By the time spring rolled around, the elite whites of the Republican establishment had been informed that they were being divorced. Their spouse: the working-class whites of the party who realized they’d been lied to and were leaving.
Trump was now the choice of these folks, his nomination a matter of formality. The establishment whites reacted as jilted lovers usually do: They pouted, mocked, scorned. They told the bastard to die.
In an attempt to explain the populist appeal of Trump, two conservative writers from august conservative magazines bickered over their keyboards about an imaginary “working-class” white man named Mike who had been cobbled together from a grab bag of stereotypes and clichés.
Make-Believe-Mike lived in the real-life working-class hamlet of Garbutt, located in upstate New York about twenty miles south of Rochester. He was described as an OxyContin junkie, deadbeat dad who was pulling a fraudulent Social Security check from Uncle Sam. Mike, one writer argued, needed to rent a U-Haul and move to the gas fields where there was work.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.
The anthropologist who typed that, it should be pointed out, doubled as a Manhattan theater critic. It should also be noted that Manhattan and Garbutt are both located in New York State. If the man really cared, he could have taken the Amtrak to Garbutt to see for himself. But he didn’t. At least Senator Rand Paul rode through the smoke of Baltimore, even if he never did look up.
So we drove to Garbutt, looking for a real-life Mike. Imagine that. On the hunt for a real-life working-class white person—defined as someone without a bachelor’s degree. I knew it wouldn’t be hard since they made up half the Republican Party and 40 percent of the country. Garbutt is one of those four-corners places: a stop sign, a few houses with peeling paint, a river, railroad tracks, and a dead gypsum mine. The place is so small there is no census data available. The people here work, or used to work, in the factories in and around Rochester.
After knocking on the town’s few doors, we quickly realized that there was no Mike who lived in Garbutt. The last Mike had moved away some time ago. His son Kevin still lived there. But Mike was long gone.
Kevin Carey, fifty, was a simple guy who was tidying up his house before he went off to his nursing job at the county hospital. The house was nothing fancy, had no real womanly touches, but the refrigerator and toilet were clean. His wife had left some time ago, and Carey had raised his boy since infancy. He pulled no government subsidies or child support checks, did not do drugs or point guns at police. He didn’t even keep beer in the fridge.
Carey had a second job as a private-duty nurse. Put that gig and the county hospital job together and they still didn’t pay like Delco used to pay when he worked the line making windshield-wiper motors. That’s what both Carey’s grandfathers did, as well as his father, the last Mike from Garbutt. And that’s what Carey did, until seven years ago after the company was sold and the jobs eventually got shipped off to Mexico. It was like that all over upstate New York. Thanks to the international trade deals, hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs went overseas: Bausch & Lomb, Kodak, Corning, Xerox.
Carey drove an older-model truck and the house could have used a coat of fresh paint. But those were luxuries. Junior needed track shoes.
The kids at school wondered about Junior. When he graduated, he said he wanted to join the military.
Serve my country, is how Junior put it. Not very many people in my school want to do it. I just want to serve my country, be a little different.
His father preferred the boy to first go to college for a year or two. Have something to fall back on in case another man-made economic tsunami crashed over him, leaving him, like his father, dripping wet in his Indonesian-made underpants ripped down to his ankles.
I admire my dad and I look up to him, Junior told me. Coming from a factory job and going into nursing at his age. Raising me.
I showed the magazine article about Mike from Garbutt to Kevin from Garbutt. He had not seen it since they don’t sell those sorts of magazines at the local grocer. They didn’t have theater critics around here either. Carey was genuinely amused about the last few sentences.
The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin . . . They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.
Interestingly, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin, who made tens of billions of dollars on a pill that narcotized America, pleaded guilty in 2007 and paid a fine of $635 million for lying about the addictive qualities of the “miracle” opioid. Since then, the pharmaceutical industry has spent more than $880 million on lobbying and campaign contributions to keep the drug and others like them legal and flowing. The vast majority of those contributions went to conservative Republicans. At the same time, opioid overdoses have claimed more than 150,000 American lives.
Purdue Pharma, which is wholly owned by the Sackler family, also happens to be headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, the hometown of the conservative magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley.
Wow, Carey said, setting the article down. Tell the writer he doesn’t have to worry about it, the young people are already moving away.
Like Denison, Iowa, it seemed the greatest export from Garbutt was its children.
Theater critics aside, high-minded commentators call the situation of people living on the downside “respectable poverty.” But they know nothing of suddenly being tossed in the street after generations of steady employment making windshield-wiper motors, or the family and community falling apart because of it. The people who did those jobs believed that if they worked hard, the work would always be there.
Then comes the ignominy of sitting in a night class with people half your age and having to leave early to get to the new underpaying job you once held as a teenager. You get home and the stack of bills as big and imposing as the Holy Bible mocks you from the table near the mudroom where you take your boots off.
Wages might have gone down or stagnated because of jobs flowing out of the country and cheap labor pouring into it, but the conservative commentators wanted Carey to remember that prices had also gone down as a consequence. So why not look at it as sort of a raise?
Carey’s Timex watch was made in the Philippines. His shirt: Vietnam. His shoes: Indonesia. Those underpants: Indonesia, bro.
Indonesia, Carey said. Seems to be the place.
An old union hand, Carey didn’t like Trump much as a person. The Donald had a big mouth, which gave him plenty of room to put his foot in it. But Trump was hitting the high note of the song everyone around here was singing. Work. We Don’t Got None.
Bernie Sanders was talking a good game too. But Bernie didn’t have a shot. The Democratic board was rigged. Hillary controlled the levers of the machine. She had the party on her side. She was in Wall Street’s pocket and gave speeches to them, and refused to tell us what she said.
So Carey wasn’t about to vote for the establishment, again.
I’m probably gonna end up voting Trump, know what I mean? he said as we took the ten-minute drive around Garbutt. We need jobs. Can you bring jobs? But I don’t see how Trump’s gonna change Congress or the law. I don’t care how good of a negotiator you are. It’s too bad, really, you can’t put a middle-class person in office.
There were millions of people like Carey in the Rust Belt, people in my family included. We have pride, and we get ornery when someone tells us to fuck off and die. This wasn’t about a slobbering white menace or a frothing racist horde. It wasn’t a pill-popping population of white self-entitlement. Economic insecurity was the biggest issue in America. It was boring everyday whiskers-in-the-sink white guys like Carey, trying to get by, trying to raise a respectable kid, trying to put something away for retirement. People like Carey felt that the three parties—the Bushes, the Clintons, and the Media—had sold them out. So why not give the bombastic billionaire who railed against Goldman Sachs a shot even if he was friends with Goldman Sachs? What was left to lose?
But the lives of struggling white people don’t make good TV, they don’t make good copy. They didn’t even rate a visit by the media. Trump, to his benefit, figured that much out. He came to Rochester just a few days after I had, the beginning of what would become an eerie pattern. We had been instructed to stop following Trump, but I was getting the freaky feeling Trump was following us.