Rise of the Right in the U.S. Heartland: a Bibliographic Essay

Reading these books came from a desire to know more about the often-overlooked โ€œflyoverย 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 wasnโ€™t 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 โ€œwhite flightโ€), and the core cities of the Bay Area (Berkeley,ย Oakland and San Francisco) ever since. Since Iโ€™ve 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 Bageantโ€™s Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from  Americaโ€™s 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 โ€œwhite  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 โ€œentitlementsโ€ on principle because theyโ€™ve been duped by Republican propaganda. Lack of financial literacy entices many into bad decisions, using credit to buy cars and houses they canโ€™t 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 familyโ€™s Purdue Pharma pushing the โ€“ prescribed โ€“ abuse of their painkiller. When the quacks prescribing it were curtailed, it morphed into todayโ€™s crisis of illegal fentanyl.

Concurrently, my article โ€œCrisis in California: Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxicโ€ (2009)*examined how the 2007 collapse of the housing bubble affected working class  communities in Californiaโ€™s Central Valley, especially the conversion of farmland to housing  during the preceding speculative boom. Iโ€™d 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 Americaโ€™s 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 Hochschildโ€™s 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 โ€œgo where the jobs are,โ€  theyโ€™re misunderstanding their immobility. Often, they canโ€™t afford to move, they donโ€™t have skills for urban job markets, and they have absolutely no desire to leave a culture they know for  another thatโ€™s alien and even hostile. There are no grandparents or relatives for childcare, no neighbors to help out in a pinch, but more importantly they donโ€™t 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 Walkerโ€™s 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 Cramerโ€™s 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 โ€œFighting 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 โ€œsewer socialismโ€ in Milwaukee.

A book by a friend-of-a-friend, Phil Neel, is Hinterland: Americaโ€™s 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 โ€œzones 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 donโ€™t agree with his political conclusions drawing on Joshua Cloverโ€™s 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 โ€œcommunization.โ€ Iโ€™d wondered what motivated right-wingers like the Bundy  clan, and why they spearheaded the โ€œSagebrush 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 โ€œproductivistโ€ ideas about nature existing solely to serve the  needs of humans; in this theological ideology, itโ€™s 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 Ketchamโ€™s 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 Smarshโ€™s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being  Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018). From the multigenerational history of Sarahโ€™s  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.  Vanceโ€™s 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 Kentuckyโ€™s KY-5, the second poorest of the 435 congressional  districts as well as the whitest. Itโ€™s also the second most conservative precinct in the country,  where Trump won over 80% of the vote in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Itโ€™s in the heart of Appalachia  and hence the butt of many โ€œhillbillyโ€ 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  โ€œcutting government red tapeโ€). For each drug purchase, such states called for only two  receipts documenting the purchaseโ€”one for the pharmacist, a second for Purdue. A  handful of more closely regulated states, mostly blue states, called for three copiesโ€”the  third going to a state medical official monitoring the prescribing of controlled substances.  [. . .] In addition to the average sales representativeโ€™s 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, โ€œOCโ€ [OxyContin].

Well the first thing you know olโ€™ Jedโ€™s a drivinโ€™ south,

Kinfolk said Jed donโ€™t 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 bottomโ€”the 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 โ€œbusiness 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 arenโ€™tย  pro-Trump activists, they rarely vote, and a quarter of them have difficulties with reading and writing (that is, adultsย  in Kentucky; nationally itโ€™s 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 donโ€™t 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 โ€œrecovery,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, whoโ€™ve 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 isnโ€™t an overt racist. I always considered her apolitical because most of her understanding of politics is shaped by mainstream media. Now that sheโ€™s 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 doesnโ€™t always watch so carefully, but being her main source of information, it is kind of like the soundtrack of her consciousness. I donโ€™t 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 doesnโ€™t 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, sheโ€™s watched so much TV that it actually isnโ€™t too surprising that she voted for a TV celebrity for president. Especially as she readily accepts the corporate mediaโ€™s spin on reality and interpretation of the truth, so much so that itโ€™s 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.

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