Americans call them...white trash. I call them... friends and family.
August 2, 2016 3:02 PM   Subscribe

"Q: ...the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? J.D. Vance: I know exactly what you mean. My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively. She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it. “We”–meaning hillbillies–“are the only group of people you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.” An interview with J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a family and a culture in crisis.

"...humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us. And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe. So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is."

Review of the book.

Excerpt:" I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamist extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. In my new life, as an uncomfortable member of what folks back home pejoratively call the elite, my friends blame racism for this perception of the president. There is, undoubtedly, some truth to that theory. But most of the people I know dislike Obama for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. They think of him as an alien because, compared to them, he is..."
posted by storybored (109 comments total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
And yet none of the white people who are also alien in exactly the way Vance describes have been accused of being Kenyan Muslim traitors. Weird.
posted by howfar at 3:10 PM on August 2, 2016 [87 favorites]


I read this interview the other day and found it absolutely riveting. I'm glad someone made a FPP that does a better job of doing it justice than I would have.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:19 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


And yet none of the white people who are also alien in exactly the way Vance describes have been accused of being Kenyan Muslim traitors. Weird.

Yeah they just get called racist, inbred, White trash, ignorant Christian fundie traitors instead..
posted by unknownmosquito at 3:26 PM on August 2, 2016 [36 favorites]


Some relevant economic data.
posted by howfar at 3:27 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


I've seen up close the dynamics described in my family. I'm essentially two generations removed from the hills, and my withering branch of the family tree is the only Democratic one, and that because I had a single mother. She knew which side her bread was buttered.

The parallels between poor whites and poor blacks are real. There's work that needs doing to bring them together. I refuse to believe that is as impossible as the current politics makes it look.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 3:28 PM on August 2, 2016 [32 favorites]


Yeah the smug condescension on here every time this gets brought up, an arms-folded sniffing "well if only these rubes would accept that I know full communism is best for them," is why I don't read threads on the south if I can avoid it anymore
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 3:28 PM on August 2, 2016 [54 favorites]


Yeah they just get called racist, inbred, White trash, ignorant Christian fundie traitors instead..

By the same people as Vance describes as calling Obama a traitor? Because unless that's what you're saying I don't see the relevance of your comment to my point.

The function of Vance's argument is to downplay racism against Obama, on the basis that it's not really his race people dislike. But he doesn't actually bear that argument out in any way at all. He just says it is true.
posted by howfar at 3:31 PM on August 2, 2016 [49 favorites]


I haven't read the book. I did grow up around a lot of white poverty, although my own family was lower middle class. I think there's some truth to what he says, however who's made political hay off of stoking the racism, homophobia, and misogyny that characterizes trump's rhetoric? I haven't read the book, and at this point don't intend to, but talking about the political position of the white working / poverty class without talking about the Southern Strategy is nonsense.

I guess that's maybe the political skew of this being conducted by the American Conservative, but instead of talking about how snooty the left is, maybe one should think about the way that Othering is used by the right, how that's backfired on them with trump's nomination, and why that strategy would necessarily put off liberals from working more directly with these people (and would in fact inspire a reflexive antipathy towards them).
posted by codacorolla at 3:38 PM on August 2, 2016 [29 favorites]


I was having a hard time placing what was going on in the interview until I looked up at the URL and realized the interviewer was Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, then things sort of snapped into focus.

The function of Vance's argument is to downplay racism against Obama, on the basis that it's not really his race people dislike. But he doesn't actually bear that argument out in any way at all. He just says it is true.

I think that's far from the only thing that's being said here, and some of the perspectives here are worth consideration, but yeah, that is definitely one function of what Vance is saying.
posted by brennen at 3:40 PM on August 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


I think that's far from the only thing that's being said here, and some of the perspectives here are worth consideration

This is true. But it's cut with a lot of self serving bullshit. Like the notion that very poor white people form Trump's base, and that this is why he is being so successful, when there are data indicating that simply isn't true.
posted by howfar at 3:44 PM on August 2, 2016 [17 favorites]


Of course they are a part of the Republican base. Note the red counties along the Appalachians of any election in the last 50 years
posted by Strange_Robinson at 3:49 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


Yeah the smug condescension on here every time this gets brought up, an arms-folded sniffing "well if only these rubes would accept that I know full communism is best for them," is why I don't read threads on the south if I can avoid it anymore

Tell me about it. When the article in the OP floated into my awareness a few days ago, a friend shared this with me, which I'm sure will go over like a lead balloon here.

I love this site, but I wouldn't expect it to respond positively to an interview apologetic to Appalachian culture and its representation/understanding by the elite, or by even the country at large.

Disclaimer: I grew up deep in the Appalachian mountains and now live in a liberal city among "elites." I'm one of those who left to better myself, etc, etc. I'd like to read the book they're promoting through this interview, to be honest.
posted by unknownmosquito at 3:53 PM on August 2, 2016 [33 favorites]


Yeah they just get called racist, inbred, White trash, ignorant Christian fundie traitors instead..

oh my god have you seen the shitfits that neocon outlets like the National Review are throwing now that they've lost control of their former willing dupes?
posted by indubitable at 3:55 PM on August 2, 2016 [10 favorites]


I love this site, but I wouldn't expect it to respond positively to an interview apologetic to Appalachian culture and its representation/understanding by the elite, or by even the country at large.

I'm perfectly fine with that premise. I think that reaching out to poor, working class whites in a constructive way is an important part of the future of the American left. However, the interview that was linked, seems to be about constructing a narrative of the elite left having abandoned and sneered at these people without even touching the long-term republican strategy of using these people as cheap, dependable votes. Does anyone know if the book goes into that? Because I don't see how you can effectively do research into this cultural perspective without mentioning that.

Me calling out trump supporters as racist isn't an insult. It's an accurate descriptor of a group of people who are fired up about straight-forwardly xenophobic policies. This guy's stated mission seems to be returning agency to a group of people who he sees as being ignored or used by "elites". Alright, great. Part of that agency is owning up to, and having a plan to, fix those racist tendencies which would make any political action alongside these people untenable to my core beliefs.
posted by codacorolla at 4:00 PM on August 2, 2016 [77 favorites]


My mom's family is from TN.

This is the first time in my life I've ever encountered anyone outside my family who calls a grandmother "Mamaw", in any context.
posted by gurple at 4:02 PM on August 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


I have no experience in the Appalachians or other cultural areas described in the interview, so much of the perspective is pretty foreign to me. It does strike me as parallel with the obituary I heard on NPR last night for folk singer Penny Lang. They played her song Ain't Life Sweet, which is an interesting mix of rejection of the modern trappings of success (education, world travel, money) and a love letter to working class country life.

Listening to it again, my feelings are complicated. I get most of the emotions, the empathy for those less worthy or successful, and the love of a certain kind of life that gets looked down upon by the cultural elite. But the rejection of travel, education, and a more worldly view is problematic in that it breeds insularity and distrust of the "other." Nothing breaks down barriers between people than travel, and education is critically important for the functioning of our country.

I guess bottom line is that empathy and understanding needs to be extended to everyone, and no one should get a pass on being dismissive of someone else's life and experiences.
posted by Existential Dread at 4:04 PM on August 2, 2016 [7 favorites]


I'm sorry that he's so far off the mark on race – and I mean really off the mark – because he does bring up valid points about elitism in modern politics that end up being sort of drowned out by the more objectionable statements. He's coming from a conservative position, which means there's a lot I'm going to fundamentally disagree with him on (especially on culture and poverty), but at the very least he offers a perspective on rural white poverty that tends to get overlooked in favor of a one-dimensional "they're too stupid to know better" line of thinking.
posted by teponaztli at 4:04 PM on August 2, 2016 [20 favorites]


Yeah they just get called racist, inbred, White trash, ignorant Christian fundie traitors instead..

This just reads to me as excusing racist and xenophobic behavior because of liberal smugness and judgmental elites.
posted by FJT at 4:08 PM on August 2, 2016 [10 favorites]


I'm from the South, and have plenty of family members in the group who'd get tarred with the PWT label, and...eh? It's sort of half right? Sure, plenty of the people in the urban liberal circles I run in can be smug about poor people, especially poor rural whites, and on the other hand the strong message of inclusion and "we're listening" at last week's DNC was directed at the disenfranchised of all types, and I doubt those people from my childhood heard much of it, because the people on stage didn't look like them. The idea that poor whites, or rural people, or Christians (which you definitely hear) are the only group you can look down is so patently wrong that disabusing yourself of that notion is a necessary part of being part of society at this point.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 4:16 PM on August 2, 2016 [22 favorites]


I think that reaching out to poor, working class whites in a constructive way is an important part of the future of the American left.....[R]acist [is] an accurate descriptor of a group of people who are fired up about straight-forwardly xenophobic policies.

You sound like you've got the outreach coordinator position for this new American left on lockdown.
posted by jpe at 4:16 PM on August 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


unknownmosquito, that article isn't wrong, but is in desperate need of an editor and a tl;dr. It's almost as if it is written to be deliberately difficult to get through, rehashing the same point over and over unnecessarily. The central premise makes it worth at least understanding the argument, though.
posted by wierdo at 4:19 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


There were a couple of things I found interesting in this when I saw it a little while ago.
  1. When you look past the electoral-politics framing, it points out a tremendous cultural divide that is in some sense orthogonal to matters of political politics and race. When in the WaPo excerpt Vance writes that
    Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent — clean, perfect, neutral — sounds almost foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him
    he could be describing Mitt Romney just as well as Obama, details aside---better, in fact, given his willful disregard of the racism Obama's had to deal with. In a certain way, I'm reminded of MeFi's own cstross's notion of the Beige Dictatorship: the vast majority of our leaders seem to come from certain backgrounds, and even those who didn't (e.g. Obama) seem to come through a very narrow undergraduate funnel. (John McCain is an interesting exception here: he's exactly the sort of man I would expect to fill the role of "cultural hero" vance refers to earlier in the excerpt.) How exactly this white working class ended up on the same political side as these elites, rather than those elites, is something I don't feel I fully understand. Could be that these elites realized that even if they (Nixon, Reagan, H.W. Bush, W. Bush) weren't of this culture they could use its people by sending appropriate cultural signals, but that feels like too simple an explanation. I'm very definitely on one side of this cultural divide, which is why I look for work like Vance's, or like I hope Vance's to be: I need to at least understand where people on the other side are coming from.
  2. On a very different note, the double bind that results when an intense love of and cultural value for family runs into the crab-bucket mentality Vance describes in the interview with Dreher is hard to read about. I'm fortunate in my own family, and I value them a great deal: the people in themselves, the things they've done for me and the opportunities they've given me. Family is important! But when your family is consistently acting to cause you harm---well. (In a way it reminds me of the misery I've seen some of my queer friends who come from conservative families go through.)
(apologies for the long paragraphs: apparently the p and ol/li tags don't play together so nicely)
posted by golwengaud at 4:20 PM on August 2, 2016 [21 favorites]


eh? It's sort of half right?

Yikes. Sort of shocked to see that in writing, to be honest, unless I'm misinterpreting your statement.
posted by delight at 4:21 PM on August 2, 2016


Of course they are a part of the Republican base. Note the red counties along the Appalachians of any election in the last 50 years

But what does that specifically have to do with Trump, in the way that Vance wants to argue?

Vance is trying to present something useful and important, but I don't think it's just his minimisation of racism or his romanticisation of Trump that renders it incoherent, but rather his very conservativism. He talks about how social programmes can't replace families and human agency, and then goes on to talk about the need for proper social services intervention and properly funded schools and how his military service taught him to function as an adult. He identifies as a conservative, but his critique only makes sense as a critique of the right. His critique of the left, such as it is, seems to be founded in an entirely aesthetic and cultural distaste.
posted by howfar at 4:23 PM on August 2, 2016 [16 favorites]


I meant the sense that smug liberals have abandoned them is half right. Not the other thing.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 4:23 PM on August 2, 2016 [11 favorites]


There was an author on The Current on CBC this morning talking about class and racial division in the US. You can hear the audio and read the article here. I was really fascinated about it (especially as someone who is Southern, often avoids threads about the South on MeFi) because it felt very recognizable in terms of US history and politics.
posted by Kitteh at 4:25 PM on August 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


Okay, thanks for clarifying.
posted by delight at 4:25 PM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


His critique of the left, such as it is, seems to be founded in an entirely aesthetic and cultural distaste.
I don't think that's true, for what it's worth. I think he's deeply skeptical of the ability of the government to solve moral and cultural problems, and he identifies the problems of the white working-class as being fundamentally moral and cultural.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:26 PM on August 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


I don't think that's true, for what it's worth. I think he's deeply skeptical of the ability of the government to solve moral and cultural problems,

Well, yes, I think you're right, but that's why I think his position is incoherent. Because the policies he calls for and celebrates are founded on the government (through schools, social services, the military) intervening to solve social problems.
posted by howfar at 4:29 PM on August 2, 2016 [12 favorites]


Yeah, but howfar makes the really interesting point that his own life experience suggests that the government can solve moral and cultural problems. Now you can argue that it's easier to do this on an individual basis, by putting people in an entirely new and rigidly structured context, and that this isn't something the government can do on a large scale, but I'm not sure that's true.

Was this sort of thing---imparting the values required of citizens---part of the motivation behind public education in the U.S., or am I making this up?
posted by golwengaud at 4:30 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


About half my family is working class poor, though not redneck, they certainly related to them. Growing up in inner city schools in the 80s and 90s there was a real push aimed at young black men to get educated, stay out of the drug trade and get an education even if it meant going into the military. It left out much direction for young black women save finding a "good" man. Visiting my poor relatives they seemed very much in the same pit of classism my school was trying to drag their students out of. In the interview J.D. Vance talks about how difficult it is to better oneself when your community and even your family sees that as being "too big for your britches." A pretty common stumbling stone growing up in poverty regardless of race. Back to high school, my male classmates for the most part benefitted from the encouragement of their community. My white cousins elsewhere failed to get degrees, joined the military, but not for the prospect of education, clung to their family roots. I also failed to get an education, though living in a diverse area meant I hardly subscribed to the xenophobia and anti-intellectualism they fell victim to. Too often we look at class based on race, which makes sense historically, but at a certain point it's obvious that simply being white and having the level of privilege associated with that isn't enough to keep whole communities from drowning in poverty. And honestly, it feels like that is about to take the rest of the country down with it. Just as I like to remind my (white, bigoted) coworkers that I'm undoubtedly more "ghetto" than any of our black clients, I'm quick to point out to my (white, college educated) acquaintances that I'm poor, dumb and uneducated. Dismissing any group out of hand is wrong. I fing the politics and racism revolting, but I don't think the white poor are stupid or unworthy of help. Why these same people relate to a crazy white guy from New York is beyond me, except maybe the recognize him from tv?
posted by palindromeisnotapalindrome at 4:30 PM on August 2, 2016 [25 favorites]


Tell me about it. When the article in the OP floated into my awareness a few days ago, a friend shared this with me, which I'm sure will go over like a lead balloon here.

I'm pretty sure it was here and did, in fact?

He talks about how social programmes can't replace families and human agency, and then goes on to talk about the need for proper social services intervention and properly funded schools and how his military service taught him to function as an adult.

I don't think that's true, for what it's worth. I think he's deeply skeptical of the ability of the government to solve moral and cultural problems, and he identifies the problems of the white working-class as being fundamentally moral and cultural.

Yeah what he says (paraphrased) is "school funding and social services are part of the picture but [argument for the importance of church, the military, moral values]." And the military may be the government but it's hardly beloved by the Left.
posted by atoxyl at 4:32 PM on August 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


Probably the best example I've come across about how poor white people and poor black people are both (differently) downtrodden social classes is the fact that "I like anything but rap and country" is A Thing. "My tastes in music are limited to simply avoiding anything marked as being affiliated with poor people."
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:36 PM on August 2, 2016 [54 favorites]


Wow, based on the comments, I expected the review to indicate that the book was much more of an apologia. But instead:

Does Vance offer any solutions for white working-class despondency and fatalism? "These problems were not created by government or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them," he argues. "We hillbillies have got to wake the hell up."

This is more of that National Review "moral collapse, not worldwide global economic dislocations, is the cause of white poverty in the U.S." nastiness. I'm not here for any excuses for or minimizing of this population's racism (sorry, if you think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim, Mexicans are rapists, and Muslims should be banned from the country, you are a racist), but it's still sad to see this kind of respectability politics turned on them. It's just so blatant--the upper (still mostly white) classes have decided they have more use for certain black men, women generally, and gays than they do for the surplus white labor of the South, so now they're tossing the last group, which previously was able to build its self-worth on its superiority to the former, in the trash.
posted by praemunire at 4:37 PM on August 2, 2016 [21 favorites]


If you need an essay to prove you're not racist then you're probably racist.
posted by srboisvert at 4:39 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


In one of the earlier long election threads a good article was posted (Misrepresenting the White Working Class: What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong), along with a link to an On The Media episode which was discussing class in America, and in which they interviewed the author of White Trash: The 400 Year History of Race In America (same book linked by Kitteh, above).

Very good, all of it.
posted by triggerfinger at 4:43 PM on August 2, 2016 [21 favorites]


"I love this site, but I wouldn't expect it to respond positively to an interview apologetic to Appalachian culture and its representation/understanding by the elite, or by even the country at large."

Wendell Berry threads are pretty well-received here, and I think one could consider a lot of his writing Appalachian culture apologia. As one of those who reflexively "folds his arms, sniffing, with smug condescension", I find his essays always snap me back into an awareness of systemic social problems facing the rural poor and help me sympathize. I just received the Vance book in the mail this week and am curious to see how he compares to Berry.
posted by klarck at 4:51 PM on August 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


I don't think it's incoherent - he's just on the center-right rather than the far-right.

The thing that seems to be missing regarding racism is just - if your premise is that you're willing to take a hard look at the culture you come from and its flaws then why do you have to press the soft-pedal when you get to that particular issue? So I think Vance (judging from some of his essays, anyway) does kinda fall down there.

But I don't think it's wrong to say that it's easier to get white liberals interested in problems confronting, say, the black underclass - maybe because it seems more exotic, actually - than the white underclass. And I think don't think it's surprising that poor or working class white people can end up feeling like there's nobody looking out for them specifically.
posted by atoxyl at 4:56 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


Well, yes, I think you're right, but that's why I think his position is incoherent. Because the policies he calls for and celebrates are founded on the government (through schools, social services, the military) intervening to solve social problems.
I'm trying to put my finger on this, and I'm struggling a bit. I think that what he would say is that core values should be inculcated by traditional institutions like the church and patriarchal families. It's possible to set up government programs that support those institutions and their values, and inasmuch as you can do that, government programs can be good. But when government programs try to substitute or provide alternatives to those institutions, they're bad, because ultimately the traditional institutions are the things that make society work. I think that's what he'd say, although his story about his time in the Marines somewhat contradicts it, since that did seem to substitute for the family guidance that he thinks he didn't get.

(Needless to say, I think this is bullshit, but I'm coming at this from a very different ideological and cultural perspective than he is, although my mom's family is also white, working-class and Southern.)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:59 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


He identifies as a conservative, but his critique only makes sense as a critique of the right. His critique of the left, such as it is, seems to be founded in an entirely aesthetic and cultural distaste.

Well said. The nuclear family has failed, good glob, how many kids over the past few centuries and yet conservatives keep bemoaning, "if only we would support nuclear families!"

I think that what he would say is that core values should be inculcated by traditional institutions like the church and patriarchal families.

Compared to good old mom and dad, "the government" is a godsend.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:00 PM on August 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think he's wrong. I just am not sure that he's incoherent.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:01 PM on August 2, 2016


Here is, IMHO, a better and more concise analysis of the economic concerns facing Trump supporters that does not turn a blind eye to their racism:

Globe and Mail, March 13 2016, The Truth Behind Donald Trump's Lies

The strangest thing of all about Mr. Trump’s neo-Republican base is that they would be far better off voting Democrat, the party that favours giving benefits to people in their situation, including medical coverage. It is also the only party interested in reducing income inequality, or even talking about it. But the Democratic Party is the one that gets the vast majority of the black vote in the U.S., and so they don’t go there.

That strange and sad fact has given Mr. Trump his route to the Republican nomination – via Republican voters left behind by the Republican Party. It’s a conundrum epitomized by the sight of Cowboy Guy slugging a black man in the face in North Carolina. You want to sympathize with these people, but then that happens.
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 5:15 PM on August 2, 2016 [10 favorites]


Is Vance's project really to explain Trump? I think that's more of a hook than what he's fundamentally trying to do.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:42 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


Has anybody read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-year Untold Story of Class in America? On the Media did a piece about it. A snippet, relevant to the election:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even if squatters weren't particularly respected or trusted, they had to be pandered to every few years, in order to get people elected. And you mention the story of the Arkansas traveler from 1840.

NANCY ISENBERG: Yeah, the Arkansas traveler tells the story of a rich politician canvassing in the backcountry, and he asks a squatter for some refreshment. The squatter is seated on a whiskey barrel and he ignores him. And the politician is obliged, in order to get his refreshment, in order to get his vote, to, you know, jump off his horse, grab the squatter’s fiddle and show that he can play his kind of music.

And that, I think, eerily is a, a recurrent problem with our American democracy. What we really have is a democracy of manners, not a real democracy. And what I mean by that is that we accept huge disparities in wealth but we demand that our politicians sound like us or dress like us.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:46 PM on August 2, 2016 [17 favorites]


Here's one response to Dreher's piece: "Dreher's main take-away seems to be that hillbillies (the ones who didn't get out) are lazy, sexed-up, stupid, and self-deceiving and they need Jesus and Brother Rod's Benedict Option, in stores soon. ... Dreher's review is part of a growing wingnut literature on how badly the poor honkies have let them down."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:04 PM on August 2, 2016 [8 favorites]


That strange and sad fact has given Mr. Trump his route to the Republican nomination

I think this is overlooking the massive impact of Trump being an outsider. People have been thoroughly betrayed and ignored by Washington and politicians at every turn. Of all the GOP and Dem candidates, Trump acts the least like a politician, and on top of that he's an expert at being on camera, and on top of that he's giving the establishment the finger in no uncertain terms and on top of that he is being the champion who shrugs off the elite's snide mockery and comes right back swinging at them.

Trump would be a force to be reckoned with with or without racism. People are angry, betrayed, let down, desperate. Trump may be taking advantage of racism among other things, but if people weren't racist, he'd probably just be using some other "cause" and still be riding the wave of their (largely justified) fury at Washington and the situation in the nation.

Perhaps that's what you mean - the Destructor was coming regardless, but it (Trump) took the form of Mr Stay Puft marshmellow man (racism) because that was what was on the ground.
posted by -harlequin- at 6:04 PM on August 2, 2016 [9 favorites]


For like the fifty-millionth time, the average Trump primary voter has a higher income than both the average Sanders primary voter and the average Clinton primary voter. And I also think it would be cool if we could take this guy's arguments on their own (deeply problematic, but still interesting) terms and not just make this another referendum on the 2016 election.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:10 PM on August 2, 2016 [25 favorites]


The last part of the interview talks specifically about Trump and why people support him.
posted by teponaztli at 6:22 PM on August 2, 2016


Once again, there’s no evidence that Trump’s supporters are disproportionately poor, in fact there's evidence to the contrary. However there is evidence that they are disproportionately racist.

Now, I am all about reducing inequality and helping the poor, including the racist poor. You don’t even have to threaten me with the possibility that they'll vote for Trump if we don’t. Simply trying to ensure that children don’t go hungry and people don’t lead lives of misery is good enough for me.

The problem with talking about poor white people is that it frames them as a population that is uniquely challenged. But they’re not. They face the same challenges all poor people face, without the additional burden of racial prejudice. Being poor is terrible enough, we don’t have to pretend that poor white people are disdained in a way that poor black people are not.

And we certainly don’t have to take the smug position that this author takes, which is that he escaped poverty, so others should be able to, and if they don’t it’s the moral failing of the poor people themselves. I haven’t finished the book, but right in the introduction he has an anecdote about a couple who had good jobs and bad work ethics and so lost their jobs and brought all their misery upon themselves. The problem here is not, as he argues, that the Democrats are teaching them “learned helplessness” — it’s that research indicates that financial stress literally makes it more difficult to do things like show up and focus on a job.
posted by pocketfullofrye at 6:30 PM on August 2, 2016 [48 favorites]


Yeah they just get called racist, inbred, White trash, ignorant Christian fundie traitors instead..

oh my god have you seen the shitfits that neocon outlets like the National Review are throwing now that they've lost control of their former willing dupes?


Reminds me of the comments here in the Prop 8 defeat thread about the California black vote skewing heavily against gay marriage. Wish I could find them. You haven't seen smugness and condescension quite like that...
posted by resurrexit at 7:39 PM on August 2, 2016 [6 favorites]


I think that what he would say is that core values should be inculcated by traditional institutions like the church and patriarchal families.

I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think he's wrong. I just am not sure that he's incoherent.


But he (and the interviewer) are incoherent. They talk about how the government can only do so much, and how personal agency is important to better life outcomes, and how societal problems can make it harder for individuals to exercise their personal agency in beneficial ways, but totally fail to address how to magically imbue disenfranchised people with the needed "personal agency."

It basically becomes a bootstraps argument, with a tiny little head nod to how a government institution (the marines) gave the author a hand up, and then some hand waving about the very church and family that pretty much failed the author entirely. Let alone anyone else who didn't have at least a "Mamaw" in their life. They don't sell tough old bird matriarchs (who are loving and want the best for the young'uns and not at all abusive or toxic) at the bootstrap store. Not every kid gets a useful church or a nurturing patriarch to show them the way. The author and the interviewer would have us just abandon people who don't land in the perfect situation, the "liberals" they hate so much want the government to try to help.

As far as the "smug" liberal elites thing goes -- I wonder what it is that people who consider liberals to be smug want liberals to do more of? Because a lot of the complaints about "smugness" come from people with privilege pushing back against increased equality because for them it feels like oppression. And you can include the black churches who worked against Prop 8 in that -- because Christians are a privileged class in this country even if they are poor and black. And what's more "smug" than that satisfied feeling that you get when you can stop other people from living their lives "wrong"?
posted by sparklemotion at 8:17 PM on August 2, 2016 [13 favorites]


***waves at gurple*** plenty of Memas here in Texas. Also Meemee, Grandew, Granny (lastname ) and a Momma (firstname) That's just my family, mind
you. I love them all but yeah, there's a lot of racism happening/in our history.
posted by emjaybee at 8:23 PM on August 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


Q: ...the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that?

As shown in this thread, the contempt - and the accompanying stereotyping of large groups of people - is not invisible at all, and is instead thoroughly rationalized.
posted by kanewai at 9:01 PM on August 2, 2016 [17 favorites]


I don't gotta go a hundred yards to find someone who's poor and white, in my little New England seaside town.

No, most of them aren't deliberately bigoted or racist. These are the middle-aged men and women manning the counter at the Cumberland Farms convenience store. Working at the Speedway gas station, or trying to keep their pizza parlor afloat. All of them are desperate and hurting and dying in numbers not seen since the AIDS epidemic. [cite] (Cheap Fentanyl being sold in irregular doses as ordinary H or Oxies. Those are taken as a cure for "My parents put three kids through college, I can't make rent and have two jobs and a degree I'll be paying off until (unless) I die.")

It's cheap and easy to cast these folks as inherently racist and ignorant. I know me plenty of well-off engineer types who are way on-board the alt-right Trump Train. I don't know any of my working-class neighbors (euphemism for systemic poor) who really give much thought to politics unless they watch Fox News or listen to "El Rushbo" as a cheap hobby - many, many, many more of them watch clips from The Daily Show and other late-night talk shows, and listen to pop radio. They're on our side. They just feel helpless and hopeless.

If "privileged" white men are dying in record numbers at a record rate, that is not a canary in a coalmine slowly going silent. That is the mine erupting into fire and horror around you. Save your schadenfreude for when you and yours are safe.

Vote Clinton. We really need to.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:02 PM on August 2, 2016 [30 favorites]


He identifies as a conservative, but his critique only makes sense as a critique of the right. His critique of the left, such as it is, seems to be founded in an entirely aesthetic and cultural distaste.

There's a HUGE desire for economically-liberal government policies tied to socially-conservative ones.

If "privileged" white men are dying in record numbers at a record rate, that is not a canary in a coalmine slowly going silent.

" But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:28 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today?
This seems like a common perspective, but doesn't this describe almost all middle-class people though? Is he assuming that all these other "professional class" whites have been so for generations and generations? That's one reason I find the comparisons to racial prejudice kind of tenuous, we're often talking about people who are working class being offended at people who became middle class a generation ago, or people who became middle class a generation ago getting offended by people who became middle class a couple of generations ago. In any case this "middle class" status isn't as secure as people think, so they should get over themselves.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:34 PM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


I came here to point out that my problem with this was the framing, and poketfullofrye nailed it for me


The problem with talking about poor white people is that it frames them as a population that is uniquely challenged. But they’re not. They face the same challenges all poor people face, without the additional burden of racial prejudice. Being poor is terrible enough, we don’t have to pretend that poor white people are disdained in a way that poor black people are not.


And I agree with others about the gross generalization and clear misunderstanding of left is.
posted by herda05 at 10:44 PM on August 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


From the article posted by triggerfinger, this interesting tidbit:

"Take the assumed popularity of Trump among the white working class, for example. There appears to be supporting evidence for that. According to Brookings, for example, in a national survey 55% of “Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who support Trump are white working-class Americans.” But this does not mean what Brookings thinks it means. Among all adult whites, nearly 70% do not have bachelor’s degrees (the definition of “working class” used here). This means that at 55%, the white working-class is under-represented among Trump supporters. Conversely, unless Trump is getting much more minority support than reported, his supporters are disproportionally college-educated whites. They make up 30% of the white population, but they are at least 40% of Trump voters in the Brookings survey."
posted by storybored at 10:53 PM on August 2, 2016 [12 favorites]


The problem with talking about poor white people is that it frames them as a population that is uniquely challenged.

Is this a complaint about the way Vance frames the conversation, or more generally saying that it's impossible to talk about white poverty without framing things this way?
posted by teponaztli at 11:12 PM on August 2, 2016


Is this a complaint about the way Vance frames the conversation, or more generally saying that it's impossible to talk about white poverty without framing things this way?

Well Vance kinda does explicitly frame it to say that they are uniquely challenged. But then pocketfulofrye just kinda declared that they're not and... well in material terms maybe they are not but as I said above I feel like there may be something to it psychologically.
posted by atoxyl at 12:31 AM on August 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Being poor is terrible enough, we don’t have to pretend that poor white people are disdained in a way that poor black people are not.

I don't think it's pretending - they are disdained in completely different ways.

I grew up in an area where most minority families were middle class. They definitely faced racism, some of it coded, some of it openly hostile. But the trailer trash, the burnouts, the downriver families, the Ypsituckians - they were at the bottom of the social caste system.

It doesn't take anything away from anyone else's struggle to acknowledge this. And by not acknowledging it, we might be leaving the door wide open for the right wing to exploit the divide.
posted by kanewai at 3:29 AM on August 3, 2016 [16 favorites]


I read the other day about how the post-war rise in standards of living mainly happened in the smaller towns and cities. So the perception of the good middle-class life was closely tied with the smaller community, with a main street and smaller businesses. In that context, authority was local, services were local and politics were local. Which also meant that white middle class men in positions that are not really reckoned today had tons of authority then. One of my right-wing friends who is from a dying town has parents who were teachers. They were really important and highly respected people when she was a kid and their sun shined on her.
Poverty and squalor was local, too and it was there all the time and at least as bad as today, but for a lot of those who saw their lives improve in those smaller communities between -45 and the mid-70's, I can see how it might seem to be a moral problem rather than a structural issue, and I can remember how they taught this to their children - today's Trump-voters. You would know those poor people personally, and you just *knew* they were poor because they were doing wrong. (I don't agree, I'm just describing how I have see it happened for those right-wing white voters - that have college education and a decent wage).
That whole conservative culture is dying - those smaller communities are dying. It's objectively true. And the politicians on both sides and the big corporations have been working side by side to replace family farms with factory farms, high streets with mega malls, small businesses with giant corporations. That is also objectively true.
So where do they go? What they are angry about is not financial loss because they are not the ones who are hurt. It's the loss of a culture, a way of life, a moral outlook and for the men, an authority where women and POC were expected to know their places - below the white men. And part of that culture has always been a secret admiration for that loudmouthed jock who was set out to inherit his father's business and who spent school bullying the smaller guys and harassing the girls. People hung out with him and laughed at his jokes, because there would fancy nights out, trips on the boat, weekends in the summer residence - maybe a job at his dad's business. And if you weren't the one being bullied or harassed, you felt strong just by hanging out with him. Trump is an extreme caricature of that guy. He's channeling the aggression and making promises no one expects him to deliver on.
That culture is racist, and sexist in it's foundation. And the demographic and cultural changes going on now are for them a very strong proof of how everything they believed was America has gone to hell. (And this is happening in Europe as well, it's not about how stupid America is).
Are there also poor white people voting for Trump? Why yes, there are. Mainly, my guess is they don't vote that much. The statistics, quoted by several above, clearly show that they are voting more for Clinton.
posted by mumimor at 3:43 AM on August 3, 2016 [24 favorites]


Are there also poor white people voting for Trump? Why yes, there are. Mainly, my guess is they don't vote that much. The statistics, quoted by several above, clearly show that they are voting more for Clinton.
I don't think the statistics do show that, for what it's worth. The statistics cited above are about all voters, not just white voters. Clinton and Sanders primary voters had about the same annual income, but that reflects Clinton's overwhelming support among black voters, who on average earn less than white voters. Low-income white voters were more likely to vote for Sanders. Appalachia, which is the specific region that Vance is talking about, was an area of relative strength for Sanders in 2016, although it went strongly for Clinton in 2008.

But I think you're right that low-income people in general aren't likely to vote in primaries.

I find these discussions frustrating, and I can't decide if that's just my own hangups or not. My mother's family is working-class, white, Southern and definitely not hillbilly. My mom talks about kids she knew growing up whose families were "down from the hills," and that's a distinctive thing that set them outside the dominant culture of the region where she lived. I think there are structural things that make the culture of Appalachia different from the culture of the southeastern seaboard or the Mississippi Delta or other parts of the south where there are working-class white people. There's a different relationship to race in Appalachia, to the government, to class consciousness. (And while Vance is a conservative and probably isn't going to say this, part of what's going on with the disdain for the elite is a history of militant class-consciousness that doesn't exist in most of the US. It's not just that elites talk differently and sound alien: it's that they sound like the people who ordered the militia to gun your ancestors down when they tried to form a union. Joining the elite can be seen as siding with your community's oppressors, which complicates people's efforts to change their class status in ways that I don't think are as true for communities whose oppression is defined by something other than class.) I don't want to romanticize Appalachia, because there's lots of ugly stuff in that culture. But it's also frustrating to me to hear people talk about working-class white Southerners without any nuance or understanding.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:00 AM on August 3, 2016 [17 favorites]


I don't think the statistics do show that, for what it's worth. The statistics cited above are about all voters, not just white voters. Clinton and Sanders primary voters had about the same annual income, but that reflects Clinton's overwhelming support among black voters, who on average earn less than white voters. Low-income white voters were more likely to vote for Sanders. Appalachia, which is the specific region that Vance is talking about, was an area of relative strength for Sanders in 2016, although it went strongly for Clinton in 2008.

My bad - I left out Sanders because he is out of the race now, but you are of course right on this.

And yes, anyone who wants to engage with any voters in the South could do good to stop seeing them all in silly stereotypes. I haven't travelled there a lot, but enough to see there are big differences. The class-consciousness you describe could be the same thing Vance calls "Scotts-Irish pride" (or something similar).
posted by mumimor at 6:21 AM on August 3, 2016


Being empathetic, and using said empathy to lift all boats shouldn't be such a hard sell.
posted by kmartino at 6:27 AM on August 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


More Dreher: The Voice Of West Virginia leads to What West Virginia is saying at the polls
A generally suspicious and pissed-off attitude toward politics generally is not hard to understand in West Virginia, and is a more plausible explanation for the ideological see-sawing of the exit polls than any grand strategy. Nearly a third of Democratic primary voters said they had a family member in the coal industry. Coal workers have been in an impossible situation for years. Mining employment has fallen from over 120,000 at its 1950s peak to between 20,000 and 25,000; union membership has fallen sharply; and miners, whose culture has historically involved giving the finger to the company, have been widely convinced that environmental policies from the Obama administration are to blame. Meanwhile the company bosses, whom no miner loves, have aggressively bought political influence, including a state supreme court judge so blatantly funded and elected to reverse a ruling against Massey Coal that the U.S. Supreme Court ordered him off the case. The repugnant Don Blankenship, dictatorial head of Massey when its safety-flouting practices killed 29 miners in the 2010 Big Branch explosion, was recently sentenced to one year in prison – a political victory for the ambitious federal prosecutor who put him there, but a modest sentence for what was arguably mass manslaughter. Miners have watched their industry and unions dying as mountaintop removal wrecks their landscape on the way out. Everything Bernie Sanders says about a rigged economy and political system is matter-of-fact in their experience, and so is much of what Donald Trump says on the same themes. If you want to run a grievance-based campaign, well, there are plenty of grievances here. The fact that one of those campaigns is fraudulent does not make the grievances it is exploiting any less acute.
UNNECESSARIAT
Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!

If there’s no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there’s certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them.
The main problem as I understand it is that people will not accept the kind of help that is possible.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:24 AM on August 3, 2016 [6 favorites]


Being empathetic, and using said empathy to lift all boats shouldn't be such a hard sell.

It shouldn't be, but when "elites" try to show that empathy, they get accused of condescension.

Look at Obama's "horrible"clinging faux pas that people are still pissed off about. No one mentions the couple of sentences before, where he talked about the challenges facing poor white communities, and how that powerlessness gets funneled into caring deeply about things that most liberals just don't get. It's all about how the big meanie professor guy was looking down on "real" Americans.

Even the best of us have trouble maintaining empathy for those who show us nothing but disdain.
posted by sparklemotion at 7:33 AM on August 3, 2016 [8 favorites]


"But I remain incredibly optimistic about the future. Maybe that’s the hillbilly resilience in me. Or maybe I’m just an idiot. But if writing this book, and talking with friends and strangers about its message, has taught me anything, it’s that most people are trying incredibly hard to make it, even in this more complicated and scary world. The short view of our country is that we’re doomed. The long view, inherited from my grandparents’ 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still control some part of our fate. Even if we are doomed, there’s reason to pretend otherwise."

I think this is an interesting conclusion to the interview. My family is original from Appalachia (my sisters and I are the first generation in a couple hundred years born outside the mountains), and while my parents left Appalachia after high school, they still have family they will speak with and I'm reminded of one of my mom's cousins who may live in Ohio or Indiana now. She's scared of the world now and has told my mom how everything seemed to go downhill starting in the 1960s.

In a way, I think this is representative of a lot of the fear that's driving not just Appalachians, or poor whites, but whites in general to support someone like Trump. They grew up in an age white culture was the monolithic culture of the United States, and the world they fondly recall has been eroding away ever since because of the growing acceptance of cultures and ways of life that belong to everyone who don't dwell within their demographic. The orderliness of their childhoods is given over to what they perceive as chaos and Trump is promising to return that order.

As is, my grandfather on my mother's side was a coal miner in Appalachia in the 1930s, and the rest of my grandparents all grew up in the heart of Virginia's Appalachian coal country. I do think Vance is right, that generation was generally optimistic because they lived lives that generally followed an upward trajectory. Most of them grew up on farms that didn't have indoor plumbing, and as they left the farms, they found jobs (for the men, it was either work for the power company or work in the mines, my grandfathers split the difference), and those jobs paid like nobody's business compared to the money they grew up not having. I asked my grandmother once what it was like to live through the Great Depression and she told me she didn't really notice anything different (if you don't live high, when the fall comes, you don't fall very far).

Then the Second World War came and both my grandfathers went off to fight, again splitting the difference between the Pacific and Europe, and both came home to victory parades and a faith that the world was moving forward. My grandfather who worked in the mines managed to save enough to buy his own mines and for a brief time, thanks to a coal boom, became what I would consider moderately wealthy, only to lose it all and move the family into a trailer when that boom turned into a bust. He had to return to working in the mine, returning home covered in coal dust, and the impact of that moment made it difficult for my mom, 40 years later, hard to watch a recent reality show about coal mining. Nonetheless, the grandparents I knew were always positive people, always cheerful, and even as I grew older and they even more older, never shared any hint of pessimism about the future. They all lived out their final years in nice ranch style homes with their preferred Buicks parked in the driveway.

It's their children who now fear the future because they know the world and optimism for its future their parents knew, but that upward trajectory has faltered. It's not just about the decline of the coal mining jobs, which has been happening for decades, in part because of coal companies realizing that blowing the top off mountains is cheaper and requires fewer miners, and also the introduction of equipment to replace the jobs of men. It's about the decline in accessing that upward trajectory. And I think he's right that for a lot of these people, those in power, left or right, haven't really paid much attention to them. However, there's a bit of class and cultural consciousness going on here, of turning on the television or reading the newspaper, and not seeing the same world that is neatly packaged in nostalgia during the better years of their lives. That's what driving many to Trump, just as much as talk about empty factories.

This isn't meant to be an encompassing statement, not by far. My parents are optimistic people, too, who have had their fair share of ups and downs in life. There's a lot of people like them, too, who have embraced the world we live in.
posted by Atreides at 8:01 AM on August 3, 2016 [13 favorites]


"I teared up more than once as I read this beautiful and painful memoir of his hillbilly family and their struggles to cope with the modern world."

I cried, I laughed, I rejoiced, I wept anew!

The condescension and self-righteousness of the putatively sympathetic reviewers of this book are far more nauseating than the supposed "liberal smugness" that they deride.
posted by blucevalo at 8:12 AM on August 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


A common thread that seems to run through a lot of these kind of articles is that the welfare payments, etc, proposed by the left may stave off immediate material need, but they do less than nothing to help people feel dignified, respected, or necessary. That even if the left better represents their economic interests, it feels like that’s too often at the cost of their self-respect.

I’m not sure how to get past this. Perhaps focus rhetoric more on getting money into these areas through employment — building infrastructure and providing services — rather than just transfer payments. Perhaps build up organizations that embody the positive aspects of military training (structure, purpose, access to education) without all the violence and trauma. Focus on building up an economy and a culture where working hard and playing by the rules really is enough to guarantee a good, stable life.

Regardless, it's always going to be hard to convince someone that you have their best interests at heart if you can't demonstrate that you understand their values.
posted by Kilter at 8:39 AM on August 3, 2016 [13 favorites]


related: I would love it if Metafilter would stop using the term "garbage people". it makes me sad every time I see it.
posted by clawsoon at 8:45 AM on August 3, 2016 [7 favorites]


A Jamaican American friend of mine posted a link to this in her facebook page with a comment about how little sympathy she had with whites now facing the same difficulties that her relatives had faced for hundreds of years. While some may think that's harsh, it's falling back into the same expectation that minority groups are expected to forgive/empathize with/coddle white folks when white folks run into trouble. She has every right to be pissed. It follows along the story of the heroin epidemic now sweeping the nation that was ignored until white people started dying.

Likewise: If there’s no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there’s certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them. You know where they've perfected this means of extraction? Ferguson and other towns and counties that rely on fines and court fees to operate.

I wish I had an answer to the people caught in a position where their privilege is no longer protecting them. They're finding out that they are just part of the masses, unwanted and valued only for what can be pulled from them at minimal cost. I wish they would make common cause with the poor POC, seeing as they are being shafted in exactly the same way. This is not a new tragedy, it is just an old one expanding. And I wish the media would report it that way.
posted by Hactar at 8:59 AM on August 3, 2016 [23 favorites]


sparklemotion: Even the best of us have trouble maintaining empathy for those who show us nothing but disdain.

This is part of the game. Keep poor and marginalized communities separate, but continually pass along the worst things that the "other side" says about you. Pretty soon both sides believe that those people have nothing but disdain for our people. All we hear is how much they hate us, so we come to hate them, too. It's an effective way to build reliable voting blocks. In theory, the Internet could've democratized contact and allowed "opposed" groups of poor people to connect directly with each other, but elites have done a pretty good job of controlling the attention of "their" poor and marginalized groups.

If you want to know why there's so much disdain for Black Lives Matter from the average person on the right, for example, you have to realize how hard Fox News has hammered on a short clip of some marginal protesters from a while ago chanting "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon." Virtually every day that clip is played. The right-wing elite has been able to successfully paint that picture of BLM among their audience. And the left-wing elite does exactly the same thing. If you think that you have an accurate picture of the people being talked about in this article and book, and you've never lived among them, then you are wrong. You've been allowed to see them through a purposely limited pinhole which helps keep you separated from them and loyal to "your" elites.
posted by clawsoon at 9:04 AM on August 3, 2016 [14 favorites]


The condescension and self-righteousness of the putatively sympathetic reviewers of this book are far more nauseating than the supposed "liberal smugness" that they deride.


Loath as I am to credit JOHN DERBYSHIRE, of all people, with any insight, there is a passage from this old NR piece from 2003 that contains, I think, more than a germ of truth. After allowing as to how he is socially "at ease in a roomful of New York liberals in a way that, to be truthful about it, I am not in a gathering of red-state evangelicals", Derbyshire states:
We conservatives like to scoff at lefties for their "noble savage" fixation — the way they go all misty-eyed and paternalistic at the thought of the poor helpless victims of capitalism, racism, colonialism, etc. etc. Well, I think I can see some similar strain of condescension in my own outlook. What the heroic worker was to an old-line Marxist, what the suffering Negro was to civil-rights marchers, what the unfulfilled housewife is to Hillary Clinton, the Vietnamese peasant to Jane Fonda, the Palestinian rioter to Edward Said, so the red-state conservative with his Bible, his hunting rifle and his sodomy laws is to me. He is authentic, in a way I am not.
posted by non canadian guy at 9:05 AM on August 3, 2016 [9 favorites]


Well Vance kinda does explicitly frame it to say that they are uniquely challenged. But then pocketfulofrye just kinda declared that they're not and... well in material terms maybe they are not but as I said above I feel like there may be something to it psychologically.

What I mean is that people are contemptuous of and unsympathetic to poor white people because they're poor, not because they're white. They myth of classlessness, hatred of the poor, and white supremacy are all so ingrained in our culture that we're surprised when we recognize attitudes that people have toward poor white people, the way they're treated, because we're not used to seeing white people denigrated that way.

I grew up in an area where most minority families were middle class. They definitely faced racism, some of it coded, some of it openly hostile. But the trailer trash, the burnouts, the downriver families, the Ypsituckians - they were at the bottom of the social caste system.

I mean, unless the poor white people in this community are somehow poor because they're white, and the middle class minorities have somehow been practicing systemic racism against them for generations, there's nothing about the situation of the poor white people that wouldn't be exactly the same if the middle class were also white. They would still be poor, they would still be denigrated. Their race is immaterial to their situation. We simply expect white supremacy to be so effective that white people will always be better off than racial minorities, in any situation.

But the fact that a white person isn't automatically financially better off than any member of a racial minority doesn't mean that the struggle of being poor and white is about being white. It's still about being poor.

As Atoxyl points out, there may be a kind of shame to being poor and white because you expect your whiteness to redeem your poverty and it doesnt -- the idea that poorness is for those inferior racial minorities, or at least those other racial minorities are poor because they're racial minorities, and a white person has no excuse.

But once again, that's about the contempt we have for poverty, not for white people. It's about the assumption that poverty is something people bring upon themselves, that there's something wrong with you for being poor unless you have an "excuse." It's similar to the argument people sometimes make about "nice guys" who are culturally trained to expect women to give them things (sex, attention, deference) and are outraged and become MRAs when women don't.

But there's a weird, fine line in that argument. People in pain, whether they're racist white people who are poor or sexist men who are insecure, do deserve empathy. But when we pretend that that pain proves equivalence among differently privileged populations we risk distorting the reality of the situation, which is that an insufficiency of privilege to make one better off than people who don't have it at all is not a disadvantage in the same way that a total lack of privilege is.

[And just to be super clear, I in no way believe that all poor white people, all "hillbillies," the entire population of Appalachia, is racist. I'm specifically talking about the subgroup this book and article address who are].
posted by pocketfullofrye at 9:12 AM on August 3, 2016 [14 favorites]


The other article in this vein that's making the rounds is this piece: "What do Donald Trump voters really crave? Respect". The argument is similar, that working class whites are responding to the loss of unions and other "outlets for respect" in their surge, "led by Trump, into the ugly, unacceptable territory of outright racism."

But many have pointed out that white working class racism is nothing new. Here's that tweetstorm in condensed form:
.@Chrisarnade argues white working class has turned to Trump in large part because they "feel disrespected." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/30/what-do-donald-trump-voters-want-respect

Demise of unions and other w-c institutions, he argues, have left white workers socially bereft, and Trump speaks to their anxieties. Looking at Cle suburb of Parma, Arnade says, If Trump voters are "surging ahead...into outright racism," it's symptom of broader decline.

There's one big problem with this argument, though: Parma was a bastion of racism and outright discrimination when unions were strong. Arnade notes Parma is "almost all white." What he doesn't say is it's almost all white because the city fought all attempts at integration. In 1970, there were 41 black ppl in Parma, out of a population of 100K In 1973, DOJ sued Parma for violating Fair Housing Act. Parma fought the case for 7 yrs., and did nothing to integrate In 1980, there were still only 364 black ppl in city, this was the result of deliberate action to keep black ppl out. Fed judge who finally ruled city had discriminated found that Parma had a reputation as Cle suburb that was "most hostile to blacks." Elected officials had made "overtly racist" statements. Would-be black homebuyers were steered away. The city refused to accept any federal housing funds for fear it would require integration.

In 1968, Parma City Council refused to pass a housing resolution saying only city welcomed "all persons of goodwill." Parma was, in other words, much like the Yonkers depicted in David Simon's "Show Me a Hero." Only worse. White residents were firmly opposed to integration of any type even when unions were strong and the economy was booming.

It's frankly preposterous to depict white racism in Parma as if it's a response to changing economic conditions or social anomie. Racism has been incredibly powerful in Parma for the entirety of the postwar period. Now, you might say, as ppl in Parma did, that it's easy for white elites to talk about integration when they live in lily-white worlds. Except this isn't true in Cleveland Shaker Heights, the ritzy suburb, made an explicit and rigorous commitment to integrate in late 50s and maintained that commitment in the decades that followed Results were imperfect, but ended up with far more integrated community.

It's absolutely true that the working class (white, black, Latino, etc.) has gotten a raw deal from the US economy since the 1970s. It's also absolutely true that Trump, like Sanders, articulated working-class hostility to trade in a way that other candidates didn't. But white working-class racism is not a new phenomenon. It's not stronger than it was when unions were powerful.

And the simple reality is that for progressives, and for the Dem Party, anti-racism isn't a secondary consideration to economic justice. Both are central to any truly progressive vision. So yes, the Dems are less welcoming to some white working-class voters than once were. But that's because the Dem Party is more committed (even if imperfectly) to antiracism than it once was. Dems should reach out to white working class more than they have But that can only work if white workers stop being racist Period.
posted by AceRock at 9:21 AM on August 3, 2016 [18 favorites]


clawsoon: If you think that you have an accurate picture of the people being talked about in this article and book, and you've never lived among them, then you are wrong. You've been allowed to see them through a purposely limited pinhole which helps keep you separated from them and loyal to "your" elites.

This is straight out of the interview, of a conservative author by a conservative interviewer:
I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion. Each time someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon.

This isn't some liberal media caricature of how the entirety of rural white America sees people who aren't like them. This is someone who claims to have insight from living on both "sides" purposefully taking the worst interpretation of what folks on the left had said and turning attempts at empathy into condescension.
posted by sparklemotion at 9:40 AM on August 3, 2016 [7 favorites]


As Atoxyl points out, there may be a kind of shame to being poor and white because you expect your whiteness to redeem your poverty and it doesnt -- the idea that poorness is for those inferior racial minorities, or at least those other racial minorities are poor because they're racial minorities, and a white person has no excuse

Well that's not actually exactly what I'm not saying it's incorrect either - however couldn't you extend that to say that other (maybe even especially white) people will also ask - what's your excuse? I think there's truth to the idea that people who are poor and white and from certain places are disdained in a particular way.

My other point was just that in my experience struggling white people feel like they are not addressed as a constituency (except by some fairly noxious types). And I think the left could do better at that, and I don't think it would have to be at the expense of minorities, but it might require being willing to recognize poor white people as a particular interest group.
posted by atoxyl at 9:48 AM on August 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


I don't think it takes special interpretations to think that poor Southerners are often looked down on by coastal city folk. I remember my own sneering old days, when I used to brag about "never having been south of the Mason-Dixon Line" like it was a badge of honor. They may be choosing the worst examples, and obviously not everyone is like that, but they're not pulling from thin air.

This is a really interesting article, and I'm going to buy his book and see if it resonates with my husband, who was raised rurally and sometimes chafes about hillbilly stereotypes, and always chokes up when Gaius Baltar says "I know a little something about farming."
posted by corb at 10:37 AM on August 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


Well that's not actually exactly what I'm not saying it's incorrect either


That didn't come out right! "That's not actually exactly what I was saying though I'm not saying it's incorrect either."
posted by atoxyl at 11:14 AM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


As a progressive white southerner with a Scots-Irish family name, who is still Presbyterian, who has kirked the tartans, who went to school with a whole lot of people with Mc in their name, who had given people rides home to trailer parks, and has childhood friends with false teeth due to meth, I just find it all infuriating. I came from them. I know them. I love them.

The folks I know who fit this description, my friends and family, deserve a lot of sympathy for the closing of the mills and factories where they expected to work as their parents and grandparents had worked. They deserve sympathy for the blight of drug addiction that plagues their communities and the lack of resources for treatment. They even deserve some sympathy, or at least pity, that the world has changed really quickly around them and that thoughts and words and actions that were socially acceptable 20 years ago no longer are.

But most of the real suffering here is caused by the Republican party's gutting of support for education, infrastructure, and social services in our southeastern states. Good training for private sector jobs and good paying public sector jobs would help tremendously, help not as a handout but as in making it possible for life to not just be completely bleakly impossible. So much of their pain could be relieved by the expansion of Medicaid, which our Republican governors have blocked, to get their kids into rehab and provide good care for their chronically sick. So much multi-generational misery could be stopped by access to birth control and abortion, to real support in raising wanted children, to some availability of affordable housing and childcare.

But my people have voted again and again for the most good old boy, croniest, most racist Republicans they can find to spite the Democrats who are supported by the people who aren't white. And the people they have voted into power in our states care not a lick about them, don't help them at all, and raid the state coffers for the benefit of themselves and their rich friends. And somehow, in the world I'm from, everyone still manages to blame people who aren't white for all of it. And somehow, I'm supposed to be sympathetic for their favoring a faux billionaire who lies every other word he says as he himself ships more jobs overseas. And if they elect him president he will ensure that their pain and suffering only increases.
posted by hydropsyche at 11:46 AM on August 3, 2016 [25 favorites]


Appalachia has been poor and white and insular since its first settlers pushed beyond the 1763 Proclamation Line: too inhospitable and unproductive to support the slave-based agriculture of the foothills and low country, politically distant from state capitals, economies tied to low-level extractive industry (e.g. logging and mining) that concentrated wealth in a few families, textile and paper mills, and some marginal small-scale manufacturing (including illegal moonshining and weed-growing).

You don't need to buy into the Scotch-Irish "rough fearless warriors of the mountains" mythos peddled by people like Jim Webb to accept that Appalachian culture is tied to a notion of independence on the margins.

It's not quite the same as the "crap town" argument about Brexit, but those who have the luck, talent and means to get out of small-town and rural Appalachia tend to get the fuck out. And Vance himself acknowledges this by talking about the military as a socioeconomic escape ladder.

Anyway, here's part of one of Dreher's questions:
My dad was able to raise my sister and me in the 1970s on a civil servant’s salary, supplemented by my mom’s small salary as a school bus driver.
Hm. Government jobs. Appalachia got the TVA and electrification and the Blue Ridge Parkway and national parks and state forests. (It also got Dollywood, which provides a huge ongoing economic boost for that bit of eastern Tennessee.) Dreher wants to make this a moral argument about discipline and agency and personal choices, to fit with his religious conservatism, but his economic conservatism supports the gutting of public services, and one way to sell economic conservatism to Appalachia is through racial divisiveness. (As an aside: having a church every quarter-mile isn't going to stop people drinking and fucking and driving cars fast along narrow country roads.)

You end up having to ask: what do you actually want? It's easy to talk in abstractions -- respect without condescension, a hand-up instead of a hand-out -- but those abstractions end up entangling economic needs in narratives of self-identity.

It reminds me of the studies done on the impact of casino profit-sharing payments to members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in the Qualla Boundary, compared to those around them in that bit of Appalachia. The eastern Cherokee also have access to subsidised health care, which has made some inroads into health and addiction problems.
posted by holgate at 12:15 PM on August 3, 2016 [15 favorites]




excellent link, the man of twists and turns
posted by mumimor at 12:57 PM on August 3, 2016


A couple more examples (in roughly autobiographical order) of Vance's writing:
The Bad Faith of the White Working Class, on religion

Why Trump's Antiwar Message Resonates with White America, on the military

As a Poor Kid from the Rust Belt, Yale Law School Brought Me Face-to-face with Radical Inequality
What Vance's description reminds me of is Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and the disdain and exploitation that the Okies faced in California. I think of it as a kind of sequel to the Little House on the Prairie series, in which the resourceful pioneers have become dispossessed migrants. (While retaining incredible resourcefulness; I was struck by Steinbeck's descriptions of the repairs needed to keep their vehicles moving.) Or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
Cotton Tenants: Three Families is so choked with Agee’s anger—at Fortune, at the misery of the Depression, at the wretchedness of the lives of the people he is writing about, at economic injustice, at himself—that you can almost see him turning blue as he writes.
Poor rural whites were a key part of the Democratic coalition (made up of those groups furthest from the fire, to use Brad DeLong's metaphor) -- it was FDR and the Democrats who made their lives better -- until the 1960s, the Vietnam War (which destroyed the Johnson Administration), and the civil rights movement. Nixon and the Republicans convinced poor whites that the Democrats were now more focused on helping blacks.

According to Vance, a big cultural problem is the breakdown of families. I wonder if this has any bearing on Bill Clinton's chronic infidelity. (I'm currently reading Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge.) I'm also reminded of William Julius Wilson's observation in When Work Disappears that there's a connection between unemployment and family breakdown: when unemployment is extremely high (as in the black inner cities in the 1980s), few people get married, even after they have children. Why tie yourself to someone with little or no prospects?

Another big issue is pride (or conversely, respect from others) -- it's difficult to maintain in a materialistic society which judges you almost entirely by whether you're rich or poor. If movies are our dominant art form, how are rural whites reflected in this mirror? In today's diverse pantheon of superheroes, who represents them? (Hawkeye? Maybe Captain America? Iron Man would of course be at the opposite extreme.)
posted by russilwvong at 1:00 PM on August 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


If movies are our dominant art form, how are rural whites reflected in this mirror? In today's diverse pantheon of superheroes, who represents them? (Hawkeye? Maybe Captain America? Iron Man would of course be at the opposite extreme.)

Superman
Star-Lord
Ghost Rider
Wolverine (caveat: Canadian)
Daredevil (obviously more working-class white than rural white, but his character arc, at least as depicted in the Netflix series, could easily be transplanted to any small town facing takeover by President Business and various Foreign Baddies)

Those with more nerd-fu I'm sure could name more, but these guys at least have had major productions in the past decade or so.
posted by sparklemotion at 1:21 PM on August 3, 2016


Chris Ladd, How the GOP is Winning Among the Poor - "Another surprising pattern emerges from the analysis – the stark racial divide between the poorest Americans, and those who receive the most poverty relief. In an interesting irony, the list of most dependent counties does not line up with the list of poorest counties. The counties which receive the highest levels of welfare assistance are disproportionately white; while most of America’s poorest counties are majority-minority.

Though African-Americans and Hispanics suffer far higher poverty rates, they receive far less proportionately in government transfers. Poor whites receive government assistance at a far higher rate than poor non-whites. In other words, even in poverty, it pays to be white."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:31 PM on August 3, 2016 [13 favorites]


Right now, the link is down, so I can't quote directly. But to me the most relevant part of the Vance interview was his account of how the poor white talk themselves down. In that sense he is not your plain hater conservative. He is pointing to a real issue that really needs to be dealt with. Why have these people given up on themselves, and how can we support them in getting on?
posted by mumimor at 1:50 PM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


...the welfare payments, etc, proposed by the left may stave off immediate material need, but they do less than nothing to help people feel dignified, respected, or necessary. That even if the left better represents their economic interests, it feels like that’s too often at the cost of their self-respect.

I’m not sure how to get past this. Perhaps focus rhetoric more on getting money into these areas through employment...


American culture is HUGE on insisting that welfare be as shameful and harsh as it can possible be, and demanding that people on welfare must never have comforts and must always be grateful for what they're being given, which is more than they deserve. Turn that disgusting cultural ship around (not exactly a small task - it's intertwined with various work-ethics and bedrock ideas of self-worth) and I think we'd already be half there.

"But wait!" you say, "my point was that people need jobs, not welfare!"

The ship has to be turned regardless because not only is the unnecessariat class going to grow much bigger (as the economy moves into the future), but in an ideal world that's actually a good thing - the standard futurist vision is that Jetsons future where society's wealth production involves little labor leaving people free to pursue the kind of wealth creation that our economy currently fails to recognize until it's too late: childrearing, arts, teaching, learning, volunteering, quality of life, etc. The unnecessariat is not people lacking in worthwhile things to do, it's people lacking in ways to make ends meet because the economy no-longer has need of them and society currently does't have a plan-B for that.

Currently we're on the dystopic mirror-universe path where society's wealth production involves little labor leaving everyone as beggars and thieves in a new gilded age of mass poverty/incarceration and a scattering of walled-off islands of bottomless wealth.

We need to get off the nightware path, but that means fundamentally altering the arrangment in which society does little to stop the economy deciding people should be ejected from society.
posted by -harlequin- at 2:23 PM on August 3, 2016 [7 favorites]


in an ideal world that's actually a good thing - the standard futurist vision is that Jetsons future where society's wealth production involves little labor leaving people free to pursue the kind of wealth creation that our economy currently fails to recognize until it's too late: childrearing, arts, teaching, learning, volunteering, quality of life, etc.

It strikes me that those complaining that they want jobs, not even genuinely adequate welfare, in this context are actually saying that the best and highest use they can conceive of for their lives is the gruelling, dangerous manual labor that chewed up their fathers. Of course, everyone who works has at least some of their identity invested in that job (and for many, quite a bit). So not having a job is hard. But if you have fallen into the unnecessariat, if the economy doesn't have a paid place for you and so you must be on benefits even though you're healthy, nothing is making you spend the rest of your now-free time on the couch playing video games or drinking beer instead of finding productive uses of your time and energy and skills. People (and especially women) have found meaning in their lives outside formal waged jobs since the dawn of human history. That is where it seems like the culture is maybe currently maladapted to circumstances (which is different from saying it's "bad" or "toxic" or whatever); not in somehow making poor rural whites lazy or prone to thoughtless drug use or incapable of family planning, but in being stuck in a model of worth and purpose that was frankly pretty self-destructive for those in the worst jobs to start with.

(I do think some of this complaint is disingenuous, and what they really mean is they don't want even genuinely adequate benefits in a system where benefits also flow to people of color and other aliens. Let's face it, you don't see people rejecting and complaining about the deductibility of mortage interest. But that's not true of everyone.)
posted by praemunire at 3:03 PM on August 3, 2016 [6 favorites]


Ok, I gotta press back against the techno-Jesus talk a little bit. It almost always sounds like a reason for doing nothing. We really need to consider the Jetsons or Star Trek not happening. As in, plan as though utopia is not around the corner.

Techno Jesus and the Rapture, I'm worried, are two sides of the same do-nothing coin.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 4:36 PM on August 3, 2016


We really need to consider the Jetsons or Star Trek not happening. As in, plan as though utopia is not around the corner.

Either you misunderstood or I'm not sure I understand - if the uneccessariat isn't a thing, then that would mean we don't have a problem and don't need to do anything - there will be jobs for all! But the uneccessariat looks to me like a real thing that is in plain view, which means doing nothing ensures we get the things that we already see happening: mass poverty and mass incarceration. The point of the jetsons reference was that we're not on that path, we're on the other path such that staying the course / doing nothing will likely only make the problems grow worse.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:50 PM on August 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


Ya, I hear ya. It's my knee jerk reaction to brogrammer stuff I'm increasingly intolerant of. My apologies.

These folks are not unnecessary except by design. For whatever reason technological progress has been entirely about repression and disconnect, despite all the initial optimism around it. And I'll go ahead a forward the idea that, no, education is not the answer. Fostering a love of learning could help, but that's not what school is for most folks. It's training as a cog in an ever growing hell-machine.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 4:58 PM on August 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


There's a HUGE desire for economically-liberal government policies tied to socially-conservative ones.

Perhaps the American Solidarity Party shall be among the groups to benefit from the eventual imploding of the GOP.
posted by Apocryphon at 6:11 PM on August 3, 2016


Ok, I gotta press back against the techno-Jesus talk a little bit. It almost always sounds like a reason for doing nothing.

I don't think it's that at all - the prediction (without addressing whether it's correct) is that we are in the early stages of a shift away from labor being done by the human body, which will leave a large number of people effectively unemployable. And that means either we have to reimagine the role of work entirely or face an unprecedented escalation of inequality and unrest. I mean I think a lot of people see it as an opportunity but also a potential crisis.
posted by atoxyl at 6:45 PM on August 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'm not so sure myself that we are imminently running out of work for people to do - though a large part of that is that I think we in rich countries forget how cheap a human life is elsewhere and don't like to think about how we benefit from that. But I think it's going to happen enough that we need to figure out what to do about it.
posted by atoxyl at 6:51 PM on August 3, 2016


Dude I know it's way back up there but that John Derbyshire quote gives me the giant WTFs.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:30 PM on August 3, 2016


But in re where this thread has actually headed since then, thanks atoxyl. We have to reimagine the role of work entirely. That is really the only way to solve this that doesn't involve megadeath. (and fuck you Dave Mustaine for robbing that word of its existential horror)
posted by aspersioncast at 7:35 PM on August 3, 2016


They face the same challenges all poor people face, without the additional burden of racial prejudice. Being poor is terrible enough, we don’t have to pretend that poor white people are disdained in a way that poor black people are not.

I am a hillbilly and quite happy being a hillbilly. If you are referring to Vance"s family, I have to disagree with you. I crashed IOS typing a detailed rebuttal with examples, references and dates, but all it came down to was, I ain't a flatlander, my non-NDN ancestors weren't flatlanders and I don't want to be a flatlander.

The Scotch-Irish were alienated from the dominant English cultures when came to British America, they were alienated from the dominant English cultures before there was a British America or even a Britain. When they got here Puritan Mass. burned their church down and Anglican Maryland arrested their preacher and got the building. The Quakers considered them barbaric, white savages good for soaking up casualties on the frontier. When they got far enough south to encounter the Planter culture, they were included in the insult "Po' white trash"

The All American stereotype, "They're dumb, mean, lazy, ignorant degenerates that are quick with a blade. The only thing they're good for is their music and some of their women, as long as you don't have to take them home to meet your mother." has been widely applied to three groups; Blacks, Hillbillies and Mexicans that got stranded in the U. S. when the boarder moved. Its still being applied to Hillbillies, play the fifth season of Justified and watch the portrayal of Dewey and Wendy Crowe. Same shit, different century.

So nope, I don't feel any affinity for the other WASP groups and haven't noticed any of them in a big hurry to claim me. Also Vance's hillbilly family wasn't like my hillbilly extended family. Yeah, our farm wasn't big enough so we had to share crop on the side, and I remember at least one spring we switched to kids eating meals first and adults splitting the rest. That was just the way it was, kids, breed stock and feed stock first and in that order. It worked pretty good until Nixon started pushing latifundia.
posted by ridgerunner at 11:06 PM on August 3, 2016 [8 favorites]


The polling data indicate that very poor white people are not part of Trump's base, because they don't vote at all.

There was a short read on Medium about how the emerging visibility of this demographic is affecting the longstanding racial dynamic in American politics. And Rod Dreher has been writing about this segment for a while now, referencing the "unnecessariat" framework.
posted by Svejk at 1:28 AM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


pocketfullofrye, they aren't facing prejudice because they are white, they are facing prejudice because they are a particular sort of white people-- they're attacked for their accents and their place of origin.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:25 AM on August 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Certain kinds of manufacturing, mining and farming are just continuing to shrink in the sense that they can support fewer and fewer workers. We can only hope to transition by training workers for more intellectual jobs: including electronics (design, repair) especially for green energy, robotics, computer programming, teaching, and medical tech. It seems as though the push for free community college is exactly what impoverished communities should be excited about.
posted by TreeRooster at 3:03 PM on August 4, 2016


We can only hope to transition by training workers for more intellectual jobs

The issue with that becomes one of social continuity and cohesion. A decent education in specialised skills often translates into "getting a job somewhere else", because intellectual work tends to cluster. I'd love to see a kind of "new TVA" focused upon residential and community solar power, but would there be a willingness to pursue it even if the funding were available? We're talking about communities where you can't assume every home has electricity and water.

People will still need plumbers and electricians and mechanics, no matter where they are.
posted by holgate at 9:49 PM on August 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


So I read the book. It's quite a story.

Vance's grandparents were hillbillies who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio (Appalachia had little to export except coal and people). Economically, they prospered, but their norms are pretty eye-opening to read about. One reason why his grandparents moved to Ohio was that his grandmother was pregnant, at 13. They had a high-conflict home life.

Vance's mother was a nurse with a good income, but became an alcoholic and drug addict, and he grew up (in the 1980s and 1990s) with a revolving cast of his mother's husbands (married three times) and boyfriends. His family life was worse than average, but as he describes it as being not that unusual in his circles.

After high school he joined the Marines for four years. Then he did a college degree, in two years. Then he went to Yale Law School! You could read it as a great example of social mobility and the American Dream -- a kid from a white-peasant social background with a terrible home life makes it to an Ivy League law school, joins elite social networks (one of his mentors was Amy Chua). But Vance's primary concern is the demoralization of his home culture (Greater Appalachia), and the vast distance between his home culture and the elite circles he's joined.

As someone who hasn't experienced either the chaos of Vance's childhood, or the ascension to an Ivy League school, it was a fascinating read.

There was a news story a couple days ago saying that Trump's supporters are not particularly likely to be personally suffering economically -- but they're likely to come from communities which are doing badly. Sounds like Vance would fall right into that category (conservative communitarian).

Thinking in terms of institutions: in Vance's telling, families are failing -- they're chaotic and dysfunctional. Public schools are functional. The people he's thinking of don't attend church regularly (he gives a striking counter-example, his father ended up straightening out after becoming a devout churchgoer). Businesses are weaker than they were.

For him personally, it was the Marines that made a huge difference:
The Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene, or personal finances. I took mandatory classes about balancing a checkbook, saving, and investing. When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings deposited in a mediocre regional bank, a senior enlisted marine drove me to Navy Federal -- a respected credit union -- and had me open an account. When I caught strep throat and tried to tough it out, my commanding officer noticed and ordered me to the doctor.

... For all my grandma's efforts, for all of her "You can do anything; don't be like those fuckers who think the deck is stacked against them" diatribes, the message had only partially set in before I enlisted. Surrounding me was another message: that I and the people like me weren't good enough; that the reason Middletown produced zero Ivy League graduates was some genetic or character defect. I couldn't possibly see how destructive that mentality was until I escaped it. The Marine Corps replaced it with something else, something that loathes excuses. "Giving it my all" was a catchphrase, something heard in health or gym class. When I first ran three miles, mildly impressed with my mediocre twenty-five-minute time, a terrifying senior drill instructor greeted me at the finish line: "If you're not puking, you're lazy! Stop being fucking lazy!" He then ordered me to sprint between him and a tree repeatedly. Just as I felt I might pass out, he relented. "That's how you should feel at the end of every run!" he yelled. In the Marines, giving it your all was a way of life.

I'm not saying ability doesn't matter. It certainly helps. But there's something powerful about realizing that you've undersold yourself -- that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I'd most like to change about the white working class, I say, "The feeling that our choices don't matter." The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor.
What else would improve people's lives in these communities?

I'm thinking that the problems really start with childhood. So maybe start with early childhood intervention -- in Canada we have local maternity programs which aim to help young or vulnerable mothers. Encourage teenagers to delay becoming parents; older parents should have more stable lives and be more mature.

Vance thinks the problems run deeper than economics. As he describes it, jobs are available (wages aren't high, but the cost of living in the region isn't high either), but people are lacking self-discipline and a work ethic. That said, even if bringing down unemployment (e.g. by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, which subsidizes low-wage earnings) doesn't solve the whole problem, at least it would help.
posted by russilwvong at 5:08 PM on August 16, 2016 [6 favorites]


but people are lacking self-discipline and a work ethic.

That's something you often hear from veterans, often accompanied by a desire for some kind of broad service obligation that provides opportunity for people from those regions to spend some time elsewhere and be exposed to very different ways of life. It's hard to imagine the political will existing for that, and you can't draft all of southeastern Kentucky into the military. (That's even before considering the inherent problems of sustaining a massive volunteer military force as a de facto socioeconomic escape mechanism, given what happens when that force is deployed in far away places.)

Deep Appalachia still often resembles a pre-industrial society, where work is casual or seasonal. You can (and should) throw money at education and public-sector jobs, but Vance doesn't seem quite able to reconcile the tension between respecting those communities and supporting individual ambition by providing a route out of them. That's not a criticism: it's one of the knottiest problems that rich developed nations face in the 21st century, in part because it brings into focus the kind of personal and generational sacrifices that are still common among the poorest and least settled groups in the US (e.g. migrant farm workers who follow the harvest) and happen in developing nations now, but which for white Americans are largely considered part of their past, not the present and future.
posted by holgate at 10:27 AM on August 17, 2016 [2 favorites]




This is what brought home that this is a bought-and-paid for shill. They bought and paid for him because they knew that he could convince his family and friends that a woman born to working-class parents who married a man from a straight-up poor single mother are somehow "elite."

Terry pressed him on it. And he replied, I'm paraphrasing here, but the actual quotes are a lot worse, but delivered in a folksy-sincere style - "Well, they surrounded themselves with elites, after literally pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, as we expect all poor white trash to do, so it's a shame."

Instant. Loss. Of. Respect.

He's anti-Trump only because his paymasters are.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:59 PM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


In one way, I appreciate his highlighting of poverty in Appalachia, but in another way, it feels as if he's stereotyping the whole region as one entirely of poverty, a people who cannot rise above their own problems without outside assistance. As I've said in the past, I'm part of the first generation of my family not born in the mountains in over 200+ years. My parents were born and raised in them, and I cannot fathom in any way that their parents would condone lying in court to a judge. That part really bothered me, in his interview, anyways. I don't think that's something he can really wave as a 'hillbilly' virtue of choosing "his people" over the "elite."

Likewise, I assume he recognizes there were a fair number of immigrants who arrived to work in the coal mines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And likewise, some of my ancestors who were among the first to settle in the mountains in the 1700s were of German origin, as well English. It's true, I have plenty of the Scotch-Irish ancestors, but again, making a blanket claim that Appalachians are all Scotch-Irish is completely ignoring a significant chunk of the region's history.

To a degree, I wonder if he hasn't simply fallen in love with this romantic highlander myth of the Appalachian and laid it down atop his family's own problems as a means to understand them or explain them.
posted by Atreides at 8:29 AM on August 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


After reading the articles I'm not buying his book because he's an Ivy League elitist who has surrounded himself with "elites" and comes across as pretty hypocritical. I agree Clinton being the best candidate of all that threw their hat in ring last year is a pretty piss poor situation, but to criticize her for being an elite is just stupid. How are you going to get a campaign off the ground without connections to the rest of the elites in this country?

He may be right about coal country hillbillies, I doubt it but being exploited as an internal colony by Pittsburgh, Delaware and NYC mining companies could have changed local culture significantly from the rest of Appalachia. Hillbilly Country is big, Appalachia and the Ozarks are about 250,000 square miles and have a population of about 25 million. If we were a country nobody would be surprised at a lot of variations within the culture.

My guess is that so many of us were able resist the atomization of our families into nuclear families punching a time clock for 200 years has left us in a similar situation to other tribal people that can't avoid the modern world any longer. Personally, I'll morn the loss of a culture and I'll die a landed peasant on land my g-g-grandparents hunted and gathered on, and what my descendants do with the land really ain't up to me.
posted by ridgerunner at 2:04 PM on August 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


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