Books: "The Rage of White Folk ... how the silent majority became a loud and angry minority."

Four recent books are reviewed. I'm including what amounts to the preamble, and you are encouraged to set aside 20 minutes to give Hahn's thoughts the time they deserve.

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The Rage of White Folk, by Steven Hahn (The Nation)

How the silent majority became a loud and angry minority.

Long banished from the political lexicon and long marginalized in analyses of American life (unless modified by the term “middle”), class has been thrust back into the mainstream of public discourse. Although the country’s growing inequalities in wealth are partly responsible for this turn, the apparent attraction of the white working class to an assortment of politicians on the right—Donald Trump chief among them—is clearly a driving force. Which is to say that, for many political observers, “class” seems to be most appealing when it can be attached to what is regarded as bad or irrational behavior or, perhaps, to some notion of “false consciousness.”

IN THIS REVIEW

HILLBILLY ELEGY: A MEMOIR OF A FAMILY AND CULTURE IN CRISIS
By J.D. Vance

WHITE TRASH: THE 400 YEAR UNTOLD HISTORY OF CLASS IN AMERICA
By Nancy Isenberg

WHITE RAGE: THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH OF OUR RACIAL DIVIDE
By Carol Anderson

THE NEW MINORITY: WHITE WORKING CLASS POLITICS IN AN AGE OF IMMIGRATION AND INEQUALITY
By Justin Gest

The attention isn’t entirely misplaced. As early as the Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, George Wallace showed strength among ethnic working-class voters in Northern states like Wisconsin, and, running as the candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968, he won votes among unionized industrial workers as well as rural and small-town white Southerners. The defection of white working-class ethnics from the Democratic Party was one of the keys to Ronald Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984, and many of the defectors—“Reagan Democrats,” as they’ve come to be known—refused to return to the Democratic fold even after Reagan left office.

By the time Donald Trump entered the presidential campaign, the frustrations and hostility of white voters across the Rust Belt and outside major metropolitan areas seemed to be boiling over; many readily embraced Trump’s economic nationalism and aggressive posture toward a range of perceived enemies at home and abroad. It was these white voters, pollsters and political professionals tell us, who enabled Trump to eke out his electoral-vote victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and, with them, the presidency.

The apparent political muscle of white working-class voters in the United States has been further validated by the rise of the radical right across Europe, and especially by the surprising victory of the Brexit vote last summer and the formidable run that Marine Le Pen of the National Front made for the French presidency this spring. In both cases, it seemed that older white voters from declining industrial districts, many of whom had once voted for the Labour Party in Britain or the Socialists and Communists in France, moved to the right, venting their discontent at the consequences of globalization and immigration—a so-called populist wave, as many media outlets described it.

Scholars and writers haven’t been slow to sink their teeth, both descriptively and analytically, into this phenomenon. In fact, over the course of Trump’s campaign, a burst of new works of memoir, history, and sociology—-including J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, Carol Anderson’s White Rage, and Justin Gest’s The New Minority—appeared to have anticipated the emergence of the white working class as a significant political actor. Each of these books offers a different vantage point from which to view the discontent of white working-class people; taken together, they provide us with a look into the travails, anxieties, and developing rage of a constituency that is often depicted as helping to fuel this period of political reaction. With the exception of Gest’s book, they illustrate some of the limits that emerge when the phrase “white working class” is invoked and, as a result, remind us of the dangers of homogenizing white workers politically. They also serve as a reminder of just how little we still know about the moment we are in ...

As Floyd Dems gut public housing: "In (Bernie Sanders') reckoning, the problem with the American economy wasn’t some shadowy cabal of interested parties, but the entire billionaire class."

Yesterday in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Adam Dickey rushed to assure doubters that all the standard requisite anti-fascist bromides were being dispensed via social media.

In other words, his usual form sans content.

Meanwhile, eight months into Deaf Gahan's public housing takeover, with fumbling functionary David Duggins doing just as slipshod a uninformed stooge's job at his new megabuck NAHA appointment as any of Donald Trump's federal appointees, neither Dickey nor his party has uttered so much as a peep about resisting this outrage -- although they remains united in censoring heretics like me, which conveniently enables them to ignore valid questions and maybe even sleep at night on widely scattered occasions.

But androids don't sleep, do they?

Populism for Plutocrats, by Matt Karp (Jacobin)

Democratic leaders still haven’t learned: you can’t fight the forces of oligarchy without naming the enemy.

 ... If “our politics and our economy” are rigged, who rigged them? Democrats, after all, have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-five years. From Bill Clinton’s serial deregulation of Wall Street to Obama’s decision to bail out predatory banks rather than victimized homeowners, elected Democrats have done their fair share to fashion the plutocratic order that now dominates the American economy ...

 ... But if “A Better Deal” is a blueprint to challenge the forces of plutocracy, it could use another draft. It includes lamentations about monopoly control over airlines, eyeglasses, and craft beer, but not a single mention of unions. (Without a much more comprehensive program to boost the power of workers, no combination of antitrust enforcement and infrastructure dollars — let alone job training programs — will level the playing field) ...

 ... Yet even as Schumer and Pelosi announce the dawn of a new Democratic populism, the weakness of their own language betrays them. Is it possible to fight plutocracy without identifying any actual plutocrats?

The main point: Know Your Enemy.

What distinguished the Bernie Sanders campaign more than any other issue — including his support for free college or Medicare for All — was that he named his enemy. Among his other objectives, Sanders’s attacks on “the 1 percent” were an attempt to reorder American politics around class lines: not with a stale disquisition on stratification, but by tapping into Americans’ anti-billionaire sentiment, religiously excluded from mainstream politics by both parties but thrumming powerfully just below the surface.

Our Revolution: "It Is Not Our Job to Fit Into the Democratic Establishment."

As though economics don't exist, these two Clintonites call for the Democratic Party to court the center.

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.

To which Robert Reich plausibly rebutted:

Almost everything in the oped is dead wrong. For the last 40 years, Republicans have been moving to the right and Democrats have been moving to the so-called “center,” with the result that the center keeps shifting rightward and the Democrats have lost their way.

Nor can Democrats expect to win simply by being against Trump.

Democrats have to take a bold stand to make America work for the many -- reversing the unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the hands of a few.

I wonder which of these costumes Chairman Adam will be inhabiting this week, and how often he'll be switching between one and the other? That's a lot of non-existent phone booths for someone who isn't even Superman.

Nina Turner: It Is Not Our Job to Fit Into the Democratic Establishment, by Collier Meyerson (The Nation)

The new president of Our Revolution on race, class, electoral strategy, and whether we’ll feel the Bern in 2020.

Nina Turner is a “proud homegirl” of Cleveland, Ohio, where she was a state senator from 2008 to 2014 and a candidate for secretary of state in 2014. Long viewed as a rising star inside the Democratic Party, Turner began 2015 affiliated with the Ready for Hillary Super PAC, only to throw her support behind Bernie Sanders later in the year. During the primary, Turner became one of the most prominent black voices to stump for Sanders, and she has remained an active Sanders ally, joining the board of Our Revolution. On Thursday, the organization announced that Turner would take over as president, replacing Jeff Weaver, who was Sanders’s campaign manager in 2016. The Nation spoke with Turner about her goals for the group. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I'll leave this q/a right here.

CM: How will Our Revolution relate to the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC, that kind of establishment that so many activists and politicians, including you, have frequently criticized?

NT: I don’t think it is our job nor our obligation to fit in. It’s their job to fit in with us. But the overwhelming majority of registered voters in this country, I think it’s 53 percent or maybe 54 percent, identify as independent. Now, we know independents lean one way or the other but they identify as independent so that means that both political parties need to do some soul searching. I’m certainly willing to sit across the table with almost anybody if we gonna work towards the collective good, but it is not Our Revolution’s job to fit in with them.

"Rural identity has come to be largely defined as an us vs. them mentality, with the them being people who live in cities."

As a side note, this is the 1,250th post of the year at NAC. This is a new world record, at least for this blog. Can someone out there suggest how I might earn a few farthings for all this pro bono work? Now to the point ...

So it goes: Fire and brimstone evangelicals vote for a crass libertine, the poor for a paragon of wealth, and resentful anti-urban rural cadres for the ultimate city dweller.

Is there racism, xenophobia and homophobia in these expressions? Of course, but to focus on these to the exclusion of other economic and class factors steadily building up steam since America first met Archie Bunker in 1971 is to avert one's eye from the ball that matters, if not one more so than the other, then equally.

Call me a Marxist if you wish. I remain convinced that economic considerations play a huge part in these instances, and understanding what just happens is crucial. I'm not there yet. It has taken us time to arrive at this juncture.

Listen up, folks: As for this rural resentment described below, whence I came. I may not have physically moved very far away from my roots, but psychologically, I've spent the past 35 years stuffing these developmental markers into a trunk and throwing it into a mine shaft, from where it has now emerged, gloriously intact, ascendant.

We may be past the point where thinking and facts even matter, and probably my insistence that we all go find a mirror for necessary introspection is the stuff of childlike escapist fantasy – and lest we forget, to echo my pal Ignatius, veneration of Walt Disney is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

It's simple. Leaving aside the inadequacies of the Democratic "opposition," it should be obvious that I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump in a million years, and probably a clear majority of my high school classmates just did. Understanding why they did might help me understand why I didn't. It won't change the world to learn the answer, though it might change me.

The Reality of Rural Resentment, by Sommer Mathis (City Lab)

One of the biggest themes to emerge so far from the 2016 U.S. presidential election is a widening rural vs. urban divide.

... (Professor Kathy) Cramer's new book, The Politics of Resentment, traces the rise of conservative Governor Scott Walker and the political evolution of Wisconsin. What Cramer says she found is that a strong sense of rural identity in the communities she visited has become a key driver of political motivation in Wisconsin. And over time, that sense of rural identity has come to be largely defined as an us vs. them mentality, with the them being people who live in cities ...

Five key points: "Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics."

Polish Duck Blood Soup.

This is one of the finest pieces I've read on the topic, although it omits mention of the role of religion, especially evangelical voters who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump is spite of his ... well ... you know.

Then again, we already knew evangelicals were rationality-challenged. I can't do justice to this article with an excerpt alone, so please click through and read the entirety.

What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan C. Williams (Harvard Business Review)

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich ...

... Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Democrats if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points ...

Your Saturday Radical 2: Chris Hedges, Karl Marx and why everything is not beautiful.

For a broader overview, the interview format here:

“We are in a revolutionary moment”: Chris Hedges explains why an uprising is coming — and soon, by Elias Isquith (Salon)

In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.

In fact, in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Hedges argues that the world is currently at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen. There are similarities between our time and the era of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe — or the French Revolutionary era that preceded them — he says. But in many ways, climate change least among them, the stakes this time are much higher. According to Hedges, a revolution is coming; we just don’t yet know when, where, how — or on whose behalf.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Hedges to discuss his book, why he thinks our world is in for some massive disruptions, and why we need revolutionaries now more than ever.

A bit more deeply here:

Karl Marx Was Right, by Chris Hedges (Truth Dig)

... Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production” and “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … the relationships which make one class the ruling one.” He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was “an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.” Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic.

"Best of All Possible Worlds": An amazing tale about a public art contest in Evansville, Indiana.

It's quite early in 2014, and yet this piece is an early favorite for most thought-provoking work -- and it's a page turner with one unsurprising ending and another completely unexpected plot twist.

Wow.

BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: A Public Art Contest in Evansville, Indiana, Becomes a Debate over Class, Race, and Good Taste, by Mark Lane (Believer)

DISCUSSED: Awarding Prizes to Art, Portals and Boundary States, Riverboat Gambling, Questioning the Priorities of Urban Renewal, Order as a Healing Mechanism, Productive Mental Disorders, High Levels of Ambient Gayness, Part-Time Artists as Bellwethers of Economic Growth, Vandalism, Art Acting Like Art, Meeting the Neighbors, The Kardashians, A Lost Picasso

In early 2012, Saul Melman came across an ad for an outdoor sculpture contest in Evansville, Indiana, a city about which he knew nothing. Artists were invited to propose a sculpture for one of twelve four-by-four-foot concrete pads in Evansville’s arts district, to be evaluated in part based on the sculpture’s integration into the neighborhood and its connection to the community.

After Poe: More about "Little White Houses."

Readers may have missed an important comment by the Bookseller on Bluegill's posting last week: Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

For those interested in this topic, and for Josh, look for this upcoming book: Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, by Dianne Harris, University Of Minnesota Press, releasing Feb. 1.

Poe: "The design seems better suited to simply facilitate crime than livability."

Friend and former neighbor Josh Poe is the sort of engaged and educated person who regularly challenges and improves upon my thinking; in short, the sort New Albany still tends to lose too often.

He continues the good work here, reminding that certain community outcomes are the direct result of careful planning rather than random market occurrences, often for the most egregious of reasons. If you don't think it still happens and happens here, I invite you to check out the school district mapping in western New Albany sometime.

A city divided: Louisville’s urban landscape rooted in segregation, by Joshua Poe, LEO

Author and journalist George R. Leighton visited Louisville during the mid 1930s, after which he opined in Harper’s Magazine that the River City was a place that paid great “attention to food and drink, but for the rest, let well enough alone.”

Eight decades later, the city’s dining scene continues to thrive while many of the same problems that long ago plagued Louisville’s urban landscape persist — namely, the physical barriers that isolate west Louisville, dividing this city by race and class.

"Wal-Mart: 50 Years of Gutting America's Middle Class."

Photo from the article, courtesy of the documentary, 'Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price'.

What better choice for reading on the nation's birthday? Speaking of our forefathers (note the proper spelling, Erika), is this what they fought and died for?

Wal-Mart: 50 Years of Gutting America's Middle Class

Walmart's explosive growth has gutted two key pillars of the American middle class: small businesses and well-paid manufacturing jobs

by Stacy Mitchell

Separate but equal but not really (wink, wink).

The City of New Albany has recently spent an amount on Spring Street Hill Road nearly double the state's total $1.2 million annual TARC outlay to fund transit in the whole of Southern Indiana.

That poorly located, two-fifths mile of engineering accident serving a very limited but very specific population was deemed a high priority necessity for all the goofy reasons Bob "adverse and disproportionate are good, right?" Caesar and a handful of well placed others could muster.

But cut multiple bus routes on which other parts of the city depend for work, groceries, trips to the doctor, etc.? Shucks and shrugs all around. Sorry about your luck.

Given that we're about to spend another million or so on Governor's Balls and the like patting ourselves on the back for 200 years of ongoing something or other, isn't it about time we address the blatant, class-based attitudes that fuel our politics as much now as they did when Washington C. DePauw owned our government?

Speaking of the riverfront, let's check the class warfare front.

Pictured above is the rear of what New Albanians long have referred to as the Reisz Furniture Building, which has been vacant for as long as most of us can remember, apart from being used by Schmitt Furniture as storage. Recently a proposal has been advanced by a Mishawaka-based firm (Sterling) to restore this long-term eyesore and replace rapidly decaying structures adjacent to it with new buildings, all for the purpose of creating affordable senior housing.

Largely at the behest of members Kevin Zurschmiede (R) and Bob Caesar (PD - Pretend Democrat), New Albany's city council rushed forward a resolution opposing affordable housing tax credits for this project, and these credits subsequently were denied by the state agency.

A half-block to the west, a sign has been erected to tout the "proper" use of governmental incentives to private developers.

For the River View development to proceed, it must be the beneficiary of -- yes, you guessed it -- various governmental subsidies and incentives, without which the utterly cashless Mainland Properties cannot so much as turn one single spade of downtown dirt.

What's more, while Zurschmiede, Caesar and four other council persons took the opportunity of their vote to rail publicly against the very possibility that the Reisz plan might someday, far in the future, be modified to permit differing uses of dwelling spaces than those originally specified in order for construction to be incentivized, not one of them has yet indicated a similar level of internal disturbance with the fact that Mainland has completely changed the nature and intent of its River View project, from enabling downtown condo ownership and residency from the outset, to pushing its ownership society to the very end, with intervening phases of retail, office and (gasp) apartment rentals all to occur first, whether they're needed or not.

Neither Zurschmiede nor Caesar have commented publicly as to what they feel might be a better way to rehab the long neglected Reisz building than the Sterling proposal. Concurrently, they both seem to approve subsidies to build something on the part of a development group with absolutely no money, rather than to incentivize another development group with money enough to a least complete plans without its open palm garishly extended.

If class warfare does not explain these attitudes, then what does?

Step aside, Carlito: It's "Caesar's Way" (home, that is).

Jeff already wrote the story:

Head for the hill: Caesar leading another self-serving charge.

Head for the hill: Caesar leading another self-serving charge.

Despite Hill Bob Caesar's silly claims to the contrary, Spring Street Hill Road is not a major city artery. It's a low volume, local access road serving a very limited number of residents who have not one but two alternate routes for entering and exiting their relatively isolated neighborhood(s).

The entire path in question is approximately 1,900 feet long. If Caesar's latest proposition receives council approval, the imprudently championed and poorly executed 2/5 of a mile update will have cost citizens $1,000 per foot, assuming the same engineers who didn't sufficiently account for the watershed last time get it right this time.

But Bob lives up there, so nothing's more important.

New Albany’s Spring Street Hill fix to be heard, by Daniel Suddeath

NEW ALBANY — The New Albany City Council will be asked Monday to appropriate $540,000 for Spring Street Hill Road repairs, which if approved, would bring the total amount of money spent on stabilizing the street to nearly $1.9 million.

The road was again closed by the city in May after a section of the street shifted following heavy rains last spring. In 2009, Spring Street Hill was reopened after being shutdown for several years due to erosion problems.

More than $1.3 million in tax-increment financing, or TIF, proceeds were poured into the project three years ago, as engineers and officials believed the road that connects the city’s West End to Silver Hills was finally stable.

Here’s a civic expenditure that is guaranteed to pass muster, even (especially) with the Luddite cadres in New Albany.

Last week the Courier-Journal reported that at the June 19 meeting of New Albany’s city council, members “will be asked … to approve a request from Mayor Doug England's administration to appropriate $1 million from a fund donated to the city by the Caesars Indiana riverboat casino.”

Read it here: New Albany council asked to appropriate $1 million

The England administration describes the ultimate destination of this money as “capital outlays,” meaning that specific projects are not being identified at this point in time.

But NAC just learned that Councilman Cappuccino intends to hijack the cool million in question, not for his personal enrichment – he’s far too unambitious for that – but to further efforts to protect Westendia from modernization by funding a pet program that he’s calling Relocate Them People Now (RTPN).

Here’s an excerpt from Cappuccino’s crayon-encrusted press release.

Just like you, I’ve always known that too many uppity progressives spoil the barbecued bologna, and so I come to you today with an exciting proposal to get them people out of town so we can return to our God-fearing lifestyle of poverty and dropping out of high school early to dig ditches.

Them people always talk about cleaning up the city, well, what about cleaning out some of them people? All they ever do is complain about how things might get better for all of us, but do we really want that? Can you imagine how much harder you’d have to work to keep up your property if it becomes more valuable? And if them people make us keep up out property, what happens to the rental business then? And how do I make a living preying on constituents slightly dumber than me?

That’s why I’m taking that million bucks, and instead of them people buying us out, we’ll buy them out – and ship ‘em off to France or Birdseye or wherever it is they keep talking about being so much better than here. Once we’re finished cleansing the IQs around here, we can get back to some sun tea, horseshoes and inbreeding.

Hmm, my only questions are these: Do we have more than two days to consider the offer? And will my 3rd district councilman "Nanny" Price fight to rezone our neighborhood to prevent our departure?

What's that sound ... the door hitting us in the you-know-where? That figures, but I hear there'll be a gala book burning after we're gone.

Burying the Destroyer

No, I don't mean Gravity Head, which starts today, or even spending the morning watching our Senior Editor on television with WHAS's Terry Mieners, kicking off the nationally recognized 10th annual festival with a 5:00 A.M. tailgating party.

Longtime readers will remember our references to Ted Fulmore's excellent three part historic series on local business college professor Ira Strunk and his murder of Charles Hoover published on his Our History in New Albany blog. Ira gunned down Charles and his father after rumors of an affair between the younger Hoover and Ira's wife, Myra, became too much for a respectable Gilded Age gent to bear.

Desperate Housewives - 1886 style
Ira and Myra – the descent
Ira vs. Myra - the end

Given that the brutal killings occurred in broad daylight on Market Street downtown, it's a bit of a puzzler that Ira was acquitted of the crime.

Enter Lawrence Lipin, author of Producers, Proletarians, and Politicians: Workers and Party Politics in Evansville and New Albany, Indiana, 1850-87, and the Journal of Social History.

Lipin's essay, Burying the "destroyer of one happy home": manhood, industrial authority, and political alliance building in the murder trial of Ira Strunk, first published in the Journal in 1995 and excerpted below, exposes the class warfare that took center stage in a trial that often had more to do with the shots fired by workers at a domineering upper class than it did with those fired by Ira at Charles.


For Strunk's trial to make this visible, timing and context are everything. Since the War of 1812, New Albany had been a busy manufacturing town on the Indiana bank of the Ohio river. There a large and prosperous group of native-born steamboat carpenters and joiners engaged in fraternal organizations, in reform, and in local politics, bequeathing the community with the kind of active and cantankerous public life that was not uncommon in the antebellum era.

However, the Civil War changed all that, economically decimating the shipyards while encouraging merchants to move their capital into the construction of large iron, glass and woolen mills. While important connections were made between the new industrial workers and the remaining ship carpenters in churches, temperance organization, and in politics, working-class power would prove to be short-lived in the postwar era. During the depression of the 1870s all the major factories came under the control of Washington Charles DePauw. Described by an early member of the Knights of Labor as "the greatest tyrant and labor-crusher on earth," DePauw imposed his will on the city time and time again.(7) Doing his bidding, the city council vacated streets without compensation handing them over to DePauw - redrew city boundaries to exclude his glass works from taxation, and created special police forces to patrol his works in times of industrial conflict.(8) During strikes, the local press - regardless of party - defended him and printed threats to "communistic" foreign-born workers.(9) In this new and hostile environment, the labor movement became increasingly inert. Since few politicians were willing to antagonize the city's most prominent citizen - who often threatened to move his plants elsewhere - Gilded Age workers in New Albany were increasingly isolated from the support of the local community. And they would remain so until 1886.


The full paper is well worth a read if you find time between beers this weekend.