White, working-class, middle-aged Americans are one of the only demographics in the world that has seen its life expectancy fall. But Mike wasn’t just a statistic.
This are just results of policies that were implemented from 1980 to today. Outsourcing manufacturing gutted middle class but what killed it was systematic destruction of traditional family values. Ironically, white males who are always blamed for everything wrong in this country, are biggest losers in last 30 years.
But hey according to MSM and our elites, some average Joe from flyover country, who saw complete destruction of his town by Wall Street and big business, saw worst of opioid epidemic in community, lost all economic perspective, is complety ignored by Washington is somehow still enjoying white privilege and is root cause of systemic racism and all problems in US.
It wasn’t the regulations that initiated the companies to flee. It was greed. Pure and simple. Cheap labor, dumping toxic waste freely into foreign country’s waterways and land, chasing higher profits with little regard for anything, and anyone other than their profit margins.
Nope. If your competitors are reducing manufacturing costs by moving overseas, and there’s no means of leveling the playing field (i.e., free trade agreements outlaw it) then you can either go with them, or go bankrupt. We either need to reduce the regulatory burden, or impose more aggressive import tariffs on countries that do not observe our labor and environmental laws. The best answer is to do some of both.
I see your point. My personal experience was with a friend of a friend who made manikins. He moved his company to Mexico, because the toxic waste material spewing from his factory was found to be illegal. In Mexico, there was no such regulations, and he was free to dump his toxic untreated sludge into the waterways of his new location. And made a fortune in the process.
I don’t know that we’re actually disagreeing on anything here. Over time, I think you will find that the margins for outsourcing have declined too as there’s competition in those foreign jurisdictions. Of course, that makes it even more difficult to bring those businesses home. The only way to do it is to make the costs of those environmental and labor laws more explicit. That will have the double advantage of bringing manufacturing home (by eliminating the principal advantage of outsourcing) and making Americans more sober about the cost of ever more costly regulation. The cost will be a lower standard of living overall as the cost of goods will increase, but most of the advantages of those efficiencies went to the capital class anyway. In my mind, the trade offs are worth it. And this from a life-long Republican and executive at a large domestic manufacturer.
I'd only add, that while a staunch capitalist, maybe we'll find that we really don't need all the cheap made in China consumer products we've been conditioned to believe we need.
Spot on. Never forget that as our politicians were signing the various free trade agreements and rolling back tariffs to enrich China, they were promising to retrain US workers to work in a "service economy". What happened to that training and those jobs? Every heard of a "call center" in Lahore?
so... race to the bottom to where we employ the most desperate nation's regulatory standards? This is pretty much what actual "free trade" agreements were supposed to prevent - a baseline of labor, environmental and financial standards that did not allow businesses to pursue this arbitrage strategy. Of course, since corporations are also writing these free trade agreements, they are allowing the former while rendering the latter impractical.
You will see that most FTAs include environmental provisions, but they only require enforcement of that jurisdiction’s then-existing laws. Of course, that doesn’t mean they have to impose laws as rigorous as the US’s, and none do. It’s the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, combined with the Endangered Species Act, that are the major cost drivers. China, India, Cambodia, Mexico -- none of them have laws even remotely as burdensome. That, combined with US labor laws, is why the free trade agreements have gutted middle America.
I’m not saying it *should* be a race to the bottom. To the contrary, I’m saying that’s what happens when you impose severe environmental regulation domestically and you do not require the same of foreign jurisdictions. Businesses have to leave, or shutter. They cannot otherwise compete.
It is both. Little or no regulations oversea and not just greed. If you have widget factory in the US and turn out a product with a market value of $5.00 and you are clearing overhead and making a profit, things are great. Your only competitor is a French company who make the same widget you make with equal quality and cost as yours.
The French company says it is moving its factory to China because of cheaper production costs and now will sell its widget for $2.00. What do you do to stay in business? You move your factories to China otherwise you go out of business.
There no simple answers to complex problems but I have an idea to alleviate this but it takes backbone from Congress and we all know politicians have no backbone. The only thing that motivates a politician is a hefty bribe.
"The French company says it is moving its factory to China because of cheaper production costs and now will sell its widget for $2.00. What do you do to stay in business? "
You can do any number of things. If your competitor is solely able to achieve the lower price as a result of employing child labor, or dumping toxic waste --- by all means, bring this to light, and market yourself as the alternative.
I don't like China for its intellectual property theft, its putting Uighurs in concentration camps (and killing them to sell their vital organs to buyers for cash), its worldwide spread of Covid (by not ceasing international flights in 2020), its lithium ion batteries made of Congolese cobalt harvested by African children and, perhaps most, its bequeathal of fentanyl and crystal meth to us through our friends in Central American gangs.
I quit buying Chinese products more than five years ago. I'm not rich, but I'm not particularly materialistic. I'm the one who posts the "Made in China?" question on Amazon listings, which information the company should have started sharing many years ago. As time goes by, I find there are many others who are doing the same.
I can't buy only American products -- there aren't that many these days -- but I'm happy to pick up used tools and furniture here and there, including some bought initially from China, but at least not bought from China by me.
They will but they are complicit in things they believe themselves superior to. LeBron James being the poster child thereof. But in my experience buying cheap sub-par crap is more expensive in the long run because you have to replace it more often. One of the best things I ever did for my finances was stop shopping at WalChina.
Agreed. Plus most of us produce widgets that are incorporated into other widgets so who is to hear our complaint and hold the firm using the lowest cost global labor? Nobody and by the time anybody reacts the market has moved on without you. And I'm in a market (Aerospace) with some very long product life cycles.
"That will work on a small group of people but the vast majority will go for the cheaper product. IMHO."
if Madison avenue can market sugary drinks to the world, surely they can market a company taking a stand against slave labor. If competitors are using slave labor, Western consumers can certainly be persuaded to pay a premium for the product that isn't made by slaves.
I don't think the issue is with the consumer. The issue is the regulatory morass that's making it so prohibitive to build anything in America.
You could in theory market your product in a way that differentiates it, preferably as a premium product and then sell it for $10. That is easier said than done of course, but it is a possibility.
You will likely sell fewer units even if you succeed, but that doesn't have to be fatal.
I moved my manufacturing factory to Mexico in the late 1980s. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I did it to survive. I had 300 employees in the US and eventually 900 in Mexico. Unless you have dealt with bureaucrat regulators you do not know how unjustly they treat businesses like mine. I was early to move, and out of strict necessity. Later companies moved to be competitive to mine, and most moved on th China. I hated to be part of this process. But I did save my company and my life savings. Unless you have experienced the other side of regulators you may not know the whole story.
Very few Democrats have ever run manufacturing companies, they only know one exaggerated perspective.
I wrote this last night, don't know where it landed, so here are a couple of examples again:
Know that I retired in 1999, so my memory isn't as good. I started my company in 1972 at 24 yrs old, with $990 and no experience. In Mexico we had far fewer injuries not because we had OSHA on our back but because there was no longer an incentive to be injured. In California a new law had just been introduced that allowed for emotional distress, and this only added to the huge incentive for an employee to receive workers Comp and stay home. It was already impossible to diagnosis a hurt back! We valued our employees highly so we did not need inspections from OSHA to do nonsensical things like rearranging certain equipment to meet certain standards that had no safety relevance in our factory. It was stunning to see how rare it was for a Mexican worker to get injured compared to our US workers! In Mexico I did not have to deal with the AQMD (Air Quality Management District) - Los Angeles' sister agency to the EPA. This is a long story. The short version: my company turned itself in when the AQMD for the first time in the history we knew of started enforcing the emissions permits it issued. We made and finished furniture so we emitted carbon-based materials. I was not aware but we emitted more than we were permitted. Back in the 1980s the AQMD did not appear to enforce much. We went to the top environmental attorneys in LA, and they advised that by being good corporate citizens and turning ourselves in, the AQMD would work with us. This turned out to be an enormous mistake. They threw the book at us. I met with the head of enforcement to see if he really wanted to bankrupt my company by forcing us to only use water-based solvents very quickly since none of these solvents had been proven to finish furniture adequately. He couldn't care less about the company or its 300 employees and countless suppliers and customers. So I suggested that he at least even the playing field by enforcing this on all of my competitors. He didn't know them, but I knew my industry extremely well and was sure there were at least 4 or 5 competitors who not only emitted more than my company but were permitted less because they were younger companies that would not have acquired the level of permitting we had. I would even give him their addresses! He showed no interest. We had no choice but to try to make a compound nicknamed "1,1,1," a water-based solvent, to work despite years of failed attempts with it in the past. This cost me a great deal of sleepless nights and money. But a miracle happened, our incredibly hard work paid off - we finally made it work! And we could stay in business. To my knowledge my competitors never turned themselves in, they never revealed they were very under-permitted, and they did not have to use 1,1,1. I could only assume they continued to emit over their permitted levels without consequence. Many years later when I was happily ensconced in Mexico I received a phone call from the top attorney we had used for the AQMD experience. She asked me to testify for some state governmental hearing to explain how unfairly my company was treated. You can imagine how happy I was to tell her to tell California just where they could go to get advice on treating companies fairly.
Thanks so much for this, Dennies, I really appreciate your taking the time. This is a ghastly misuse of the regulatory process, and if it's as widespread across America as I can imagine it is in California, I can see why owners like you choose to move out of the country.
If we want to build things in this country, then we need to make it a whole lot easier for the people who do that work to operate. Environmental concerns are important and a proper area to regulate. But your experience went beyond proper regulation into Nightmare Land, and it must end.
If only one company does it, that company has a competitive advantage that other companies cannot cope with on American soil with costly regulations and union-backed work rules that reduce output and productivity. Companies are composed of people who make rational decisions for the workers, customers and investors, without whose backing there would be no company in the first place.
Imagine being stupid enough to think that "greed" could motivate businesses to relocate without there first needing to be some REASON that it was more profitable to leave than to stay.
I know! Greed is not enough. There’s the matter of selling your soul to make a buck, exploiting your workers, pushing ahead with no introspection about what you are doing and how it will affect everyone else, in order to PRETEND that the reason you choose leave the U.S. to exploit a Third World country has some legitimacy and has nothing to do with your greedy soulless existence. So much more in operation here! Greed is merely a motivator. Continued exploitation and defense of those actions when the results are clear for all to see, on every level, takes a special kind of useless idiocy.
It is racist of people like you to say that "third worlders" don't deserve jobs, and ignorant to pretend that they're being "exploited" because they're paid less than Americans when they're making much more than they could otherwise. All of that beside the fact that American business is made unnecessarily expensive by left-wing policy.
"It is racist of people like you to say that "third worlders" don't deserve jobs."
And you badly misuse the word "racist." Third Worlders deserve jobs. But not when they come at the expense of my fellow workers. If a job is to be located in the United States or the Third World, I will always root for the home team.
“Greed” is probably the hard edged way to say “profits”, which is a normal business motive. It’s the other companions that come with offshoring (exploitation of cheap labor, environmental impacts, supply chain problems, etc) that are so harmful. The Dark Side of capitalism.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong, I built 5 plants in China, all to serve the Chinese market and the Chinese government held my companies, and all foreign companies to environmental regulations not dis-similar from our own. The environmental permitting processes were exhaustive. They did not hold their own local companies to these standards. You believe a myth, like most on the left, believe in a fairy tale world where all of your beliefs can have some validity.
Agree. I’m not going to “like” this article because it’s fundamentally false underpinning is that Republican support for free markets crushed the middle class. It’s only true to the extent that politicians, most especially Clinton, wanted to outsource our free markets to the developing world while increasing regulations here. There are far fewer public companies today than there were 30 years ago, despite a higher population.
Members of both parties have engaged in taxpayer reallocation schemes and government expansion to the point that government picks winners and losers and serves to crush competition at every turn, but the left does it to far greater levels and far more frequently. From Clinton’s support of the WTO which was set up to permanently disadvantage to US for not having a VAT tax, to Obama’s “patent” courts which allow big companies to ultimately steal IP from start ups over 90% of the time, it is government intervention which destroys the middle class and the markets which are no longer anything resembling free.
Not ALL Republicans offer a good alternative, but many of them do. Republicans push policies often to decentralize control. Neocons are terrible, but they aren’t actually conservatives. The left cheers the destruction of the working class, and sane contributing citizens generally.
The fortunate thing is that since they are the results of policies, those policies can be changed. As C.S. Lewis says, "when you're on the wrong road, the most progressive man is the one who turns around first."
The unfortunate thing is that we are unlikely to actually reverse these policies anytime soon, since neither political party actually gives a crap about the people they are hurting.
Raziel, these are not 'just results of policies that were implemented from 1980 to today'. The middle class may be gutted but from what I can see these past twenty years or so, there are a lot of very wealthy, well known (white) Americans who commit suicide, suffer from self abuse, take opioids (it used to be cocaine..) and 'die from loneliness' too. And many of them quite publicly.
This is not only a demographic issue, or a class issue, or an economic issue, or a race one (since not only whites are affected) - it is also a psychological one involving depression and anguish that crosses over all delineations. Not an easy fix. But to you it's simply family values and outsourcing jobs that's the cause. Somewhat on the simplistic side.
Try not to politicize it with your MSM 'white privilege' and 'root cause of systemic racism' condemnation, it's hyperbole.
This is a deeply personal piece, and I appreciate that. I'm trying to fit it into my experiences and coming up a bit short. I came from a literally dirt poor family (our first log cabin had a packed dirt floor) with no electricity or running water, and home schooled through grade 10. The outhouse was the way of doing business. Four kids, nuclear family, parents quit drinking before we were sentient. All four of us have reasonably comfortable lives and families. Bit of providence there, but maybe statistically significant? Leaning towards the core nuclear family as the prominent factor instead of being poor. Thoughts?
Family is a form of government and is the most important, as well as effective. Every step up in size, be it neighborhood, town, etc enables participants more opportunity for failure. The devolution of the family is the root of most of our social ills.
Kids don't get to choose their family and they have little or no control over their parents. Emphasizing family (Particularly the traditional definition of family) just makes those of us who didn't have a particularly great family situation feel even more shitty.
Emphasizing community seems like a better path to me, and it's something that many conservatives I know believe in (generally by way of the Church), but spend too little time emphasizing. Also, it's something that should be emphasized and concentrated on outside of the Church as well.
Todays "conservatives" spend far too much time talking about freedom and too little talking about responsibility.
I think it's fair to say that liberals have lost their way, but so have conservatives.
1000X this. I fully agree that family is perhaps the most important factor in getting a leg up in life. It’s also beyond the control of the individual and leaves no room for personal agency. It’s akin to progressives telling blacks they’re doomed to a life of disadvantage based on their skin color. There has to be exposure to alternative paths out of poverty. I broke a generational legacy of abuse, poverty, and addiction but it involved severing ties with almost all of my family. I’m a huge believer in personal agency but it still only goes so far when you’re in a hole. Eventually you need a hand up (and I’m not referring to government social programs). Community can be found in church yes, but also school or work.
You're right. The world's no utopia and kids pay the price based on the luck of the draw, and through no fault of their own. Community structures outside the family have a place, especially for those with unhappy childhoods. My purpose in life is to provide for and protect my family. That gives life meaning. Having seen wartorn countries where human life was cheap, even though I despise our ruling class, I'm hoping everything holds together so my daughters can have a peaceful life. Utopia is a destructive dream.
Present day Liberals tend to talk about responsibility without talking about freedom, or acknowledging their own privilege. Present day conservatives tend to talk about freedom without wanting to discuss their responsibilities, which many seem to view as only including waving the flag and pissing off the libtards.
Yes, I'm generalizing excessively. I'm human, it happens.
Yeah, I'm human too. It's crazy how much hubris our government has to think it can fix shit that has been going on since time immemorial. If they throw enough money at it.
I can see the value of an intact family as well. That wasn't my point.
It in no way helps children to hear this, particularly when emphasis is put on the word "traditional". Especially when those words are uttered by adults who have no clue the negative impact those words have.
To be clear, while my parents had a less than ideal/happy marriage, I was far better off than many others in that area. Still, coming home from school to see my dad carrying boxes of his stuff out of the house for the third or fourth time (it would not be the last) was far from the high point of my childhood.
People with traditional values should not be marginalized because they are not universal. No one's values are universal and if I am to respect values different from mine, mine need to be respected too. For many of us those values are based on 2,000 years of growth. For others, far longer than that. So they are traditional as compared newly created values.
You misunderstand. Conservatives, at least in my experience, value responsibility and personal accountability. They just want the freedom.to decide what that is instead of the government. The left always bemoans trickle down economics but never examines it's trickle down social policies. I think if we are honest we will acknowledge those are disastrous.
Where things get tricky is when my desire to exercise my freedom to do something overlaps yours. Say for instance I want do some target practice in my backyard at three AM when most people prefer to sleep. In an advanced society somebody needs to arbitrate those kinds of conflicts. If not the government, then who?
It's legit to debate where to draw the line on what the government gets to arbitrate, but it doesn't make sense to me to imply that the government is categorically wrong to do that job.
Most communities have laws for that. Criminal laws if it is prohibited and if it is not prohibited you are free to fire away. We have that exact scenario in my unincorporated part of a rapidly growing county. Noise violations are subject to the same violations which leave civil nuisance suits. Which are defended by it is not illegal. That is different than regulation by unelected bureaucrat fiat. And we have seen the rise of that in light of Congress' abandonment of its legislative function.
I agree. There are people in poor neighborhoods that are noble and live right. I do not like this wealth divide. Morals and values should not depend on socioeconomic class.
It should easier to be noble from a place of abundance, but judging from the plethora of self-professed and self-serving "elites" out there pretty easy to be ignoble as well. To face hardship with dignity is IMO very noble.
Being poor reduces your options and puts pressure on everything in life. I suspect people are then more prone to taking out their stress and frustrations on other people, and the ones close get the mother load. A bit of wealth opens up our options and allows us to distance ourselves from the existential stress. I remember Mom and Dad agonizing over how to feed us kids. At one point, they had to empty our piggy banks and pool the money. We got IOUs. It's a very different world that my family and I live in now (my wife had a similar upbringing), but we remember. I think our masters in the establishment have had too many generations apart from reality to understand life. We humans don't seem to do well with too much time on our hands.
Your piggy bank experience as a child is very similar to one I had. My father needed gas money so he could get to a job interview. He didn't get the job, and the IOU went unpaid. He'd been blacklisted because he reported his previous employer for safety violations. They couldn't fire him, so instead they made his life a living hell at work until he quit. We lost pretty much everything. I don't think he ever fully recovered from that experience.
I've long thought that multi-generational wealth is extremely dangerous. Some families seem to handle it OK for the most part, but many do not. In my opinion Andrew Carnegie had the right idea in regards to wealth.
First, I would tell the author to bail on the democrats. They are addicted to elitism and big money. Their core constituency, at least as they seem to see it, consists of black women, trans activists, college professors, the Martha's Vineyard and Hamptons crowd, and big Silicon Valley and big Pharma money. They are not interested in the white working class or any working class really. If your white, male and working class, you are about as far from their interests as your gonna get. If you believe in God more than in the Metaverse or Tik Tok, you are not one of them, in fact you are the enemy. If you drive a truck and have a dirty job, you are to be used until you are no longer useful. If you work at Walmart or the local grocery store, you are to be unseen and when you are too old or too sick to support yourself they will give you just enough to keep you unseen. They have no interest in bettering your condition and like the Walmart worker they would prefer the kind of jobs you do not be seen and be exported to places where they do not have to witness it, smell it or have it interfere with their green spaces. They certainly do not want you to have the kind of economic stability that translates into political power. Stay in your place, be useful as long as you can and then fade away and be quiet.
Are the republicans any better? Depends on which republicans you are talking about and what you mean by better. If you mean the Mitch McConnel's of the world who envy the democrats ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley then the answer is very likely not. If you mean the more populist types who are averse to unfettered free trade, who question green orthodoxy, who actually think that the country is bigger then the Boston to DC corridor or San Francisco, who think that best way to help people is to provide an environment that creates and maintains good paying working class jobs, who think that excessive immigration creates too much competition for jobs at the lower end, well then maybe that is a group for you. Are the republicans cynically taking an opening to the white working class? Probably. But then the democrats have taken what used to their constituency and they need the working class to win. Is that perfect? No. But it beats being used by the democrats to serve their primary constituency while enduring mocking and being humiliated by them as the price. And, at least, because they need you, these new, populist republicans are going to make some effort to address your concerns. At least with them you have some leverage.
You may have missed it, but there has been a major political realignment happening for 30 yrs and it started with Bill Clinton, NAFTA, globalization, the democrats moving closer to big money with banking deregulation. It carried on under Bush Jr. and China entering the WTO and it really revealed itself under Obama and the bank bailouts. Trump, for all his flaws, saw this and called it out and took advantage of it. Its one of the reasons that the democrats and the old school republicans like Romney and McConnel hate him so much, he exposed that the game was rigged and worse, he showed the working class that they do still have power enough to create havoc for those who have ignored them when not outright trying to make their lives harder while treating them with contempt, mocking their values as they cling to God and guns while showing up at Veteran's Day parades in trucks with American flags on them. From the perspective of the old school republicans and the democrats, the best thing the working class can do is be useful to them or serve in the army and then disappear.
BTW professor, when is the last time you came out of the classroom or the faculty lounge and went and had coffee with the janitorial staff at the university? Have you ever invited one of the campus cops to a cookout? When is the last time you stopped to have a conversation of any length with the lady who cleans the dishes in the cafeteria? When your plumber comes to the house do you make any effort to try and appreciate what he does and ask questions or even the kid who changes the brakes on your car? I can tell you that this republican does precisely those things. The democrats need more Mike Rowe's and fewer AOCs.
Did you know that it is easier to find a Java programmer or a Business Analyst than a good plumber or machinist? I cannot walk the streets of Boston or DC without tripping over a Phd looking for a job engaged in mental masturbation that will pay for their Starbucks habit, but I'll be damned if I can find a guy to do good tile work for under $600 a day and needs less than 3 weeks to get to me.
Not everyone is cut out to be a financial analyst or a doctor or a VP of sales. Some people lack the intellect. Some people lack the drive. Some people are just not temperamentally cut out for that kind of work. Some people are cut out to work with their hands. That is not to say they are stupid, a lot of trades and manufacturing jobs are physically tough but also require a good brain. Ever tried to do the calculations for the cuts to install trusses? Ever tried to figure out how much load a new AC unit will put on an electrical system in a house or whether a booster is needed to run an internet cable?
I do not disagree with you about minimizing the role of luck, but two points. First, the government is not going to fix family dysfunction and the impact on kids by handing out money. It is going to HELP fix it by creating an environment that allows people to have the dignity and purpose of a good paying job. The government cannot make parents better people or better parents period. What it can do is to try and create an environment where people have an opportunity to mitigate the dysfunction by having less financial stress and fear and have the pride and dignity that come from meaningful work. Second, to a certain degree we create our own luck. We just do. But even then, we are never going to eliminate the impact of chance.
Finally, we need to restore RESPECT for people who do all those kinds of blue collar jobs. We need a culture that treats the people who do that work with respect. We need a culture that values these people not one that ignores and denigrates them. The farmer on the tractor or the dental hygienist are as human and important and valuable as any dentist or professor of Women's Studies. Now go convince your democratic friends, your faculty peers, of this. Tell your students that they are free to drop out and go to trade school and still have your respect.
Great post. But the wounds run very deep. I have a brother in law that runs a union carpenter shop. They are begging for young folks to enter into an apprenticeships. The benefits accrued during an apprenticeship on your way to journeyman are significant. Same for all the other trades. When they do get someone to enter the system more often than not they quit or get caught drunk or drugged on the job. His work force has aged significantly over the last decade. Years ago, when teaching at a university, I use to ask why my freshman students were in college. Too many of them had no answer or were there because their parents insisted. Many of them were never going to graduate because they just didn't have the intellect, while other with the intellect just weren't interested in being there. We need to stop insisting that college is the only way to the "good life" outside of the military. We need to recognize where we are now as a economic/social system.
"Finally, we need to restore RESPECT for people who do all those kinds of blue collar jobs. "
100% spot on. Most decent people, in fact, did these jobs to finance their degrees. Are we now so much better because we're doctors or lawyers or - perish the thought - consultants???
Work is work. And everyone who works hard at a job and does it well is worthy of respect. If you think you're better than they are, you're just a shitty person. Full stop. No equivocation You are and you need to own that. And if you treat waiters, waitresses and servers poorly, there's a special place in Hell awaiting you.
Beautiful article. At a very human level it’s impossible for me to grieve the loss of Mike, and others like him.
And yet….
I come from a similar background, though in Maine, where it was the loss of the paper mills (among other factors) that lead to the slow death of the working class. My family too has its abuse and alcoholism.
Two things helped me escape:
I enlisted in the U.S. Navy (to get as far from home as possible) and when one of my first Chiefs suggested therapy might help my rage, I went.
I refuse to buy into a narrative that strips the people I knew growing up from the agency to struggle with their demons, personal and cultural — it robs them of their humanity.
I can and do morn the death of people like Mike, but I can’t, and don’t wish to try, to mourn the death of a population who refuses to adapt.
Hell, I grew up in a family where everyone for the last 3-4 generations on both sides had gone to college, and I still had to enlist in the Navy to learn how to be an adult and a man.
GO NAVY BEAT ARMY!! My program director said to me, “never underestimate the positive socialization the military accomplishes “. This was before it got “woke” though.
I've watched two white male friends die deaths of despair. Both were fatherless. Bloodworth mentions alcoholic fathers, violent sons of bitches, and that's always been a problem for some, but since he was growing up in the 80s, post-second wave feminism, I can't help but wonder whether this movement escalated that alcoholism and rage, because I credit feminism and other progressive narratives with our current epidemic of loneliness, these deaths of despair. The message is that we don't need men, isn't it? And what drives men, on a fundamental level, is providing for their family. To take away the obligation to provide, to serve as 'head' of the family, you take away a vehicle for purpose and pride. Add to this a denigrating narrative on the working class -- salt of the earth occupations -- mocking Christians and "family values" and what you get is plain chaos.
One white male friend (he was gay) -- he and I connected over our father's deaths when we were young. He worked as a sort of companion for the elderly, and seeing how they go out -- lonely and forgotten -- depending on hired help -- facilitated his decline into alcoholism, which killed him. The last time I saw him, he was yellow, and couldn't eat.
The other one, his father left his family and had little to do with them; the mother and children were supported by the church (in Holland).
The Dutch friend never found his place in the world, despite loyal friends, and his sisters. His wife had the elite job, and he too slipped into alcoholism. Part of what brought on the alcoholism was the lack of a father. Sisters helping him get a job. Women succeeding, him failing. His wife eventually quit the marriage, but in the end, it was his ex-wife who held his hand as he died of loneliness (due to the lockdown, when he had nothing to do but drink himself to death).
As my mother's days appear to be numbered, I've been writing cards with holiday memories, which brings up so much wistfulness. I'm among the many "unintentionally childless" people (1 in 4) who face an even lonelier demise with no children to advocate for us. I'm traveling back in time to suburban streets shrieking with kids; families gathered on lawns in their Easter best for photographs before driving off to church, family dinners -- this collective social world resides in my memory alone, it seems a thing of the past. As a kid, I was always holding babies; I haven't held a baby in thirty years -- my nephews (late 20s, early 30s) appear to be headed down the childless road despite the modeling of a sound marriage in their parents...most of the people I work with are childless and live alone...
There's an epidemic of abandoned bodies -- people of more diverse social classes ending up in unmarked graves. Loosening the morals on marriage and family is, in part, responsible for this. In a presentation I gave recently on dying alone, the social-justice bent of the audience was one of hubris. They cared more about inmates dying alone in their cells (ironically, inmates don't die alone) than the story of a 74-year-old childless career woman who died alone in her bathtub, unknown until her decomposing body stunk up the building. They insisted that their "chosen" families were superior to creating blood families. Hubris.
I am not from your class background, but the year I spent teaching working class kids in my hometown high school opened my eyes to the working class experience. I taught the cruelly-misnamed "College Prep" classes (only 9/39 actually went on to college, some were semi-literate) while the kids of my fellow professionals contended with higher order ideas in Honors down the hall. One of my students is now homeless, another committed suicide, the sharpest mind works at a gas station, and the only one who attended a private, four-year school is now a single mother on disability with $40,000 in college debt left to pay off. There is no neat political approach that would fix all these problems. There is no pro or anti-government fix. What's lacking first and foremost is empathy, which begins with seeing. My former students and their families are invisible here.
Valid points, but ascribing these problems as being caused by a changing economy is myopic. Everything in this story strike me as cultural failings. A western people adrift without a powerful worldview, without a Christian worldview. Why expect the government to solve cultural problems? Money doesn’t make you happy. Gratitude does.
False. But, for some reason you choose to state these as "facts."
Dr. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, states that “‘active conservative protestants who attend church regularly are actually 35% less likely to divorce than those who have no religious preferences.”
For those who were active in their church, the divorce rate was 27 to 50% lower than for non-churchgoers. On the other hand, Christians—those who simply call themselves “Christians” but do not actively engage with the faith—are 20% more likely than the general population to get divorced.
Very sad story. But saying it’s the government’s job, or a political party’s job to fix it is misguided. Society itself has lost its soul. We chose to abandon God. We chose to drive him out of schools and the public square. And with it went the basics-- Love you neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have done to you. You are your brother’s keeper. Had Mike belonged to a loving church, he would have found a family who cared for him. And knowing that love, he could have sorted out his life better.
there are churches and then there are churches. Unfortunately the church’s I attended as a child, teen were into how much money they could get from the parishioners, and had a severe problem with priests sexually abusing a wide range of children. No one was prosecuted, the victims, now adults don’t turn to the church. The church didn’t build a community within the parish or within the community. I know a lot of you have a very positive opinions and faith in the church of your flavor. Some of us will never accept the church again in our lives.
This resonated with me a great deal. I’m between funerals right now - my cousin committed suicide. Maybe was murdered, but it was a long time before the body was found, so hard to tell, and if she was, well the police in her economically depressed semi-vacant strip-mall suburban town are drowning in fentanyl overdoses so they don’t have a lot of time to prioritize yet another drunk redneck domestic violence killing. In a few weeks I’ll be at the funeral of one of my oldest childhood friends who drank himself to death at 39.
Like a lot of others, my observation of all of this is less that there’s something here for the government to fix, and more that my people - white working class people - have a profound cultural sickness that we need to address. Yes, there are all manner of external political and cultural forces that contributed to this, from the end of manufacturing to a cultural narrative that tells these people that they’re worthless, especially the men. But no one will fix that except our own communities.
One major, major issue I see is the fallout of divorce and broken and unstable families, plus substance abuse. My cousin was a child of divorce, was divorced herself, and was estranged from her son and his family due to her substance abuse; my friend was a child of divorced parents who lost his own marriage and custody of his kids due to his drinking. The normalization of divorce has been profoundly toxic for our society - and I speak as someone who is divorced myself (thankfully without kids) and now remarried with stepchildren. The amount of support and help and work it takes to help my stepchildren heal from the breakup of their parents’ marriage is massive and requires a profound subordination of self by all the adults involved - and these are kids who still have a close emotional relationship with both parents, are financially stable, etc. Without that, the almost inevitable legacy is emotional damage that makes it very hard for kids to, themselves, form stable families - and we know those stable families are the bedrock of a functional society.
The other thing I see is a culture of being aggrieved. My cousins are always quitting jobs because they were disrespected, because the boss didn’t value them, because they were smarter than the boss...and not quitting for something better. Quitting to sit on their couches (or often their parents’, siblings’, or ex-spouses’ couches) with their Playstations and cheap beer. If they’re not quitting, they’re getting in fights. It’s southern honor culture gone to a squalid extreme - they aren’t dueling or starting feuds, they’re getting into punch-ups by the dumpsters behind a strip-mall sports bar because a guy flicked a cigarette butt too close to their feet.
We only fix these things ourselves, with God’s help. Daddy government isn’t going to step in from DC with some piece of legislation that digs us out of the hole of addiction and broken families and poor economic prospects. And if he did, we’d hate ourselves even more, because the sickness at the heart of all of this is rooted in a deep lack of self-respect and powerlessness.
"a culture of being aggrieved" this is such a great encapsulation of a feeling that allows the one to continue to make bad choices, resign themselves to helplessness, and refuse to work in therapy or counseling.
And, like, the truth is that many of my relatives *are* suffering from the impact of external forces that are beyond their control - it isn’t their fault that the job landscape for men without college degrees has tanked; it isn’t their fault that masculinity is a dirty word in many segments of society - but the continued refusal to own their choices seals to deal on failure. Like, quitting that job at Pep Boys was your decision. Not finishing that community college HVAC certificate program was your decision. Picking up that beer, that cigarette, that joint was your decision.
A very sad story. But what I takeaway the most, because the author seems fixated on it is, you don’t put your trust in democrats. You don’t stay a dem and your life certainly shouldn’t rise or fall on getting a job with the democrat party for heck’s sake.
You shouldn't blindly follow any political party or group. You should constantly question and hold them accountable, especially when they fail to truly listen or champion the things that truly matter to you.
God this is sad. Parents matter. Love matters. This is NOT the governments place to make this happen. Our government is made up of a bunch of shitheads capitalizing on their positions. What's really sad is, luck does matter. Did you get lucky and be born to two people who prioritize their kids, who want them to be independent and confident and capable, or two parents consumed with themselves? It's all luck. You can't pick your parents and your start in life. If you have a good base, you can get through all the hard stuff, and there's always hard stuff.
I think of it slightly differently. Luck should matter less. We have the agency that makes love matter as you say. Why not put more focus on that and less on individualism/identity? Family first.
Because many people in these situations have family that is more likely to drag them down than help them up. Family has to be fixed at a societal level but the millions of individuals living this life right now don’t have time to sit around and wait for that evolution to occur and also don’t have a family they can lean into and receive love and support from.
“Democrats, who used to be our party, who remain my party, are our last, best hope, if they can only find their way back to the class-based political space they once inhabited.”
I’m sorry, but this sounds like wishful thinking. Even 50 or 80 years ago, when the Democrats really did cater to the working class, they were not your friends. They used you. It was a snow job, a long con.
Look at the despicable leadership of the Democrats today, people like Schumer, Schiff, Pelosi, and Newsom. They are as dishonest as the day is long. They lie easily, and they are bought.
This is why Trump was so successful, and why the Democrats, in a temporary alliance with establishment Republicans, have scrambled to take him down for indiscretions that they completely ignore and forgive among their own.
They’re not your friends. Your friends are your friends, your family, your coworkers, fellow church members… your community. To rebuild the kind of coalitions that are needed to take country back from the radical Left, opportunists, and China-owned crooks will take a grassroots effort that may no longer be possible in our shiftless society.
This thought process is a big part of the reason why the Democrat party selected "good ol' workin' class Joe Biden" instead of Hillary, Liz Warren, or Bernie as their presidential candidate in 2020.
I’m from a small cowtown in Colodado, graduated from high school in 1980. My parents had seven kids on a Jr. College professor’s salary. Then he got brain cancer when I was in 5th grade. We went from white collar to blue collar to falling down hard.
I think what saved my brothers and sister was the Catholic Church, Mom and Dad’s refusal to divorce each other and my mother’s parents among also hundreds of people in our community.
Yay you! Telll more of your story! It will help so many people. In fact you're making me think there should be a podcast like this called rise up... Stories of those who rose out of the ashes of a difficult childhood and succeeded.
I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Bloodworth, but this essay reads like survivor's guilt to me.
Yes, life is tough and far tougher still if you're one of the millions who don't have anyone who has your back. Dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional humans, but I don't know that that's necessarily the fault of politicians of either party.
I don't think it's a question of burrowing down, so you shut out what you don't want to see. I think it's a question of realistically defining your own sphere of influence. You _can_ help people—but only if they are willing to accept your help.
"We didn't need to be studied. We needed to be represented." THIS. RIGHT HERE. But the Dems won't get it. Never will. A sense of progressive elitism rules the roost over there, and it's almost impossible to break, because it's LIFE-DEFINING for so many Dem thought leaders. It gives them meaning in their lives, and there's almost nothing more powerful than that.
Me? I'm a mildly grumpy Asian man (son of immigrants) who'se tired of being labeled as "white adjacent" by these narcissistic idiots. In the end, it's all about them.
A very, very sad story. But, if you are waiting for the government to step in, you’ve already given up. You’ve handed your agency to others. The democratic party believes in government, but government can never fill the roll of family and faith. In fact, the democrats have worked hard to destroy those ties. Parents Bill of Rights is a glaring example - separate kids from parents via the schools by telling parents to give up their kids to a system that doesn’t care. Not one democrat voted to empower parents. Shameful.
I am really sorry for your loss.
This are just results of policies that were implemented from 1980 to today. Outsourcing manufacturing gutted middle class but what killed it was systematic destruction of traditional family values. Ironically, white males who are always blamed for everything wrong in this country, are biggest losers in last 30 years.
But hey according to MSM and our elites, some average Joe from flyover country, who saw complete destruction of his town by Wall Street and big business, saw worst of opioid epidemic in community, lost all economic perspective, is complety ignored by Washington is somehow still enjoying white privilege and is root cause of systemic racism and all problems in US.
Manufacturing has been outsourced due to massive, uncontrollable government regulations. Those regs will never be rolled back.
It wasn’t the regulations that initiated the companies to flee. It was greed. Pure and simple. Cheap labor, dumping toxic waste freely into foreign country’s waterways and land, chasing higher profits with little regard for anything, and anyone other than their profit margins.
Nope. If your competitors are reducing manufacturing costs by moving overseas, and there’s no means of leveling the playing field (i.e., free trade agreements outlaw it) then you can either go with them, or go bankrupt. We either need to reduce the regulatory burden, or impose more aggressive import tariffs on countries that do not observe our labor and environmental laws. The best answer is to do some of both.
I see your point. My personal experience was with a friend of a friend who made manikins. He moved his company to Mexico, because the toxic waste material spewing from his factory was found to be illegal. In Mexico, there was no such regulations, and he was free to dump his toxic untreated sludge into the waterways of his new location. And made a fortune in the process.
I don’t know that we’re actually disagreeing on anything here. Over time, I think you will find that the margins for outsourcing have declined too as there’s competition in those foreign jurisdictions. Of course, that makes it even more difficult to bring those businesses home. The only way to do it is to make the costs of those environmental and labor laws more explicit. That will have the double advantage of bringing manufacturing home (by eliminating the principal advantage of outsourcing) and making Americans more sober about the cost of ever more costly regulation. The cost will be a lower standard of living overall as the cost of goods will increase, but most of the advantages of those efficiencies went to the capital class anyway. In my mind, the trade offs are worth it. And this from a life-long Republican and executive at a large domestic manufacturer.
I'd only add, that while a staunch capitalist, maybe we'll find that we really don't need all the cheap made in China consumer products we've been conditioned to believe we need.
Spot on. Never forget that as our politicians were signing the various free trade agreements and rolling back tariffs to enrich China, they were promising to retrain US workers to work in a "service economy". What happened to that training and those jobs? Every heard of a "call center" in Lahore?
And how many people do you see working at solar arrays or wind farms?
so... race to the bottom to where we employ the most desperate nation's regulatory standards? This is pretty much what actual "free trade" agreements were supposed to prevent - a baseline of labor, environmental and financial standards that did not allow businesses to pursue this arbitrage strategy. Of course, since corporations are also writing these free trade agreements, they are allowing the former while rendering the latter impractical.
Here’s a CRS article on the subject. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10166
You will see that most FTAs include environmental provisions, but they only require enforcement of that jurisdiction’s then-existing laws. Of course, that doesn’t mean they have to impose laws as rigorous as the US’s, and none do. It’s the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, combined with the Endangered Species Act, that are the major cost drivers. China, India, Cambodia, Mexico -- none of them have laws even remotely as burdensome. That, combined with US labor laws, is why the free trade agreements have gutted middle America.
I’m not saying it *should* be a race to the bottom. To the contrary, I’m saying that’s what happens when you impose severe environmental regulation domestically and you do not require the same of foreign jurisdictions. Businesses have to leave, or shutter. They cannot otherwise compete.
It is both. Little or no regulations oversea and not just greed. If you have widget factory in the US and turn out a product with a market value of $5.00 and you are clearing overhead and making a profit, things are great. Your only competitor is a French company who make the same widget you make with equal quality and cost as yours.
The French company says it is moving its factory to China because of cheaper production costs and now will sell its widget for $2.00. What do you do to stay in business? You move your factories to China otherwise you go out of business.
There no simple answers to complex problems but I have an idea to alleviate this but it takes backbone from Congress and we all know politicians have no backbone. The only thing that motivates a politician is a hefty bribe.
More on my idea later.
"The French company says it is moving its factory to China because of cheaper production costs and now will sell its widget for $2.00. What do you do to stay in business? "
You can do any number of things. If your competitor is solely able to achieve the lower price as a result of employing child labor, or dumping toxic waste --- by all means, bring this to light, and market yourself as the alternative.
That will work on a small group of people but the vast majority will go for the cheaper product. IMHO.
Not me.
I don't like China for its intellectual property theft, its putting Uighurs in concentration camps (and killing them to sell their vital organs to buyers for cash), its worldwide spread of Covid (by not ceasing international flights in 2020), its lithium ion batteries made of Congolese cobalt harvested by African children and, perhaps most, its bequeathal of fentanyl and crystal meth to us through our friends in Central American gangs.
I quit buying Chinese products more than five years ago. I'm not rich, but I'm not particularly materialistic. I'm the one who posts the "Made in China?" question on Amazon listings, which information the company should have started sharing many years ago. As time goes by, I find there are many others who are doing the same.
I can't buy only American products -- there aren't that many these days -- but I'm happy to pick up used tools and furniture here and there, including some bought initially from China, but at least not bought from China by me.
It's a start, and it's satisfying.
They will but they are complicit in things they believe themselves superior to. LeBron James being the poster child thereof. But in my experience buying cheap sub-par crap is more expensive in the long run because you have to replace it more often. One of the best things I ever did for my finances was stop shopping at WalChina.
We have met the enemy and they are us.
Agreed. Plus most of us produce widgets that are incorporated into other widgets so who is to hear our complaint and hold the firm using the lowest cost global labor? Nobody and by the time anybody reacts the market has moved on without you. And I'm in a market (Aerospace) with some very long product life cycles.
"That will work on a small group of people but the vast majority will go for the cheaper product. IMHO."
if Madison avenue can market sugary drinks to the world, surely they can market a company taking a stand against slave labor. If competitors are using slave labor, Western consumers can certainly be persuaded to pay a premium for the product that isn't made by slaves.
I don't think the issue is with the consumer. The issue is the regulatory morass that's making it so prohibitive to build anything in America.
You could in theory market your product in a way that differentiates it, preferably as a premium product and then sell it for $10. That is easier said than done of course, but it is a possibility.
You will likely sell fewer units even if you succeed, but that doesn't have to be fatal.
I moved my manufacturing factory to Mexico in the late 1980s. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I did it to survive. I had 300 employees in the US and eventually 900 in Mexico. Unless you have dealt with bureaucrat regulators you do not know how unjustly they treat businesses like mine. I was early to move, and out of strict necessity. Later companies moved to be competitive to mine, and most moved on th China. I hated to be part of this process. But I did save my company and my life savings. Unless you have experienced the other side of regulators you may not know the whole story.
Very few Democrats have ever run manufacturing companies, they only know one exaggerated perspective.
Can you specify which regulatory burdens you have been relieved of in your move?
edit: not asking out of snark but an honest inquiry as to what the trade offs have been.
I wrote this last night, don't know where it landed, so here are a couple of examples again:
Know that I retired in 1999, so my memory isn't as good. I started my company in 1972 at 24 yrs old, with $990 and no experience. In Mexico we had far fewer injuries not because we had OSHA on our back but because there was no longer an incentive to be injured. In California a new law had just been introduced that allowed for emotional distress, and this only added to the huge incentive for an employee to receive workers Comp and stay home. It was already impossible to diagnosis a hurt back! We valued our employees highly so we did not need inspections from OSHA to do nonsensical things like rearranging certain equipment to meet certain standards that had no safety relevance in our factory. It was stunning to see how rare it was for a Mexican worker to get injured compared to our US workers! In Mexico I did not have to deal with the AQMD (Air Quality Management District) - Los Angeles' sister agency to the EPA. This is a long story. The short version: my company turned itself in when the AQMD for the first time in the history we knew of started enforcing the emissions permits it issued. We made and finished furniture so we emitted carbon-based materials. I was not aware but we emitted more than we were permitted. Back in the 1980s the AQMD did not appear to enforce much. We went to the top environmental attorneys in LA, and they advised that by being good corporate citizens and turning ourselves in, the AQMD would work with us. This turned out to be an enormous mistake. They threw the book at us. I met with the head of enforcement to see if he really wanted to bankrupt my company by forcing us to only use water-based solvents very quickly since none of these solvents had been proven to finish furniture adequately. He couldn't care less about the company or its 300 employees and countless suppliers and customers. So I suggested that he at least even the playing field by enforcing this on all of my competitors. He didn't know them, but I knew my industry extremely well and was sure there were at least 4 or 5 competitors who not only emitted more than my company but were permitted less because they were younger companies that would not have acquired the level of permitting we had. I would even give him their addresses! He showed no interest. We had no choice but to try to make a compound nicknamed "1,1,1," a water-based solvent, to work despite years of failed attempts with it in the past. This cost me a great deal of sleepless nights and money. But a miracle happened, our incredibly hard work paid off - we finally made it work! And we could stay in business. To my knowledge my competitors never turned themselves in, they never revealed they were very under-permitted, and they did not have to use 1,1,1. I could only assume they continued to emit over their permitted levels without consequence. Many years later when I was happily ensconced in Mexico I received a phone call from the top attorney we had used for the AQMD experience. She asked me to testify for some state governmental hearing to explain how unfairly my company was treated. You can imagine how happy I was to tell her to tell California just where they could go to get advice on treating companies fairly.
Thanks so much for this, Dennies, I really appreciate your taking the time. This is a ghastly misuse of the regulatory process, and if it's as widespread across America as I can imagine it is in California, I can see why owners like you choose to move out of the country.
If we want to build things in this country, then we need to make it a whole lot easier for the people who do that work to operate. Environmental concerns are important and a proper area to regulate. But your experience went beyond proper regulation into Nightmare Land, and it must end.
I agree with Smarticat: please explain what regulatory burdens you escaped by moving to Mexico. I find this fascinating and would truly like to know.
I agree with you.
It wasn’t just corporate greed...it was ours, the consumer. We wanted cheaper prices. It cost America it’s soul.
I was/am part of that cheap consumerism & I utterly regret it. But, there is no way out of it now. America is forever stuck in that quagmire.
It’s was the u fortunate confluence of “Madison Ave”, the war on religion, and the rise of the “if it feels good, do it” culture.
If only one company does it, that company has a competitive advantage that other companies cannot cope with on American soil with costly regulations and union-backed work rules that reduce output and productivity. Companies are composed of people who make rational decisions for the workers, customers and investors, without whose backing there would be no company in the first place.
But you noticed that the unions didn't really care either. As long as the money is flowing through their hands.
Unions are big business.
Imagine being stupid enough to think that "greed" could motivate businesses to relocate without there first needing to be some REASON that it was more profitable to leave than to stay.
I know! Greed is not enough. There’s the matter of selling your soul to make a buck, exploiting your workers, pushing ahead with no introspection about what you are doing and how it will affect everyone else, in order to PRETEND that the reason you choose leave the U.S. to exploit a Third World country has some legitimacy and has nothing to do with your greedy soulless existence. So much more in operation here! Greed is merely a motivator. Continued exploitation and defense of those actions when the results are clear for all to see, on every level, takes a special kind of useless idiocy.
You badly misuse the word "exploit".
It is racist of people like you to say that "third worlders" don't deserve jobs, and ignorant to pretend that they're being "exploited" because they're paid less than Americans when they're making much more than they could otherwise. All of that beside the fact that American business is made unnecessarily expensive by left-wing policy.
Useless idiocy indeed.
"It is racist of people like you to say that "third worlders" don't deserve jobs."
And you badly misuse the word "racist." Third Worlders deserve jobs. But not when they come at the expense of my fellow workers. If a job is to be located in the United States or the Third World, I will always root for the home team.
You have never run a business. It's all castles in Spain to you.
“Greed” is probably the hard edged way to say “profits”, which is a normal business motive. It’s the other companions that come with offshoring (exploitation of cheap labor, environmental impacts, supply chain problems, etc) that are so harmful. The Dark Side of capitalism.
There is nothing "capitalist" about the negatives that you list. Other systems have those problems to substantially greater degrees.
Then why did Clinton sign the WTO to encourage corporations to do just that?
I'm sorry, but you're wrong, I built 5 plants in China, all to serve the Chinese market and the Chinese government held my companies, and all foreign companies to environmental regulations not dis-similar from our own. The environmental permitting processes were exhaustive. They did not hold their own local companies to these standards. You believe a myth, like most on the left, believe in a fairy tale world where all of your beliefs can have some validity.
Agree. I’m not going to “like” this article because it’s fundamentally false underpinning is that Republican support for free markets crushed the middle class. It’s only true to the extent that politicians, most especially Clinton, wanted to outsource our free markets to the developing world while increasing regulations here. There are far fewer public companies today than there were 30 years ago, despite a higher population.
Members of both parties have engaged in taxpayer reallocation schemes and government expansion to the point that government picks winners and losers and serves to crush competition at every turn, but the left does it to far greater levels and far more frequently. From Clinton’s support of the WTO which was set up to permanently disadvantage to US for not having a VAT tax, to Obama’s “patent” courts which allow big companies to ultimately steal IP from start ups over 90% of the time, it is government intervention which destroys the middle class and the markets which are no longer anything resembling free.
Not ALL Republicans offer a good alternative, but many of them do. Republicans push policies often to decentralize control. Neocons are terrible, but they aren’t actually conservatives. The left cheers the destruction of the working class, and sane contributing citizens generally.
The fortunate thing is that since they are the results of policies, those policies can be changed. As C.S. Lewis says, "when you're on the wrong road, the most progressive man is the one who turns around first."
The unfortunate thing is that we are unlikely to actually reverse these policies anytime soon, since neither political party actually gives a crap about the people they are hurting.
That last line is a sad commentary, but completely accurate. We're like passengers on a runaway train driven by idiots.
Spot on. This is the definition of demoralIzation. Yuri Bezmenov tried to warn us in 1984, but we didn’t listen: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-reason-with-a-demoralized
Blame the victim.
Yep, you’ve nailed it.
Raziel, these are not 'just results of policies that were implemented from 1980 to today'. The middle class may be gutted but from what I can see these past twenty years or so, there are a lot of very wealthy, well known (white) Americans who commit suicide, suffer from self abuse, take opioids (it used to be cocaine..) and 'die from loneliness' too. And many of them quite publicly.
This is not only a demographic issue, or a class issue, or an economic issue, or a race one (since not only whites are affected) - it is also a psychological one involving depression and anguish that crosses over all delineations. Not an easy fix. But to you it's simply family values and outsourcing jobs that's the cause. Somewhat on the simplistic side.
Try not to politicize it with your MSM 'white privilege' and 'root cause of systemic racism' condemnation, it's hyperbole.
This is a deeply personal piece, and I appreciate that. I'm trying to fit it into my experiences and coming up a bit short. I came from a literally dirt poor family (our first log cabin had a packed dirt floor) with no electricity or running water, and home schooled through grade 10. The outhouse was the way of doing business. Four kids, nuclear family, parents quit drinking before we were sentient. All four of us have reasonably comfortable lives and families. Bit of providence there, but maybe statistically significant? Leaning towards the core nuclear family as the prominent factor instead of being poor. Thoughts?
Family is key and should be encouraged/promoted by all levels of society and Government. Family is the bedrock
Family is a form of government and is the most important, as well as effective. Every step up in size, be it neighborhood, town, etc enables participants more opportunity for failure. The devolution of the family is the root of most of our social ills.
Kids don't get to choose their family and they have little or no control over their parents. Emphasizing family (Particularly the traditional definition of family) just makes those of us who didn't have a particularly great family situation feel even more shitty.
Emphasizing community seems like a better path to me, and it's something that many conservatives I know believe in (generally by way of the Church), but spend too little time emphasizing. Also, it's something that should be emphasized and concentrated on outside of the Church as well.
Todays "conservatives" spend far too much time talking about freedom and too little talking about responsibility.
I think it's fair to say that liberals have lost their way, but so have conservatives.
1000X this. I fully agree that family is perhaps the most important factor in getting a leg up in life. It’s also beyond the control of the individual and leaves no room for personal agency. It’s akin to progressives telling blacks they’re doomed to a life of disadvantage based on their skin color. There has to be exposure to alternative paths out of poverty. I broke a generational legacy of abuse, poverty, and addiction but it involved severing ties with almost all of my family. I’m a huge believer in personal agency but it still only goes so far when you’re in a hole. Eventually you need a hand up (and I’m not referring to government social programs). Community can be found in church yes, but also school or work.
You also have to drop the shovel.
You're right. The world's no utopia and kids pay the price based on the luck of the draw, and through no fault of their own. Community structures outside the family have a place, especially for those with unhappy childhoods. My purpose in life is to provide for and protect my family. That gives life meaning. Having seen wartorn countries where human life was cheap, even though I despise our ruling class, I'm hoping everything holds together so my daughters can have a peaceful life. Utopia is a destructive dream.
But freedom is responsibility.
I completely agree.
Present day Liberals tend to talk about responsibility without talking about freedom, or acknowledging their own privilege. Present day conservatives tend to talk about freedom without wanting to discuss their responsibilities, which many seem to view as only including waving the flag and pissing off the libtards.
Yes, I'm generalizing excessively. I'm human, it happens.
Yeah, I'm human too. It's crazy how much hubris our government has to think it can fix shit that has been going on since time immemorial. If they throw enough money at it.
If they take enough money from the populace and throw money at it without safeguarding that the money actually gets to what it is thrown at.
I mean no disrespect but just because something makes you feel
shitty, doesn’t mean it’s untrue. I also came from a split family with loads of other problems but I can see the value of an intact family.
I think community can have an important impact but unfortunately for kids like us, IMO, not as big as family.
I can see the value of an intact family as well. That wasn't my point.
It in no way helps children to hear this, particularly when emphasis is put on the word "traditional". Especially when those words are uttered by adults who have no clue the negative impact those words have.
To be clear, while my parents had a less than ideal/happy marriage, I was far better off than many others in that area. Still, coming home from school to see my dad carrying boxes of his stuff out of the house for the third or fourth time (it would not be the last) was far from the high point of my childhood.
People with traditional values should not be marginalized because they are not universal. No one's values are universal and if I am to respect values different from mine, mine need to be respected too. For many of us those values are based on 2,000 years of growth. For others, far longer than that. So they are traditional as compared newly created values.
You misunderstand. Conservatives, at least in my experience, value responsibility and personal accountability. They just want the freedom.to decide what that is instead of the government. The left always bemoans trickle down economics but never examines it's trickle down social policies. I think if we are honest we will acknowledge those are disastrous.
Where things get tricky is when my desire to exercise my freedom to do something overlaps yours. Say for instance I want do some target practice in my backyard at three AM when most people prefer to sleep. In an advanced society somebody needs to arbitrate those kinds of conflicts. If not the government, then who?
It's legit to debate where to draw the line on what the government gets to arbitrate, but it doesn't make sense to me to imply that the government is categorically wrong to do that job.
Most communities have laws for that. Criminal laws if it is prohibited and if it is not prohibited you are free to fire away. We have that exact scenario in my unincorporated part of a rapidly growing county. Noise violations are subject to the same violations which leave civil nuisance suits. Which are defended by it is not illegal. That is different than regulation by unelected bureaucrat fiat. And we have seen the rise of that in light of Congress' abandonment of its legislative function.
Quitting the alcohol may have made more difference than anything else.
I agree. There are people in poor neighborhoods that are noble and live right. I do not like this wealth divide. Morals and values should not depend on socioeconomic class.
I agree in general, but it's much easier to be noble when you are not living hand to mouth.
It should easier to be noble from a place of abundance, but judging from the plethora of self-professed and self-serving "elites" out there pretty easy to be ignoble as well. To face hardship with dignity is IMO very noble.
Being poor reduces your options and puts pressure on everything in life. I suspect people are then more prone to taking out their stress and frustrations on other people, and the ones close get the mother load. A bit of wealth opens up our options and allows us to distance ourselves from the existential stress. I remember Mom and Dad agonizing over how to feed us kids. At one point, they had to empty our piggy banks and pool the money. We got IOUs. It's a very different world that my family and I live in now (my wife had a similar upbringing), but we remember. I think our masters in the establishment have had too many generations apart from reality to understand life. We humans don't seem to do well with too much time on our hands.
Your piggy bank experience as a child is very similar to one I had. My father needed gas money so he could get to a job interview. He didn't get the job, and the IOU went unpaid. He'd been blacklisted because he reported his previous employer for safety violations. They couldn't fire him, so instead they made his life a living hell at work until he quit. We lost pretty much everything. I don't think he ever fully recovered from that experience.
I've long thought that multi-generational wealth is extremely dangerous. Some families seem to handle it OK for the most part, but many do not. In my opinion Andrew Carnegie had the right idea in regards to wealth.
I don't believe you can separate them.
Damn....a whole lot to unpack in this.
First, I would tell the author to bail on the democrats. They are addicted to elitism and big money. Their core constituency, at least as they seem to see it, consists of black women, trans activists, college professors, the Martha's Vineyard and Hamptons crowd, and big Silicon Valley and big Pharma money. They are not interested in the white working class or any working class really. If your white, male and working class, you are about as far from their interests as your gonna get. If you believe in God more than in the Metaverse or Tik Tok, you are not one of them, in fact you are the enemy. If you drive a truck and have a dirty job, you are to be used until you are no longer useful. If you work at Walmart or the local grocery store, you are to be unseen and when you are too old or too sick to support yourself they will give you just enough to keep you unseen. They have no interest in bettering your condition and like the Walmart worker they would prefer the kind of jobs you do not be seen and be exported to places where they do not have to witness it, smell it or have it interfere with their green spaces. They certainly do not want you to have the kind of economic stability that translates into political power. Stay in your place, be useful as long as you can and then fade away and be quiet.
Are the republicans any better? Depends on which republicans you are talking about and what you mean by better. If you mean the Mitch McConnel's of the world who envy the democrats ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley then the answer is very likely not. If you mean the more populist types who are averse to unfettered free trade, who question green orthodoxy, who actually think that the country is bigger then the Boston to DC corridor or San Francisco, who think that best way to help people is to provide an environment that creates and maintains good paying working class jobs, who think that excessive immigration creates too much competition for jobs at the lower end, well then maybe that is a group for you. Are the republicans cynically taking an opening to the white working class? Probably. But then the democrats have taken what used to their constituency and they need the working class to win. Is that perfect? No. But it beats being used by the democrats to serve their primary constituency while enduring mocking and being humiliated by them as the price. And, at least, because they need you, these new, populist republicans are going to make some effort to address your concerns. At least with them you have some leverage.
You may have missed it, but there has been a major political realignment happening for 30 yrs and it started with Bill Clinton, NAFTA, globalization, the democrats moving closer to big money with banking deregulation. It carried on under Bush Jr. and China entering the WTO and it really revealed itself under Obama and the bank bailouts. Trump, for all his flaws, saw this and called it out and took advantage of it. Its one of the reasons that the democrats and the old school republicans like Romney and McConnel hate him so much, he exposed that the game was rigged and worse, he showed the working class that they do still have power enough to create havoc for those who have ignored them when not outright trying to make their lives harder while treating them with contempt, mocking their values as they cling to God and guns while showing up at Veteran's Day parades in trucks with American flags on them. From the perspective of the old school republicans and the democrats, the best thing the working class can do is be useful to them or serve in the army and then disappear.
BTW professor, when is the last time you came out of the classroom or the faculty lounge and went and had coffee with the janitorial staff at the university? Have you ever invited one of the campus cops to a cookout? When is the last time you stopped to have a conversation of any length with the lady who cleans the dishes in the cafeteria? When your plumber comes to the house do you make any effort to try and appreciate what he does and ask questions or even the kid who changes the brakes on your car? I can tell you that this republican does precisely those things. The democrats need more Mike Rowe's and fewer AOCs.
Did you know that it is easier to find a Java programmer or a Business Analyst than a good plumber or machinist? I cannot walk the streets of Boston or DC without tripping over a Phd looking for a job engaged in mental masturbation that will pay for their Starbucks habit, but I'll be damned if I can find a guy to do good tile work for under $600 a day and needs less than 3 weeks to get to me.
Not everyone is cut out to be a financial analyst or a doctor or a VP of sales. Some people lack the intellect. Some people lack the drive. Some people are just not temperamentally cut out for that kind of work. Some people are cut out to work with their hands. That is not to say they are stupid, a lot of trades and manufacturing jobs are physically tough but also require a good brain. Ever tried to do the calculations for the cuts to install trusses? Ever tried to figure out how much load a new AC unit will put on an electrical system in a house or whether a booster is needed to run an internet cable?
I do not disagree with you about minimizing the role of luck, but two points. First, the government is not going to fix family dysfunction and the impact on kids by handing out money. It is going to HELP fix it by creating an environment that allows people to have the dignity and purpose of a good paying job. The government cannot make parents better people or better parents period. What it can do is to try and create an environment where people have an opportunity to mitigate the dysfunction by having less financial stress and fear and have the pride and dignity that come from meaningful work. Second, to a certain degree we create our own luck. We just do. But even then, we are never going to eliminate the impact of chance.
Finally, we need to restore RESPECT for people who do all those kinds of blue collar jobs. We need a culture that treats the people who do that work with respect. We need a culture that values these people not one that ignores and denigrates them. The farmer on the tractor or the dental hygienist are as human and important and valuable as any dentist or professor of Women's Studies. Now go convince your democratic friends, your faculty peers, of this. Tell your students that they are free to drop out and go to trade school and still have your respect.
Great post. But the wounds run very deep. I have a brother in law that runs a union carpenter shop. They are begging for young folks to enter into an apprenticeships. The benefits accrued during an apprenticeship on your way to journeyman are significant. Same for all the other trades. When they do get someone to enter the system more often than not they quit or get caught drunk or drugged on the job. His work force has aged significantly over the last decade. Years ago, when teaching at a university, I use to ask why my freshman students were in college. Too many of them had no answer or were there because their parents insisted. Many of them were never going to graduate because they just didn't have the intellect, while other with the intellect just weren't interested in being there. We need to stop insisting that college is the only way to the "good life" outside of the military. We need to recognize where we are now as a economic/social system.
How true. My plumber can't keep the people he hires and it's not because of the pay. Everyone wants to be a millionaire without putting in the work.
"Finally, we need to restore RESPECT for people who do all those kinds of blue collar jobs. "
100% spot on. Most decent people, in fact, did these jobs to finance their degrees. Are we now so much better because we're doctors or lawyers or - perish the thought - consultants???
Work is work. And everyone who works hard at a job and does it well is worthy of respect. If you think you're better than they are, you're just a shitty person. Full stop. No equivocation You are and you need to own that. And if you treat waiters, waitresses and servers poorly, there's a special place in Hell awaiting you.
So nicely summarized Lemon
Dang I need to go get my flag, unfurl it, and wave it around. Seriously. You describe the America I love.
Beautiful article. At a very human level it’s impossible for me to grieve the loss of Mike, and others like him.
And yet….
I come from a similar background, though in Maine, where it was the loss of the paper mills (among other factors) that lead to the slow death of the working class. My family too has its abuse and alcoholism.
Two things helped me escape:
I enlisted in the U.S. Navy (to get as far from home as possible) and when one of my first Chiefs suggested therapy might help my rage, I went.
I refuse to buy into a narrative that strips the people I knew growing up from the agency to struggle with their demons, personal and cultural — it robs them of their humanity.
I can and do morn the death of people like Mike, but I can’t, and don’t wish to try, to mourn the death of a population who refuses to adapt.
It seemed clear to me that he did try to adapt, but he didn't have the foundation he needed to fully transition out of his early challenges.
It sounds like he had a decent job and people who cared about him but there was too much emotional baggage for him to find happiness.
Hell, I grew up in a family where everyone for the last 3-4 generations on both sides had gone to college, and I still had to enlist in the Navy to learn how to be an adult and a man.
Ain’t that the truth, brother!
GO NAVY BEAT ARMY!! My program director said to me, “never underestimate the positive socialization the military accomplishes “. This was before it got “woke” though.
I've watched two white male friends die deaths of despair. Both were fatherless. Bloodworth mentions alcoholic fathers, violent sons of bitches, and that's always been a problem for some, but since he was growing up in the 80s, post-second wave feminism, I can't help but wonder whether this movement escalated that alcoholism and rage, because I credit feminism and other progressive narratives with our current epidemic of loneliness, these deaths of despair. The message is that we don't need men, isn't it? And what drives men, on a fundamental level, is providing for their family. To take away the obligation to provide, to serve as 'head' of the family, you take away a vehicle for purpose and pride. Add to this a denigrating narrative on the working class -- salt of the earth occupations -- mocking Christians and "family values" and what you get is plain chaos.
One white male friend (he was gay) -- he and I connected over our father's deaths when we were young. He worked as a sort of companion for the elderly, and seeing how they go out -- lonely and forgotten -- depending on hired help -- facilitated his decline into alcoholism, which killed him. The last time I saw him, he was yellow, and couldn't eat.
The other one, his father left his family and had little to do with them; the mother and children were supported by the church (in Holland).
The Dutch friend never found his place in the world, despite loyal friends, and his sisters. His wife had the elite job, and he too slipped into alcoholism. Part of what brought on the alcoholism was the lack of a father. Sisters helping him get a job. Women succeeding, him failing. His wife eventually quit the marriage, but in the end, it was his ex-wife who held his hand as he died of loneliness (due to the lockdown, when he had nothing to do but drink himself to death).
As my mother's days appear to be numbered, I've been writing cards with holiday memories, which brings up so much wistfulness. I'm among the many "unintentionally childless" people (1 in 4) who face an even lonelier demise with no children to advocate for us. I'm traveling back in time to suburban streets shrieking with kids; families gathered on lawns in their Easter best for photographs before driving off to church, family dinners -- this collective social world resides in my memory alone, it seems a thing of the past. As a kid, I was always holding babies; I haven't held a baby in thirty years -- my nephews (late 20s, early 30s) appear to be headed down the childless road despite the modeling of a sound marriage in their parents...most of the people I work with are childless and live alone...
There's an epidemic of abandoned bodies -- people of more diverse social classes ending up in unmarked graves. Loosening the morals on marriage and family is, in part, responsible for this. In a presentation I gave recently on dying alone, the social-justice bent of the audience was one of hubris. They cared more about inmates dying alone in their cells (ironically, inmates don't die alone) than the story of a 74-year-old childless career woman who died alone in her bathtub, unknown until her decomposing body stunk up the building. They insisted that their "chosen" families were superior to creating blood families. Hubris.
Absolutely beautiful comment.
Thank you for sharing your story.
I am not from your class background, but the year I spent teaching working class kids in my hometown high school opened my eyes to the working class experience. I taught the cruelly-misnamed "College Prep" classes (only 9/39 actually went on to college, some were semi-literate) while the kids of my fellow professionals contended with higher order ideas in Honors down the hall. One of my students is now homeless, another committed suicide, the sharpest mind works at a gas station, and the only one who attended a private, four-year school is now a single mother on disability with $40,000 in college debt left to pay off. There is no neat political approach that would fix all these problems. There is no pro or anti-government fix. What's lacking first and foremost is empathy, which begins with seeing. My former students and their families are invisible here.
Valid points, but ascribing these problems as being caused by a changing economy is myopic. Everything in this story strike me as cultural failings. A western people adrift without a powerful worldview, without a Christian worldview. Why expect the government to solve cultural problems? Money doesn’t make you happy. Gratitude does.
We confuse pleasure with happiness. Happiness isn’t easy, pleasure is, so we try to eat, drink and buy our way out of unhappiness.
Why a "Christian" worldview? I won't support that thought until Christians in America start acting like Christians.
I'll leave your with this:
Groups less likely to divorce; Catholics and Atheists
Group most likely to divorce: Evangelicals
Not sure how this falls into your idea of what a Christian Worldview is?
False. But, for some reason you choose to state these as "facts."
Dr. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, states that “‘active conservative protestants who attend church regularly are actually 35% less likely to divorce than those who have no religious preferences.”
For those who were active in their church, the divorce rate was 27 to 50% lower than for non-churchgoers. On the other hand, Christians—those who simply call themselves “Christians” but do not actively engage with the faith—are 20% more likely than the general population to get divorced.
Very sad story. But saying it’s the government’s job, or a political party’s job to fix it is misguided. Society itself has lost its soul. We chose to abandon God. We chose to drive him out of schools and the public square. And with it went the basics-- Love you neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have done to you. You are your brother’s keeper. Had Mike belonged to a loving church, he would have found a family who cared for him. And knowing that love, he could have sorted out his life better.
Great comment!! Strongly agree!!
there are churches and then there are churches. Unfortunately the church’s I attended as a child, teen were into how much money they could get from the parishioners, and had a severe problem with priests sexually abusing a wide range of children. No one was prosecuted, the victims, now adults don’t turn to the church. The church didn’t build a community within the parish or within the community. I know a lot of you have a very positive opinions and faith in the church of your flavor. Some of us will never accept the church again in our lives.
What you unfortunately experienced was bad people in a church. But don’t blame Christianity as a whole.
This resonated with me a great deal. I’m between funerals right now - my cousin committed suicide. Maybe was murdered, but it was a long time before the body was found, so hard to tell, and if she was, well the police in her economically depressed semi-vacant strip-mall suburban town are drowning in fentanyl overdoses so they don’t have a lot of time to prioritize yet another drunk redneck domestic violence killing. In a few weeks I’ll be at the funeral of one of my oldest childhood friends who drank himself to death at 39.
Like a lot of others, my observation of all of this is less that there’s something here for the government to fix, and more that my people - white working class people - have a profound cultural sickness that we need to address. Yes, there are all manner of external political and cultural forces that contributed to this, from the end of manufacturing to a cultural narrative that tells these people that they’re worthless, especially the men. But no one will fix that except our own communities.
One major, major issue I see is the fallout of divorce and broken and unstable families, plus substance abuse. My cousin was a child of divorce, was divorced herself, and was estranged from her son and his family due to her substance abuse; my friend was a child of divorced parents who lost his own marriage and custody of his kids due to his drinking. The normalization of divorce has been profoundly toxic for our society - and I speak as someone who is divorced myself (thankfully without kids) and now remarried with stepchildren. The amount of support and help and work it takes to help my stepchildren heal from the breakup of their parents’ marriage is massive and requires a profound subordination of self by all the adults involved - and these are kids who still have a close emotional relationship with both parents, are financially stable, etc. Without that, the almost inevitable legacy is emotional damage that makes it very hard for kids to, themselves, form stable families - and we know those stable families are the bedrock of a functional society.
The other thing I see is a culture of being aggrieved. My cousins are always quitting jobs because they were disrespected, because the boss didn’t value them, because they were smarter than the boss...and not quitting for something better. Quitting to sit on their couches (or often their parents’, siblings’, or ex-spouses’ couches) with their Playstations and cheap beer. If they’re not quitting, they’re getting in fights. It’s southern honor culture gone to a squalid extreme - they aren’t dueling or starting feuds, they’re getting into punch-ups by the dumpsters behind a strip-mall sports bar because a guy flicked a cigarette butt too close to their feet.
We only fix these things ourselves, with God’s help. Daddy government isn’t going to step in from DC with some piece of legislation that digs us out of the hole of addiction and broken families and poor economic prospects. And if he did, we’d hate ourselves even more, because the sickness at the heart of all of this is rooted in a deep lack of self-respect and powerlessness.
Someone used the phrase "victimhood Olympics" in a comment to another article a few days ago. I kept thinking of that phrase when I read this article.
"a culture of being aggrieved" this is such a great encapsulation of a feeling that allows the one to continue to make bad choices, resign themselves to helplessness, and refuse to work in therapy or counseling.
And, like, the truth is that many of my relatives *are* suffering from the impact of external forces that are beyond their control - it isn’t their fault that the job landscape for men without college degrees has tanked; it isn’t their fault that masculinity is a dirty word in many segments of society - but the continued refusal to own their choices seals to deal on failure. Like, quitting that job at Pep Boys was your decision. Not finishing that community college HVAC certificate program was your decision. Picking up that beer, that cigarette, that joint was your decision.
You nailed it.
Like this 20X
A very sad story. But what I takeaway the most, because the author seems fixated on it is, you don’t put your trust in democrats. You don’t stay a dem and your life certainly shouldn’t rise or fall on getting a job with the democrat party for heck’s sake.
You shouldn't blindly follow any political party or group. You should constantly question and hold them accountable, especially when they fail to truly listen or champion the things that truly matter to you.
Good point. Blindly following assures you will be taken for granted.
God this is sad. Parents matter. Love matters. This is NOT the governments place to make this happen. Our government is made up of a bunch of shitheads capitalizing on their positions. What's really sad is, luck does matter. Did you get lucky and be born to two people who prioritize their kids, who want them to be independent and confident and capable, or two parents consumed with themselves? It's all luck. You can't pick your parents and your start in life. If you have a good base, you can get through all the hard stuff, and there's always hard stuff.
I think of it slightly differently. Luck should matter less. We have the agency that makes love matter as you say. Why not put more focus on that and less on individualism/identity? Family first.
Because many people in these situations have family that is more likely to drag them down than help them up. Family has to be fixed at a societal level but the millions of individuals living this life right now don’t have time to sit around and wait for that evolution to occur and also don’t have a family they can lean into and receive love and support from.
“Democrats, who used to be our party, who remain my party, are our last, best hope, if they can only find their way back to the class-based political space they once inhabited.”
I’m sorry, but this sounds like wishful thinking. Even 50 or 80 years ago, when the Democrats really did cater to the working class, they were not your friends. They used you. It was a snow job, a long con.
Look at the despicable leadership of the Democrats today, people like Schumer, Schiff, Pelosi, and Newsom. They are as dishonest as the day is long. They lie easily, and they are bought.
This is why Trump was so successful, and why the Democrats, in a temporary alliance with establishment Republicans, have scrambled to take him down for indiscretions that they completely ignore and forgive among their own.
They’re not your friends. Your friends are your friends, your family, your coworkers, fellow church members… your community. To rebuild the kind of coalitions that are needed to take country back from the radical Left, opportunists, and China-owned crooks will take a grassroots effort that may no longer be possible in our shiftless society.
The book "White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness" is an interesting, albeit imperfect discussion to emphasize Terry's point.
https://www.amazon.com/White-Working-Class-Overcoming-Cluelessness/dp/1633693783
This thought process is a big part of the reason why the Democrat party selected "good ol' workin' class Joe Biden" instead of Hillary, Liz Warren, or Bernie as their presidential candidate in 2020.
And Fetterman in Penn. because (seemingly) working class.
I’m from a small cowtown in Colodado, graduated from high school in 1980. My parents had seven kids on a Jr. College professor’s salary. Then he got brain cancer when I was in 5th grade. We went from white collar to blue collar to falling down hard.
I think what saved my brothers and sister was the Catholic Church, Mom and Dad’s refusal to divorce each other and my mother’s parents among also hundreds of people in our community.
Yay you! Telll more of your story! It will help so many people. In fact you're making me think there should be a podcast like this called rise up... Stories of those who rose out of the ashes of a difficult childhood and succeeded.
Thank you!
"Colodado". I like that.
Ooops.
I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Bloodworth, but this essay reads like survivor's guilt to me.
Yes, life is tough and far tougher still if you're one of the millions who don't have anyone who has your back. Dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional humans, but I don't know that that's necessarily the fault of politicians of either party.
I don't think it's a question of burrowing down, so you shut out what you don't want to see. I think it's a question of realistically defining your own sphere of influence. You _can_ help people—but only if they are willing to accept your help.
"We didn't need to be studied. We needed to be represented." THIS. RIGHT HERE. But the Dems won't get it. Never will. A sense of progressive elitism rules the roost over there, and it's almost impossible to break, because it's LIFE-DEFINING for so many Dem thought leaders. It gives them meaning in their lives, and there's almost nothing more powerful than that.
Me? I'm a mildly grumpy Asian man (son of immigrants) who'se tired of being labeled as "white adjacent" by these narcissistic idiots. In the end, it's all about them.
A very, very sad story. But, if you are waiting for the government to step in, you’ve already given up. You’ve handed your agency to others. The democratic party believes in government, but government can never fill the roll of family and faith. In fact, the democrats have worked hard to destroy those ties. Parents Bill of Rights is a glaring example - separate kids from parents via the schools by telling parents to give up their kids to a system that doesn’t care. Not one democrat voted to empower parents. Shameful.