I was born in West Virginia and spent all of 10 days there as an infant before my family moved to Ohio. Perhaps that's a license for me to say why Appalachians are poor, drink too much, and voted for Donald Trump. The best-selling and widely praised "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" by J.D. Vance, proceeds along those lines. But I shouldn't single out that book: Sloppy analysis of collections of people -- coastal elites, flyover America, Muslims, immigrants, people without college degrees, you name it -- has become routine. And it's killing our politics.
Three laws guide this bogus analysis of groups. First, define the group by the outcome you are trying to explain. Second, invoke a stereotype and exaggerate it. Third, endow the group with innate permanent properties, akin to racial characteristics. Together, these errors establish a kind of collective guilt, blaming an entire ill-defined group for the failings of its individuals, even if the offenders are a tiny minority. This is both divisive and false -- and all the more toxic because of its flavor of intellectual propriety.
