I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.
Call it the civilization-vs.-barbarism hypothesis to explain the increase in labor immobility. Pointer from Mark Thoma, who I am sure looks at this from the standpoint of a different axis.
French is commenting on a piece by Kevin Williamson. More coverage here.
“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces,” the NR roving correspondent writes. “[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves.”
I’m fine highlighting the “victim class” nature of some people’s thinking…provided that analysis is applied consistently across classes (and we know it’s not). “Political thinking” is as much about which issues you choose to view through your lens as it is about your lens.
“They failed themselves.”
Apparently, it is okay to say this about working-class whites, but not other demographic groups.
Is it possible that the relative success working class whites found in the 30 or 40 years immediately following World War II has been put largely out of their reach today, in significant part, by numerous policy choices made by a political class that despises and dismisses them? Just asking.
It is also funny that we all write off the entire Democrat half, because, well, we obviously can’t expect them to do anything constructive.
So, the Democrats have a pretty good racket while they can keep it, where Republicans blame the collective failures on Republicans, and then when there are no good establishment candidates, the only charismatic outsider means the Republican party is imploding.
I guess we didn’t not build that.
And we heard plenty of this back in the Black Ghetteos of yesteryear and the National Review has no problem complaining about poor minorities.
The National Review reaction is similar to Arnold Kling reaction to the failure of the libertarian movement this year. They can’t believe that a core group of conservatives don’t believe in the magic of markets and how the modern economic system that has hurt their communities that poor white working classes are reacting in poor way supporting Trump.
The thing is, these symptoms of social pathology are appearing in the lower classes of all races, certainly throughout the Anglosphere, and probably in much of the world, both developed and developing. Go read some British writer like Hitchens or Dalrymple on the current state of the white English underclass. Outside of extremely religious communities, where exactly is the lower class still engaging in traditionally ordered lifestyles? After the dam breaks, you get the flood.
The fact that the timing of this social decay is similar across many countries is revealing. It’s almost like there’s something much bigger at play than the local idiosyncrasies of regional dysfunctional subcultures. Time for the NR crowd to arrange an Average is Over reading club for themselves, right after they fix their website (talk about decay!)
So, to say, “They did it to themselves,” is correct in a certain narrow sense, but absurdly crude and naive due to a pinhole focus on just one part of our nature. Human beings have constrained autonomy and so respond in somewhat predictable ways to economic and cultural incentives. So subordinating the role of the large social forces at play to insignificance in comparison with mere failures of virtue or personal discipline is a key error since they clearly act in tandem.
Thoma’s OMG-ing is kind of pathetic. That said, not having spent much time among the kind of people Williamson talks about, I don’t know what to make of his “these communities deserve to die” statements. I grew up in a small town in Western PA, which wasn’t that far removed from Appalachia and its various social problems. There were elements of the kind of dysfunction he talks about, but nothing that bad. More DUI’s and pot smoking than heroin.
It maybe that in parts of the country like W. Va, communities are suffering from a kind of adverse selection: everyone with a clue moved away already, and the folks who stayed behind are the kind of low-motivation, self-indulgent, entitled people he complains about, and they really would shape up and fly right if only there were more positive examples in their peer groups. Case in point: All The Right Moves, that Tom Cruise flick about high school football players trying to earn college scholarships so they could get the heck out of these depressing coal mining towns the grew up in…that came out 33 years ago in 1983. That’s a long period of brain drain. And now that the coal mines are mostly gone, too….
With that in mind, it probably would be best for the rest of these folks to move, also. If you think of a town where the middle and upper class residents gradually vanished and the people who remained didn’t quite have the human capital to do things like keep the water running and the traffic lights on…probably a good idea to move somewhere that the water is still running, no?
This comment nails it.
I think an underappreciated personality trait is the degree of environmental stimulation you need to express a particular behavior. In this case it’s some generic sense of civility, and without a critical mass of high Human Capital people to establish beneficial communal norms any sort of portal to civil participation there’s an inertial tendency for the wheels to come off, which is what we’re seeing.
Sorry, that comment wasn’t edited.
Make that last sentence “and without a critical mass of high Human Capital people to establish beneficial communal norms there’s no portal to civil participation and an inertial tendency for the wheels to come off, which is what we’re seeing.”
It is the natural progression, is it not? Playing the victim the order of the day. I agree completely with French, who pretty much describes my path- grew up in rural Kentucky and live today in a small town in Tennessee. We see the same things, it appears.
From the final Daily Caller link: >> While Williamson blames the people living in run-down white communities for their own woes, he does not apply the same principle to run-down minority communities. In his book and articles on the failures of Detroit, for instance, the National Review writer blames “progressivism” and unions for ruining the predominately African-American city.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/12/national-review-writer-working-class-communities-deserve-to-die/#ixzz42zYLOFUA
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Maybe Williamson is setting up the Tabloid Dem Press to publicize, and mostly agree with, his strong critique of the bad decisions of poor white folk. Then, when enough Media Dems are on board with "Trump supporters have chosen failure" idea, maybe he'll switch and claim it's the same problem in even more-poor, Black and Hispanic communities. Or maybe he'll let others do that work.
Bad decisions are the problem — racism is a small influence on Blacks encouraging bad decisions, even less for whites. But the big gov't entitlement ideas, including the Basic Income, and programs are huge enablers of victim excuse making.
All anti-poverty work should be focused on offering jobs to the poor, close to where they live. Including more possible programs to see which ones work the best (gov't created jobs; gov't subsidized jobs; gov't tax & regulation exemptions to business for hiring unemployed, etc.)
They have done it to themselves through who they voted for and through not voting. We will see if they remedy that.
I know literally nobody like this. The people I see who like Trump seem to like him for the opposite reason, or at least they think they do.
So, what changed is select rural locations suddenly and inexplicably lost their morality for no reason?
Or, did we squander our manufacturing surplus by reducing rather than increasing our competitive moat?
See Rod Dreher’s comments.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/hard-case-for-trump/
Why can’t it be both? Why can’t the Appalachians be both victims of globalization and progressive policies and also show a sense of entitlement? Both are possible.
The American dream is that your life will be better than your parents. That is certainly true of immigrants, less true of many in the white working class. That’s where the sense of entitlement comes from, the idea that a $10/hour job is beneath them if their parents made $10/hour in an entry level job 20 years ago. Of course they could move to LA and lay drywall, right? Plenty of jobs like that.
Are there plenty of jobs like that?
Every once in awhile someone will say something like, “if your willing to move to the other side of the country to a shithole and do a terrible job I would never do myself, you can make $15-$25/hour. Yeah, your parents did as well or better without having to work on an oil rig in North Dakota with no women, in the freezing cold, and living in an overpriced trailer because that’s all the temporary housing they have. But fuck you, seize the day you bum!”
These jobs command (not that big and ever decreasing) hardship bonus pay specifically because most people won’t move to North Dakota. If millions upon millions of people did move to North Dakota what do you think the wage premium would be? Would it not just evaporate down to the same minimum wage you can get at working at Wal-Mart?
Is it really worth the expense of moving across the country to a temporary nowheresville where you can’t put down roots? If you get sick or need child care where can you turn other then expensive paid help? What happens when you uproot your entire life to participate in some boom industry only to have the price of oil collapse five years later and all the jobs dry up?
Or maybe they can move to NYC, the cost of living there is totally reasonable for anyone that doesn’t want to live ten to an apartment.
Or maybe we can be really glib and assume average IQ people are all going to become engineers and other high IQ professionals. Isn’t that the Thomas Friedmen solution. What would happen to the wages of high IQ professions if genetics hadn’t restricted supply? Can we really all get jobs trading financial derivatives to one another?
For two centuries whenever one set of jobs got destroyed another opened up. That isn’t true anymore though, especially for anyone below a certain IQ threshold. Prime age male labor force participation has been going down in every single developed country for decades now. Are all of them bums? Is every single government and culture on the entire planet just not being free market and pull yourself up by your bootstraps enough?
What do you want these people to do? Do you have any answer for them that isn’t a glib rationalization? Can you even keep your own story straight? If there are no jobs, why are we importing more people? If there are jobs, why aren’t non-whites taking advantage of the jobs lazy white bums are turning down rather then stabilizing at net tax liability levels of human capital generation after generation?
As best I can tell the plan is to import third worlders to compete with them for ever decreasing wages and conditions for a vanishing number of jobs. This desperate of divided mass of tan-ish peasantry then won’t be able to challenge the powers that be in any meaningful way. I’m shocked, absolutely shocked, that white people are rebelling against being told to die off so we can become a third world country.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this issue in Player Piano in 1952. He noted that its the people who escaped upbringings from the left side of the bell curve that most hated the left side of the bell curve. They were lucky enough to have won the genetic lottery and fell far from the tree, but they still saw themselves as tainted by where they grew up, so they developed an intense hatred of anyone who couldn’t get out like them.
Williamson was born a few IQ points higher then the kids he played baseball with growing up, and now he’s moved to the big city and gotten a job churning out second rate sophistry to the right hand side of k-street. But he can never get over the fact that at one point he had something in common with flyover country. Can’t flyover country just die off already so he doesn’t have to be ashamed of his own childhood.
I won’t even get into the social/cultural issues that people on the left side of social issues have pushed that have been absolutely devastating to the left half of the bell curve. Needless to say just as they spent down the nations economic capital they spent down its social capital as well.
The best the right can come up with on those issues is Charles Murray telling the upper middle class to yell at the white working class that they are worthless bums who have it coming, because if its one thing the UMC needs encouragement of its shaming and deploring working class whites. Lowering the social status of working class white men is defiantly what is needed to improve their communities and marriage prospects.
it is not that bad. My son hated school and so got a job as a umber’s helper after high school, he is doing great. His pay is not great (about $12/hour) but our county has allowed a reasonable amount of building so he bought a nice condo for $44K. That is what we need cheaper housing and healthcare everything else is very cheap today.
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-year.html
Bravo, asdf.
asdf, you rock! I don’t always agree, but you are a pleasure to read!
My father’s family is from a county like that in Kentucky.
The population peaked at the 1890 census — yes, 1890 — and the only time it grew after that was the 1930s when my Grandfather and many others lost their jobs elsewhere and moved back to the farm — at least they could eat.
So for over a century the smart kids or ones with something on the ball left.
So you were left with those at the bottom of the barrel.
Is it any wonder that the ones that are still there leave a lot to be desired for any jobs.
By the way, it was coal that originally attracted a large population influx to a relatively under populated region. But since 1930 ( ? ) the coal industry has
industrialized and even though coal production has continued to grow, the industry required many, many fewer miners, so by modern times the region was overpopulated for the jobs or resources available to support them. The regions major problem is that not enough of the population has moved away.