5
How America Went Astray
People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, State of the Union Address, 1944
Kevin Green died at home, age fifty-four, in January 2015, three weeks after leaving the hospital. So much had changed since the days when he was a sleek cross-country runner with a shining future.
Shortly after mourning Kevin, our mutual friend Rick “Ricochet” Goff himself was dying after a lifetime of drink, drugs and negligible health care. Ricochet was smart but had been expelled from school in eighth grade (as punishment for truancy!) and never recovered.
Then Mary Mayor, Nick’s seventh-grade crush, a sweet, raven-haired girl who was the daughter of the county trapper, went off the rails. Mary was smart, hardworking and infinitely resourceful: when her parents moved away after her junior year of high school, she wanted to graduate with her friends, so she got a job at the Yamhill Café, rented a room and finished school on her own. But soon after graduation she was swamped by the wave of joblessness, despair, alcohol and drugs sweeping the area, and she didn’t get the help that she needed. She spent seven years homeless, once putting a gun in her mouth to end it all. Her sister and three other relatives had already killed themselves. Just as she was about to squeeze the trigger, she thought of her daughter and paused; she decided to soldier on. Finally, with the help of a local church, Mary was able to start over. She is now sober and drug-free, making a living selling her own handcrafted birdhouses, though she still suffers pancreatitis from her drinking years. She was mortified to share details of her past but agreed to do so because she wants Americans to see those who struggle as real people. “I’d like to keep my personal life private,” she acknowledged, “but then at the same time I want to let others know what it’s like to be homeless and wonder where your next meal is going to be.”
Kevin, Ricochet and Mary were good, capable, caring people who found themselves swamped by larger economic changes—and then that brokenness was passed to the next generation, with their children struggling with their own demons of addiction, unemployment or incarceration. Yes, people made bad choices, sometimes criminal ones. But the essence of the problem is not individual behavior any more than the deaths of alcoholics were a problem of individual debauchery in the declining Soviet Union. In each case, the bad decisions were a symptom of larger economic malaise. In white America, the impact was focused on those who came of age in the late 1970s or afterward. Irene Green had lost Thomas Jr., Cindy and Kevin but was herself going strong physically and mentally at age eighty. Her own mother had died recently at ninety-seven. The younger generations of Greens were far more troubled, and you could see the declining well-being of working-class America—and a visualization of America’s declining life expectancy—each time you looked around the Green dinner table. What we saw was a tragedy not just for one family, for the country cannot achieve its potential when so many citizens are not reaching theirs.
Mary Mayor, after a great recovery from alcohol, drugs and homelessness, with one of the birdhouses she makes and sells for a living (photo by Nicholas Kristof)
This is not an exclusively liberal or conservative issue. Conservative writers like Charles Murray and David Brooks have explored these chasms, with Brooks arguing that “the central problem of our time is the stagnation of middle-class wages, the disintegration of working-class communities and the ensuing fragmentation of American society.” On the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren and many other Democrats have made similar arguments. Remarkably, this pain in white working-class America helped account for the rise of both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left.
What went wrong?
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States had pioneered efforts to create opportunity. The Homestead Acts, beginning in 1862, were a self-help program that gave American families 160 acres of land each if they farmed it productively or improved it over five years. Homesteads transformed the West and turned impoverished workers into landed farmers. One-quarter of Americans can trace some of their family wealth to that visionary initiative. Another historic program was rural electrification, which beginning in 1936 brought electricity (and later telephone service) to farmers across America, transforming rural life, improving productivity and multiplying opportunity.
The United States was one of the first regions of the world to offer near universal basic education, and then one of the first countries to introduce high schools for nearly all children. “By the early twentieth century America educated its youth to a far greater extent than did most, if not every, European country,” Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz write in The Race Between Education and Technology, their exploration of how investments in human capital made America the world’s leading country. “Secondary schools in America were free and generally accessible, whereas they were costly and often inaccessible in most of Europe. Even by the 1930s America was virtually alone in providing universally free and accessible secondary schools.” A state university and community college system made tertiary education widespread, and the aforementioned GI Bill of Rights vastly expanded educational attainment and homeownership in America. Three-quarters of men who had served in the military took advantage of the educational opportunities in the GI Bill, and 5 million became homeowners as a result. The GI Bill was a major investment in ordinary Americans, and it paid huge returns by creating the modern middle class.
There were many other historic initiatives in the early twentieth century that put the United States on a progressive path. In the 1930s, America helped pioneer limits on guns with the National Firearms Act, in which members of Congress seriously considered banning handguns. In that same era, Congress approved social safety net programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and jobs initiatives like the Civilian Conservation Corps. Other countries later adopted many elements of these programs.
Then in about 1970, for reasons we’ll explore, America went off track, beginning a nearly half-century drift in the wrong direction. High-school graduation rates tumbled from the highest to among the lowest in the industrialized world. Incarceration rose sevenfold. Family structure collapsed. Single-parent households soared. Life expectancy peaked. Working-class incomes grew glacially, if at all. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans enjoyed a quadrupling of incomes since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, and the rest of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.
The decline in education leadership is particularly significant, because good jobs increasingly require a solid educational foundation. Globalization, automation and a relentless focus on cost cutting led to a hollowing out of urban blue-collar and clerical jobs that in the past were often performed by people with limited education. David Autor, an economist at MIT, has found that as a result, urban workers with only a high-school education fill jobs that are actually lower skilled now than back in the 1970s.
One reason Kevin Green floundered was that he hadn’t graduated from high school. That hadn’t been an impediment for earlier generations of blue-collar workers, including his dad, for in the early 1970s some 72 percent of American jobs required only a high-school education or less. By 2020, that will have fallen to 36 percent. One consequence is a plunge in earnings for those with limited education. In the 1970s, a male high-school graduate earned on average almost four-fifths as much as a male college graduate, but that has fallen to just over 50 percent. And those like Kevin who didn’t graduate from high school do even worse.
The last half century is also the period in which the American pathway began to diverge significantly from the paths of Canada and Europe. In the 1970s, the top 1 percent earned a similar share of income, 10 percent, whether in the United States or Europe. That rose modestly in Europe to 12 percent today; in the United States it doubled to 20 percent. That’s the calculation of the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and their colleagues; others offer different estimates that show a smaller increase in inequality.*1
Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers offers another prism to look at inequality. He calculates that if we now had the same income distribution that we had in 1979, the bottom 80 percent of the distribution would have $1 trillion more, and the top 1 percent would have $1 trillion less. That means that the average family at the top would earn $700,000 less per year, and the average family in the bottom 80 percent would earn $11,000 more. For an average working family, that would amount to almost a 25 percent increase in income.
In 1970, tax revenue made up about the same share of gross national product in the United States as the average in the OECD, the club of industrialized nations. It then inched up in every other rich country, as one might expect when populations age and need more public services, while remaining unchanged in the United States. So people in other wealthy countries today pay about an extra ten cents on the dollar in taxes, but in exchange get health insurance, better infrastructure, less poverty, reduced homelessness and, we’d argue, a healthier society.
U.S. deregulation and pro-business policies do genuinely nurture economic growth and dynamism, but there are trade-offs. France’s per capita GDP, for example, is well below that of the United States. Yet look at a typical citizen in each country, and the difference is not so clear-cut. One study finds that the average French citizen is 92 percent as well off as the average American, and that the average French person also lives longer than the average American, is less likely to have a child die, is less likely to die in childbirth, works 310 fewer hours in a year (more than an hour less per workday), is less likely to be murdered and is less likely to die of a drug overdose. The two of us prefer the American life, but not everyone, particularly those left behind, would make the same choice.
This chart from the “World Inequality Report 2018” shows how the top 1 percent gained enormous ground in the United States since 1980, but only modestly in Western Europe.
“American exceptionalism” these days often runs in the wrong direction: we’re frequently exceptional because of economic and social pathologies that we suffer to a much greater degree than other advanced countries. A woman in America is now roughly twice as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Britain. Shouldn’t this be an embarrassment to every American? We forged a different path over the last half century from the rest of the advanced world, and it has turned out to be a dead end for millions of Americans.
ONE SIGN THAT the United States was moving rightward and following a different trajectory than the rest of the West was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan both reflected and shaped the country’s mood in the 1970s when in his speeches he regularly denounced a Chicago welfare recipient: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands.”*2 After his election to the presidency, he famously declared in his inaugural address in 1981, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He broke the air traffic controllers’ union, worker protections declined and the business world became much more powerful.
As hostility toward government spread in America, there have been determined efforts to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and then “starve the beast”—using reduced revenue to justify cuts in services for the disadvantaged. This is both disingenuous and cruel, as well as out of step with the advanced world. Other countries over the decades expanded health-care coverage, adopted family-leave policies, extended mass transit and implemented child allowances to reduce poverty, while the United States bucked the trend by slashing taxes, cutting back hours at public libraries, raising tuition at state universities and allowing infrastructure to decay. Grover Norquist, an influential Republican advocate for lower tax rates, captured the small government ideology: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Why did the United States drift so far rightward in a way other countries mostly did not? We wonder if one reason wasn’t national anxiety about race, violence and unrest beginning in the mid-1960s. This was the time of assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., of political riots in Chicago, of race riots in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit and other cities, of domestic terrorists like the Weathermen, of talk of revolution, of hippies and yuppies, of furious debates in households across America. Repeated psychology experiments have shown that fear makes us more conservative in our political beliefs, and Richard Nixon seized upon the fears in 1968 when he ran for president with coded dog whistles playing on white apprehensions of black unrest.
This “southern strategy” turned the South into a GOP bastion, and the fearmongering has often extended into social policies as well. Welfare was portrayed as handouts to lazy blacks, and immigration as a threat to American culture and jobs. The lack of social-support policies then led to a certain despair and disintegration of traditional communities, amplifying fears that traditional values were being lost and pushing states that once had progressive streaks, like Iowa and Oklahoma, firmly into the Republican camp. Kent Hance, a Texas politician who defeated George W. Bush in a 1978 congressional race, told us that the lesson his victory taught Bush was, “He wasn’t going to be out-Christianed or out-good-old-boyed again.” That was broadly true in much of the South and middle of the country, as “God, guns and gays” became dominant issues that helped conservatives.
Another factor was the inflation of the 1970s and the recognition that American business had grown too complacent, too blasé about efficiency and shareholder return, so that the economy really did need a kick in the pants. European and Japanese corporations were gaining ground, and some union rules did suppress innovation and labor-saving efficiencies. There were legitimate grounds for deregulation and also a genuine need for new industries like venture capital and private equity that forced efficiencies in the bloated private sector. But we then went too far in unleashing unfettered capitalism. In the 1970s, we undermined our international competitiveness because our companies looked after all stakeholders, employees included; today we’ve gone to the other extreme, as ruthless corporations scurry to the beck and call of shareholder capitalism. Our international competitiveness is damaged because the American economy has created a Hobbesian world in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” As the business writer Steven Pearlstein put it: “What began as a useful corrective has, 25 years later, become a morally corrupting and self-defeating economic dogma that threatens the future of American capitalism….Our current prosperity is not sustainable because it is not producing the kind of society that most of us desire.”
In the mid-twentieth century, Big Business was kept in check by Big Government and Big Labor, but that balance faded and business now faces fewer constraints. As society fractured, the sense of everyone being in the same boat faded, so that it became more acceptable to flaunt wealth. Indeed, riches became something to be celebrated; in 1984, the television series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous made its debut. The writer Michael Tomasky puts it this way: “Americans became a more acquisitive—bluntly, a more selfish—people.”
In 1965, the average chief executive earned about twenty times as much as the average worker; now the average CEO earns more than three hundred times as much. A Walmart employee earning the median salary at the company, $19,177, would have to work for 1,188 years to earn as much as the chief executive did in 2018 alone. Companies also changed the ways they operated, outsourcing custodial jobs and eliminating pensions in ways that raised share prices but left many families more vulnerable. Historically, corporations that prospered returned significant sums to workers, but increasingly investors protested solicitude to employees. When American Airlines announced in 2017 that it would reinvest a share of its hefty first-quarter earnings in pay raises for staff, Wall Street erupted in jeers. “Labor is being paid first again,” protested an analyst for Citigroup. “Shareholders get leftovers.” Morgan Stanley downgraded American Airlines shares, citing the “worrying precedent,” and the airline’s share price tumbled 8 percent over two days.
Oren Cass, a former management consultant at Bain & Company who was domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, understands the arguments for business efficiencies. He notes that the erosion of the old labor market resulted in strong overall economic growth and cheap products. But the trade-off was not worth it, he adds. In his book The Once and Future Worker, he cautions, “What we have been left with is a society teetering atop eroded foundations, lacking structural integrity, and heading toward collapse.”
Whereas government historically had helped struggling Americans with measures like the GI Bill of Rights, it retreated just as disappearing jobs, proliferating drug use and disintegrating families increased the need for social services. The churches, schools and community organizations could not respond adequately when faced with these dark new forces, so government officials instinctively lashed back with mass incarceration that only compounded the problems. In medieval Europe, villages responded to inexplicable crop failures from the “Little Ice Age” by burning witches; in the twenty-first century, we built prisons instead. Neither was a successful strategy.
Increasingly, government not only refused to help but also seemed to adopt petty cruelty as a principle of governance. More states and localities, for example, imposed an array of fines on even minor offenders as a way to fund agencies—and then locked people up when they couldn’t pay. The civilized world had begun to close debtors’ prisons in the 1830s, seeing them as barbaric. Yet when we dropped in on the Tulsa jail one day, we found twenty-three people inside simply for failing to pay government fines and fees. One gray-haired woman, Rosalind Hill, fifty-three years old with a long history of mental illness and drug addiction, had spent eighteen months incarcerated for failure to pay a blizzard of fees and fines. With penalties and interest, her total owed had soared to $11,258, but her depression and bipolar disorder made it impossible for her to hold a job. So she was periodically imprisoned for failure to pay, and then new fines would be tacked on top of the old ones.
The Tulsa jail, where one day we found twenty-three people locked up simply for failure to pay government fines (photo by Lynsey Addario)
In Oklahoma, criminal defendants can be assessed sixty-six different kinds of fees, ranging from a “courthouse security fee” to a “sheriff’s fee for pursuing fugitive from justice.” There’s even a fee for an indigent person applying for a public defender, even though the indigent by definition can’t pay; once they confirm their indigence by failing to pay, they are arrested. The sums accumulate to staggering levels. Cynthia Odom, an office worker in Tulsa, told us that she owes $170,000 and is constantly at risk of being carted off to jail, away from her two children. Even the Tulsa district attorney, Stephen Kunzweiler, told us, “It’s a dysfunctional system.”
That’s not simply Oklahoma. In New York City, detainees were regularly held for failure to pay a one-dollar bail. Typically, this happened when someone was arrested on multiple charges, with $500 bail on the primary charge and one-dollar bail on the secondary charge. But then the main charge was dropped, and the person remained stuck in jail because the computer showed a remaining one-dollar debt. Even if the inmates had healthy bank accounts, they couldn’t access them to pay any sum, and sometimes they had no one to ask for help; the obstacle wasn’t the money but finding a friend or relative with the time and English-language ability to confront the system and pay the bail. One mother missed her child’s funeral because she was jailed on one-dollar bail. Some inmates were held for days, weeks or occasionally months for failure to pay the same amount. Finally, a group of New York University students came up with a solution: they formed the Dollar Bail Brigade, a collection of volunteers who would periodically go to jail and bail out inmates for one dollar. Even for elite university students, the bureaucratic challenges can be staggering: it took one volunteer twenty-four hours and three jail visits to pay an inmate’s single dollar of bail.
It’s puzzling that many politicians fear that poor people are trying to milk the system, while they don’t seem to fear rich people doing the same with far more dollars at stake. The latest fashion for smacking the downtrodden among some lawmakers: work requirements to receive benefits such as Medicaid. In theory, requiring certain people to work in return for benefits could be a useful way to nudge the long-term unemployed back into the labor force. But in practice these requirements are often just an excuse to cut off benefits. Arkansas in 2018 became the first state to impose work requirements for Medicaid. It also required participants to log their work hours online with an email address and a code sent by mail, and proceed through several successive web pages. Unfortunately, Arkansas ranks forty-eighth among states in internet access, and many Medicaid recipients have no email or internet. Even months later, in early 2019, Arkansas’s Medicaid website had no clear explanation of the new work requirements or how to reapply or input work hours. Of the first group subjected to the requirement, 72 percent could not comply. So families lost health insurance, and then some people were unable to get medication and, their sicknesses flaring, lost jobs. This is a reminder that work requirements are often a camouflaged and mean-spirited move to kick people out of the safety net. Meanwhile, from 2007 to 2016, the state granted subsidies of $156 million to corporations, including HP and Caterpillar, under an “economic development” program that researchers found had almost no correlation to increased employment.
Some local leaders are refusing to expand social programs even when voters demand it. After residents in Utah and Idaho voted to expand Medicaid in November 2018, the Republican legislatures tried to roll back those votes. The ethos of the country changed in this half century. Many Americans came to celebrate wealth as a prime metric of success and became more judgmental of those who lost jobs, went bankrupt, used drugs or otherwise stumbled; the acme of this changing ethos was the election in 2016 of a billionaire president who was best known for ostentatious living and for his reality TV refrain: “You’re fired!”
THE CAUSES OF ECONOMIC DISTRESS included automation and globalization, which affected workers in many countries, and real wages for low-skilled workers fell not only in the United States but also in Britain and Germany. So as part of our journey to understand what went so badly wrong, we wanted to see if workers battered by these global forces had suffered as severely across the border in Canada. As it happened, a sociologist named Victor Tan Chen had explored precisely that question after the Great Recession of 2008–09. Chen, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, spent weeks talking to autoworkers laid off by General Motors and Ford in Detroit and also in Windsor, Ontario, its sister city just across the border. Global economic forces had disrupted auto plants in both countries, but Chen found that laid-off autoworkers fared worse in Detroit. That’s partly because of a better Canadian safety net, including a national health-care system, and partly because of a vigorous Canadian effort to cushion the blow. Within twenty-four hours of a big layoff on the Canadian side, the government set up an “action center” to help with job searches, government benefits and access to focused retraining programs. Peer aides would help with preparing résumés and finding solutions. When Ford laid off workers in Windsor, some of them hoped to study nursing, but the local college program was oversubscribed. So the action center convinced the college to start a new nursing program immediately.
Canada did relatively better because it didn’t as firmly buy into the narrative that outcomes are simply about personal responsibility, a doctrine that left workers in the United States often feeling like failures and, in Chen’s words, “sinking into apathy, despair, and self-blame.” Chen argues that the psychological blow of losing a job (and, we would argue, a home) was particularly demoralizing, and he argues for more supportive government policies, like the Canadian action centers or retraining programs and education benefits. He calls for a return to social balance through a “morality of grace,” an ethic that relies more on compassion and egalitarianism, less on scolding about personal irresponsibility. The morality of grace arises from the theological concept that everyone can be saved by God’s grace, even the undeserving, the uneducated, the jobless, the addicted and the homeless.
Canada is not unusual in its jobs efforts; the United States is. As a fraction of GDP, the United States spends on job-training and assistance programs barely one-fifth as much as the average among industrialized countries. Moreover, the United States has significantly cut spending on these programs in recent decades, while significantly increasing spending on prisons instead.
The lesson is that the tragedies that befell so many working-class Americans were not inevitable. “A lot of people put this on globalization, but the thing about globalization is that it’s global,” Princeton professor Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, told us. “And none of this stuff is happening in Germany or France or Spain. The deaths of despair are just not happening in Europe. So something is happening here, and I think it’s that over the last forty years a lot of policy has been directed against the working class.” Canada and Europe were also roiled by trade disruptions and global recession, but they preserved some space for labor unions and used higher taxes to protect citizens with more comprehensive social safety nets, job retraining, universal health care and strict regulations limiting the marketing of prescription painkillers. So unemployed workers in Canada and Europe were less likely to lose their homes, to see their families break up, to die of overdoses—and they were in a better position to find new jobs and restart their lives when the economy revived. Where was the American government?
America took a half-century detour that has failed particularly in creating inclusive growth. Poor parts of the country had been catching up with the rich parts for much of the twentieth century. Mississippi went from 30 percent of the per capita income in Massachusetts in the 1930s to almost 70 percent by 1975, and similar trends were apparent in other southern states. But that trend slowed and then reversed, so that Mississippi is now down to 55 percent of the Massachusetts per capita income. The reasons seem to be in part self-inflicted. There has been a growing premium in the labor market for educated workers, but Mississippi and other southern states have underinvested in education and other forms of human capital, particularly for blacks but also for whites. The South’s strategy was to cut taxes, on the theory that low taxes would attract businesses and boost the economic growth rate, but this was not terribly effective in the age of the knowledge economy. High-paying, high-technology employers want low tax rates, of course, but above all they require a pool of educated workers, so they often end up investing in high-tax, high-education states like California, Massachusetts and New York. This is amplified when right-wing politicians in the South defend Confederate statues or demonize gays or transgender people, and the result is further economic backwardness and frustration. And the cycle repeats.
Not since the Great Depression has America experienced the kind of working-class stagnation that we’ve seen in recent decades, and it has fed polarization, racism and bigotry, gnawing away at our social fabric. Resentment has grown toward Latinos, Muslims and African Americans, and sometimes toward upwardly mobile women as well. White supremacists gained ground, and on websites and social media Americans glibly trumpet their bigotry. Hate crimes have increased in the United States for three years in a row, the FBI reported. On one ultra-right website we visited, people posted venomous statements about Muslims and called for mass deportation. One woman proposed, “Any Muslim man wanting to come into our country must be castrated first.”
Is this America?
The white working class has genuine grievances. It has greatly suffered from rising inequality, from a minimum wage falling in real terms and from inattention by Washington politicians. Perhaps as a result, this demographic is also extremely distrustful of politicians and political solutions—93 percent say they have an unfavorable view of politicians.
“This creates a dilemma for Democrats,” the economist Isabel Sawhill notes in her book The Forgotten Americans. “Any activist agenda risks driving even more of the working class into the Republican camp, especially if that agenda relies on Washington-led policy making and new taxes.” So far, these voters have doubled down on politicians who want to move the United States farther away from the trend in the Western world.
President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a manifestation of that trend. Trump did extremely well in areas with high death rates for whites aged forty to sixty-four. Many of these working-class white voters had previously supported President Obama and President Clinton, but now they switched sides and backed Trump. “People felt ignored,” the pollster Frank Luntz told us. “And Donald Trump spoke to them.” Once in office, of course, Trump chipped away at the Affordable Care Act, so that fewer Americans were insured than would otherwise have been the case. Less insurance in turn means that more die from heart disease, cervical cancer and liver ailments, and fewer have access to addiction treatment, a tragic wrong for his working-class supporters.
In Oklahoma, we met a kindergarten teacher named Rhonda McCracken who fervently supports the local domestic violence intervention center, which she said had helped her escape a brutal ex-husband who beat and choked her. “I remember thinking, He’s going to kill me,” she recalled. “There was hitting and kicking, but choking was most common.” Staff at the domestic violence center helped McCracken escape that relationship and start over.
“They saved my life, and my son’s,” she told us, her eyes liquid.
So how does McCracken vote? “I voted for President Trump,” she told us, noting that she is a Republican, and it seemed natural to support him. “I’m conservative, and he was the conservative choice,” she explained. Soon after taking office, Trump attempted to cut funds that finance the domestic violence center, and McCracken was aghast. “My prayer is that Congress will step in” to protect domestic violence programs, she told us. Yet she did not regret her vote for Trump, and she was generally sympathetic with his desire to cut spending. She said she might support his reelection.
Because many readers are likely to find the support for the GOP unfathomable in places that are hurting so badly, we asked our Yamhill friend and neighbor Dave Peper to explain his politics. As we’ll see later, Dave has endured tough times—including seven episodes of homelessness—but he is a firm supporter of Trump. One reason is that he’s a firm believer in gun rights and carries a loaded handgun on his hip at all times. But Dave says that he’s also fed up with paying taxes to support social programs that, as he sees it, go to support deadbeats who don’t want to work.
“I think we need welfare reform like you can’t believe,” he said. “I believe there’s a ton of people out there milking this system to death. I’m sick and tired of paying for it. I really am. My taxes tend to go up, but my road never gets fixed.” As examples of people milking the system, he cites people in the area who don’t seem much interested in working hard but get food stamps or disability. Dave and April once tried to help a local meth addict, a construction worker who was homeless, by letting the man stay on their property in his truck. Then the man refused to move out, continued to use drugs and became confrontational. After five months, Dave ordered the man away at gunpoint.
“I really liked the guy and I felt for him, because I had been there,” Dave recalled. “He reminds me so much of myself.” He shook his head. “We wanted to try and help him, but it seemed that his addiction was more important than trying to find himself a place to live.”
Our understanding of politics and the world often differed from Dave’s, partly because his version of reality relies heavily on Fox News. “Yes, I watch Fox News,” he told us, “but I also watch CNN because I do like to kind of get a point of view from the other side. I’ll be honest, it’s kind of hard for me to watch it very long because it feels like lies to me.” People like Dave living in a conservative news orbit become inflamed by issues that liberals never even hear about. Dave was incensed that Google Home speakers, when asked questions like “Who is Allah?” or “Who is Buddha?” gave immediate answers but could not readily answer questions like “Who is Jesus?” This was a tempest in the right-wing media world in 2018, prompting accusations that Google was anti-Christian or trying to promote Islam. Google responded by tweaking the algorithm so that it answered all such questions the same way: “Religion can be complicated and I’m still learning.”
For all his strong support for Trump, Dave acknowledged being troubled by the polarization and nastiness of politics today. “I don’t know what the solution is,” he added, “but I just pray every night for my country and my home.” Dave reflected local sentiments. In Yamhill in 2016, Trump captured 57 percent of the vote, and Hillary Clinton 32 percent (most of the rest went to Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate). The Green family also supported Trump, as did so many others who were struggling and whose lives were on the line. As went Yamhill, so went much of white, working-class America. One of the strongest predictors of support for Trump in any county was the share of whites with just a high-school diploma or less. Friends in Yamhill often saw Trump as the outsider who would drain the swamp, bring back jobs in manufacturing and primary industries and restore a period when working-class lives were steadily getting better.
Working-class voters are not uniformly conservative in their views. Polls show that they favor higher taxes on the rich, paid family leave and a higher minimum wage. But the working poor are disdainful of government benefits, even though they sometimes rely on them, partly because they often see firsthand how neighbors abuse those benefits; there’s far more anger at perceived welfare abuses than at larger subsidies for private jets. The resentment is more visceral when it is people around them who are bending rules and benefiting unfairly.
Rev. Rhonda Kroeker in Yamhill shares some of that concern, and she, too, is sympathetic to Trump. “People just want a more simple life,” she told us. “They want America to be great again. The way it was when we were kids. Maybe they just trusted that this man could actually help make that happen.” Pressed on what that simple life would look like, she thought for a moment and answered, “Just the America we grew up in. I was proud to be an American girl. Families were important. It was important to go to school. It was important to have a job. Try and do the right thing for your family. I don’t know. Maybe they see that in Trump.”
WE BELIEVE THAT NOSTALGIA is widespread, and we wholeheartedly agree that schools, jobs and family are all extremely important. We also argue that this supposed golden era had a dark side: in the early 1960s, before the wave of changes in America, women had few opportunities, African Americans lived under Jim Crow laws and family planning was banned in a majority of states for unmarried women. As recently as 1987, only half of Americans said that it was always wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or stick. A 1963 poll found that 59 percent of Americans believed that black-white marriages should be illegal, and interracial marriage was still banned in sixteen states as recently as 1967, when the Supreme Court overturned such laws in the case of Loving v. Virginia. Some of those laws banned only black-white marriages, but as of 1950 fifteen states specifically banned all interracial marriages, including those like ours between an Asian American and a white person.
Anyone prone to nostalgia for a “golden era” should remember Gary Knapp firing his gun at the field where Dee lay cowering. Yet it’s true that there were indeed elements of that era that were important and that have been lost. Inequality was lower, and working-class families enjoyed huge gains in education, in incomes, in standard of living. Families had their problems, but children were far more likely to be raised in intact, robust two-parent households, and there was very little homelessness. One simple gauge of well-being: suicide rates were much lower than today. Few of our friends understood the plight of those struggling more viscerally than Mary Mayor, Nick’s old friend who had spent years homeless and once put a gun in her mouth. So we asked Mary if she supported politicians who would take a different course to fix America. Yes, she said, although she acknowledged that she wasn’t terribly interested in politics and had never actually voted until recently. “It was just too complex,” she told us. “And I got confused with this or that.” But finally, she said, she voted for change in the 2016 general election because the stakes were so high. Casting a ballot for the first time in her life, she voted for Donald Trump.
“Trump is our only hope,” Mary told us. “The man’s dirty, you know? But he’s still plugging forward.” She said she wished that Trump would get off Twitter, but added that the economy was doing better, with more jobs available. The media are unfair to Trump, she said, while giving Democrats a pass.
In the fall of 2018, when Taylor Swift endorsed two Democratic candidates, Mary wrote on Facebook, “Taylor Swift, all your music I’ve collected over the years just became fire starter.”
In the middle of a series of Trump scandals, we asked Mary how she thought Trump was doing so far. She paused thoughtfully and said firmly, “He’s done a good job.”
“He believes in the American people,” she added. “I feel great to call myself an American once again.”