(A surprisingly informed review of 2 new books by Bill Clinton's chief
speech-writer.)
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_04/3002
Dec/Jan 2009
WORKING, STIFFED
Two books plumb the all-American struggle to make do
By DAVID KUSNET
Trucking Country:
The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Politics and Society in
Twentieth Century America)
by Shane Hamilton
A People's History of Poverty in America (New Press People's Histories)
by Stephen Pimpare
For much of the past eight years, many liberal intellectuals have seemed
less inclined to support blue-collar Americans in their struggles than
to look askance at their presumed political, consumer, and cultural
preferences. Why did so many white working-class voters support George
W. Bush in 2000 and 2004? Why do so many moderate-income Americans not
only shop at Wal-Mart but embrace it as a model of enterprise—even
though it drives down wages and benefits for both its own workers and
those at its suppliers worldwide? And why does so much popular culture,
from Fox News to talk radio, reflect a right-wing populism that
ridicules professorial politicians from Al Gore to Barack Obama but
reveres CEOs from Jack Welch to Donald Trump?
For readers seeking a unified field theory for the origins and appeal of
right-wing populism, the most popular and persuasive was offered in
Thomas Frank’s 2004 best seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank
indicted working-class rural Kansans for abandoning their populist
economic instincts in favor of their conservative cultural
predispositions. Thus, he colorfully complained, these voters regularly
reject the progressive Democrats who have their best interests at heart
because they perceive progressives to be “latte-drinking, sushi-eating,
Volvo-driving” elitists. Instead, these blue-collar Kansans support
“grandstanding Christers” who favor corporate elites against everyday
Americans. Many liberal commentators have applied the logic of Frank’s
account in order to explain the country’s stubborn red-blue divide,
which has turned working-class redoubts like West Virginia into
Republican mainstays. Cultural identifications, not economic interests,
are at work—or so we’re told.
Now come two scholarly studies that offer counterpoints to the view that
culture trumped economics during the era of conservative backlash. In
Trucking Country, historian Shane Hamilton directly challenges Frank’s
thesis. “Conservatives may or may not have ‘won the heart of America,’
as Thomas Frank’s subtitle declares, but, if they did, it was not by
hoodwinking rural Americans into rejecting their own economic
interests,” Hamilton writes. “Instead rural Americans’ ideas regarding
state intervention in the economy helped shape the broader conservative
ideologies of the late twentieth century.” His book explores the growth
of independent, nonunion trucking since the 1970s—and the ways that the
wildcat-trucking movement produced a wave of economic deregulation from
the 1980s on. Once the ideology of deregulation took hold in Washington,
Hamilton observes, it created optimal conditions for ongoing
conservative rule: defeats for progressive politics, widespread distrust
of activist government, and a steep decline in private-sector unionism.
Meanwhile, in A People’s History of Poverty in America, Stephen Pimpare
tells the story of how poor people have suffered economic deprivation,
social isolation, and scornful treatment by private charities and public
programs from colonial America through the current explosion of debt.
Pimpare’s book is not about contemporary American politics—it is a
sympathetic social history that allows poor people, past and present, to
tell their own remarkably similar stories. Among its many valuable
lessons, it reflects the attitudes of nonpoor Americans, from the
insecure middle class to the more affluent, who have sought to
distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving poor”—those who
actively seek to improve their conditions and those who seem resigned to
dependence on public assistance or private charity.
Taken together, the two studies effectively point up how
individualism—the notion that your life is exclusively your own
responsibility— can cut against the grain of solidarity among the less
fortunate players in the US economy. The individualist ethos is by no
means a monopoly of the right, but it reinforces conservative aims as it
plays out in economic life: It motivates many to seek self-employment,
avoid unions, oppose social programs, look down on poor people—and vote
for conservative Republicans. Yes, such individualistic economic
attitudes often accompany cultural conservatism (although economic
individualists such as Barry Goldwater can be libertarians on social
issues). But as Hamilton argues explicitly and a close reading of
Pimpare’s book implies, much more than cultural identification was at
work over the past four decades of right-wing dominance. Economic
interests and ideals were central to the consolidation of conservative
power.
Hamilton locates the origins of this economic shift far from the think
tanks and lobbying offices of Washington: in the ranks of nonunion
long-haul truckers who clustered in the rural southern and border states
but came to exert an increasing influence over industries ranging from
transportation to retail to meatpacking. By organizing their own
movements to rival the Teamsters union, staging disruptive protests
ostensibly against rising fuel prices but actually against the entire
structure of the trucking industry during the energy crisis and
stagflation of 1979, and aggressively lobbying for deregulation, the
independent truckers set the stage for the fiercely antiunion economic
policies of the Reagan administration. The rise of the nonunion truckers
and the positions they promoted contributed, in turn, to the growth of
nonunion companies such as Wal-Mart and Iowa Beef Packers. As Hamilton
shows, these companies won a race to the bottom by slashing wages and
lowering prices, emerging as the powerhouses in the cost-cutting
consumer economy of the 1990s and beyond.
Pimpare’s informative and insightful history of poverty in America
underscores how the ranks of the urban poor have suffered from the
ideology of economic individualism. Part of Howard Zinn’s People’s
History series, Pimpare’s book stresses the experiences of poor people
in this country over the past three centuries, usually as explained in
letters, diaries, and books by poor (or formerly poor) people
themselves. The better known among them include James Baldwin, Michael
Gold, and Jack Conroy. This is a thematic, not a chronological, history,
with chapters about hunger, homelessness, the treatment of women and
children, and the indignities imposed on those who receive public
assistance or private charity. Over the decades, wealthy benefactors
have behaved patronizingly toward the poor, and welfare agencies and
private charities have presumed them to be cheats or wastrels, even as
poor applicants have lined up for hours for scarce low-wage jobs.
Much of this material will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in or
around poverty, worked for social-service agencies, or read the works of
Jacob Riis, Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, or William Julius
Wilson. A People’s History of Poverty is most valuable for its focus on
individual experiences and its anecdotal detail. Pimpare recounts
stories that no social satirist could make up, such as wealthy suburban
philanthropists serving ham sandwiches to Jewish youngsters from New
York at the turn of the past century and complaining that some of the
kids refused to eat their lunch. But Pimpare is also able to show the
ways in which poor Americans managed to challenge and overcome the more
baleful effects of economic individualism. Poor people from very
different backgrounds have always relied on one another to survive,
creating networks of community institutions and mutual-assistance
societies. As Jack Kirkland, best known for the stage adaptation of
Erskine Caldwell’s novel of southern poverty, Tobacco Road, once said,
“When you’re in trouble, you never go to rich friends to help you, you
go to poor friends.”
Still, despite the fresh terrain each author examines, they nonetheless
press their arguments a bit too far. An instructor in American politics
and social-welfare policy at Yeshiva College and the Wurzweiler School
of Social Work, Pimpare is so sympathetic to the poor that he seems
reluctant to discuss the ways in which poverty damages its victims, as
other observers such as Harrington and Wilson have readily acknowledged.
Nor does Pimpare explore why some people study, work, build businesses,
and engage in social struggles that enable them to emerge from poverty
while others are ground down by deprivation and despair. He does include
a chapter about work, but he remains comparatively silent about the
social movements of the working poor, including the union-organizing
campaigns among hospital workers, building service workers, farm
workers, and others in low-wage sectors of the economy. By failing to
focus on those workers, Pimpare misses an opportunity to emphasize how
much most poor people have in common with those who are struggling to
stay in the middle class. Most Americans are much more sympathetic to
the working poor—those who, in the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s phrase,
“take the early bus”—than the dependent poor.
Similarly, Hamilton’s saga of independent trucking’s uprising likely
overemphasizes its importance. Independent truckers almost certainly
were not the most powerful force behind deregulation and deunionization.
Other forces were at work—and other stories need to be told about how
the American economy made what the economists Barry Bluestone and
Bennett Harrison called “the great U-Turn” from providing high wages to
promoting low prices. For instance, during the 1970s, much of corporate
America chose to challenge unions, many liberal public officials
embraced deregulation, and many working Americans did begin to vote
according to their cultural preferences, not their paychecks. And since
1980, despite the earlier defection of rural white voters from the New
Deal consensus, the more politically influential of swing voters remain
urban and suburban Catholics—those famous recruits to the ranks of the
Reagan Democrats who later supported Bill Clinton.
As for the economic individualism that Hamilton emphasizes, it
frequently coexists with not only cultural conservatism but also a
genuine economic populism. Even as white working-class voters have
spurned some legacies of Great Society liberalism, they continue to join
unions when they can, support New Deal programs that help working
people, their children, and retirees—and vote for progressive candidates
who are more closely identified with social insurance than with social
engineering. Independent trucking is for Hamilton what Kansas was for
Frank—the locus that shows a part of what has gone wrong with American
politics. In the aftermath of the fall financial crisis and in the midst
of resurgent resentment of the damage wrought by Wall Street elites,
perhaps we will get a better sense of the full picture.
David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton from 1992
through 1994. He is the author of Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why
America’s Best Workers Are More Unhappy Than Ever (Wiley, 2008).
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