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...