This summer’s breakout star is 6-year-old Alana “Honey Boo Boo Child” Thompson (pictured) of TLC’s controversial hit “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”

But lost in the outrage about her “go-go juice” is just how squarely the show fits into America’s long tradition of “white trash” entertainment, which for decades has elevated characters like Honey Boo Boo into the nation’s objects of fun.

As Anthony Harkins observes in “Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon,” hillbillies peak, popularity-wise, just when Americans sense that things in general are headed south. Its first true zenith came in the depressed 1930s, a handmaiden to the birth of commercial country music. Another arrived in the turbulent 1960s, when “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres” were in their prime.

Though the term first referred to mountaineers in the Appalachians and the Ozarks, the hillbilly trope spread to cover pretty much all non-urban territory in America, joined by its cousins in cultural iconography, the “redneck” and “white trash.” Yet no matter where an alleged country bumpkin comes from, he will be derided for his crass behavior. The hillbilly figure allows middle-class white people to offload the venality and sin of the nation onto some other constituency, people who live somewhere — anywhere — else.

The hillbilly’s backwardness highlights the progress more upstanding Americans in the cities. These fools haven’t crawled out of the muck, the story goes, because they don’t want to. This idea that the hillbilly’s poverty is a choice allows more upscale Americans to feel comfortable while laughing at the antics before them.