Our Economic Interests

Rebuking the lie that rural voters and working people vote against thier own economic interests.

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For this current essay I am tackling a phrase that has driven me crazy for a long time, refuting the notion that rural and working-class people “Vote Against Their Own Economic Interests.” My motivation to write this is not just to dunk on the Democratic Party—although that isn’t without its pleasures—but also to address what I see as a dangerous lack of empathy that urban liberals have toward people in the country. I don’t think we’d be in the mess we currently find ourselves in if liberal policies were more helpful to people outside of American cities and if country people were treated with greater respect by the culture at large. This piece is wonkier and denser than my writing usually is. I’ve been wrestling with it for about a year, though, so I think this is as good as it is gonna get. My next one will be funnier. Promise!

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Here’s my latest…

VOTING AGAINST OUR OWN ECONOMIC INTERESTS

It is common for liberal commentators to claim that working class and rural voters “vote against their own economic interests” when they vote for Republicans. This phrase has been around for decades. At this point, it has come to seem self-evident. For a long time, I accepted it as true, but I have come to realize just how damaging this statement is. For to say that someone “votes against their own economic interests” is condescending at best. It is myopic, classist and divisive at worst. Most importantly, it is also untrue.

I tell the story that follows a lot, but in many ways, it planted a political pebble in my shoe that has irritated me ever since, so, I’ll share it again, in this somewhat different context…

In 2013, I got a job working on oil rigs in a boomtown in North Dakota where I met many men who’d lost their homes in the 2008 housing crash. These were guys from all over the country, but mostly from the middle, who had run construction companies, worked as landscapers or contractors or roofers, or even sold real estate. They’d gotten jobs in the oil industry as a final, desperate measure and many of them sent money home to their families while sleeping in cars or renting rooms in flop houses. This is the backdrop to my memoir, The Good Hand.

I had come to the oil field from Brooklyn, New York, and found myself, much to my chagrin, often defending then President Obama. You don’t find many liberals working the rigs, and I took a lot of heat for my politics. This all culminated in a night at a Montana hotel bar where I nearly came to blows with my boss, a usually laid-back truck pusher. He was a staunch Republican who felt the country was going off track. We were drunk, and it was stupid. Nobody actually took a swing, but we came close.

Over the years, as I’ve looked back at this moment, I’ve felt pride in the fact that I stood by my convictions, however, as I’ve educated myself, I have come to the conclusion that in many ways I was wrong. As an urbanite, Obama’s policies had protected my economic interests. I was blind to the fact that they had been bad for my rural friends.

For over a generation, Democratic policies have favored American cities and left country people out to dry. Despite this, the classist liberal canard that rural people “vote against their own economic interests” persists. As an electoral strategy, this translates to: “Let’s tell people in the country they are stupid, and I bet they’ll vote for us.” It doesn’t work.

As the post-mortem of the recent election grinds on and on, we continue to hear that Democrats have a “messaging problem.” This is foolish. The Democrats have a substance problem. If you don’t stand for anything (hi, Kamala) then you are going to have a hard time explaining what you stand for. Whatever message the Democrats land on in the following months and years it needs to be backed up by substance. Until Democrats can articulate a vision to help working class Americans, they will continue to lose them. If you don’t believe me, ask AOC.

Let’s talk about the original sin: It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA into law in 1993 and later normalized trade relations with China, hollowing out the rust belt and putting working class Americans out of work. Clinton also, during what is claimed to be the longest economic expansion in American history, gutted welfare, which rural Americans rely on more than urban Americans. This fact that country people rely on welfare more than city people is often viewed as an indictment of individuals in rural America, rather than a systemic economic issue that needs to be addressed through policy initiatives.

As liberal economist Paul Krugman, in a bizarre article last spring noted, “Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.”

Krugman’s statement only makes sense as a criticism of progressive taxation itself, if not the very idea of the social contract. Were Mr. Krugman to make this formulation using race or gender as data points, as opposed to geographic location and class, he’d have destroyed his reputation, lost his job and been run out of town. In liberal culture today racism and sexism are grounds for excommunication, while classism and regional prejudice are rewarded with staff gigs at the New York Times.

One reason that Appalachian Americans, for example, rely on welfare more than their urban counterparts is because government assistance was built into the business model of the region’s first biggest employers— coal companies. One in ten miners with twenty-five years of experience become disabled by black lung. When coal companies failed to provide disability insurance to workers, the federal government in the 1970’s created the Black Lung Disability Trust fund by enacting a small excise tax on coal. But the fund has run a deficit since it was created, meaning that for sixty years the federal government has been footing coal companies’ bills by providing checks to disabled miners, their widows, and their dependents. As if this weren’t galling enough, in 2008 the Obama administration bailed out the fund to the tune of 6.5 billion dollars. Because of this, for some families in Appalachia, disability checks are a multi-generational way of life.

Modern corporations have recently picked up on this aspect of Big Coal’s business plan. Currently, Walmart and McDonalds rely on government welfare programs to subsidize the low pay they provide workers who are isolated from better paying jobs by dint of location. When Republicans complain that the welfare system needs reform, they are correct. Democrats and Republicans should reform this system by enacting strict regulations on companies who bilk taxpayers at the expense of workers.

Along with passing NAFTA and gutting welfare, Democrats under Clinton passed the omnibus crime bill that enabled (or at least added to) an era of mass incarceration. This crime bill is most often talked about in regard to its devastating effect on our nation’s black population, but it is also important to keep in mind that mass incarceration has disproportionately affected the working poor across all races and creeds. Middle-class people commit crimes indoors and stay out of jail. Poor people do drugs outside and get caught. Race is obviously a huge factor in understanding the American criminal justice system, but it is only one factor.

Clinton also repealed the Glass Steagall act which greatly contributed to the 2008 housing collapse. In 2008, it was President Obama, with a financial team and cabinet made up exclusively of Citigroup endorsees, who made the decision to bail out banks while allowing average Americans to lose their homes, their savings, and their pensions. Urban Americans, who rent at much higher rates than rural Americans, certainly felt the pinch of the housing crash, but the brunt of the burden of the bailout landed in the middle of the nation, not on the coasts. It landed on my buddies in North Dakota, not so much my friends in Brooklyn. It landed on my friends with contracting companies in Maryland and Kentucky, not so much of folks with office jobs in New York. President Obama’s TARP policies also took different approaches toward Wall Street banks than toward heartland factories, favoring urban constituents over their rural counterparts.

During the pandemic, I spent several years in Kentucky, and I came to see firsthand the effects of the opioid crisis, a crisis the Obama administration largely ignored. While Obama was passing, in the Affordable Care Act, a huge give-away to the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, was labeling Oxycontin a non-addictive back pain medicine. Since then Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from drug overdoses. The brunt of this epidemic has again been born by rural and working-class Americans.

Rural suspicion of the federal government is often presented in the media as a sort of cornpone superstition based on “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation.” But what exactly do you call it when corporations collude with the government to poison citizens? If the federal government endorsed a pill that destroyed your family and hollowed out your community how fast would you line up for a government mandated injection?

Rural America is the site of almost all of the nation’s extractive communities—coal mines, oil fields, fracking sites, and now wind and solar farms. To live in an extractive community, like rural Appalachia, is to live in the history of a place where corporations from Chicago, New York and Boston stripped the timber, dug the coal, poisoned the rivers and the streams, and leveled the mountaintops without sharing the profits. Historically, when citizens in these communities fought back through unionization and strikes, their struggles were stomped out with help from the Federal Government.

During the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, black and white coal miners, united in an existential fight for better wages and safer working conditions as well as by one of the few desegregated school systems in the nation at the time, confronted mine operators. The coal companies, assisted by federal troops, assassinated union leaders, attacked their wives and children, and dropped bombs and poison gas on strikers. This history of violent government action against rural people isn’t all that distant, either. I know folks who watched the National Guard roll through Harlan, Kentucky during the coal strikes of the 1970’s.

Stories about place are important. They are alive. When I moved from New York to North Dakota, I took New York’s stories with me. They were stories of progress, of go getters, of show business, of strivers. The stories, the histories and the lives of the North Dakotans I met were different than mine. The people that grew up in North Dakota primarily knew a story of boom or bust. Oil conglomerates come into that region once a generation or so. They pull out the resources and leave. In liberal academic circles, American extractive communities are sometimes compared to Latin America. We have to look outside the country to find the appropriate metaphor to describe how shitty America’s urban centers treat country people.

Paul Krugman can talk about tax giveaways all he wants. What about blood? Throughout American history it has been rural and working-class Americans who fight our wars. Men in my family have fought in every war since the American Revolution. In my office, I have a musket my ancestor carried into battle against Southern slavers. And while it was Republican George W. Bush’s administration who started the misbegotten conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, those wars were five and six years old when Obama came to power. Obama promised to end them. He did not do that. The surge lead to decades of war wherein the United States sent a disproportionate number of rural Americans into combat.

The argument I constantly hear from people when I talk about this stuff is that “Republicans are worse.” Frankly, I’m not sure that is true when it comes to rural policy, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is true. We now—my working-class, country friends and I—have two piles of shit to choose from.

I’m probably the only person I know who enthusiastically voted for Joe Biden’s first term. It is an unpopular opinion, but I think he did a better job than the past four presidents, especially when it came to providing aid and boosting economic development in rural America. The positive effects of the investments he made will take a little longer to be felt, so Trump will take credit for them. And of course, father time and his own pride caught up to Biden. He left office warning of the oligarchy his party helped create and, by pardoning his family (not to mention Dick Cheney’s fucking daughter), he made it clear that he sees himself and his family as above the law. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.

Trump is doing terrible things and he’s doing them at a very quick rate. Will his actions end up being as bad for rural and working class Americans as Clinton gutting welfare, passing an over-the-top crime bill, and repealing Glass-Steagall, or Obama’s enshrinement of American aggression through continuation of the Forever Wars, mis-management of the opioid crisis, and handouts to the banking, pharmaceutical and tech industries? Before Trump took office, I would have said, “probably not.” After a couple months of the guy, the only words that come to mind are “buckle up.”

What I do know is that, come the next election, I will—like every other working-class person I know—be voting for my own economic interests.