Yesterday, Racket published an interview with Les Leopold, along with a review of his new book, “Wall Street’s War on Workers.” Leopold’s book is structured as labor’s sober answer to yuppie sneer-fests like White Rural Rage, but I thought another key angle to the subject was already captured by an earlier book: America: The Farewell Tour by
. Chris was generous enough to take a call on the subject, and our discussion is posted below.
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City journalists now barely visit the rest of America, but when they do, they’re no longer conscious of the difference between visiting a place and living there. If you live somewhere long enough to see the former “downtown” disappear and be replaced by a Wal-Mart or Costco two miles away, or watch the plant that was the county’s main employer shutter, rust, and grow over with weeds, or if you can remember when the pill-popping streetwalker who works casinos in Biloxi on weekends was your science teacher or chair of the PTA, you’ll feel different emotions than someone merely told those facts.
I thought of America: The Farewell Tour when I read White Rural Rage because Hedges did what authors Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller did not: sit in diners with people like Christine Pagano after their AA meetings and just listen. Pagano went from being a new mom working in a diner and getting a cosmetology certificate to becoming hooked first on Oxy, then heroin, then moving to prostitution, then robbing johns with her boyfriend, being raped at least twenty times (including by cops), and finally ending up as, in her words, “no longer anything”:
She sent her son to live with her mother, a teacher. She moved in for a while with Baby in Jersey City. She eventually became homeless, sleeping in an abandoned flower shop. Her drug use soared. She would be awake for six or seven days at a time. She had as many as twenty clients a day…
Pagano’s story obviously isn’t typical, but isn’t atypical, either. You can go almost anywhere in America and find serious social wreckage. What downstream effect that might have on partisan political choices is hard to compute, but that’s not the first or even the third or fourth question I’d think to ask people in certain places, be they inner city projects or dead factory towns. Ideally you’d want to do a lot of listening before you ask anything at all, which is what Chris did. I asked him about the impact of these caricatures of the “white working class,” and he didn’t hold back:
MT: The thesis of “Wall Street’s War on Workers” is that the “white working class” has been mischaracterized and that a lot of the anger isn’t about hot-button social issues, but about layoffs. Does that line up with what you found in “America: A Farewell Tour”?
Chris Hedges: Most of the people who demonize these voters — let’s start with Paul Krugman. He spent his entire life in Ivy League institutions. They write off or they attack a group of people they’ve never met. Half of my family comes out of the lower working class in Maine, post-industrial areas that have been devastated. Think Lowell, Massachusetts.
MT: Manchestah…
Chris Hedges: The towns have been destroyed, lives have been destroyed. Les looks at Mingo County in West Virginia. So this was a county that actually had an armed rebellion of United Mine Workers at Blair Mountain in the 1920s, and the government finally had to send in the National Guard and the state militia to crush it because the Pinkertons and the gun thugs couldn’t do it. It was only in the early 1930s that Roosevelt legalized the union and gave them the ability to do collective bargaining instead of living in essence under some kind of martial law. So Mingo County, as Les points out in his book, was fervently Democratic. They remembered what the Democrats had done for them, and even Clinton was pulling over 60%.
Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.
In America, the Farewell Tour, I wrote a chapter out of Anderson, Indiana. Anderson, Indiana used to be a big GM town, produced 25,000 union jobs, huge GM plants. Clinton passes NAFTA. They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.
MT: You profiled Christine Pagano, and there was a section about Camden, New Jersey.
Chris Hedges: In Anderson, there were almost no supermarkets left. The one on the west side — I think it was the west or south, I can’t remember — was shuttered. Even the churches were shuttered. And then of course you have population decline because people leave. So you have whole streets that are just derelict because they don’t tear the houses down. So of course these people are angry. And I remember talking to the old UAW leaders, they still had a UAW hall, and they said, “We’re not trying to get people to vote for Biden. We’re just trying to say, okay, vote for Trump. But at least on the Democratic slate in the state of Indiana, vote Democrat.” Even that didn’t work.
So I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon – and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby – wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them.
The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. There were relatives of mine in Maine who, I mean, let’s be frank. I mean they didn’t even like Catholics, Jews, gays… that was a long list. If you weren’t a white male and from Mechanic Falls, Maine, they really didn’t have any time for you at all. But I can forgive that, because it’s provincialism. I mean, it’s not that they were stupid. My grandfather was very bright. Intellectually, very gifted. But his sister’s husband died when he was a senior in high school, and she had three kids and he had to drop out of school and work the farm.
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When you’re poor in America, you don’t get another chance. So I got a scholarship to these horrible boarding schools and was going to school with the Buckleys and the elite, the Mellons and so on. And I watch these mediocrities get — Bush is a classic example — chance after chance, after chance, after chance, after chance. So yeah, it’s really dangerous. And Krugman, I think you’ve called Krugman out more than once. Krugman is the poster child for this. He may be a good economist, but he doesn’t have any idea of what’s happening. And just the basics of reporting, if you’re going to write that, at least go out and listen, hear them out. But they don’t go to the communities. They don’t understand their very real suffering. They don’t understand how betrayed they feel.
I think you would agree from your own reporting, they’re not blind to Trump. But the fact is, the lies that the Democrats and the liberal class told them did far, far more damage to them, to their families and their communities, than any of the lies that Trump told. And I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to run out after they’ve been destroyed. Their communities have been destroyed. It’s that precarious. People forget the instability of the gig economy — you have so much anxiety, and with suppressed wages, which is by intent, because now we make money not by producing things, but by debt peonage. Their lives are really stressed. I mean, Barbara Ehrenreich in her great book, Nickeled and Dimed, she tries to work these low wage jobs. She finally gives up: “This is too exhausting.”
