New Geography

Author: Sherry Linkon

  • Memo to the Next President: Don’t Forget the Working Class

    At the end of most US presidential elections, most Americans are ready to see the last of campaign ads, social media commentaries and tension-fraught news coverage. That’s even more true this year. But more than in most recent elections, we shouldn’t expect the frustrations and divisions that have surfaced over the past 18 months to disappear after the ballots have been counted. Tensions over class and race, especially, may die down, but they aren’t going away. If a new president will take them on, something good might yet emerge from this ugly election.

    Although it’s true that working-class voters are declining in number, they have drawn increasing attention over the past several elections, in part because, as Ruy Teixeira and his colleagues at The Democratic Strategist have been arguing for a while, they remain a crucial demographic. And this year, the white working class has not only been recognized as a key voting bloc, it has been an active player, demanding that the country and its leaders recognize the economy does not work for many Americans.

    Amid far too many reports that have pinned Donald Trump’s success on the white working class, this year’s election coverage also has drawn attention to real problems, many of them rooted in class and racial inequalities. If the next president wants to succeed she (or he) must address what design experts call “wicked problems” — big, complex issues that resist simple explanations or one-dimensional solutions. It won’t be easy.

    The election has created the conditions for addressing the first of those: class resentment. I don’t mean the resentment poor and working-class people feel toward the wealthy. I mean the resentment they feel toward a government that doesn’t seem to care about them or have the will to address economic inequality. I’m also talking about resentment toward a public discourse that denigrates and blames working-class people for not being more like the middle class. WNYC’s On the Media provided a terrific overview of that discourse in a series of reports about common and problematic assumptions that shape reporting on poverty. As host Brooke Gladstone explained, reliance on these assumptions generates media that reinforces the idea that people are poor because they don’t work hard or because they make bad choices. No matter how much we might deplore some of the behavior and attitudes that have surfaced in the election, we can’t address the class-based cultural divide by dismissing poor and working-class people as “deplorables” who lack the critical thinking skills that college education provides.

    Good leadership could address class resentment not only with better policies — more on that below — but also by taking it seriously. While claims that Trump’s support comes primarily from the white working class are problematic, both he and Bernie Sanders won votes this year because they addressed working-class people’s sense of being left behind by the economy and put down by the media. Both also recognized a simple truth about American culture: Class is a central and increasingly important divide. A good president will acknowledge that, but also will lead the way in fostering deeper and more critical conversations about the economic, social and cultural roots of those divisions.

    Of course, the cultural divide reflects a very real and serious economic gap, and a good leader must be willing to talk about its sources and consequences — including the way contemporary global capitalism, neoliberal ideology and technology drive economic changes that deepen inequality. We need to create more jobs through infrastructure projects among other strategies. But we also need policies that address not only the quantity of jobs but also their quality — what they pay, how they are structured and how workers are protected from exploitation as well as physical and psychological injuries. Raising the minimum wage is just a start. American economic leaders need to look critically at the effects of the “gig economy” and rising precarity, a term some scholars have coined to describe the uncertainty facing many workers who can’t count on a regular paycheck. Instead of pushing for everyone to go to college, we need to focus on ensuring that the thousands of working-class jobs that our economy will continue to produce are good jobs. This doesn’t necessarily mean bringing back manufacturing. It probably does mean bringing back the labor movement, with a broader and more inclusive social unionism.

    Inequality doesn’t stem only from employment, however. As Jack Metzgar has argued, we need tax policies that focus less on the persistent fantasy of trickle-down economics and instead put cash into the pockets of the working class, who will spend it. We could expand the earned income tax credit and increase credits to help families pay for child care, housing or college. We also need to take another look at health care. The Affordable Care Act was a step in the right direction, with in its emphasis on providing insurance to those who hadn’t had it previously, but it still relies on the private insurance industry. It’s time to develop a single-payer system that puts first the needs of ordinary people, not those of a profit-based industry.

    Perhaps the most troubling problem that has surfaced in this year’s election is racism. While some have challenged stories that present racism as a white working-class problem, we also know that racism and racial divisions are real problems for working-class people. Racism is a class issue, in multiple ways. First, racial division undermines the class solidarity that could generate social change movements. It also distracts people from the real source of their problems — not other poor and working-class people, but the economic and political system that, as Guy Standing has suggested, is rigged against workers and what, in today’s economy, he has named the “precariat.”

    At the same time, racism presents a threat to working-class people. While the profiling and anxieties that underlie police violence toward black people sometimes target middle-class (and upper-middle-class) African-Americans, working-class black men are probably at greater risk. Here, too, we need policies that more forcefully address racial injustice and divisions, to ensure that citizens are protected by the police rather than needing protection from them. But we also need policies that facilitate more racial interaction. Among the most interesting insights on this year’s election was Jonathan Rothwell’s analysis of Gallup poll data, which revealed that Trump’s strongest support came from white people living in highly segregated areas. Racism is a structural issue, not just a matter of morality or attitudes, and we need to address it with policies that challenge housing and education segregation and inequities.

    None of this is easy, and these “solutions” are as limited as they are idealistic. I’m sure there are better ideas out there. Our next president needs to find them. She (or he) must pay attention — not only to the anger and frustration of working-class people but also to the complex nature of the problems that generate those feelings.

    In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign tried to keep his supporters’ momentum going by creating Organizing for America, which became Organizing for Action, a network of community organizing groups that largely faded from the national picture. This year, we need more.

    Whatever the result of Tuesday’s election, neither the media nor the new president should stop talking about and listening to the working class. It’s time to move from campaign mode to action, from courting working-class voters to addressing the conditions of their lives.

    Note: This essay was first published by Moyers & Company.

    Sherry Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University.  She is co-author, with John Russo, of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Kansas 2002) and is working on a book-length study of contemporary American literature about deindustrialization.

    Photo by: By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Losing the Narrative of Their Lives

    A study released a few weeks ago, conducted by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, documented a significant increase in the death rate among the white working class in the US, much of it due to suicide and substance abuse. In one interview about the report, Deaton suggests that the reason for the increase is the increasing economic insecurity this group faces. As he told Vox’s Julia Bellus, they have “lost the narratives of their lives.” Not surprisingly, op-eds flew right and left about this report, from Rod Dreher in The American Conservative and R.R. Reno in First Things to Paul Krugman in the New York Times and Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. This study is the latest contribution to an expanding public discussion about changes in white working-class culture, which Jack Metzgar has traced in a series of posts here about books by Andrew Cherlin, Robert Putnam, and others.

    As both Ross Douthat and Krugman note in their New York Times columns responding to the study, the rising death rate cannot be explained solely in economic terms. Douthat rejects the claims of some conservatives, including Reno, that the report reflects the consequences of liberal policy and moral decline, arguing that we must recognize that “stagnating wages” play a part in changing social patterns. But, he argues, what matters most is how economic changes have left white working-class people with “a feeling thatwhat you were supposed to have has been denied you.” As Krugman puts it, they were “raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.”

    While, as Metzgar has pointed out, recent studies of white working-class culture often begin with problematic assumptions, they nonetheless (and sometimes inadvertently) make clear that economic restructuring has social consequences that extend far beyond the factory floor or corporate offices. We are rightly concerned not only with what this means for income inequality and social justice but also for the quality of people’s lives and the way working-class experience translates into politics. As Dreher argues, we can draw a clear connection between the “dispossession” of the white working class and the popularity of Donald Trump. The “politics of resentment” that John Russo and I traced in Youngstown twenty years ago seems to have become a national pattern.

    If we want to understand the social and cultural patterns fully, I would argue, we must consider not only the material conditions or social structures that shape economic experience but also how people interpret those experiences and construct their identities in response to them. We would do well to attend not only to statistical evidence but also to stories, which provide insight into how people experience and make sense of economic and social changes. This is the kind of insight that literature can provide. By representing the social world through the stories of individuals, fiction, especially, can help us understand what large-scale change looks and feels like on a personal, subjective level.

    The long-term effects of deindustrialization – what I refer to as its half-life – have generated not only measurable social patterns like rising death rates but also a growing body of literature. If you want to understand the “lost narrative” of contemporary working-class lives, you might well begin with these books.

    In Coal Run, by Pennsylvania writer Tawni O’Dell, we meet a character who exemplifies the lost sense of self as well as the addiction, anger, and self-destructive behavior reflected in the rising death rates. Ivan Zoschenko is a former high school and college football star who has returned to his home town, where the last of the local mines is about to shut down. He feels like a failure, especially in comparison with his hard-working miner father, who taught him the importance of finding a sense of purpose through one’s work. Working as a deputy sheriff, Ivan mediates domestic disputes spurred by the town’s economic struggles, and in the process he reconnects with his working-class community and gains a renewed sense of purpose and belonging.

    Philipp Meyer offers a less hopeful story in American Rust, which follows two young men in a former steel town, both struggling to figure out their futures. One, known as the smartest kid in his high school class, dreams of escaping his hometown, studying astrophysics, and working at a research institute, but as the sole caregiver for his father, who was seriously injured in an accident in the steel mill, he cannot bring himself to leave. His dream remains beyond his reach. His best friend, Billy Poe, can’t even imagine a future for himself, and when he is jailed for a murder he didn’t commit, he gives up. In his eyes, “this place had been waiting for him. There were those who had capabilities and those who didn’t and even in his glory days he had known it, known they would figure it out one day, a bullet he would never dodge.” Meyer’s characters are younger than the middle-aged white working-class people whose death rates Case and Deaton tracked, but they display a similar sense of hopelessness.

    Indeed, deindustrialization literature suggests that – as Jennifer Silva found in her study, Coming Up Short – younger working-class people have inherited a feeling of being at once trapped and betrayed, though often with a fuzzier idea of exactly how they have been let down. Two contemporary novels focused on workers in service jobs highlight this well. In Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, we follow restaurant manager Manny DeLeon through his last shift at a suburban Red Lobster that is about to close. He takes pride in his work, but that provides only partial compensation for the conflicts he experiences in his interactions with both the corporation and the other workers, yet he sees no other options for himself.

    Finally, one of the most entertaining but also troubling novels I’ve read about contemporary working-class life is Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör. Designed as a mock-Ikea catalog, the novel highlights the soul sucking working conditions of corporate retail through the encounters of the “partners” (sales clerks) of Orsk, an Ikea knock-off, with a horde of zombies. The zombies were imprisoned on that site in the 1830s, when it was the Cuyahoga Panopticon, run by a sadistic warden who believed that hard labor was a “moral treatment that will mend your degraded minds,” while also generating profits for him. While readers may laugh at the line drawings of torture devices like the Alboterk treadmill desk, complete with spikes and shackles, the novel also critiques the limitations that working-class people face when working conditions are exploitative and wages stagnant. As the main character laments, “for all the fighting, all the struggle, all the scrimping, and saving, and double shifts” of recent years, she never has enough money to buy gas and food, and she is always in debt. Rather than recognizing the external causes of her difficulties, however, she internalizes the situation and accepts her fate, believing that this is what she deserves, what “she’d been born to do: wear a uniform and work a register. . . . to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks.”   Reading this novel, it’s easy to understand why some might turn to drugs and alcohol, or even to suicide.

    Among the most troubling insights from these novels is this: most of these novels focus on characters who are younger than the subjects of Case and Deaton’s study, which suggests a disturbing pattern as the next generation of working-class people come of age. High rates of addiction, depression, and suicide may well continue as some struggle with what has become a long-term “dispossession,” while others accept low expectations as a new normal, as Silva observed in her study. Like the protagonist of Horrorstör, working-class people may come to believe that low wages, poor working conditions, and perpetual struggle are what they deserve. And that is the stuff of tragedy.

    This article first appeared at Working-Class Perspectives.

    Sherry Linkon is a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University.  She is co-author, with John Russo, of Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown(Kansas 2002) and is working on a book-length study of contemporary American literature about deindustrialization.