Reading these books came from a desire to know more about the often-overlooked โflyoverย country,โ the heartland between the coasts, because I live in San Francisco, the bluest city in oneย of the bluest states. I was born and raised in California, as were three of my four grandparents.ย The one who wasnโt grew up in eastern Washington, where my only rural relatives still live today. I have only lived in coastal California, white suburban Orange County as a child,ย ethnically diverse urban Los Angeles as a teen and young adult (to my parentsโ credit, they wentย in the opposite direction of โwhite flightโ), and the core cities of the Bay Area (Berkeley,ย Oakland and San Francisco) ever since. Since Iโve only made brief visits to other parts of theย country, this is my quest to understand the rise of right-wing reactionaries in the hinterlands, andย why they are sympathetic to white nationalism and have electorally supported Donald Trump.ย
I began 15 years ago by reading Joe Bageantโs Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from Americaโs Class War (2007), about returning โ after 30 years โ to his white working class Scots Irish Christian-fundamentalist hometown of Winchester, Virginia. He chronicles the โwhite ghettoโ of low-wage non-union jobs at places like a Rubbermaid factory and a GE lightbulb plant (subsequently closed and moved to China); he shows how ignorance drives locals to vote against their class interests, denying themselves crucially needed social services โ like affordable healthcare โ despite chronic health problems throughout the community. Some workers receive such low pay they are shamefully reliant on food stamps, yet paradoxically are opposed to government โentitlementsโ on principle because theyโve been duped by Republican propaganda. Lack of financial literacy entices many into bad decisions, using credit to buy cars and houses they canโt afford, and saddling themselves with lifetimes of crushing debt. The book came out just as the OxyContin epidemic had overwhelmed this corner of small-town Appalachia, the result of the aggressive nationwide marketing campaign of the Sackler familyโs Purdue Pharma pushing the โ prescribed โ abuse of their painkiller. When the quacks prescribing it were curtailed, it morphed into todayโs crisis of illegal fentanyl.
Concurrently, my article โCrisis in California: Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxicโ (2009)*examined how the 2007 collapse of the housing bubble affected working class communities in Californiaโs Central Valley, especially the conversion of farmland to housing during the preceding speculative boom. Iโd been especially interested in the history of deindustrialization of the rural and agricultural regions of flyover country. So, I read Osha Gray Davidson’s book Broken Heartland: The Rise of Americaโs Rural Ghetto (1990) about Iowa, detailing the rise of local right-wing groups, like the Klan-influenced Posse Comitatus, in response to increasing immiseration. When small town and rural hospitals closed, as part of healthcare mergers and monopolization, poor residents often made the practical decision to forgo health treatments rather than drive hours to a regional hospital in a metropolitan center to face inflated medical bills โ since, due to deindustrialization, many had lost company-provided health insurance along with their jobs. This can be seen as the precursor to the opioid crisis as self medication became the solution-of-choice to deal with not only physical pain, but increasing poverty and hopelessness.
Next, I read Arlie Hochschildโs Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). Despite being the work of an academic, its case studies are a useful way to look at what drove people in Louisiana to right-wing and anti-environmental politics. Hochschild is a UC Berkeley sociology professor and the ethnographical data she compiled is incredibly useful. The most striking paradox in the book is how people living Calcasieu Parish in Louisiana love fishing and hunting in their once pristine bayous but are hostile to the Environmental Protection Agency, despite the fact that oil and petrochemical industries have made it one of the most polluted regions of the country. With the strident denial of this ecological disaster as a backdrop, whites around Lake Charles became some of the most passionate supporters of the Tea Party.
Joan Williamsโ White Worker Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2017) kind of fell into my lap, as I discovered it serendipitously in a bookshop. My takeaway was seeing how the cultural values developed in white (and stable non-white) working class communities are deeply rooted in the tight bonds of social support networks. In rural areas and small towns, where everyone knows everyone else, this cooperative practice is based in multigenerational community institutions of mutual assistance, like churches, which provide for basic needs, like childcare, home improvements, and aid in times of crisis. When professional elites comment on deindustrialization, saying these unemployed workers should simply โgo where the jobs are,โ theyโre misunderstanding their immobility. Often, they canโt afford to move, they donโt have skills for urban job markets, and they have absolutely no desire to leave a culture they know for another thatโs alien and even hostile. There are no grandparents or relatives for childcare, no neighbors to help out in a pinch, but more importantly they donโt want to be separated from their beloved family and friends. Highly educated and culturally middle-class people take their ambitious willingness to be mobile for granted; this book puts those differences in a class context.
When protests arose in response to Governor Scott Walkerโs attacks on the public sector in Wisconsin in 2011, I was reminded that in 2005 House congressional representative Jim Sensenbrenner โ who represented District 5 in the suburbs of Milwaukee โ proposed HR 4437 as a far-right attack on immigrants, making it a felony to be undocumented. The massive Sรญ se puede general strike of more than 8 million Latinx workers on May Day 2006 instantly killed the bill. So, I read Katherine Cramerโs The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016). Cramer is a sociologist, but to her credit traveled the state and conducted scores of interviews with a variety of working-class people. It opened my eyes to how the town-country divide in Wisconsin gave rise to Walker and how much rural residents resent urban liberals in urban Madison, home of the state capital and flagship university. Rural residents see everything spawned by the university as being opposed to their interests, especially academic research leading to environmental regulations affecting hunting and fishing. People in Louisiana had similar gut-level reactions when they heard that Hochschild was from Berkeley.
In a footnote, I saw mention of the book Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee (2016), so I read that book too. It showed the decades-long pendulum swing from progressive Republicans like โFighting Bobโ LaFollette to the fascistic Wisconsinites Sensenbrenner and Walker and their ilk over the last two decades. There were accounts of how deindustrialization in Milwaukee made Black working-class conditions perhaps the worst of any major metropolitan area of the country. This book succinctly detailed how that misery was inflicted as a result of intentional government policy. It clearly demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the half century of โsewer socialismโ in Milwaukee.
A book by a friend-of-a-friend, Phil Neel, is Hinterland: Americaโs New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018). Phil is a white guy who grew up in a mobile home in the Siskiyou Mountains in the far northern reaches of remote California and his book captures why rural residents of the west โ especially in places like eastern Oregon โ are so anti-government. He details how despite their rural locations, these are sites of industrial-scale agricultural and extractive industries. Yet jobs are sparse, unstable and create a dependence on the informal, temporary employment of government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Living in these โzones of abject white povertyโ causes deep feelings of resentment about strict federal rules about land use, as well as the slipping away of white superiority, and gives birth to right-wing movements. Being a first-hand account, with descriptions of his work on BLM crews, this book is excellent although I donโt agree with his political conclusions drawing on Joshua Cloverโs fetish of the riot tactic (from his book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings), devoid of a class struggle strategy and based on French theories of โcommunization.โ Iโd wondered what motivated right-wingers like the Bundy clan, and why they spearheaded the โSagebrush Rebellionโ and led the 40-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. This book concisely answers those questions.
After Hinterland, I went on a detour and read a handful of books about the rural west and how opposition to the designation of national wilderness preservation areas was based on Mormon right-wingers and their religious โproductivistโ ideas about nature existing solely to serve the needs of humans; in this theological ideology, itโs the bourgeois needs of business, especially extractive industries that expand drilling, grazing, logging and mining. This was a useful intellectual exercise for me, especially as I learned a great deal about the pervasive influence of Mormonism in the Great Basin and Southwest. One example of this digression was reading Christopher Ketchamโs excellent This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West (2019), which exposes the massive destruction of public lands by right-wing extractivists, enabled by the collusion of government agencies purportedly responsible for safeguarding these wild places. Despite this depressing reality, the book has inspiring accounts of ecologists and others who are fighting to protect our vast wilderness for future generations. Another diversion was Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands (2021), by Jonathan Thompson, which is an excellent analysis of Indigenous-led struggles against right-wing reactionaries and their attacks on wilderness in San Juan County, Utah. Also, he tells sordid tales of the looting and grave robbing sprees of corrupt white professionals in the Four Corner region, who sold stolen Ancestral Puebloan artifacts for princely sums on the black market.
I was deeply moved by Sarah Smarshโs Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018). From the multigenerational history of Sarahโs family in Kansas โ plagued by teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, and rural destitution โ I could better understand the similar experiences of my own relatives in agricultural eastern Washington. It was another eye-opener, showing how hopeless poverty breeds reactionary ideas.
I never read Hillbilly Elegy because I could tell it was a farce, especially after learning that J.D. Vanceโs Yale Law School professor, Amy Chua โ author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother โ persuaded him to write it. Last month I returned to Arlie Hochschild and read her recent Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (2024) which picks up with the full-blown opioid crisis, as legal oxycodone gave way to the street drug fentanyl. She conducts field interviews around Pike County in eastern Kentuckyโs KY-5, the second poorest of the 435 congressional districts as well as the whitest. Itโs also the second most conservative precinct in the country, where Trump won over 80% of the vote in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Itโs in the heart of Appalachia and hence the butt of many โhillbillyโ jokes. This quote describes how the drug crisis began:
Purdue focused on regulation-averse states. That there was less regulation in these red states was a point of pride among right-leaning politicians (who routinely called for โcutting government red tapeโ). For each drug purchase, such states called for only two receipts documenting the purchaseโone for the pharmacist, a second for Purdue. A handful of more closely regulated states, mostly blue states, called for three copiesโthe third going to a state medical official monitoring the prescribing of controlled substances. [. . .] In addition to the average sales representativeโs annual 2001 salary of $55,000, annual bonuses ranged from $15,000 to nearly $240,000. That year, Purdue paid its sales reps $40 million in incentive bonuses.
Purdue sales reps wrote this disgusting ditty (to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme):
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed,
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his habit fed,
Then one day he was looking at some tube,
And saw that Florida had a lax attitude.
About pills, that is, Hillbilly Heroin, โOCโ [OxyContin].
Well the first thing you know olโ Jedโs a drivinโ south,
Kinfolk said Jed donโt put too many in your mouth,
Said Sunny Florida is the place you ought to be,
So they loaded up the truck and drove speedily.
South, that is.
Pain clinics, cash nโ carry.
A Bevy of Pillbillies!โ
The crux of this book โ like her earlier Strangers in their Own Land โ is this:
As I discovered in my earlier study of Louisiana Tea Party enthusiasts, those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottomโthe illiterate, the hungryโ but those who aspired to do well or who were doing well within a region that was not.
The real MAGA supporters were the petit bourgeoisie, or wannabes, who owned shops or smallย businesses, or once had extremely high-paying jobs (for the region) and were facing downwardย mobility. The largest faction of those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was theย โbusiness owner group,โ who comprised 24.7% of those arrested. Those at the bottom of theย working class, who reside in impoverished communities โ living in rented houses or apartments,ย trailer parks, their vehicles, residential motels or outside in tents and shanties โ not only arenโtย pro-Trump activists, they rarely vote, and a quarter of them have difficulties with reading and writing (that is, adultsย in Kentucky; nationally itโs a little over one-fifth). The lives of these working-class Kentuckians โ like othersย nationwide โ are consumed with the drudgery of eking out a meager existence reduced to mere survival. In more ethnically mixed areas of the country, many working class people donโt harbor racial animus because they grew up cheek-by-jowl in multiracial settings and share more pressingย concerns โ like finding work and being able to pay rent and buying groceries on one or more minimum wage McJobs, surviving bouts of unemployment, in addition to coping with the ravages of substance abuse, overdose deaths, declining life expectancy, broken families and lives of constant sorrow.
Yet Stolen Pride offers inspiring stories of โrecovery,โ not only from drug and alcohol addiction,ย but also from ideological blindness. Once sober, many open their eyes and reject addiction toย hate, whether racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or delusional right-wing conspiracy theories.
My main motivation for all these readings was simply curiosity about class relations in the U.S. But it was greatly propelled forward after the 2016 election when my paternal aunt voted for Trump, which was shocking because that side of my family, whoโve lived in Southern California for five generations, had been Democrats since the New Deal. She grew up in industrial East Los Angeles, to a mom (my grandmother) who herself was a daughter of Swedish immigrant manual laborers and a dad who was a foundry worker, himself born to a German immigrant rancher father and WASP mother with settler roots back to the 17th century. Our Swedish-immigrant predecessors moved to the Boyle Heights area of East L.A. in the 1920s, where they lived side-by-side with Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Russian, Armenian, southern Slav and African American neighbors in Los Angelesโ most diverse working class district. The area is predominantly Latinx today, but historically has a continuous tradition of community organizing, trade unionism, and racial solidarity
My aunt married her Chicano high school sweetheart, never went to college, and raised her two kids as a single parent on a pink-collar salary after she divorced. Having grown up in a place so multiethnic, my aunt isnโt an overt racist. I always considered her apolitical because most of her understanding of politics is shaped by mainstream media. Now that sheโs retired and lives in an inherited house in deep blue urban Los Angeles, she has a huge big screen TV in her living room that during most waking hours is tuned into local and national news and talk shows on cable. Obviously she doesnโt always watch so carefully, but being her main source of information, it is kind of like the soundtrack of her consciousness. I donโt think I ever saw her watch Fox News, but the other corporate news outlets have stoked her mild anger and anti-establishment positions just the same. While she doesnโt use social media, she often just parrots sensationalist radio and TV accounts of crime and social decay, which are basically just forms of blaming the victim.
My reading quest focused on the working class in the rural heartland of the U.S., but in many ways my urban-living aunt has nearly identical beliefs about contemporary American life as they do. Since the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this has meant experiencing great financial pain and a sense of declining expectations in an economy which feels stacked against them. So, she voted with her class, specifically as a retired working-class woman making ends meet on a fixed income, while sensing a hopeless future for her five grandchildren. Inflation and climbing prices for consumer goods have directly affected her well-being, while her understanding of the economy is no deeper than the news on cable TV. More importantly, she has very few cultural affinities with Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, considering them ambitious, haughty, and elitist snobs. For the last several decades, sheโs watched so much TV that it actually isnโt too surprising that she voted for a TV celebrity for president. Especially as she readily accepts the corporate mediaโs spin on reality and interpretation of the truth, so much so that itโs shaped her consciousness. Based on her salt-of-the-earth modesty and humble character, contrasted with well-heeled and arrogant Democratic Party apparatchiks, my aunt views Clinton or Harris as she would a snooty boss or an officious HR person. Not someone a self-respecting working-class person would go out for drinks with after work.