Listened to it. In some ways it is amusing. The author had too small of a sample. East London and Youngstown Ohio are good places to start. And it is understandable that that he sees this as a totally new phenomenon.
It isn't. What he describes is exactly the same mindset middle and lower class Southern whites have had for well over a century. Probably even longer. And the techniques have been finely honed. The author talks about the the two parties. He mentions that the Republicans have benefitted from pitting one group against another. This is what the power structures in the South have been doing for generations. And it works. He also talks about the Democrats abandoning the white working class and schmoozing with the financial class. This was the result of the "new" Democrats which was represented by Bill Clinton. But not all of the Democrats have been comfortable with that. It has resulted in a fight within the Democratic party ever since, with the support for Bernie and Elizabeth Warren being the latest incarnation. To the point where, if you have ever gone to Hillary's campaign website, there are extensive and detailed proposals to deal with their problems. The author is playing the old game that both sides are equally at fault, and it isn't true.
I will grant you that the ones in the Democratic party who put the working class on top don't have that much influence, but that is changing pretty rapidly.
Heck, I even have personal experience with what the author is talking about. I grew up in a town with similar experiences as Youngstown. Beaumont, TX had about 120k people in the mid-1970s. Instead of steel, it was, and still is to a more limited extent, dominated by petrochemical refining. Which went through some serious transformation during the latter part of that decade. The refineries, leveraging off of improving computer power, wanted to embark on a major change over to automation. All of the affected unions went on a strike and tried to lock the refineries down. They couldn't do it, the oil companies had enough money to accelerate their automation plans. At first they ran at reduced operations with only the non-union supervisors on staff. As the amount of automation increased, production ramped up. When the unions finally gave up after 3 or 4 years and asked for their jobs back, the companies didn't need them any more. So thousands of very well paying jobs evaporated in a short period of time. I don't know the numbers, when I graduated from high school I left for college. My parents moved right after that. I later found them in Tampa, but that is another story...
Bottom line is that I don't really know much about the transition years. Given that there was virtually no new construction until the 1990s, I suspect things were not good.
I didn't return at all until about 10 years later. The local economy was in dire straits. When you drove by the refineries, they still had the old parking lots, but there was just a handful of pickups huddled around the entrance in a huge parking lot that once held thousands of vehicles. Beaumont never recovered. The population still hasn't reached that peak. The local economy floundered until hurricane Wilma pretty much devastated the area. During the rebuilding, the oil companies decided to do some rebuilding, converting most of the facilities from sweet, light crude to heavy, sour crude, and taking advantage of those huge parking lots by expanding capacity to boot. The resulting boom helped the local economy a lot. But it is a very different town, now.
And yeah, the only solution is education. When I graduated from high school, pretty much nobody but school teachers and professionals like the engineers working at the refineries and the pulp mills had beyond high school. That hasn't changed a lot. |
