Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician’s assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly close to my own age, was all but begging for medical clearance to go back to work. The PA refused to provide it, saying that it was out of the question until next week, when she removed the stitches from the surgery the woman had just had a day or two earlier.
In similar news, one of my favorite best-selling SF authors is off to Mexico for hernia surgery.
This is the context in which I read Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. The book was recommended by some blog or another as What’s the Matter with Kansas done better, and describes working-class life in Bageant’s home town of Winchester, Virginia.
It’s a very angry book, and it’s hard to blame him for his anger at the class system and the gross injustices it creates. He paints a really bleak portrait of life as a member of the working class, which he defines, “leaving aside all numbers” thus:
You do not have power over your work. You do not control when you work, how much you get paid, how fast you work, or whether you will be cut loose from your job at the first shiver on Wall Street. “Working class” has not a thing to do with the color of your collar and not nearly as much to do with income as most people think, or in many cases even with whether you are self-employed. These days the working class consists of truck drivers, cashiers, electricians, medical technicians, and all sorts of people conditioned by our system not to think of themselves as working class.
He uses this as a background to explain why working-class people make such desperately bad personal and political decisions, and why “progressives” have trouble making inroads with them.
Bageant hammers a couple of main points home again and again, but the anecdotes he tells are more convincing than the lectures. They ring pretty true, as well– I am a middle-class guy from a middle-class background, but I grew up in a rural working-class area, and the general types Bageant describes are familiar to me. Some of the stories are weirdly moving.
Ultimately, though, this is a frustrating book. Bageant is outraged at the current system, but not in a useful way. He does a great job of showing how working-class people get screwed by the system, but the book is short on concrete suggestions of what should or could be done to change things. His web site is even worse in this respect.
I realize that documenting the problem is a crucial step, and he does that very well. It’s just the first step, though, or it ought to be the first step in a process of trying to change things. Bageant doesn’t really give a clear indication of what the second step should be, so the book comes off as “The system sucks, we’re all fucked, grab a beer and wait for civilization to collapse.”
That’s not the book I really want to read, not least because I don’t believe it’s true. As I said above, I am not working class, but I’m not more than two generations removed from working class– my paternal grandfather spent his life working in a shoe factory, but all his kids went to college and did better for themselves, and he was extremely proud of that. My generation is pretty solidly middle-class.
So, it is possible to escape the working class, contrary to Bageant’s doom-and-gloom narrative. The question is, how can we get more people to recognize that fact, and either take advantage of the opportunities exist, or demand better services and opportunities so that they can do better?
Bageant’s description of the situation is good enough that I hoped he would have something to offer. I would’ve liked some suggestions about how progressives should be approaching the working class, not just in terms of marketing, but in terms of policy. Instead, there are just rants about how what progressives are doing now is all wrong.
Back at my doctor’s yesterday, I left with a somewhat-less-bulky splint, and the news that I probably didn’t tear the mumble ligament, so I should get away without surgery, though I’m probably looking at six weeks in casts and splints. It’ll be annoying, but nothing we can’t handle.
The woman in the next curtain bay left without her work clearance, and it didn’t look like she was going to be able to handle that. And I wish there were a way to make that better.
I haven’t read the book, but based on what you quoted he seems to have nailed something I’ve thought for awhile: “working class” includes a lot of jobs it once didn’t and, in some respects, is a lifestyle. I grew up middle class (two parents who were high school teachers in small-town America), but, in many respects feel more comfortable in working class neighborhoods and areas. With my Catholic liberal arts college salary I scrape by – barely – and have developed some of the cynicism towards Washington and Wall Street that is associated with the working class. I doubt I’m giving a clear picture here, but the post touched a nerve and I have to run out to pick up my son so I have no time to clean it up. Hope it makes sense.
What scares me most about this post would probably be that Winchester, VA, is a town I know intimately, it’s about 1 hour away from where I grew up. Sadly, what he has to say is pretty true, and I wish more people were proposing solutions.
Sorry about your thumb and rehab. You might be interested in Surgeonsblog, where Dr. Schwab tells of his own finger injury its recovery and its affect on him performing surgery.
That woman needing the work clearance may well have some or all of these problems:
She may not have any compensated time off from work for injury/illness, creating an immediate financial hardship.
She may lose her job over the time off and thus her health insurance.
This new diagnosis will be considered a pre-existing condition and may eliminate her from being able to afford or even to obtain a new health insurance policy.
She may not be able to find a new job with the injury incurred.
It may adversely impact her credit rating, and employers will use her credit score to eliminate her from hiring eligibility.
This may be a catastrophic denial (the denial of the retirn to work clearance) resulting in her financial ruin and permanent inability to get another job, let alone health benefits.
Escape is a personal improvement, but not a fix for a systemic problem. If elite upper- and upper-middle-class prosperity must rest heavily on the backs of a populous working class and third world, isn’t financial “escape” generally a reinforcement of the system?
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution to offer either; except for the suggestion that property ought not to be seen as a person’s path to happiness, and that personal relationships, autonomy, hobbies, health, etc. ought to be valued instead.
Yeah, it’s easy to say when you can afford healthcare and you’re not living paycheck to paycheck.
Where and when I grew up (blue-collar neighborhood in a southern New England town, late 1950s to early 1970s,) the working class was quite politically progressive. Not necessarily activist, but they tended to vote for their own interests rather than against them.
So what the hell has happened in the last thirty or forty years?
Though I didn’t grow up in Winchester, I spent my summers camping in the area and know (knew) it well. It bought my first illegal six-pack there at age 16. One of the problems with this area of Virginia is the divide between the long-time residents, the new D.C. suburbanites, and the old Virginia aristocracy. A few miles east of Winchester is Middleburg, Paris and other towns dominated by “horse country” society. John Warner has a large farm here, and in the seventies, Elizabeth Tailor then Warner’s wife, would grace the horse shows. Unfortunately, up and down the Route 50 corridor are towns and settlements where long poor residents have lived in the shadows of the wealthy. In the 80’s suburbanites began moving into the Rt. 50 corridor, increasing the pressures on the working class natives. These D.C. transplants brought with them all the fears and demands of city dwellers and began to implement new laws that had a profound effect on traditional lifestyles.
Given this scenario, it is not surprising that Bageant is angry. The overall economic benefits of this change profits Winchester, but the intrusion, in the form of suburbaniztion destroyed what Winchester once was. On a recent trip there I struggled to believe it was the same town I spent summers in. I can’t imagine from that perspective Bageant would have cogent solutions, but his account must, by itself, have some useful insight.
Several useful thoughts for improvement lie just below the surface of Bageant’s analysis. First, he notes that many are just an illness or accident away from financial ruin. A decent health care system of some type pioneered by other industrialized nations is an obvious solution.
Second, he notes that absent labor unions there is no informational, ideological counterweight to the positions of the local squirearchy, and no counterforce to companies exploiting the labor pool. A solution is to make it much easier to organize, starting with the repeal of the Taft Hartley law and having a neutral governmental agency supervise unionization drives, with easy access of organizers to employee rolls.
A third, probably more controversial possibility, is to protect the working class from job flights to China, India, Mexico, or wherever labor is currently cheapest.
@ #4: The trouble with “the suggestion that property ought not to be seen as a person’s path to happiness, and that personal relationships, autonomy, hobbies, health, etc. ought to be valued instead.” is that, if anything, those are things that the working class(per Bageant’s account) are likely to have even less of than property.
The combination of low cost consumer goods and vast quantities of easy, albeit often exploitative, credit means that the ability to own at least some stuff has moved pretty far down the food chain. If you have no savings and live paycheck to paycheck on a menial job, you have pretty minimal autonomy. Financial stress is said to be a major contributor to divorce, and I doubt it does social relationships in general all that much good. Health is likely to be a complete disaster for people with lousy diets, no insurance, and considerable stress.
I suspect that if lack of toys was the primary factor distinguishing the working class from those better off, then the working class would be a lot better off than it is.
David Clay: Several useful thoughts for improvement lie just below the surface of Bageant’s analysis.
Yeah, he hints at a few things. He also alludes to organizing a tenant’s association in Winchester to help with some of the housing issues.
My problem is that this stuff remains just below the surface. I would’ve been happier with the book if it had been brought out a little more clearly. As it is, there’s an air of hopelessness to the whole thing.
phisrow: I suspect that if lack of toys was the primary factor distinguishing the working class from those better off, then the working class would be a lot better off than it is.
As Bageant points out, though, part of the reason that people are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings is that they’re using exploitive credit to buy the stuff they need to maintain the illusion that they’re not working class. If they didn’t feel the need to buy the stuff, they might be in a better financial situation.
True, I ran across a link to a study, I think it was somewhere else on scienceblogs, can’t find the reference now, that makes me rather pessimistic on that point.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/588569
They suggest that feelings of powerlessness increase the price an individual is willing to pay for goods that connote status. I can’t think of any useful marketing applications for that little piece of news. I’d be very interested to see investigation of how that comes to be the case.
I live in Winchester, VA; most of my relatives are working class; and I read Joe’s book. I really wanted to like it.
I agree with Chad Orzel that it is long on anger and short on solutions. (Bageant came across to me as deeply biased against anyone who *isn’t* working class — if you’re not, you must be a sell-out or an exploiter, is the impression I got.)
The political culture in Winchester is slowly moving from red-state to purple; the surrounding county remains strongly conservative. One of the problems that Winchester has is that local poverty is deeply concentrated within city limits — the surrounding county (which has a separate government from Winchester city’s) has been pretty much zoned for McMansion developments, and does not take on much of the burden of providing affordable housing, social and health care services or schooling for immigrants, etc.
Bageant makes the point that the problems faced by Winchester’s working class are shared all over the country; I agree there as well (coming from a working class family, and having grown up in rural, working class communities). Some of it is political will, but some of it is also personal will. Both of my parents came from working class backgrounds; my mother was raised by a single mother. So getting out can be done: this is not to say it shouldn’t be easier, but it can be done. (Digression: Chad, I think somewhere on your blog I read that you grew up around Binghamton, NY — that’s where my mom grew up, and my sister lives there now.)
I have to say I came away with the impression that Bageant’s main message to progressives was: “You are evil sell-outs and besides, you are doing it wrong.”
Well, I haven’t read the book, but I’m sure I feel the same way he does. Although I grew up in a middle class environment, both my parents are from working class backgrounds, and I have been trapped in a working class environment for a while. In fact, I have the flu now because I haven’t been eating properly, and I will miss out on pay this week because I am sick. Even though we have a system to compensate for illness, it is so bureacratic that only the middle class can afford to follow the procedures. That’s the most frustrating thing – some people really think they’ve helped make the world better over the last 20 years, but they live in a closet and things are really much, much worse.
I agree with the observations in #5, having grown up next door to a line worker in an auto plant who made at least as much as my professional engineer father. He was a hunter and a solid Union Democrat – at least until 1968 rolled around.
As for the question “So what the hell has happened in the last thirty or forty years?”, I think the answer is that Nixon came up with an outstanding marketing strategy exactly 40 years ago and the Republican party never looked back.
Obama’s remarks about that strategy were wide of the mark, perhaps because he doesn’t know anyone who regularly votes against his own major interests because of a psychologically powerful minor one.