J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis comes highly recommended: National Review executive editor Reihan Salam, Silicon Valley scion Peter Thiel, and “tiger mother” Amy Chua all wrote glowing jacket blurbs. Positive reviews have since appeared across the conservative press, in Salam’s National Review — where Vance regularly contributes — the American Conservative, and the Weekly Standard. David Brooks hailed Hillbilly Elegy in a New York Times op-ed that calls for a “better form of nationalism.”

The outpouring of right-wing support shouldn’t be surprising. Vance, after all, is one of them, and Hillbilly Elegy staunchly defends the up-by-your-own-bootstraps fairy tale that capitalism has always used to win support from the underclasses.

But of course, the book is not aimed at that underclass (few books are), but rather a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that white American poverty has nothing to do with them or with any structural problems in American economy and society and everything to do with poor folks’ inherent vices.