the supreme Connecticut Wasp, Glenn Close, play Vance’s Mamaw is one of the great campy over-acting treats of contemporary American cinema. But that wasn’t Vance’s fault, and I wonder now if my negative feelings about the book may have been more a reaction to the reaction rather than the book itself. When the New York Times and other east-coast elite voices were falling over themselves praising Elegy as “honest” and “eye-opening”, it felt like it was the first time they were hearing the news about poor white people who had the misfortune to live in “fly-over country”.
The Ulster-Scots might represent the core supporters of the Vance-Trump ticket but America is, in the words of Carrickfergus poet Louis MacNeice, “incorrigibly plural”. Vance converted to Catholicism and married a Hindu lawyer. Trump has Jewish grandchildren. In this election cycle Trump’s support among black and Latino supporters has skyrocketed. It’s complicated, and so is the USA. If you thought JFK was the first “Irish-American” president, well, you were wrong – there were a dozen Ulster Presbyterian presidents before him. Kamala Harris’s parents are of Indian and Jamaican heritage, and, almost inevitably, it turns out that her four times great grandfather was a man called Hamilton Harris from Co Antrim. It’s complicated and so is the USA. If you thought JFK was the first “Irish American” president, well, you were wrong, there were a dozen Ulster Presbyterian presidents before him.
What am I trying to say here? I think what I’m trying to say is that if you want to understand this slice of America you have to get out of Manhattan, you have to talk to people, you have eat pecan pies and go to the Waffle House and visit Graceland and listen to country music. You have to understand the myths we tell ourselves. You have to read Faulkner, Woodrell, McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Hackett Fischer and maybe Hillbilly Elegy too.
Just don’t ever give anybody your DNA.
Adrian McKinty is a US-based Northern Irish writer
