The almost pathological suspicion
Fareed Zakaria is also somewhat baffled by J D Vance’s explanations for why impoverished white working class people love Trump. He’s not as baffled as I am, and he’s more polite about it, but he sees some holes in the argument.
The other, larger gap in Vance’s book is race. He speaks about the causes of the anxiety and pain of the white working class, but he describes the causes almost entirely in economic terms. Their jobs have disappeared, their wages have stagnated, their lives have become more unstable. But there is surely something else at work here — the sense that people who look and sound very different are rising up. Surveys, polls and other research confirm that racial identity and anxiety are at the heart of support for Trump.
Vance touches on this sideways, when speaking about the almost pathological suspicion his hillbillies have for Barack Obama. Vance explains that it is because of the president’s accent — “clean, perfect, neutral” — his urban background, his success in the meritocracy, his reliability as a father.
Wait. What? Vance “explains” that Obama’s reliability as a father is a reason for working class people to be pathologically suspicious of him? Why? Do they consider that “elitist” too? Is it snobbish and latte-sipping to be a good parent? If that is what he’s saying it’s just horrifying. It’s a Iago-type reason to hate someone – “He hath a daily beauty in his life/ that makes me ugly.” Apparently Obama makes people feel bad by being a good parent – and instead of trying to be good parents too, they respond by resenting him and supporting a man with no apparent morals of any kind.
“And,” one wants to whisper to Vance, “because he’s black .” After all, over the years the white working class has voted for plenty of Republican and Democratic candidates with fancy degrees and neutral accents. That’s not what makes Obama different.
The white working class has always derived some of its status because there was a minority underclass below it. In his seminal work, “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Edmund Morgan argues that even before the revolution, the introduction of slavery helped dampen class conflict within the white population. No matter how poor you were, there was security in knowing there was someone beneath you.
The rage that is fueling the Trump phenomenon is not just about stagnant wages. It is about a way of life under siege, and it risks producing a “politics of cultural despair.” That phrase was coined by Fritz Stern to describe Germany a century ago. The key to avoiding that fate is not a series of public policies — whether tariffs or tax credits — but enlightened politics, meaning leadership that does not prey on people’s fears and phobias.
Preying on people’s fears and phobias is all that Trump does.
Yes. Much more accurate.
Keep in mind that many of the working class white were members of trade unions, and those trade union were highly segregated. LBJ ended that segregation with his civil rights legislation. These white working class still hold a grudge about that.
I was born and raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from a family of toilet cleaners and garbage workers and petty, unsuccessful business. Like Vance, I was cursed with insight into the hopelessness of my circumstance, and blessed with both the appetite and the extreme good fortune to claw my way out of the deep well of poverty and ignorance into which I’d been born. I’ve not read Vance’s book, but I’ve read reviews of it, and it seems he’s missed the three Rs of Southern poverty, without which nothing peculiar to Southern behaviour can be adequately explained. These are, in my order of estimation, revanchism, racism, and religion. I’ll do my best to briefly summarise them now.
The three are intertwined throughout the South, particularly the Deep and Old South. The Appalachias are the backbone of the latter from northern Georgia to Maryland. The pine gullies and hollers were peopled by Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Cornish peasants, people who suffered under the lash of indenture to English-blooded masters, and whose only relative station came from the fact that they were Christian and free, at least once the indenture that usually came as the price of their often-unconsensual transportation had expired. The same could not be said of the Africans who were transported and enslaved, which gave the settlers some fig leaf of pride to drape across the obscenity of the poverty in which they lived. That is the proximate cause of the racism that still haunts the South to this day; I present it first because it was the most deeply-rooted, though these days I believe revanchism weighs just a bit more heavily on the Southern psyche.
It is notable that the poorest areas of the South were those that resisted the Confederacy the longest, with the most remarkable (and successful) pocket of resistance being that of West Virginia, which did not exist until 1861. West Virginians counter-seceded from Virginia when the plantation owners and plutocrats in Richmond followed South Carolina’s lunacy, and West Virginia was admitted into the Union under the opening shots of the Civil War. Eastern Tennessee and northeastern Georgia attempted similar moves of loyalty to the United States; they were unsuccessful, but only because Jefferson Davis held them by force of arms under martial law. Appalachians acted thus because they knew—poor and ignorant as they indisputably were—that the Civil War wasn’t over “States’ Rights”…it was over the rights of wealthy Englishmen to keep profiting on the backs of labour they’d stolen. Make no mistake, West Virginians and eastern Tennesseans had no solidarity with slaves, racial or otherwise, but they were on the whole unwilling to send their sons off to die so that Englishmen could keep those slaves.
After Sherman and Grant and their confreres burnt the South to the ground from New Orleans to Richmond, the plantation fields lay fallow and the Englishmen of the plains faced the prospect of being every bit as poor as their Appalachian inferiors. The Union attempted a plan, the Reconstruction, that would have seen the economy of the South forever changed, and might well have lifted the Appalachias out of poverty…or at least kept them level with the plains. If Grant had had the courage and the forebearance to follow up on Lincoln’s design, the Confederacy may well and truly have died at Appomattox in 1865. Instead, the Englishmen of the plains insinuated themselves into the putative new order; they turned slavery into sharecropping and tenant farming, with the result that they could extract just as much labour out of their workforce without having to take any responsibility for their food, clothing, or shelter. Instead of breaking slavery, Union and Confederate money men did their level best to nullify the result of the war which over half a million of their fellow countrymen (and women) had died for, not counting the millions who suffered for decades afterward. For over a century, the social order of the South continued more-or-less unchanged, except with even more poverty for those unlucky enough to be born in a plantation house.
Revanchism is a curse brought on by a broken promise. In the South’s case, it was two promises that were broken: the promise of victory (by Davis and Lee) and, then, the promise of a just and fair Reconstruction by Lincoln. Over the century and a half since those promises were both broken, they’ve been largely elided in the poorest parts of the South, and the betrayal of the Reconstruction has been subsumed into an amnesiac support for the war that the Appalachians’ ancestors wanted no truck with when it actually happened. The Union, and hence the government in general, became the chief source of corruption and despair for far too many Appalachians, betrayed as they’d been both by Richmond and then Washington over the course of decades.
Religion means something a little bit different to the poorest Southerners, particularly Appalachians. There are plenty of churches, sure, most of them small community centres in or around towns. But the pews are usually filled with what passes for the middle class, people most concerned with appearances and social stature. Most of the people I knew growing up didn’t bother with going to church, and not just because nobody could afford a suit; religion is something that these people live, a story they tell themselves and one another, because they have so few better stories to tell. They pray not because they don’t know better, but because they know all too well that they’ll never feel the hand of human justice or prosperity, and the best they can do is hope for divine intervention in this world or, failing that, a place in paradise in the next one. Most of them have never read a word of the Bible, but they’ll swear up and down it’s the only way to live your life. In fact, plenty of them don’t even consider themselves “religious” at all—they have Jesus in their hearts, and that’s more than good enough, because their lives aren’t going to get any better otherwise.
I’m not an expert on the history of the South, but I know enough (and have lived enough) to claim with some confidence that anyone who tries to frame a discussion of Southern culture without extensive treatments of at least these three points is not worth wasting your time on. Read To Kill a Mockingbird instead; it’ll be much more entertaining, at least.
Wow. That is an epic comment, Seth. Thank you.
[…] a comment by Seth on The almost pathological […]
No, I don’t think that’s it. He violates all their ideas of what a black man should be. He is smart, well-educated, speaks better than most of us (his rhetoric could remind one of MLK, he’s so skilled), but being a good father is the absolute worst, because that violates the idea they have that black men aren’t good fathers, that they abandon their families, and that all black families are dysfunctional. In short, he’s uppity.
It’s sort of like how uncomfortable people were about Robert Ingersoll because he demonstrated that a non-believer could be a truly decent, well adjusted, happy person with a good stable family life. It destroys stereotypes, and as such, is quite uncomfortable.
The thing about Iago? For me, that’s what makes Shakespeare so great. He can distill down that kind of feeling into a single phrase or situation. Yes, people do feel resentment at someone who makes them feel small, dirty or inferior – and in Obama’s case the poor whites see someone they’ve been taught to despise as worthless and inferior achieving something circumstances deny them: success, both in career and relationships. Obama brings home the appalling chaos of their lives as described by Seth’s wonderful comment because they are supposed to be better than what he is.
He hath a daily beauty in his life/ that makes me ugly is a perfect description of that feeling.
This is all VERY deep stuff! Makes Trump seem even more blunt, shallow and fake — surface to core.