In my opinion, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of United States may well prove an epic disaster. Sure. Who’s to blame ? It’s the white working class, according to Keillor, whose Wednesday Washington Post op-ed suggests that poor whites can’t claw their way out of encroaching poverty because they have bad values.
Now, the votes of whites with a high school education or less did help Donald Trump win the presidency. It’s also a simple and bleak fact that if in 2016 as many Democratic Party voters had gone to the polls as in 2012, let alone 2008, we’d now be anticipating the inauguration of Hillary Clinton.
But why reflect on the possible reasons why Democratic turnout was so lackluster when there’s a convenient, downtrodden, vilified societal group at hand to blame it on ?
Read it, and weep :
“Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America is still the land where the waitress’s kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids.”
This is the height of smug, ignorant liberal arrogance, and it's essentially the same attack that’s been deployed by Republicans and from the right in past decades to attack poor African-Americans in the inner cities ; they don’t have the cultural values which enabled other Americans to work their way up the economic ladder. They’re poor because they’re un-disciplined, ignorant, and lazy.
I happen, by the way, to know public school teachers who work in Massachusetts, in areas both rural and urban, who assure me that Keillor’s “plugged into electronics day and night” stereotype applies equally to poor whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, and pretty much any selected impoverished ethnic group you might care to name.
Whether from a hard-right think tank like the Heritage Foundation or from a liberal icon such as Garrison Keillor, these sorts of attacks are often accompanied by examples of individuals from the targeted, vilified group who, through heroic effort, have themselves transcended, or enabled their offspring to transcend, their bleak circumstances.
So, we have Keillor’s “waitress and her husband” whose heroic parental sacrifices will enable their children to become physicists — or novelists like Keillor himself.
It does happen. But statistically speaking it doesn’t happen very often. Especially these days.
Study after study has revealed that income mobility in America today has plummeted to shockingly low levels. If your parents were affluent, you’ll likely grow up be wealthy. If poor, you’ll likely grow up to be poor.
There are lots and lots of reasons, but the upshot is simple — affluent parents tend to be well-educated, and the combination gives their offspring a powerful relative head start in life.
It’s all too convenient for rich, urban elites to vilify, from afar, poor whites for their racism, their tasteless displays of lowbrow culture, their anger.
This has been going on for decades — consider John Boorman’s 1972 movie Deliverance, in which four affluent city men from Atlanta on a white water rafting weekend in Appalachia are ruthlessly hunted, raped, and killed by toothless backwoods predators whose motivations are never made clear.
Now, to point out the underlying viciousness of Garrison Keillor’s Washington Post op-ed has nothing to do with justifying racism from any quarter. Are poor white Americans more likely to be racist ? Possibly, but that’s beside the point.
What’s especially ironic about Keillor’s perspective is that the same economic trends, notably deindustrialization, that have buffeted poor and working class whites have undercut poor and working class non-white minorities as well.
But rather than promote a narrative that explores how poor Americans of all ethnicities are victims of underlying structural changes unleashed by neo-liberal economic policies, Keillor chose to single out working class whites who, as it happens aren’t doing so well these days.
Indeed, I’m rather worried that Keillor’s smug, nasty screed will fall into the hands of those hard at work trying to incite further racist hatred among working class whites.
I’ve been studying such people quite intensively this year, and I can assure you they would instantly see the immense propaganda value, towards promoting further racial hatred, represented by Garrison Keillor’s Washington Post piece : a Washington newspaper, widely regarded as representing the political and social views of America’s liberal elites, prints an op-ed that blames poor whites for their own poverty.
How classy.
But as a counterpoint to Keillor's perspective, consider this widely circulated post, from Juan Cole, published the same day as Keillor’s op-ed :
“Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.
A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.
One of the big reasons for this increased death rate has been increased use of opiods and other drugs, leading to overdoses, along with liver disease from drinking too much alcohol and increased suicide rates. The problems were especially acute among working class and rural whites with only high school or less, and later studies found that they extended to younger members of this social class in their 20s and 30s. Loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs was clearly a primary reason for this despair.
Compared to 1999, white workers, according to another recent study in the Commonwealth Foundation: “have lower incomes, fewer are employed, and fewer are married.
The only comparison I can think of to this situation is what happened to Russians in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation had a population of nearly 150 million in 1990 and thereafter fell to about 144 million. The end of the Soviet Union caused their confidence in the future to collapse and the end of the old economic system created very high unemployment. They stopped having children and drank themselves to death.”
One of the takeaways from the 2016 election is that America is deeply polarized. Maybe, just maybe, we can work to develop explanations, about what’s really going on, which unite rather than divide. Otherwise, we’ll be playing right into the hands of Donald Trump and all he has come to represent during the 2016 election.
I think we can do better, and I think Garrison Keillor can do better. Let’s at least try.