Hillbilly Elegy

increasingly: It’s not your fault that
you’re a loser; it’s the government’s
fault.
My dad, for example, has never
disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts
some of the most obvious paths to
upward mobility. When he found out that
I had decided to go to Yale Law, he
asked whether, on my applications, I had
“pretended to be black or liberal.” This
is how low the cultural expectations of
working-class white Americans have
fallen. We should hardly be surprised
that as attitudes like this one spread, the
number of people willing to work for a
better life diminishes.
The Pew Economic Mobility Project