In this quiet In(n), I feel safe trying to swim upstream about the angry white man – to humanize him, suggest that just because he’s voting for Trump, he may be something other than racist, sexist, xenophobic – that his vote may stand for more than supporting the most offensive things we hear on the news. This is old news for reporters like James Fallows, who has been scolding the media to do more than get sound bites from 3 people at a Trump rally, and to actually go to their homes, bars, union halls, and social spots and listen.
But I recently saw a post on FB from a dear friend: “Hey Bernie Sanders and #BernieBros I’m begging you to get off your high horse and be sure you do everything you can possibly do to be sure Trump doesn’t win while you’re making a self-righteous Trumpian stink about delegates awarded to whomever wins the nomination fair and square#MakeAmericaWhiteAgain” It was the intro to a Mother Jones video where they overlaid the horrifying images of whites putting down, beating on, water-cannoning, civil rights protesters on lines from Trump on the stump. While the statement is kind of incoherent, it represents a line of argument that’s pretty common: voting for Trump is so clearly racist, that slowing down Hillary is equally racist. Anything not HRC is racist.
As a privileged, reasonably smart, hard-working white man living in Manhattan with a six figure income but still scared as hell about my and my family’s future, perhaps it’s my political mission in mid-life to: 1) reach out to other freaked out and angry white men; and 2) to try and get liberals to stop sh**ting on them long enough to get them to join our cause. So here goes:
I’ll start with a composite story of union workers I met in Decatur, Illinois in 1994. Call the guy Jim. When I met Jim, I was a union organizer and consultant working to help his union put pressure on the AE Staley company to bargain, avoid striking, and to create public support that would keep the company from locking them out.
At the time, Jim was in his mid-20s. He was a trained and by all accounts skilled machinist, who helped keep a 1000 person corn processing plant running by fixing and replacing parts on highly complex, expensive, custom machines. When I met him, he had two kids – 6 and 8. He freely admitted that the first was an accident, but it was clear he enjoyed being a dad and loved his family.
He had been working at the plant for 6 years and was building seniority. With help from his father (who had also worked in the plant, but was now retired), he made a down payment on a starter house. He was doing OK: house, a car that was in good shape, was setting aside money for retirement and for his kids to go to school. He could take vacations at campgrounds and could afford to take his clan to Pizza Hut or sometimes Cracker Barrel on Friday nights. The guy was also just a cheerful presence in the union office. Not many young people were connected to the union, and Jim was active, well-liked, and generated interest from other young union members (many of whom were women or of color). Jim was a good person to help heal the wounds from when the union leadership acted out of racist and sexist tendencies in earlier days.
The union eventually got locked out for a grueling 18 months. During that time there were two suicides, several recovering alcoholics fell off the wagon, homes lost, savings drained, broken marriages, deferred medical treatment and doctor visits, cancelled Christmasses, and cancelled college plans for kids who came home from college to help. Jim eventually went back into the plant – but with reduced pay, less overtime, worse health benefits than before, and lost seniority.
That was a defining moment for him. As chronicled by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, the town of Decatur was a war zone: not only was Jim’s plant (Staley/Tate & Lyle) locked out, but Caterpillar workers were on strike, as were workers at Bridgestone/Firestone and two other companies. In Decatur, over a third of the households had a breadwinner walking picket – and nearly all of them lost. Frank reports, as many of us observed at the time, that the only national Democrat to show support for the working families of Decatur was Jesse Jackson. The rest were frustratingly absent and unresponsive.
Back to Jim. His union activism eventually caught up with him and he lost his job at the plant (which continued to weaken the union with each subsequent contract). He found other jobs as a machinist, but most of them were temporary, none provided access to retirement plans, and his insurance was spotty. Deferred medical bills and the slow drain on his savings forced him to sell his house in the 2000s, and he often took janitorial and laborer work at construction sites to keep going. In 2008, as he approached 50, he saw his father’s pension take a hit and he helped his parents move into a smaller place.
Being specific to one Jim rather than the composite: the 6 and the 8 year old didn’t go to college, they went to trade schools, and the older one tried to learn computers but couldn’t find a program that she could afford that went beyond data entry and Microsoft Office. The daughter’s a secretary – which is as white collar as the family gets now – struggling to stay current and hoping her company stays in business. The son lives at home and is taking odd jobs as he can find them.
Across 20 years, Jim’s economic condition deteriorated – it never improved. He didn’t achieve his dream of home ownership or sending his kids to school. His skills are up to date but outdated by the economy, and his retirement looks grimmer than his father’s. He doesn’t go to the doctor for fear of co-pays or expensive medication, and is nervous when he takes his wife. Age is catching up to him.
And now it’s time to vote.
In at The End of The World 
Great post, Laska. And spot on.
As someone who grew up in a blue collar town and region in southwestern Pennsylvania during the seventies and eighties, it pains me to see the angry white male narrative take hold. And, that people who should be in labor unions and secure jobs feel like they have no representation in the political system.
More on this later.
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Great post! — too fried to be more articulate now — mañana…
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OK, after a closer read: again, great post, and much to consider.
To begin with: “. . . to try and get liberals to stop sh**ting on them long enough to get them to join our cause.” Yes, get them — the so-called angry white man (and woman!) — to join, but more importantly to the point of this post, get the other “them” — liberals — to join too, the cause being to cease equating liberalism with a) privilege and b) the cheap antiracism that really only means looking down on sinking, less-educated whites.
Liberals call Trump types paranoid, and invoke Hofstadter to do it — but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. If we wanted “the white working class” to be less paranoid, maybe we should give them less hard evidence that we think they’re deadly idiots who need to be crushed. Like silence Frank Rich.
But it’s a vicious circle. Dems discussing these issues online seem almost reflexively to consider them first and foremost electorally/demographically: lost the “white working class” vote a long time ago, because racism; may not need them in order to win anyway, etc. etc. But the question then becomes “win what? win why?” If all liberal policy really means is building an oligarchy that better represents the gorgeous mosaic that is America, then there’s no real hope for the kind of liberalism that made liberalism, all too briefly, successful sometime around the middle of the last century. [UPDATE: And launched at least three generations of upward mobility.]
The brevity and racial partiality of that success remain a big issue. But here I’ll stop for now. I do recall Howard Dean saying something like “we want the guys with the confederate flag stickers on their trucks too.” If a candidate said that today, he or she probably wouldn’t have to wait to be out of the race by shrieking into a microphone.
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Yes, the Howard Dean post. Leaving aside the Confederate Flag part—because I don’t think we want or are going to get those people—I remember in graduate school, a colleague making a dismissive remark about voters who drive pick-ups with gun mounts in the cab. My response, was, “where I come from, we call those people ‘Democrats’”.
Is it possible that we really haven’t moved past the fractures of the Sixties? Where construction workers and people with post-graduate degrees found themselves irrevocably on the opposite side of a culture and economic divide? Has the electorate been slowly re-aligning into modern day versions of Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs?
I don’t really want to be either of those things.
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Obama’s “clinging to their guns and their little tin gods” or whatever remark kind of captured the problem. Many of the people who love Obama now — I mean love-love, swoon-moon-June-croon love — see “the enemy” in exactly those terms, so even when trying to “understand” them, they can’t help but patronize, it’s in the DNA.
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There is definitely a National Geographic level of distance between high income liberals (and conservatives) and the “Angry White Working Class”, observed here in their natural habitat.
I am thinking maybe a series of mixers? Co-sponsored by, say, the Yale Club and the Fraternal Order of Elks? Some ice breakers. Half the televisions playing Shark Tank. The other half streaming Michael Pollan’s show on Netflix?
Btw, I used to be an Elk. And, I tried to get into the Yale Club near Grand Central once, but a butler hit me in the temple with a blackjack.
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