CHAPTER 1
THE CONTEXT OF WHITE WORKING-CLASS RAGE
When I saw the ad for J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, I ordered it immediately, anticipating that I would "be acquainted" with its people. Indeed, I was. While my hometown was not Appalachia, I knew many poor people and dealt with a wide variety of people growing up. My father was the owner and operator of the 13 Taxi Company in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and at twelve years of age I started answering the phone there. At sixteen I got a commercial license so I could drive one of the four cabs. Added to my upbringing were two of my uncles and one aunt who were actively engaged in the bootleg business. So, I was acquainted with the poor, with working people, and the underbelly of our community.
Vance's poignant story is a riveting one of his growing up initially in Appalachian Kentucky, but mostly in the Rust Belt town of Middletown in southwest Ohio. With a drug-dependent mother, he is "saved" from that situation by a grandfather, and especially a grandmother, who were central to his making it eventually to the Marines, Ohio State University, and Yale Law School. The book is a gripping page-turner; nevertheless, I grew restive as I read along. His mother's tragic drug dependency was a story I had heard many times. But the more I read Hillbilly Elegy, the more convinced I was that Vance did not know the difference between his mother's addictive pathology and the larger culture of Appalachian life. His comments about people gaming the welfare system, for example, gave anecdotal "evidence" of a problem that is not nearly so much related to the culture as to the economic devastation of the hillbilly lives he claims to represent.
Toward the end of the book I realized what was going on. Acknowledging his conservative position Vance does what conservatives tend to do. According to him, the basic problems of his hillbillies are those of culture, not class. It is the old rightwing ploy of reducing the ravages of economics and class — and, in other discussions, race — to the inadequacies of culture. At one point Vance says that "public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us." He states further, "These problems were not created by government or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we [his people] can fix them." He insists that we "stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better." Vance's book is virtually oblivious to the history and economics of Appalachia and southwestern Ohio. He does not give an account, for example, of the "pillage and plunder" of Appalachia by coal and timber companies. The dominance of coal brought work camps with low wages and company stores with hiked-up prices. In Southern Appalachia the timber barons brought clear-cutting practices of the forests "and left environmental and economic devastation in their wake." In the process the coal and timber industries converted "independent farmers and craftspeople into laborers treated like nothing more than replaceable parts." Meanwhile, many were exiled to the North in a huge diaspora.
The great contradiction of Vance's book is that he is now ensconced in a venture capitalist firm in San Francisco and is telling his "hillbillies" that they have to be responsible for their own lives and work out their problems basically without help from the policies and actions of the state. All of this in a financial capitalism that is sucking on every government tit it can find. I suppose, however, that this is quite fitting for his stated possible plans for a political career as a Republican or, for that matter, a neoliberal Democrat.
Vance's book participates in a wider litany of public commentary that tends to blame the white working class for their current condition. In America today we find stigmatizing, stereotyping, the use of racial epithets, and, yes, romantic and nostalgic characterizations of this important group of Americans. The basic attempt here is to get in touch with the lives of white working-class people primarily through down on the ground studies of them, which will be examined in chapters 3 and 4.
Before turning to studies of white working-class Americans, however, we need to address the context confronted by them. What has been going on? What is the source of their fear, their pain, and their anger? How are we to understand their rage? I demonstrate in this chapter that white working people have endured very hard times and great social, political, and economic reversals over the last forty-five years. They have painful reasons to be afraid and furious.
Neoliberalism and the Abandonment of the Working Class
From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s the United States political economy basically followed the New Deal that originated under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This period of time was known as "the great compromise." This compromise lay in the fact that American labor, at least great numbers of workers, made good money with benefits and pensions. These payoffs, however, often required jobs that were routine, repetitive, and monotonous.
In the mid-1970s this began to change. Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement, exposés of big business such as that of auto safety by Ralph Nader, and the baby boomer counterculture scared key elements in big business. In response a massive, extremist right-wing reaction began, which would take over the previous Eisenhower form of the Republican Party and eventually make major gains in the Democratic Party during the administrations of presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
I call this movement the neoliberal turn. The term itself has had various usages across its history, but here I work with it in a very specific way to characterize what has happened in recent decades in the United States. Neoliberalism is a reaction against mixed-market economic policies and a return to "free market" capitalism as envisioned by right-wing adherents. It combats government regulation, seeks to lower wages and taxes, opposes welfare spending, and actively works to weaken unions and labor organizing. Committed to privatization and fiscal austerity, it fights to give the private sector the dominant role in the economy.
Neoliberalism began with a powerful right-wing attack initiated in the mid-1970s. Its impact on the working class — on whites and people of color — has been devastating, as we shall see.
The Right-Wing Assault on America
In 1971 Louis F. Powell Jr. was invited by the US Chamber of Commerce to draft a confidential memorandum entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System." Powell, a veteran of World War II, and a key attorney for the Tobacco Institute, wrote in his memo that the free enterprise system was under attack and in desperate difficulty.
His memorandum was a call for corporate America to take a more aggressive role in shaping US public opinion to address an ideological crisis. American culture had to be turned around, political discourse had to move in new directions, and public opinion had to be changed and won over. Joined by conservatives like Irving Kristol and William Simon, they built "a right-wing ideology machine" that over the next four decades became "an imposing network of corporate sponsors, business groups, think tanks, media watchdog organizations, radio and television talk shows, Internet sites, conservative intellectuals, and right-wing politicians."
Rich donors provided huge amounts of money to support this right-wing push, funding for which came from wealthy conservative family foundations like the Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation (the Coors family), the Koch family foundations, and the John M. Olin Foundation.
Existing conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (1943), the Hoover Foundation (1919), and the Hudson Institute (1961) took on new life and growth during the 70s, soon to be joined by the Heritage Foundation (1973), the Cato Institute (1978), and the Manhattan Institute (1978). One report estimates that right-wing think tanks spent $1 billion advancing the conservative cause in the 1990s alone. "Conservative think tanks and corporate foundations — this combination of 'brains and money'— gave the right in the 1980s and 1990s the institutional standing and financial wherewithal to dominate political debate in the United States."
Sharply concerned as well by what they saw as media bias that was unfriendly to business, the right began a twofold strategy: a program of intimidation from the outside and taking control on the inside. The first strategy began with watchdog organizations monitoring media to detect and publicize any bias they believed they detected and to push news programs to offer conservative points of view. With right-wing politicians and commentators joining this strategy they became very successful, especially with charges of "liberal bias." Royce comments that the "din" of conservative voices drowned out the left, while mainstream media overcompen-sated in their attempts to be neutral.
These pundits appeared frequently on radio, TV, Internet sites, syndicated columns, and right-wing newspapers and journals. Others, like Bill O'Reilly (until recently), Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh had their own television and radio shows.
At the same time, conservative corporate leaders took aggressive steps to alter political and economic power in the larger society through corporate mergers, widespread efforts of deregulation, and anti-union campaigns. By campaign funding of conservative politicians in the Congress, state legislators, governors' offices, and many local governments, these rightwing forces changed the political and economic landscape of America. Meanwhile, Fox Fictional News (my title) and people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity served as mouthpieces for right-wing propaganda.
All of this encouraged large donations from conservative foundations to right-wing think tanks and the spurring of a powerful current of ideas, intellectuals, pundits, and organizations. Beginning in the 70s and 80s the conservative movement became the dominant influence in political life in America.
The conservative movement was well under way by the time of Ronald Reagan's election to the US presidency and his fiction that a rising tide in the economy lifts all boats. What we have discovered since is that Reagan's rising tide actually made more room for yachts, as we see in the increases in inequality of income and wealth below. Further, his argument that the problem of government is government itself diverted the attention of many away from significant problems with "trickle-down economics," which George H.W. Bush called rightly "voodoo economics." Both of these claims about government and a rising tide were powerful cheers led by Reagan, the most effective cheerleader of the right. These comments, in effect, functioned as a subterfuge to remove protections of the American people from the excesses of a rapacious capitalism and, in fact, furthered the role of government as servant to the rich and corporate America. There are, to be sure, many problems with government but clearly not the ones Reagan identified. He lived in a B-movie world and acted out a soap opera drama filled with fictional plots that made legal thieves of the real robbers of the American Dream.
The rise of neoliberalism also led to greater political activity on the part of the US Chamber of Commerce, so that today the Chamber is a major right-wing force and a lobbying machine. While the Chamber is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla stomping through the Washington jungle, a host of other smaller but predatory animals are on the prowl. Why? Because it pays off corporate greed.
The Complicity of the Democratic Party and Its Presidents
It would be a mistake, however, to blame the entirety of the outcomes visited upon working Americans on the right-wing movement alone. By their complicity, the Democratic Party and its presidents for the last forty-five years are guilty of abandoning working people in this country. If anything, they deserve more of the shame because, at least since the time of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, the Democrats were supposed to be the party of the people, especially working people. I will not go into detail about the Democratic Party but simply in this space lay out the failures of Democratic presidents, which in most cases reflect that party's accommodation of the right-wing movement in the United States.
I begin with President Jimmy Carter, who first broke with the New Deal tradition. It was he who cut out public works projects, rejected organized labor, and with a Democratic Congress enacted the first actually sizable tax cuts for the rich. Moreover, he enacted the first of the big deregulations, and with Paul Volcker, put the country on an austerity program with highly negative impacts on workaday Americans.
But Carter was a piker compared to Bill Clinton. Not only did Clinton collude with Newt Gingrich but on occasion worked against his own party in Congress to pass his so-called neoliberal programs. The "welfare reform" he enacted in coalition with Newt Gingrich continued Ronald Reagan's assault on the poor, and Clinton's successful endorsement of NAFTA and his trade agreements with China served corporate America at considerable cost to working people in this country. He, too, lowered taxes on the rich and corporate America and was a servant to Wall Street to the detriment of the greater American public.
Instrumental in eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act, Clinton's legislative work, along with the inanities of George W. Bush, led directly to the 2008 collapse of the economy. Deregulation, eliminating protections of the people from the excesses of Wall Street and corporate America, were big on the Clinton list of actions. These included derivatives, the telecom industry, electricity, and interstate banking. And, of course, he was key to the passage of a capital gains tax. The Clinton administration also played a pivotal role in another "reform," this time of criminal justice, which led to the massive incarnation of people of color now so prominent in our country.
Moving on to the presidency of Barack Obama is painful for me. I had great hopes for him and his leadership of the country. And, like Clinton, he did some good things (e.g., the Affordable Care Act, with some qualifications), but Thomas Frank captures very well the work of his administration when he says Obama "repeatedly sacrificed working people's interests because it conflicted with the interests of the upper strata." For example, he managed to get through Congress a large stimulus package at a critical time, but the major "part of it was wasted on tax cuts designed to lure Republican votes." It also called for "shovel ready" projects, but what it did not do was develop federal job creation because such job programs would have increased the federal workforce. So, instead, Obama's so-called New New Deal doled the money out to others; and while unemployment did finally come down, wages remained stagnant, convincing the president, says Frank, that there was nothing that could really be done for working people.
A well-publicized failure was a Democratic proposal that would have permitted adjustments in mortgages for homeowners who came before bankruptcy judges. Called cramdown, this proposal would've been of extraordinary assistance to millions of homeowners, albeit not helpful to mortgage holders. When the proposal came before the Senate, Obama did nothing, and bank lobbyists defeated it readily.
In addition, the Employee Free Choice Act would have facilitated collective bargaining between workers and management and could have helped reverse the long-term decline of the percentage of union membership in the workforce. Obama endorsed this measure initially, but he withdrew his support under pressure from Walmart and Chamber of Commerce lobbyists. Among these lobbyists were former assistants to John Kerry, Rahm Emanuel, some Democratic senators, and the secretary of labor.
A good many other things, such as Obama's support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, served the interests of Big Pharma and Silicon Valley, for example, but had no protections for American workers. Finally, and damning, Obama ignored criminal behavior by banks and other financial institutions that led to the 2008 economic crisis. Some say there was nothing he could do in the last six years of his presidency because of the intransigence of Republicans in Congress. Yet the office of the president has executive powers regarding antitrust laws that were clearly at Obama's command. The timing was perfect; antitrust actions would have been powerfully popular, but Obama did nothing. As Thomas Frank reports, "Anti-monopoly investigations conducted by Obama's Justice Department went from a barely breathing four in 2009 to a flat zero in 2014."
