Stop trying to understand the rural white voter

Many of Hochschild’s conclusions are correct, but not particularly striking. She observes both here and inside Strangers in their own country that many of her subjects feel that others – minorities, immigrants, etc. – are somehow ‘falling in line’, and she notes that this idea, however incorrect, is a powerful motivator for political response , especially in impoverished communities. As she notes, many residents of these communities Doing go to cities, some in patterns of almost seasonal occupational migration, and see the scope and scale of building investment; roads; airports; restaurants – and then return to the hollowed-out, deindustrialized landscape of the post-extraction economy. Hochschild identifies a “pride paradox”: Americans want to live with pride and dignity and find themselves simultaneously proud of their community and its values ​​and ashamed of its poverty and disintegration.

Yet the book has an unfortunate tendency to fit people into this scheme in a way that can feel both narrow-minded and, frankly, a bit naive. She finds many cases of the “pride paradox,” such as Alex Hughes, a small business owner who “yes-sure” made his way into jobs and businesses — training himself and taking on work that others wouldn’t or couldn’t do — until “the 1990s Alex’s “yes, sure” strategy no longer yielded steady work,” and he found himself divorced, underemployed, and $128,000 in debt to the IRS. Like many of the Pikeville residents Hochschild meets, Hughes claims he wants nothing to do with the white nationalists. He tells her, “I’m three emergencies past a deadline at a job I’m afraid I might lose”; he has no interest in “racial conflict.” But like 80 percent of Pike County, he voted for Donald Trump, who showed hardly less hostility toward racial minorities or immigrants than the Nazis did during the march. I wondered whether the paradoxes Hochschild identified were really explanations, or whether they were always excuses and justifications.

Some of this empathy is starting to feel like special pleading. I grew up in one of these communities. Uniontown, Pennsylvania, wasn’t as small as Pikeville (although it may be even poorer), but it was still an old coal and coke town with a dying Main Street, whose population had dwindled from more than 20,000 in the 1940s . and ’50s to just under 12,000 when I was in high school there in the ’90s (and continued to drop below 10,000 today). There were and are plenty of good and noble people, but just as anyone in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, or anywhere else would like to volunteer, there are plenty of assholes as well. (Abramsky’s book is more candid on this point.) You don’t need the full thesis of a book like White rural rage, or even Thomas Frank’s What’s going on with Kansas, to see that for some people at least it’s about cruelty, like The Atlantic OceanAdam Serwer said. Sophisticated racists with an understanding of journalism and, to some extent, the social sciences are able to invoke terms like disinvestment and material deprivation as little more than a convenient excuse for their corrosive beliefs. We must be careful not to get too easily carried away by self-representation – a weakness perhaps in the ethnographic form itself.