Rob Henderson's 'Troubled' Past

A powerful new memoir of overcoming a hard childhood is 2024's 'Hillbilly Elegy'

Rob K. Henderson, author of ‘Troubled’

Rob Henderson’s terrific new memoir Troubled is this year’s Hillbilly Elegy: a poignant, at times gripping, story of a turbulent lower-class childhood, told by a young man who overcame its chaos and deprivation, but who, in so doing, also developed a critique of the ruling-class culture into which he was initiated as a Yale graduate.

Henderson is known for developing the concept of “luxury beliefs,” defined as opinions (usually about politics or social issues) held by rich people as a way to signal their status as morally concerned, but that they would never live by. For example, Henderson writes:

Advocating for sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation, or abolishing the police are good ways of advertising your membership of the elite because, thanks to your wealth and social connections, they will cost you less than me. … Drugs are frequently considered a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

And:

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant, or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960 the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95 percent. By 2005, 85 percent of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30 percent. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam at a 2017 Senate hearing stated, “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas

…Growing up with two parents is now unusual in the working class, while two-parent families are normal and becoming more common among the upper middle class.” Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper class, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down later. The families of the lower classes fell apart.

Henderson, you see, is the son of a drug-addicted Korean mother and a Hispanic father he never knew. At age three, he was taken from his mother and put into the foster care system in California, then jerked around from house to house before finally being adopted by a working-class couple in the northern part of the state. That couple divorced a year later, and Henderson’s mother took a woman as her romantic partner. This partnership was unstable, but it offered the most stability young Henderson ever knew.

Henderson was a low achiever who smoked weed and cigarettes, drank too much, and seemed headed to the same kind of chaotic life as most of his childhood friends — drugs, making babies out of wedlock, dead-end jobs, maybe even prison — until he enlisted in the US Air Force. Like J.D. Vance before him, the discipline of military life revealed to Henderson what he was capable of with focus and purpose. He ended up at Yale, and then at Cambridge, as a prestigious Gates Scholar. Troubled is a richly detailed account of his childhood, and a harsh assessment of the ruling class beliefs that, in the author’s view, make it harder for the poor to build successful lives.

As I have written in this space on many occasions, the story my late father told about growing up in the Great Depression, in a rural environment in which almost everyone was materially poor, made a deep impression on me. When the economy righted itself, and then, after World War II, when opportunities opened up for working-class people through the GI Bill, many young people from more humble backgrounds gained the chance to advance themselves economically through a college education. My dad was one of them, becoming the first in his family to go to college (and taking from that experience a firm, even dogged, conviction that college is not for everybody; he regretted not going to trade school). My dad, who grew up poor, believed that poverty is often more a matter of mindset than material deprivation. Henderson agrees:

Others suggest that economic forces are the key factor the disparity in outcomes among my peers from different periods of my life. My childhood friends and I did grow up poor, and did experience the stress of material deprivation. But money is not the whole story. There’s something else going on.

That “something else” is the absence of family stability. Writes Henderson, “For many kids, having the kind of childhood I had takes a toll in ways that a college degree will never fix.”

Troubled is a trip through that childhood, an experience of instability the likes of which is hard for middle-class Americans to conceive. Yet it is the reality for tens of millions of our countrymen. Henderson:

I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family. If you’re born into wealth, you take it for granted. If you’re born with loving parents, you’ll take them for granted, too. In one of my classes at Yale, I learned that eighteen out of the 20 students were raised by both of their birth parents. That stunned me, because none of the kids I knew growing up were raised by both of their parents. These personal discoveries reflect broader national trends: In the U.S., while eighty-five percent of children born to upper-class families are raised by both of their birth parents, only 30 percent of those born to working-class families are.

He points out that though education can help kids who had hard childhoods reach a materially successful life, that doesn’t mean that all will be well with them.

Unstable environments and unreliable caregivers aren’t bad for children because they reduce their future odds of getting into college or making a living; they are bad because the children enduring them experience pain—pain that etches itself into their brains and bodies and propels them to do things in the pursuit of relief that often inflict even more harm. College degrees and a comfortable salary are not antidotes to the lingering effects of childhood maltreatment.

Henderson says you can’t blame bad public schools for all of this. The schools he attended weren’t so bad, and he had teachers who encouraged him. “But my home life was such a mess that I didn’t have the desire to put in the effort,” he writes.

Over and over, from both his lived experience and citing academic studies, Henderson refuses to accept the received wisdom about why poor and working-class people struggle. Yes, he might have said more about political economy (as J.D. Vance did in his memoir), but Henderson’s focus is on the personal habits that make for a thriving life. Reading Troubled, I reflected on the kids I grew up with in rural Louisiana in the 1970s, and how strange the culture of our black schoolmates (the schools were 60 percent black) seemed to us white kids, almost none of whom were well-to-do. Few of our black classmates had fathers in the home; many of them grew up with half-siblings from different fathers. What was so striking, even to us kids, was not their poverty, but the chaos in their home lives. It was hard to understand. Now, though, the kind of chaos that was normal for local black kids in my childhood is normal for many working-class whites — this, even as Americans overall have grown much wealthier.

This is the kind of thing that concerns Rob Henderson in Troubled, who demonstrates using social science research that “being poor doesn’t have the same effect as living in chaos.” But Troubled is not a sociological polemic. It is first and foremost the account of one American boy’s life — and it’s Henderson’s powerful, richly detailed storytelling that carries his message with such force.

Entering into this world — again, a world that is normative for vast numbers of Americans — is to become aware that American society, for all our wealth and technology, is failing. It is failing because it has lost its moral center, and moral discipline. Again, I return to those precious stories my dad gave from his childhood: they were all poor, but most families retained a sense of moral purpose and discipline. The character traits and social habits ingrained into kids raised in those households kept those who lived with deprivation from falling apart, and helped those who were later given opportunities for advancement the means to make use of them (like the US military experience did for both Rob Henderson and J.D. Vance). Talking to friends who teach poor kids in public schools, I have heard the same kind of stories: that most of these kids are doomed not because they lack opportunity, but because the circumstances of their home lives shackle their minds and moral imaginations, making their future immiseration a near-certainty.

Once a white Christian man who worked with poor black and Hispanic kids in Dallas told me that it was a constant battle to convince the kids he tried to help that the people across the river in Dallas had not all come by their wealth through sheer luck, or criminality, but had earned it through steady effort and discipline. They had never seen anybody do it, so didn’t know it was possible. Similarly, another white Christian who ran a school for the black and Hispanic poor in that city told me that it was a revelation to him and his wife when they arrived there to discover that none of the kids in their school had ever seen an intact marriage, except on television.

This is the world Rob Henderson came from. It was a world of random violence, of persistent disorder, of near-ubiquitous drug-and-alcohol abuse. It was a world in which most people did not understand cause-and-effect — that if you do, or fail to do, certain things, then certain outcomes are likely. It was, well:

If I had to reduce what I felt during these early childhood years to a single word, the only one I can think of is: dread. Dread of being caught stealing, dread of punishment, dread of suddenly being moved somewhere else, dread of one of my foster siblings being taken away.

This is not the same thing as being materially poor! This anecdote is one of the most revealing in the book. It’s about young Rob’s telling his friends that his divorced mom had become a lesbian:

Cristian—the friend who I’d drink tequila with while his chain smoking mom was sequestered in her bedroom—was the first one I’d told. He was the most open-minded and curious of all the kids I hung out with. And his mom was the nicest (or, in any case, was the most mentally checked out and least likely to care), so I felt like I could trust them first.

After I explained that Mom was gay, Cristian replied, “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky…like winning the lottery? I mean, no one else you know has gay parents,” I said, trying to figure out if he was joking or not.

“That’s not true, there’s that chubby kid a few blocks down. His mom lives with a woman and some kids are saying she’s probably a lesbo,” Cristian said.

“Oh yeah, I remember seeing them all together at Burger King. Okay, so what’s lucky about it?” I replied.

“Your mom is with a girl. Or a woman, or whatever. She’s not going to bring random guys around. That’s lucky,” Cristian said.

In the comments section of this newsletter the other day, Dukeboy, a retired cop, said that so much sexual violence against children is committed by the males single mothers involve themselves with romantically. Studies bear this out. The Boyfriend Problem is a real thing. The dysfunction in Rob Henderson’s childhood milieu was so severe that boys who otherwise craved fathers considered themselves fortunate if mom went gay and didn’t bring guys into the house.

Think about that. Did you grow up like that? I didn’t. No wonder he left his childhood at seventeen to join the Air Force, which was the antidote to the “instability and hopelessness” of his aimless youth. In the military, the disciplined environment not only taught him what he could accomplish with focus and discipline, but it also kept him out of trouble in the impulsive period of life in which young men are statistically most likely to make major messes of their lives. While Henderson was in the service learning how to be a man, his old drinking buddies back home went to jail, or otherwise began a downhill life trajectory.

“While military life was demanding, my efforts paid off,” he writes. More:

Many people say that to do something difficult and worthwhile, they need to be “motivated.” Or that the reason they are not sticking to their goals is because they “lack motivation.” But the military taught me that people don’t need motivation, they need self-discipline. Motivation is just a feeling. Self-discipline is: “I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel.” Seldom do people relish doing something hard. Often, what divides successful from unsuccessful people is doing what you don’t feel motivated to do.

Yale, the world he entered after the military, was a very, very different cultural space. He writes:

Throughout these experiences, I learned a lot about those who sit at or near the apex of that ladder, which led me to develop the concept of “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

Specifically, he had to confront the spectacle of a university full of rich, privileged kids who told themselves that they were oppressed victims.

At Yale, more students come from families in the top one percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent, and here they were ensconced in one of the richest universities in the world, claiming that they were in danger. Broadcasting personal feelings of emotional precarity and supposed powerlessness was part of the campus culture. Conspicuously lamenting systemic disadvantage seemed to serve as both a signal and reinforcer of membership in this rarified group of future elites.

What particularly startled Henderson is the way the privileged students at Yale would endorse bizarre things:

In my second year, I learned about a psychology study that investigated moral intuitions. One question asked about incest between a brother and sister. The study found that across different countries, people overwhelmingly stated that sibling incest was wrong. One particular group of people the researchers tested, though, showed a moderate willingness to condone it: students at elite colleges. After reflecting on this strange finding, I would occasionally ask students this very question to test it myself. Most said yes, sibling incest was fine, assuming no pregnancy. I asked them other questions, like whether it would be okay for an adult to have a romantic relationship with their parent—a man and his father, for instance—and every person I asked said yes. Some were clearly uncomfortable with their answers but could find no reason to object.

He went on to see that these people would say they favored certain morals, policies, and so forth, but would never accept them in their own families. Thus, “luxury beliefs,” because they could endorse such things without paying a price. This one explains so much about contemporary American politics:

White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class white people gain status by talking about their high status. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.

The conclusion:

The luxury belief class thinks that the unhappiness associated with certain behaviors and choices is primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviors and choices themselves. But in fact, negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. In order to avoid misery we have to admit that certain actions and choices are actually in and of themselves undesirable— single parenthood, obesity, substance abuse, crime, and so on—and not simply in need of normalization.

So, what do we do about it? I’ve seen a review or two of Troubled faulting Henderson for not offering policy prescriptions. But that is precisely Henderson’s point! These problems cannot be solved by the standard managerial strategy of throwing money at policy fixes. He writes that there is “no shortcut” that can compensate for the lack of a two-parent family. You cannot create a government program that will make up for the absence of the family, and of strong social norms. There is a reason that the Great Society failed, and it’s not “systemic racism,” or whatever other excuse the Ruling Class offers.

There is simply no way to talk seriously about the problems of poverty and dysfunction in American life without taking seriously the stories in Troubled. Henderson doesn’t offer a comprehensive take on poverty and failure to thrive, and doesn’t pretend to. What he does is give an account from the bottom up, one built on actual experience growing up in the underclass — and one that calls out the self-blindness and hypocrisy of the people at the top of the social heap.

Maddeningly, I think we are even less inclined to listen to the Rob Hendersons of the world than we were in 2016, when J.D. Vance appeared on the scene with Hillbilly Elegy. The Vance book became a megaseller, and was embraced by the media as a key to explaining Trumpism (it helped that Vance, at that time, was against Trump). But four years of Trump drove the Ruling Class even further into its cocoon, and made it far less interested in understanding America as it actually is. Politics never comes up in Henderson’s book; I have no idea how he identifies politically, but he will be coded as right-wing, because he attacks progressive shibboleths.

There are no solutions on offer in Troubled, but the book is more valuable than a stack of sociopolitical books proposing programs to “fix” the poverty class. Why? Because Henderson tells the truth about how badly broken America is, and, by implication, how hard it’s going to be to repair. Rich liberals (and some rich conservatives too) display their tolerance by endorsing politics and lifestyles that, when adopted by the poor, lead to widespread destruction and immiseration. And this same ruling class rationalizes its guilt away by blaming conservatives, or invented social blights like “white supremacy”. Meanwhile, generations of children, of all races, are condemned to dysfunction and despair, because adults fail them.

I’ve told many times the story here about the old white man I knew back in Baton Rouge who lived most of his adult life in what became in the late 1970s-early 1980s a black neighborhood. It was his family’s house. When the whites fled, they stayed, and so did he, after his mom and dad died. He finally left a few years ago, when he became too old, and the neighborhood became too crime-ridden, to stay.

During the Summer of Floyd, I asked him what whites could do to help blacks in the northern half of the city. “Nothing,” he said. He wasn’t saying it from a position of having a hard heart; in fact, until his retirement, he worked for an anti-poverty organization. He made an argument a lot like Rob Henderson does in this book.

He told me that the black community in our city had, for the most part, not only lost the concept of family, they had lost even the cultural memory of family. Only the grandmothers and grandfathers of his generation were left as a living bridge to that stable past — and they were dying. When they were gone, there would be nothing left.

Without the family returning, somehow, nothing would ever improve for the black community, he said. There’s not enough money or government help in the world to replace what families do, and communities of families. Besides, he said, whites have no authority at all there. The solution, if there is to be a solution, has to come from within the black community.

Well, as Henderson — who, recall, is half-Korean, half-Latino — makes clear, poverty and social dysfunction is not confined to any one race. Maybe nobody has the solution to this crisis, but Rob Henderson at least gets us started with something that is conspicuously absent in discussions about it: honesty about the true nature of the problem, including straight talk about what doesn’t work to do anything other than flatter the prejudices of the Ruling Class.

Reading Troubled brought to mind both the good side and the down side of the ruling party’s politics where I live now, Hungary. That is, the governing party believes that politics can and should manage public life and the economy in ways that encourage the formation of strong families. But Prime Minister Orban has also conceded that political economy alone cannot make for a strong, thriving society. Families, churches, schools, and other meaning-giving institutions have to play a role. I am certain that Rob Henderson would not deny that political economy has something to say about addressing these problems. It’s rather that he focuses narrowly on what he learned about poverty and chaos from his own childhood because so few people who think and write about these things understand what he knows from experience. In that lies the great value of this book, which must have been painful to write.

You should buy Troubled. Plus, Rob Henderson writes a great Substack newsletter too.