"He had struggled hard to climb out of the world of a poor plumber’s fifth son, to make it to a salary of $70,000 a year with a company that built oil rigs, to a third and at-last-right wife, and to a home he loved that was now wrecked. At the entrance gate to the middle class, he felt he’d been slapped in the face. For progressive movements from the 1960s on — in support of blacks, women, sexual minorities, immigrants, refugees — the federal government was, he believed, a giant ticket-dispensing machine in an era in which the economy was visiting on middle-class and blue-collar white men the sorts of punishment once more commonly reserved for blacks. Democrats were, he was convinced, continuing to make the government into an instrument of his own marginalization — and media liberals were now ridiculing people like him as ignorant, backward rednecks. Culturally, demographically, economically, and now environmentally, he felt ever more like a stranger in his own land.
It mattered little to him that Donald Trump would not reduce the big government he so fervently wanted cut, or that The Donald was soft on the pro-life, pro-marriage positions he valued, or that he hadn’t uttered a peep about the national debt. None of it mattered because Trump, he felt, would switch off that marginalization machine and restore the honor of his kind of people, of himself. Mike knew that liberals favored care for the environment far more than Republicans, Tea Partiers, or Donald Trump. Yet, despite his lost home in a despoiled land, like others of his older white neighbors back at the Bayou and here in the Basin, Mike was foursquare for Trump; that’s how deeply his pride was injured and a measure of just how much that injury galled him." -- Arlie Hochschild 2016 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
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Hey Kirk, thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of this particular book before you mentioned it, but it's at least the third published this year alone that focuses on the white working class. Between these books and the number of articles and commentaries I've seen on the subject, this seems to be the year of the white working class (in print anyway). Hillbilly Elegy seems to be the one getting the most publicity these days, perhaps since its author (J.D. Vance) is a conservative who grew up in Appalachia before a stint in the Marines, undergraduate studies and Yale Law School. The other is bluntly-titled White Trash. All three books (at least from the excerpt you shared and the author interviews I've listened to) seem to have similar explanations for the appeal of Trump to the white working class.
From the perspective of white males with a high school diploma or less, government giveaways to less-deserving people of color and immigrants, along with free trade deals like NAFTA have made life worse for them. The United States has turned into a country that is no longer theirs. To give credit where it’s due, they’re actually right about some of this. Free trade has had winners and losers, and unfortunately for them they landed in the latter category. Beyond that, the correctness of their position ends. The truth is that the diminishing power of unions has played a significant role as well. As for people of color and immigrants, plenty of them are working class as well and have been negatively impacted also. As Vance has written (and as Kevin D. Williamson has also written, though far more harshly), some of the wounds the white working class has suffered are self-inflicted. The stories I’ve been seeing in various newspapers about the decreasing lifespans of middle-aged white men and women are driven in significant part by alcohol and opioid addiction. Rather than people of color and immigrants, it is in fact whites who are the largest consumers of programs intended to help the poor (including the expansion of Medicaid that many GOP-governed states continue to reject).
Trump is, for better or worse, the first politician in a long time who has spoken directly to the anxieties of the white working class. Some of that anxiety is economic. But a substantive part of that anxiety (if not animus) is racial. Rather than the dog whistling of certain previous GOP candidates for president however, Trump has opted for the bullhorn in appealing to the baser prejudices held by held by some working class whites. Trump’s xenophobia and bigotry have unfortunately drowned out legitimate economic grievances about how the economy fails to work for a significant portion of the population in this country. If Trump loses this election, those economic issues won’t disappear.
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/09/04/hillbilly-elegy-sheds-light-on-shadowy-places-in-the-hollers/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/06/23/a-cultural-and-political-history-of-white-trash-america/?utm_term=.02778c01a769
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