The Destruction of the American Working ClassNorth American society prides itself on being classless. Almost no one in North America calls him/herself lower-class or upper-class, and people who describe themselves as 'middle-class' (a class which really no longer exists in North America) do so hesitantly. Few even describe themselves as 'working-class', since that seems to imply it's a place one resides for life (which is the case, but to acknowledge this fact would put the lie to the myth of social mobility). Despite the Great American (and Canadian) Dream (anyone can be President or Billionaire if they work long and hard at it), your chances of moving up even one quintile in the economic and social order are negligible, and dependent more on luck than intelligence, endeavour or education.
My friend Joe Bageant's book Deer Hunting With Jesus explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible courage and honesty.
This is a society where poverty and illness are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and misunderstood. The principal determinant of one's class in America, and the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education.
More than anything, Deer Hunting is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens, and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all, a fair pension and a decent wage for a day's work -- the end of the "dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure".
I'd given away three copies of Joe's book before I'd ready anything beyond the brilliant introduction -- I just knew the people I gave them to needed to read the book more than I did. If you've read Lakoff, and kind of understand the huge divide between conservative and liberal worldviews, you have to read Bageant, so you really understand the chasm between the worldviews of the uneducated and educated. When you read Joe's astonishing stories, all of a sudden what George Lakoff says makes sense. And, just as astonishingly, so does Bush's 2004 win, and the terrifying prospect that Republican arch-conservatives could be poised to establish a dynasty in the US that will accelerate the Cheney-Bush regime's project for endless war, bankrupting and dismantling government, and ending the separation of church and state, and which will last until that country's final, ghastly unraveling occurs (I'm betting that will happen later this century).
I picked up my fourth copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus in Australia, which includes a little orientation for Australians not familiar with current US culture. This orientation was probably unnecessary for two reasons: Educated Australians (and Canadians and Europeans) probably know as much about current US culture as their American counterparts. And uneducated people from these countries, I strongly suspect, think much like their US counterparts (though less fanatically) -- Joe's description of uneducated Americans sent shudders up my spine, as I recognized in their stories and attitudes those of many uneducated Canadians I thought I knew, or didn't care to know (and now understand much better).
There is so much wisdom in this book, and it is so important to read to achieve an understanding of the current predicament of the US (and hence of the world), that I would not presume to précis it here. If you read only one book this year, please make it Deer Hunting With Jesus.
Some of the key lessons for me:
- "Universal access to a decent education would lift the lives of millions over time...Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations". After reading Joe's stories I have new respect for those who have taught themselves what they needed to learn to be informed, independent citizens, and an appreciation for how those without education are oppressed to an almost unimaginable degree.
- At least 60% of Americans are "working class", i.e. they do not have power over their work -- when they work, how much they get paid or whether they'll be "cut loose from their job [or self-employed labour dependent on big corporations] at the first shiver of Wall Street".
- The critical aspects of the "terrible and silent crisis" destroying working-class Americans are: (a) the working class' own passivity, antipathy to intellect, and belligerence towards the outside world, (b) an economic, corporatist system that benefits from keeping them uneducated, fearful and debt-ridden (and hence holders of low-wage, nonunion, disposable, part-time, noninsured jobs), (c) a health-care system that is especially dysfunctional in working-class areas and whose few quality services are unaffordable to the working class, (d) their dreadful, fat-laden diet (which is all that they can afford) and the toll it takes on their health, and (e) religious and political leaders who prey on their ignorance and exploit their fears.
- Almost as bad as the corporatists at exploiting the working class are the rich, uneducated entrepreneurial class who live in their neighbourhoods -- realtors, lawyers, brokers, gas retailers, "downtown pickle vendors" and other "middlemen who stand on the necks of the working poor". This "mob of Kiwanis and Rotarians" who dominate local politics help get tax breaks and regulation exemptions for big corporations, in return for financial favours.
- As I read this book I realized that my book on Natural Enterprise, which was in part designed to help the chronically underemployed to find meaningful work, will be totally inaccessible to the working class -- they don't have the literacy or basis of understanding of how an economy works to even begin to understand its processes and messages. I can appreciate how working-class people, and their friends (like Joe) perceive "entrepreneurs" to be just the low-level agents of the corporatists, not a means for their liberation from wage slavery.
- "Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism. It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation that allows working people to accept the American empire's wars without a blink." Joe tells how scourges like Tyson Foods and Rubbermade belittle, abuse, threaten and browbeat their workers into obedience, and acceptance of their lot in life. As a result, "the intellectual lives of most working-class Americans consist of things that sound as if they might or should be true" (e.g. that we should all "support our troops"), and what is engendered as a result is a "tide of national meanness".
- Rich Republicans still meet the working-class and small business class on their own turf, at community activities important to these people. Progressives don't even visit, so no other voice is ever heard in the 'red' communities, and as a result "the left understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people...letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit".
- As a consequence of this numbing existence, "it is [a huge myth] that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq...There is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead."
- The mortgage and banking industries exploit workers' dreams of home ownership, supported by the corporatists who need continued growth and rising home prices to finance ever-increasing consumer spending, in the fragile house of cards which is now beginning to implode in the US. Gullible poor workers who buy mobile homes on rented property are essentially "buying large rapidly-depreciating vehicles and paying for space to park them", the absolute antithesis of real home ownership, and a recipe for bankruptcy. But as long as workers are taught that "they are not worthy of a traditional house or decent treatment in the labor market or a living wage", this is the best they can hope for and aspire to.
- Probably the most eye-opening chapter for me was the one where he explains Americans' zeal for gun ownership and fierce opposition to gun control (a view Joe himself shares). He provides credible data to support gun owners' claims that (at least in a country as violent as the US) the mere possession of a gun deters more crime than gun ownership precipits. Progressives should look at the facts and realize that their passion for gun control is alienating them, and the parties they support, from 70 million gun owners for whom the issue is a pivotal one at the ballot box.
- At the same time, Joe is concerned about the propensity of many Americans (which he later ascribes in part to their belligerent Scots-Irish heritage) to carry their enthusiasm for guns to a degree that makes them "devotees to lethality". He worries about its explosive potential: "What happens when this country hits Peak Oil demand and the electrical grid starts browning down and even little things become desperately difficult or unaffordable? What happens if the wrong kind of president declares the wrong kind of national emergency? What will be the first reflex of those hundreds of thousands of devotees to lethality?" Joe is concerned that this belligerence and passion for religious fundamentalism is behind the passion for wars in the Mid-East and Asia and even a passion for a nuclear war. He analyzes the low-level perpetrators of Abu Ghraib like Lynddie England and finds their behaviour completely consistent with the pent-up anger, ignorance and willingness to follow orders that those of Scots-Irish ancestry, or influenced by that culture, exhibit around the world and especially in workng-class US communities.
- Joe describes the leaders of the fundamentalist churches in the US as poorly educated breakaways from the lower ranks of other churches. Their lack of "fancy learnin'" is unrecognized by their equally uneducated followers. Fundamentalists now make up a quarter of the electorate, a segment that has recently and cynically been politicized by corporatists, and is overwhelmingly white, with a high-school education or less, and working-class. A growing minority of evangelicals are believers in replacing secular government and laws with Christian ones, and support what can only be called Holy Wars against non-Christian nations, to accelerate the prophecy of the second coming and the Reign of Christ. A majority believe in the Rapture, which means they could care less about the future of their nation or the environment.
- Unlike public schools, and unlike health care and other civic organizations, fundamentalist congregations are still functioning, growing and open to all. And Christian education and Christian home-schooling are filling the void of a crumbling public education system, and helping to develop the cadres of right-wing believers in the future. They have already achieved astonishing penetration of the upper echelons of the Bush administration and many political establishments and educational institutions and NGOs. The product of this brainwashing by uneducated religious leaders is an electorate "with eyes, that is to say the camera to shoot what is all around them, but no intellectual software to edit or make sense of it all.", victims of "an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis" that Joe predicts will outlast any brief respite in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
- Joe points out the astonishing popularity of the most grotesque "entertainments" -- videos circulating on and off the Internet showing the grisly deaths of both Americans and Iraqis in the Bush War -- the ultimate reality shows. The former are used to whip up fury, indignation and xenophobia, and the latter are a spectacle of religious eye-for-an-eye retribution, applauded by Mel Gibson-style viewers as vengeance in God's name. Joe is not surprised at this, or at the probability that many more Abu Ghraib type atrocities are occurring worldwide in US secret prisons, directed by the CIA and perpetrated by working class, uneducated, Scots-Irish troops many with streaks of religious zealotry. And he was not surprised at the monstrous animal cruelty at the Pilgrims Pride plant (workers reveling in stomping chickens to death), where Lynddie England used to work until she quit because management didn't care about the atrocities that went on there. You come from violent stock, and get put down violently all your life, you tend to perpetuate the pattern. Violence, in the streets, in the workplace, in entertainment, and in theatres of war, defines the working class life experience. The rest of us would just rather not see it or acknowledge it.
- There is a complicated and ironic explanation why huge not-for-profit (but very profitable) hospitals centralized in affluent communities are starving out smaller, local hospitals in poorer areas, to the point that health-care facilities in poorer communities are mostly now just places exhausted working class Americans are "discarded when they can no longer work". Joe explains the perverse way many of these institutions are forced to operate, often treating long-term patients for illnesses they don't have and worsening their condition. These facilities are now the largest cause of bankruptcies in the US, even though 2/3 of these bankrupts have health insurance (thanks to high premiums and deductibles and uncovered costs), and half of uninsured Americans owe money to health-care institutions.
- Joe presents some alarming data on the health care and social security crisis looming especially for older women in the US. Two thirds of Social Security recipients are women, and 90% of them receive no other income, putting most of them below the poverty line at a time the Bushies are trying to cut, bankrupt and/or abolish the system entirely. Half of Americans depend entirely on the government for help when they get old. "Social security is the most important ongoing domestic story in America", Joe asserts bluntly, explaining that it is destroying the social fabric of working class families as many face the dread of regularly visiting elder family members in horrific institutions, elders who paid much into the system and now plead desperately and hopelessly for escape from these terrible places, escape that never comes.
The bottom line of this vicious cycle is that half of Americans are functionally illiterate, and poor education, poor health care, poor nutrition, corporatist oppression and exploitation are creating a time bomb that, in the short run, vents itself in anger against pontificating liberals they never see and don't understand, and in the long run could explode into bloody and nationwide violence. These people, living right in our midst but whom we never reach out to, simply don't have the wherewithal to improve their own lot -- "they are too uneducated, too conditioned to the idea that being a consumer is the same thing as being a citizen."
Joe laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition -- for discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a 'menu' of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand names and ensembles. "Adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to eat, see, wear, hear and drive." None of us can, any longer, "make up his or her identity from scratch." The upper-middle and affluent suburban "catering classes", those who support the corporatist centre (orange band in my chart above), are more to blame for its excesses than the working class because the catering classes at least have the education and power to see and resist it. When I published this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to become part of it.
We are all, Joe argues, prisoners of this corporatist political and economic system, caught, more or less, in its web. "America's much-ballyhood liberty is largely fictional. Three million of us are [in prisons or on parole]...The rest of us are captives of credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our ceaseless quest for a decent retirement fund." What's worse, "You never know you are in prison until you try the door". And America's working class in particular has been so systematically dumbed down that they can't even see the door.
America, he says, cannot hope to stop messing up the rest of the world until it solves its own mess. "When social conscience extends no farther than ourselves, our friends, our families then Darfur and secret American prisons abroad are not [perceived to be] a problem".
This book is about the horrific mess that is America in the 21st century, but there is nothing here for those of us living in other countries to be smug about. American culture is being embraced everywhere in the world (and not, for the most part, forced down anyone's throats). And our cultures already exhibit many of the same qualities and propensities that are so magnified in the US and portrayed in such terrifying light by Joe Bageant.
So no matter where in the world you live, please buy several copies of Deer Hunting With Jesus and give them to people who do not understand why George Bush won the US election of 2004. This is important, and Joe has done all the hard work and research for us, in a courageous, personal and awesome portrait of the true nature of the most powerful country on the planet. We need everyone to hear this story, to understand what has been going on under our noses all along, that we never got quite close enough to see.
