The Jobless White Working Class
By 
It would be nice to not have to talk about a white working class in the United States. I would love to just talk about the working class, where it wouldn’t really matter if they were white, black, or Latino because they would have interests in common. But of course that is never going to happen. Even assuming that racial animosity could decrease, the histories and geographies of different races are simply too different. And thus we have a white working class problem, especially as many of them are finding Donald Trump appealing because he voices their frustrations and their hatreds. Of course some of those hatreds are openly racist, but the frustrations of not having any economic opportunities or any future is real too. Yet neither party has even started thinking of a jobs program for working-class people that is even marginally based in reality. Telling people to go to college or get retrained for largely nonexistent jobs is simply not a jobs policy. Yet even Bernie Sanders’ campaign, as useful as it has been on economic inequality, is very quiet on this sort of thing. These people are struggling, and the economic consequences are seen in growing educational disparities and health disparities. We need to pay attention to their stories and act upon them.
When you go into these communities and leave the small bubbles of success –Manhattan, Los Angeles, northern Virginia, Cambridge – and listen to people who work with their hands, you hear a uniform frustration and a constant anxiety. In a country of such amazing wealth, a large percentage of people are trying not to sink.
In Blossburg, Pennsylvania, Arnie Knapp walks five miles into town every morning, trying to keep his body in shape and not succumb to the various injuries he suffered working the mills. He started working at 14 and once they closed, he worked a series of lower-paying jobs. Unlike the characters profiled in the National Review article, he isn’t looking for a handout: “I haven’t asked for anything but work from anyone. Problem is, there aren’t a lot of jobs around here any more.”
In Appleton, Wisconsin, Tom Lawless, who has been driving long-haul trucks all his life and measures his success in millions of miles safely driven, is frustrated: “I am getting squeezed, my pay gets lower, and my costs go higher.”
In Ohatchee, Alabama, Larry, taking a day off work to take his son fishing, is gracious but frustrated: “I have worked in foundries all my life, since I was 15. Hard work, and I don’t got a lot of money to show for it.”
The frustration isn’t just misplaced nostalgia – the economic statistics show the same thing.
It’s hardly surprising that Kevin Williamson would turn on the very people he needs to vote in his political agenda. There’s never been anything but contempt from the rich toward poor whites. Now that those poor whites are voting Trump instead of Jeb or Walker or even Cruz, there’s no reason to even hide the hate anymore. And while we would like to think that these voters would “vote their interests” and support Democrats, and of course some do, the reality is that they see their own interests in a variety of ways. Some prioritize their white identity, some their evangelicalism or Catholicism, some their love of shooting things, some their economic class. Without leftist organizing in these towns and cities, there’s little reason to expect the white working class to organize to see themselves as workers primarily. That’s especially true when they barely know anyone with jobs to begin with. But regardless of this, if we want to blunt the force of Trumpism and fight to prevent future Trumps from demagoguing the frustrations of the white working class into scary political violence and eliminationist rhetoric, we need to give the white working class (as well as the other working classes) a reason to believe in this nation. The answer has to be jobs. We need a jobs program for people who do not graduate from college. People need to be able to live dignified lives with hope for the future. But with Carrier moving 1400 jobs from Indiana to Mexico, to use one of thousands of examples of the flight of good jobs from working people (not to mention their automation), the reason for working class people to have hope in this nation is declining, not increasing. Until we have a real answer to this–until we have a solid program or at least a solid set of demands for a comprehensive jobs program–we can expect more white working class support of racist and fascist candidates.