Earlier today we looked at Tom Nichols’ suggestion that we stop treating Trump as a comedic figure and confront him as the existential danger that he is. Ever since Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” remark, there has been discomfort treating the Trump supporters as subhumans. My favorite term, “MAGAts,” is a complete no-no. I was fascinated by an adaptation this morning in The Atlantic from Max Fraser’s new book, Hillbilly Highway, How The Hillbillies Remade America. When hundreds of thousands of poor white Appalachians migrated to-- and formed ghettos in-- many of America’s big cities, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, etc, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, they were stereotyped and treated with as much contempt as immigrants from other countries are today. JD Vance (R-OH) seems to have cerebrally understood this better than most politicians and has made it work for him politically-- just as Trump, albeit intuitively, has. The success of Trump's MAGA movement is founded on this New York City billionaire and conman's ability to connect-- both viscerally and superficially-- with what Fraser refers to as the descendants of those migrants along the Hillbilly Highway.
“Education does not have importance to these people as it does to us,” observed one schoolteacher. “They work for a day or two, and then you see them no more,” grumbled an employer. “Some don’t want modern facilities— if they have a bathtub, they don’t use it,” another meeting attendee claimed. And the charges they leveled only descended from there: “They let their children run wild.” They left their trash in the street and refused to go to the doctor. They misspent what little money they had. They fought and drank with abandon. Some were even rumored to disregard “laws here, such as it being a felony to have sexual relations with a member of their own family or with a girl who consents.”
“Then, as now,” wrote Fraser, “liberalism found itself confronting a white working-class problem at least partially of its own creation.” He went on to emphasize “important insights into our current political impasse— and into the lessons the modern Democratic Party has failed to learn for more than half a century… Residents of these hillbilly ghettos, as they were commonly referred to by public officials and in media accounts at the time, stood out for their rural mannerisms and regionally alien cultural markings, for being, as Cincinnati’s director of health education put it, ‘different— different in speech, in dress, in culture, in habits and mores, in education, in social status, in work experience, and in health.’ The neighborhoods themselves, meanwhile, were marked by rates of unemployment, housing insecurity, poverty-related medical issues, and crime and policing that more closely resembled predominantly Black urban neighborhoods… than the postwar era’s growing middle-class suburbs. That the inhabitants of the hillbilly ghetto were white confounded many of their mid-century contemporaries, who struggled to reconcile them with their more familiar bigotries. ‘The so-called hillbillies, who now constitute a major slum problem in several midwestern cities … are about the only sizable group of white, Protestant, old-line Americans who are now living in city slums,’ opined a columnist for Fortune. ‘The trouble with the latter, as with the rural Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, is that they simply don’t know how to live in cities.’”
Roscoe Giffin, a Kentucky sociologist based at Berea College “explained that the ‘pathological quality’ of the city’s hillbilly ghettos could be attributed to a series of ‘culturally determined patterns of behavior which the Southern Mountaineers bring with them when they come to live north of the Ohio River’—among them a low regard for ‘formal education,’ an instinctual emphasis on fulfilling ‘immediate’ needs and desires, a ‘clannish’ hostility toward outsiders, and a ‘fatalistic’ resignation to present conditions. These behaviors, Giffin noted, had originated as natural and even rational adaptations to their impoverished rural circumstances. But they became counterproductive and self-defeating ‘when such people came to live around Liberty and Sycamore Streets of Cincinnati.’ The solution, Bragdon and Giffin counseled the assembled city representatives, was time, understanding, and, above all, patient instruction in the expectations of modern urban society. ‘The basis of all human-relations work with all people,’ Giffin reminded his audience, ‘is that you have first to accept them as they are before they are willing to modify their behavior.’”
Fraser recounted how “‘Urban adjustment,’ meanwhile, became the prevailing paradigm for addressing the overlapping issues of migration, poverty, and inner-city decline, [leading to] the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964… [and] culminated in the enactment of one of postwar liberalism’s most ambitious social-policy experiments.”
In his own biographical account, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance provided a personal and reflective account of his own upbringing in a working-class Appalachian family and his journey to success, exploring the socio-economic challenges faced by the "hillbilly" community and delving intosalient issues like generational poverty, addiction and the cultural dynamics of the region. He managed to establish a cultural connection with working-class voters, incorporating themes from the book into his campaign messaging to appeal to voters who identify with the struggles and aspirations he wrote about, while creating a narrative that positions him as an advocate for people facing similar challenges.
Jerrad Christian is the Democrat taking on MAGA Republican Troy Balderson in the sprawling east central Ohio congressional district with a prohibitive partisan lean of R+34. The young software programmer feels he can beat Balderson, a backbencher few in the district can name when asked who their congressmember is. This is an “Appalachian district” that gave Trump 64.7% of it’s vote in 2020 and two years later gave reelected Balderson with 69.3% against Democrat Amy Ripple-Elton. One reason for Christian’s optimism is because of how well the pro-Choice amendment did in the district, winning in Licking, Fairfield and Delaware the 3 biggest counties in the district, all of which Balderson won comfortably. “Growing up in the Appalachian region of Ohio,” he told me this afternoon, “my childhood was spent in the rugged beauty of rolling hills and the harsh reality of poverty. This landscape, while breathtaking, conceals not only stories of hardship but also those of resilience. It is a place where the word ‘crick,’ a local term for a creek, rolls off our tongues as naturally as the water flows through our backyards. It wasn’t until my late teens that I discovered ‘crick’ wasn’t recognized as a real word outside my region.”
Consider contributing to Jerrad’s campaign here after you read the rest of what he had too say below:
Growing up in Appalachia, poverty was real; it was a lived experience. But, amidst the scarcity, there was an abundance of community spirit. Neighbors became extended family, sharing whatever little they had. We looked out for each other, knowing that when hardship struck one, it affected us all. This camaraderie was our lifeline, providing not just material support but a sense of belonging and dignity.
Despite our resilience, there was an overwhelming sense of being forgotten by the government. Policies and promises seemed to overlook the unique challenges we faced, making many feel invisible in the broader national narrative. This neglect fostered a deep-seated frustration and a feeling of betrayal. It's not surprising that this discontent paved the way for the rise of the Republican party in the region. The party's messaging, which often spoke in angry terms, resonated deeply with the community's feelings of abandonment.
Yet, despite the political shifts and economic struggles, the heart of the Appalachian people has not wavered. We were, and still are, good people deserving of respect and consideration. This sentiment echoes the profound words of Stephen Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” It’s a powerful reminder that talent, intelligence, and worth are not confined to the well-known or well-off. They are scattered across all walks of life, even in the overlooked hills of Appalachian Ohio. Our stories, struggles, and dreams matter just as much, and are just as deserving as any other in America's narrative.
Back to Fraser and Hillbilly Highway:
There were always other ways to think about the issue of urban adjustment, of course. Southern Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, like other groups of rural migrants and low-income residents in the city, were also contending with limited employment options, predatory slumlords, and overcrowded and under-resourced public schools— not to mention an openly hostile police force, which by the middle of the 1950s was arresting white Appalachian natives at roughly four times the rate they appeared in the city’s general population. In Detroit, 10 years after pouring into the Arsenal of Democracy in search of wartime defense work, migrants from the rural South made up fully half of the population crammed into the city’s blight-ridden downtown core, an area already riddled with “thousands of dwellings in various stages of decay and deterioration, the majority of which are utterly unfit for human habitation,” according to the city’s charitable agencies. In Uptown—“seedy, dreary, congested, despairing,” as the Chicago Daily News would describe it, “Appalachia in Chicago”— more than one in four apartments lacked adequate plumbing, and residential overcrowding was exceeded only in the poor Black neighborhood of Lawndale. By the time the Johnson administration was rolling out the War on Poverty, fewer than half of Uptown’s adult residents were able to secure full-time work.
In its focus on “culturally determined patterns of behavior” as opposed to structural factors such as these, the urban-adjustment framing… consistently mistook the symptoms of the postwar urban crisis for its causes. Instead of recognizing the already accelerating flight of jobs and tax revenues to the suburbs as an early preview of larger-scale disruptions to come, officials used urban adjustment as a rationale for blaming rural poor people for their inability to adapt.
In this way, urban adjustment also anticipated the notion of a separate and self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” first introduced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959 and then widely popularized by the journalist and social critic Michael Harrington over the next few years. Lewis developed his influential theory in ethnographic studies of poor families from Mexico and Puerto Rico. But the catalog of pathological behaviors and attitudes that he identified among his subjects— “a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence and inferiority”; “a lack of impulse control, a strong present-time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism”— in many cases directly echoed Giffin’s portrayals of maladjusted Appalachian migrants.
Before long, a distorted and punitive version of Lewis’s ideas would win both liberal and conservative adherents and find its way to the very center of postwar social policy, first as a means of explaining why certain groups of people became dependent on social assistance and then as an argument for curtailing or altogether eliminating those very forms of public support. As it did, the urban-adjustment framework’s earlier focus on the cultural habits of the rural poor, broadly defined, gave way to the culture of poverty’s near-singular association with the more and more distressed Black inner city.
The consequences of that shift would reverberate to the present. For poor Black communities, the racialized discourse around poverty would be an unmitigated disaster. The slow death of federal poverty-reduction programs begun under Richard Nixon, the massive expansion of a racially targeted war on urban street crime during the 1970s and ’80s, and the culminating assault on welfare “as we know it” during the Clinton years would all be executed under the logic of eradicating a culture of poverty that was said to be the defining hallmark of a new Black underclass.
The new preoccupation with race would also further obscure the one redeeming feature of the urban-adjustment framework. In its focus on the common circumstances confronted by populations of the rural dispossessed clustered around the margins of affluent society—Black, white, Hispanic, and otherwise—urban adjustment held out the prospect of a more materially grounded kind of analysis, one that might have seen beyond the cultural or racial explanations for poverty and grasped the larger social and political forces beginning to undermine the postwar economy. The window for turning the language of urban adjustment into a multiracial, bottom-up politics of the poor, though, was always small. By the end of the ’60s, it had been shut for good.
As a final consequence of all this, the white poor and working classes would come to occupy a more marginal position in the worldview of Democratic liberalism over subsequent decades. After playing a crucial role in catalyzing liberal attention to the social effects of the postwar urban crisis, the hillbilly ghettos of the urban Midwest largely disappeared from view after the formal launch of the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, as deindustrialization, automation, off-shoring, and new waves of import competition brought ever-widening devastation to the blue-collar workforce of the country’s industrial heartland, professional-class interests elevated by the new knowledge-and-service economy moved to the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda. These “New Democrats” offered the occasional promise to retrain out-of-work miners and factory hands as computer programmers—but in downwardly mobile white working-class communities throughout the region, precious little came of it. Instead, right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump would find a rich soil in which to plant the seeds of populist resentment, creating one of the more consequential class realignments in modern American political history.
Hillary Clinton had these voters in mind, back in 2016, when she wrote off “half of Trump’s supporters” as a “basket of deplorables.” Whatever truth there was in her description of the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” nature of Trump’s base—and subsequent events would indicate that there was clearly some truth to it—it was the wrong message for the moment, easily construed as casually elitist and politically tone-deaf. Rightly or wrongly, Clinton seemed more interested in modifying the behavior of these voters than in trying to understand the material foundations of their grievances. When about a quarter of white working-class Obama voters forsook Clinton for Trump in that fall’s election, it was hard not to attribute the results at least in part to Clinton’s failure to convince that portion of the electorate that the party had anything to offer them beyond condescending disregard.
If anybody seems to have learned the lessons of Clinton’s faux pas, it is Joe Biden. Since entering the White House, Biden has done more than any Democratic president of the past 75 years to reinvigorate American industrial policy, all while steering its focus toward those parts of the Midwest and South that suffered the effects of deindustrialization most acutely and where the Republican Party has made the most gains among working-class voters. Might this be enough to overcome liberalism’s decades of pathologizing poor and working-class whites? Recent polling suggests that Biden faces an uphill battle among these voters in crucial midwestern swing states. But to paraphrase Roscoe Giffin, a party has to first understand where it’s gone wrong before it will be willing to change its behavior.
Zach Shrewsbury in the Democratic candidate for the West Virginia Senate seat being abandoned by Joe Manchin. This evening he toldme that "The excerpt in The Atlantic from Professor Fraser’s book is spot on. Appalachians have always been accused of having a culture that prizes ignorance, laziness, backwardness and a belief that suffering is all there is with no willingness to do anything to address it. Nothing could be further from the truth, but liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, have often refused to believe that. West Virginians are tired of being condescended to; we’re tired of being treated like all we amount to are stereotypes. We’ve been exploited out-of-state interests and rich, out-of-touch, self-serving 'leaders' like Joe Manchin for far too long. West Virginia and all of Appalachia deserve better.”