Once, J.D. Vance feared that Donald Trump would become “America’s Hitler.” Now, he’s Trump’s pick for vice president. But that story is beside the point. Trump and Vance have a lot in common, including this: They’re both con men who despise their supporters. In fact, Vance, despite stiff competition, is arguably the most cynical figure in contemporary American politics. You never know whether Trump believes the false things he says; Vance is smart enough to know that he’s given a political pig in a poke. And if the Trump-Vance ticket wins, there’s a good chance that, given Trump’s evident lack of interest in the details of policy and — yes — his age, Vance will, one way or another, end up running the country. So, about that con: Vance, now a junior senator from Ohio, talks a lot about his humble beginnings. But people should read what he wrote in Hillbilly, a rural elegy, which shows astonishing contempt for the people he grew up with but who, unlike him, failed to escape the poverty that abounds in small towns. And people should also be aware that, although in his speech at the convention on Wednesday he denounced the “barons of Wall Street,” his rise has been largely orchestrated by a group of tech billionaires; he is a protégé of Peter Thiel. Hillbilly, a rural elegy is part personal memoir, part social commentary, and, to be fair, it addresses a real problem. Over the past two generations, something has gone seriously wrong in much of rural and small-town America. There has been a sharp rise in the percentage of working-age men who are unemployed, especially in the eastern Midwest. Social problems have proliferated; As economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented, there has been a rise in “deaths of despair,” which they defined as deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. What has happened? I would focus on changes in the economy that have undermined the raison d’être of many small towns, a process that began during the Ronald Reagan years and is not unique to our country. The loss of economic opportunity has, in turn, led to social dysfunction, which mirrors the earlier rise in social dysfunction in American cities as urban blue-collar jobs disappeared. These problems are real, and we should be making a national effort to address the plight of lagging regions. Indeed, the Biden administration has been doing just that, with much of its industrial policy directed at helping depressed areas. Among other things, up to $575 million in Biden administration aid — funded in part by laws unanimously opposed by Republicans — will help modernize a steel plant in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio. And let’s not forget that many rural Americans only have health insurance because of policies that Republicans fiercely opposed. But in Hillbilly, a rural elegy, Vance rejects the “white working-class cultural movement that seeks to blame society or government for problems.” Instead, he argues that there are many white Americans in small towns who have no one to blame but themselves. They are lazy: “You can walk around a city where 30% of young people work less than 20 hours a week and not find a single person who is aware of their own laziness.” They are poorly educated, not for lack of opportunity, but because they are unmotivated: “We don’t study as children, and we don’t force our children to study when we become parents.” Imagine the reaction if a liberal Democrat said something like that. Yet after entering politics, Vance suddenly decided that the white working class is not lazy, but rather a victim of outside forces. He began vehemently accusing immigrants of taking jobs that should go to the American-born. A passage in his convention speech seemed to imply that immigrants who have entered the country illegally are responsible for inflation. He understandably failed to acknowledge that inflation has fallen by two-thirds since mid-2022, and that workers without supervisory roles — especially those with low wages — have seen their incomes, on average, rise more than prices. In fact, immigrants are not taking our jobs. Unemployment among natives remains near an all-time low. To the extent that native-born Americans are leaving the workforce, it is largely because the baby-boom generation is retiring. And it is especially curious that he blames immigrants for the problems in America's countryside and small towns, which began long before the recent surge in immigration, and where even now we see relatively few immigrants. In Vance's home state, only 5 percent of the population is foreign-born, compared with 40 percent in New York. Still, there is no reason to believe anything Vance says about supporting the working class. His book makes clear that, at least to some extent, he despises those who have not achieved something comparable to his professional career. He may have grown up poor, but he is now nothing more than a clever and unscrupulous politician who uses his background to hide the extent to which he represents the values and interests of the plutocrats. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in economics. © The New York Times, 2024. Translation of News ClipsFollow all the information on Economy and Business on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter