Edsall on Democrats' uphill battle in 2022, 2024, with attention to the white working class

The headline for Thomas Edsall's column is "Democrats are Making Life too Easy for Republicans," and an excerpt focusing on the white working class follows:  

At the moment, there is widespread pessimism among those on the left end of the political spectrum. Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote that for predictable reasons, “Democrats face an uphill battle in both 2022 and 2024.”

But, she went on, “the problems are much deeper. First, the white working class that used to vote Democratic no longer does.” Sawhill noted that when she

studied this group back in 2018, what surprised me most was their very negative attitudes toward government, their dislike of social welfare programs, their commitment to an ethic of personal responsibility and the importance of family and religion in their lives. This large group includes some people who are just plain prejudiced but a larger group that simply resents all the attention paid to race, gender, sexual preference or identity and the disrespect they think this entails for those with more traditional views and lifestyles.

Messages coming from the more progressive members of the Democratic Party, Sawhill warned, “will be exploited by Republicans to move moderate Democrats or to move no-Trump Republicans in their direction.”

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party, writing by email:

Misguided focus on unpopular social policies are driving voters away from the Democratic Party and are mobilizing Republicans. Democrats used to be the party of the working class, but today they are instead seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, crippling the police and injecting social justice into math classes.

As a result, Westwood continued,

It is no surprise that this doesn’t connect with a working family struggling to pay for surging grocery bills. By abandoning their core brand, even Democrats who oppose defunding the police are burdened by the party’s commitment to unpopular social policy.

The traditional strategy in midterm elections, Westwood wrote, is to mobilize the party base. Instead, he contended, Democrats

have decided to let the fringe brand the party’s messaging around issues that fail to obtain majority support among the base. Perhaps the most successful misinformation campaign in modern politics is being waged by the Twitter left against the base of the Democratic Party. The Twitter mob is intent on pushing social policies that have approximately zero chance of becoming law as a test of liberalism. Even if you support reducing taxes on the middle class, immigration reform and increasing the minimum wage, opposing defunding the police or the legalization of property crime makes you an unreasonable outcast.  (emphasis mine)

In other words, Westwood is blasting purity tests. 

I have highlighted the column's comment about the rural-urban dynamic in a post at Legal Ruralism.  

Pollster Stanley Greenberg on appealing to working-class voters across race

Greenberg writes under the headline, "Democrats, Speak to Working Class Discontent."  My favorite thing about this piece for The American Prospect is Greenberg's focus on coalition-building among working-class folks, across racial and ethnic lines.  Here's an excerpt: 

Today, the Democrats’ working-class problem isn’t limited to white workers. The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics—a daunting 12 points off their margin since 2016, according to Ruy Teixeira.

* * *

After studying working-class voters for nearly four decades, I believe the trajectory can be shifted or reversed. But there is no room for error. There is no room for fools. There is no time for strategists who look down on or rule out voters who fail a purist civics test. There is also no room for sensibilities that keep us from clearly understanding our options.

* * *  

The emergence of Barack Obama signaled a shift in Democratic appeals. During the 2008 primary, Obama became the “change candidate” because of his early opposition to the Iraq War, not because he spoke to working-class discontent. At the Democratic Convention four years earlier, Obama had told a unifying story as an African American who saw only one United States of America, not separate Americas divided by race and partisanship. In focus groups before the 2008 convention, I was surprised by how many white workers were open to what would be the first African American president. Many of them would have scored high on any “racial resentment” scale, but they were not blaming Blacks for their current condition. They were blaming high-paid CEOs for outsourcing American jobs, and they were blaming NAFTA. Many decided Obama was different from other Black leaders and might govern for the whole country, not just work for “his own people.”  (emphasis mine).

If you govern for the whole country, you know that two-thirds of all registered voters never graduated from a four-year college. Well before the financial crash in 2008, they were angry. Employment in manufacturing had plummeted after 2000 from almost 18 million to 14 million jobs. Innovations in technology and structural changes in the economy were raising worker productivity, but the top 1 percent and then the top .01 percent were seizing all the gains in income.

During the 2008 campaign, James Carville and I, as heads of Democracy Corps, and John Podesta, the director of the Center for American Progress, convened a monthly meeting at my house in Washington to help fashion a Democratic strategy. Among the attendees was David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign chief. We created an “economy project” whose polling showed what should have been obvious. The Democrats’ most powerful message called for an end to trickle-down economics and a focus on creating American jobs and a government that worked for the middle class again.

But despite a deepening economic crisis, Obama didn’t talk much about the economy in his 2008 campaign. Under the banner “Change We Can Believe In,” he promised to get beyond “the bitterness” that “consumed Washington” to make health care affordable, cut middle-class taxes, and “bring our troops home.”

Cross-posted (with additional excerpts about rural voters) to Legal Ruralism.  

Academic research: J.D. Vance, Cultural Alien: On Upward Mobility

Here's a link to the article by Milena Feldman and Markus Rieger-Ladich, published in Reading the Local in American Studies:

In the US, writing about oneself is still strongly influenced by religious discourses as well as by the idea that an individual’s success is primarily determined by his or her hard work and talent. Hence, focusing on oneself as the object of inquiry often fails to raise awareness of structural disadvantages, such as in the educational system. Against this background, this contribution turns to a memoir that takes a different approach and made its author famous overnight: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Published at the beginning of the Trump administration, many hoped that his story of social ascent from the milieu of the white underclass would help explain Donald Trump’s success. Why do people have such high expectations when reading a book that focuses on the lives of those who some refer to as “hillbillies,” “rednecks,” or “white trash” but whom J.D. Vance calls “neighbors,” “friends,” and “family”? We read the book as an auto-sociobiographical text to find out what it might tell us about social mobility, educational careers, and institutional discrimination in the US and to examine in how far J.D. Vance’s can be read as a specifically US-American version of auto-sociobiography.

On rural resentment and pain, and its link to the trucker strike

I am a huge fan of Thomas Edsall, who writes regularly for the New York Times, but I missed this column earlier this month until today.  The headline is provocative, "There's a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers."  As is typical of Edsall, he marshals recent academic research on a topic.  You have to get pretty deep into this column to get to the rural part of this one, which otherwise focuses on class and regional inequality, but I'm just going to highlight below those rural bits.  The rural bits, by the way, could also be framed as regional inequality.  Edsall writes:  

I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:

In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.

The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.

“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University; Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics; and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article “Progressive Cities: Urban-Rural Polarization of Social Values and Economic Development Around the World.”

* * * 

Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”

Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:

when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”

The urban-rural conflict between postmaterialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”

I'm thinking "postmaterialistic values" sound like what Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs"--those that folks with other pressing problems (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs) in their lives solved then have the time to worry and think about. 

In an email, Luca elaborated:

There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in second demographic transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.

Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”

Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.

The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.

Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In their October 2017 paper “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”

There's so much more to Edsall's column, which I'll try to get to in another post focusing more on class than geography.  

Meanwhile, here's another New York Times column on the Ottawa trucker's strike, this one by Ross Douthat and focused on class.   

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, Tim Ryan (D) pleads with the white working class to trust Democrats

Here's the lede for today's Washington Post story by Michael Scherer, as candidate Tim Ryan campaigns in Ironton, Ohio, population 11, 129, in the Ohio River Valley:  

Congressman Tim Ryan has been traveling the foothills of western Appalachia with a joke about marriage he hopes will make him Ohio’s next U.S. Senator.

The voters he needs to turn his way — the forgotten, the struggling, in communities with hollow factories, Trump flags and fentanyl epidemics — don’t agree with everything he stands for as a Democrat. But then, he asks his small crowds, who does?

“If my wife and I have 10 conversations in one day and we agree on six or seven of them, we crack a bottle of wine and celebrate how great our marriage is,” he said at a recent stop here along the Ohio River, just a few blocks from an empty brownfield where furnaces once burned. “So why would you think you are going to agree with someone 100 percent of the time?”

Ryan’s bet — and the national Democratic dream — is that a few issues still just might matter more than his party label. He lists three whenever he speaks, after talking up his small-town upbringing and all of his union relatives who once worked at steel plants or auto suppliers: rebuilding the country with major public works spending, new government investing in manufacturing industries and beating China.

“They have a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, a 100-year plan,” he said of the Asian superpower. “We are living in a 24-hour news cycle talking about really dumb stuff, like Big Bird and Dr. Seuss.”

The pitch has made Ryan one of the most consequential Democratic candidates of the 2022 cycle, a test case on whether his party has any hope of reclaiming its erstwhile White working-class voting base, as former president Donald Trump, who sped their flight, waits in the wings. The struggle is, by any measure, uphill.

* * *  

With less than 10 months to go before the general election, Ryan has already visited 72 of the state’s 88 counties in a full-press effort to try to persuade the hinterlands, a handful at a time, that Democrats like him are human beings who breathe the same air.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Post script:  NPR's All Things Considered is doing a story on Tim Ryan on the afternoon of February 1, 2022.

A young Mainer's thoughts on cultivating the rural vote

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in an essay for the Washington Post a few days ago (published simultaneously on The Nation's website, for which vanden Heuvel is the director) about Chloe Maxmin, a Maine state legislator who grew up in rural, impoverished Lincoln County, in the state's mid-coast region.  Maxmin and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, have a book coming out in a few months on the topic.  Here's an excerpt from vanden Heuvel's essay, inspired by Maxmin's work and ideas:  

First, to reach someone, you have to reach out. Rural Democrats consistently lament that the national party hasn’t invested enough money or time in rural organizing. By contrast, during her 2020 campaign, Maxmin says she had 90,000 voter contacts, the most of any state Senate campaign in the state. Her closest opponent had just 35,000. As a result, she connected with persuadable Trump voters who had never spoken with a Democratic candidate.

And Maxmin didn’t just talk to voters; she sought to understand them. As she told me during an interview last year, her canvassing strategy was “to stand there for 10 or 15 minutes and have a conversation — and then go back and follow up.” The progressive advocacy group People’s Action calls this approach “deep canvassing,” and found that it helped decrease Trump’s margins where implemented in key battleground states.

But once you’ve started a conversation with voters, how do you connect your policies to their problems?

Many Democrats respond to any reflexive rural repulsion against “progressivism” by disavowing it and running toward the center. (Just ask any average Joe, be they Lieberman, Manchin or Biden.) But Maxmin has a different strategy. She makes progressive ideals concrete, real and relevant to people’s lives — so conversations can move past talking points and cut straight to what these changes could actually mean.

I was struck, too, by this very poignant vignette, which had me thinking about how folks along the political spectrum judge those they deem "white trash." 

Maxmin and Woodward describe an encounter when Maxmin, canvassing alone, walked down a dirt road leading to a nondescript trailer. She knocked on the door, which cracked open to reveal a man who appeared hesitant to hear from her. Nevertheless, she introduced herself and asked him about the issues he cared about most in the coming election. They chatted for a bit, and then he said something she may not have expected to hear: “You’re the first person to listen to me. Everyone judges what my house looks like. They don’t bother to knock. I’m grateful that you came. I’m going to vote for you.”

I was reminded of the article about Maxmin when this came across my Twitter feed today, from a young Minnesotan associated with the Rural Rising Project:  

Like Maxmin, this organizer is endorsing listening as a critical part of the process, something urban and coastal elites--so assured they know everything--are often not very good at.

Cross Posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Poignant reflection on the working class in central Illinois

The last in a series of essays by Tom Morello (guitarist with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, among others). appeared in the New York Times a few days ago.  It's headlined "Class Struggle in My Family's Hometown."  This one is datelined Marseilles, Illinois, population 5,094, where Morello spent summers during his childhood.  The small city is on the Illinois River, and along with the good (e.g,  community events, Little League, bike riding) Morello highlights some negative aspects of its history (e.g., environmental degradation, high incidence of cancer).

Here's an excerpt about the recent "class warfare" there:  

Lately, Marseilles has seen some more hard times. The factories and the mines are long closed. Norman Rockwell streets once vied to see who could have the tidiest lawn. Recently, on our block, three abandoned houses had gone back to nature, roofs collapsed, trees growing through windows, raccoons taking up residence. There may still be a Little League, but when I spoke a few years ago with some teenagers with teardrop tattoos on their faces, they spoke of their limited prospects: Walmart, the Army, selling meth.

The town was once solidly union, voted Democrat and gave birth to America’s most militant leftist grandma, Mary Morello. Now Confederate flags dot some of the lawns. There’s a lot of good, hard-working people doing their best, but there’s a palpable feeling that they’ve been abandoned by Democratic and Republican administrations. It’s fertile ground for a demagogic grifter who attributes their problems to immigrants and Muslims, deflecting blame from a capitalist order that sees them as marks and cannon fodder. Where poverty meets disinformation, intolerance can bloom.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Thomas Edsall on class and how Democrats might pry America away from Trump

Thomas Edsall writes frequently for the New York Times, and his columns are always worth reading.  Here's an excerpt from the one last Sunday, which touches on rural and small-town America in his quotes from scholars who are looking at issues of the day (emphasis mine). 

Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she certainly sees threats, “but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”

At the same time, she cautioned,

the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.

In other words, Hochschild is attending to inequities across regions.  The column continues:  

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.

“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”

The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,

is that both parties are willing to undermine democratic norms for short-term policy gains. This is not a behavior that came from nowhere — the American public is to blame. We reward politicians who attack election outcomes, who present the opposition as subhuman and who avoid meaningful compromise.

Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:

If the Democratic Party wants to challenge Republicans they need to move to the center and attempt to peel away centrist Republicans. Endorsing divisive policies and elevating divisive leaders only serves to make the Democrats less appealing to the very voters they need to sway to win.

Then there is this from Westwood that references the culture wars (again, emphasis mine).   

The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,

must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On issues of race/ethnicity and rurality in the California Redistricting Process

The Sacramento Bee reports today on the latest from California's independent re-districting commission, specifically about a newly drawn U.S. Congressional district that stretches from just south of San Francisco, down through part of Silicon Valley, along parts of the central coast, and inland to the rural reaches of San Luis Obispo County.  Here's an excerpt from Gillian Brassil's story focusing what's wrong with a district like this one, a Democrat-heavy area that would likely be held by incumbent Rep. Jimmy Panetta of Carmel Valley, in Monterey County.  

Paul Mitchell, a redistricting expert, said that the size and shape of the district aren’t what pose a problem, rather the distribution of wealth, endorsements and political structure that would make it difficult for a representative from San Luis Obispo County to run against someone from Silicon Valley. 

He drew an analogy: If a sliver of downtown Sacramento were connected to disparate rural areas, candidates from outside the state’s capital would stand little chance against someone who has the financial and political support of people in the metropolitan hub.

“Somebody from Yolo County isn’t going to beat somebody from Sacramento in a congressional race. That’s the problem, I think, with this new ‘ribbon of shame’ that they’re talking about,” Mitchell said. “It’s not the size that I think is problematic. It’s the fact that it has a finger going into Atherton and Menlo Park and the Apple headquarters.” 

“Ribbon of shame” was former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nickname for a 2000s-era congressional district that stretched from Oxnard to the bottom of Monterey County. Maps sliced it out the last time California underwent redistricting in 2010. The phrase resurfaced among analysts to describe the San Luis Obispo to South San Francisco stretch.

My prior post on this topic is here.   

Postscript:  The final maps, published a few days before Christmas, are here.  A Wall Street Journal editorial on the topic doesn't mention rural issues, but it criticizing California's "racial gerrymandering" as reflected in the final redistricting is here.  An excerpt follows:  

The map-makers apparently tried to achieve something like proportional representation by race, drawing 18 majority-Hispanic districts and 18 majority white districts, according to the Princeton data. That roughly tracks both groups’ total share of the adult population. One district is majority Asian and the rest have no majority group.

This outcome is being touted as a victory by ethnic activists, but it means that voters are being assigned electoral districts based in part on race or ethnicity. The idea is that voters of a particular race should be grouped together to increase their collective voting power. 

* * * 

But it has the effect of amplifying identity politics, including white identity politics. When jurisdictions are carved along ethnic lines, politicians in both parties have less need to build multiethnic coalitions.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On bell hooks' compassion for poor whites

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name, bell hooks, died this morning.  She was a prolific scholar known for her poetry, as well as her work on race, gender, class, capitalism and place.  

hooks ended her career at Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky, and while I thought of her as a Kentuckian, I didn't necessarily think of her as rural.  Still, this line from a bell hooks tribute in the New York Times caught my eye:

bell hooks was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, who was born on Sept. 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Ky., [population 31,000] a small city in the southwestern part of the state not far from the Tennessee border.

Though her childhood in the semirural South exposed her to vicious examples of white supremacy, her tight-knit Black community in Hopkinsville showed her the possibility of resistance from the margins, of finding community among the oppressed and drawing power from those connections — a theme to which she would return frequently in her work.

Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a postal worker, and her mother, Rosa Bell (Oldham) Watkins, was a homemaker.

I've long found it interesting that hooks/Watkins chose to live out the final years of her career at Berea College, also in nonmetro Kentucky.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  I think it shows an attachment to place, not a lack of ambition.  

I've also always found noteworthy hooks' thoughts on class in particular her compassion for poor whites.  Here's an excerpt from her book Where We Stand:  Class Matters (2000):   

Most folks who comment on class acknowledge that poverty is seen as having a black face, but they rarely point to the fact that this representation has been created and sustained by the mass media ... The hidden face[s] of poverty in the United States are  the untold stories of millions of poor white people.  Undue media focus on poor nonwhites deflects attention away from the reality of white poverty. (p. 116-17)

A relatively recent bell hooks interview that proved controversial--at least with my students at UC Davis School of Law--is here.  What I see as the most provocative quote follows: 

For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Bradley Jackson of "The Morning Show" as country mouse--or is it country bear?

I just started watching "The Morning Show" (Apple+) last week and was soon struck by the country mouse-city mouse dynamic the creators set up between Alex Levy, played by Jennifer Anniston, and Bradley Jackson, played by Reese Witherspoon.  Bradley is the new morning co-anchor, joining Alex, after her former co-anchor, a man, is deposed for sexual harassment in the era of MeToo.  

There are so many important themes in this show--not least the patriarchy, sexually predatory behavior by men, and--ultimately--women's empowerment.  Here, I want to pick up on two other themes that jump out--two themes that happen to be my pet issues:  rurality and class.  Bradley Jackson represents the rural kid from West Virginia--brusque, direct, rough around the edges even when she is gussied up in the fine New York duds the network provides her (she prefers pants to dresses, thank you very much).  She was raised working class.  Bradley is the country mouse foil to Alex Levy's super polished, conniving, and inwardly angst-ridden/falling apart city mouse. 

In Episodes 4 and 5, which I watched tonight, Bradley reveals--in her first appearance as co-anchor of the show--that she had an abortion when she was 15. Here, she brushes right up against being white trash. And while the abortion and the matter-of-fact way she discloses it are controversial and thus shake network executives, they also generate a younger following for the show.  The disclosure also inspires college students in Mississippi to stand up against state abortion regulations.  To them, Bradley is a hero.  Critical issues of generational difference and generational conflict are thus surfaced.  

Also notable is how the show's creators give Bradley the "Pretty Woman" treatment--putting her in posh clothing, including a private shopping spree at Barney's over the weekend before she begins her gig.  They do not, however, ask her to eliminate the slight twang with which she speaks.  

Another interesting scene is when The Morning Show "cleans up" Bradley's mom in West Virginia to bring her on air--reading from cue cards--to talk about what a great kid Bradley was growing up.  In fact, Bradley and her mom were frequently in intense conflict, and it is this ruse by The Morning Show's producers that causes Bradley to burst out and disclose a more honest portrait of her life in the Mountain State, including her teenage abortion.  

In another scene, Bradley is talking on air about a young adult author and says "ya"--as in "y'all"--rather than "Y", "A," as this term gets pronounced, with the letters articulated separately.  She handles it well, repeating "ya" in realization--or is it poking fun at herself?--and then saying it the way said by people in the know, upper class folks. 

I'm looking forward to more rural-urban differentiation in future episodes.  I'd also love to see some commentary on these issues, but so far, I've found only this piece offering a nod to Bradley's Appalachian roots.  (Oh, and there's this ad for the West Virginia hoodie Bradley/Reese wears in an episode of the show).  

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Is an orientation to work and self-sufficiency making Democrats' domestic policies unpopular?

National Public Radio reported a few days ago on new poll that shows Democrats not getting credit for their assistance to low-income families.  Kelsey Snell and Domenico Montanaro report, with some excerpts following, including this part I want to highlight the most, but which doesn't show up in the transcript.  It's a quote from a Republican voter in Oklahoma who got the child tax credit for his kids but says it didn't help it all.  In that regard, he represents one in five voters who responded to the survey.  Curious, because it's hard to imagine how a cash infusion couldn't help "at all." 

Perhaps more importantly, that respondent--whose race is not specified--doesn't think it's good for government to give money to people.  Here's his quote (transcribed by me):  

Long term, it's a problem because you need a better choice.  What you're doing when you actually give these people that Band Aid is you're making them dependent on that Band Aid.

This reflects a long-standing attitude of Americans who value work--the idea of work.  These folks expect all people to work because they work--even if the fruits of their labor don't truly meet their economic need.  This is reflected most prominently in Jennifer Sherman's book, Those who Work, Those who Don't:  Poverty, Morality and Family in Rural America, and I've written about it here and here.  

What follows is an excerpt from the story's transcript with more context on the poll on which they're reporting:   

Democrats say the child tax credit has a particularly large impact on low-income families for whom the additional funds have been crucial. A recent study from Columbia University found that those monthly payments kept 3.6 million children out of poverty in October.

In the NPR/Marist survey, almost 6 in 10 eligible households said they received the child tax credit. But the 59% of eligible respondents is far below the number of families that the government expects should be getting funds. The IRS estimated earlier this year that the families of 88% of children in the U.S. would be eligible for the payments and said in September that 35 million families received them.

The disconnect between the government figures and respondents' answers is a perception and credit problem for Biden and Democrats.

Even among those who did recall receiving the tax credit, two-thirds said it only helped a little and 1 in 5 said it didn't help at all.
Biden's perception problem

For the president, there were further signs that voters don't give him credit for the policies of his own administration.

When it came to those direct payments, respondents gave Democrats in Congress a plurality of the credit for getting them to people (40%), while 17%, credited Republicans — even though zero congressional Republicans voted for the March relief bill.

The same percentage — just 17% — felt Biden was most responsible for sending the cash.

* * *

While the numbers are a sign of a deeply polarized society, there's also evidence of lackluster feelings for the president among even people in his own party.

For example, in the survey, while 76% of Republicans strongly disapproved of the job Biden is doing, only 38% of Democrats strongly approved.

* * *

Democrats have spent months repeating the message that their legislation will not add to the deficit or worsen inflation. In an address from the White House in October, Biden called the plans fiscally responsible policies to help the country grow.

"They don't add a single penny to the deficit," he said. "And they don't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact, they reduce the deficit."

Overall, 61% of respondents said things in the country are going in the wrong direction. That's a significant drop from back in July, when .Biden was saying the U.S. was on the cusp of independence from the pandemic. Americans then were split but more optimistic than they are now on the direction of the country.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

White trash in Percival Everett's new novel, The Trees

The novel, The Trees, out next week, was featured on National Public Radio this morning, and author Percival Everett's discussion with NPR host Scott Simon intrigued me because it implicated both rurality and, more prominently, race and whiteness.  Here's an excerpt from the interview: 

Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big-city heat from Hattiesburg. They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and they're in the small town of Money to investigate the murder of two men in the back room of the same shotgun-style house - one, a white man who's disfigured in a way so gruesome we can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please; the other, a Black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue.

Simon observes near the end of the interview:

SIMON: I've got to ask you. I enjoyed the book a lot. So many of the white Southerners in this book are not just bigots. They're obese. They're dumb. They smell, as you write, memorably, of one, of excrement - and you don't say excrement - Aqua Velva and pimento cheese, which is an awfully clever phrase. And with no apologies made for white bigots, are you stereotyping white Southerners?

EVERETT: Welcome to club. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

EVERETT: I am, in fact. How does it feel? That's my question. Yes, I'm not fair in this novel. It's not a novel about fairness. In fact, after I wrote the first page, my admission to my wife was, well, I'm not being fair, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

This left me wanting to know more, and then I found this by Christian Lorentzen on Book Forum.  I'll just excerpt a short quote here from the commentary titled "Hillbilly Effigy": 

Not much present in The Trees are white liberals or leftists. The novel isn’t about them (us), unless perhaps it’s meant to flatter them with a vision of their redneck white-trash cousins getting a comeuppance at the hands of cunning and ruthless Black assassins (spoiler: the Black corpse is not the real killer, nor is it a ghost) and their Asian counterparts, avenging their own victims of lynching. Everett has had his go at white liberals elsewhere, most notably in Erasure, his satire of the publishing industry and the Quality Lit Biz. The Trees is looser and more freewheeling than that novel, Everett’s masterpiece.

Prior to that is this, also touching on class and whiteness:

Most of the white characters in this novel are guilty: even if they are merely the descendants of the perpetrators of lynchings, they are unrepentant racists (or “know-nothing, pre–Civil War, inbred peckerwoods,” as one character puts it), frequent users of the N-word (with the hard r), stealers of livestock, or members of a pathetically diminished Ku Klux Klan. The racists are present all the way up the chain of American power.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.