I thought of Mickey, a carpenter I know in my town when I read about the staggering and rising death rate among the white working class. The new study, by a team of prominent economists, has found that sickness and early death in the white working class is rooted in poor job prospects for the less educated as they enter the job market, a situation that compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity and other pathologies
I have to admit my own shallow prejudices, even though I know better, when I think of the white working class lately, I tend to think of the angry people shouting and threatening journalists at those creepy rallies Donald Trump loves to go to.
But that is just another kind of bigotry, and I know better.
As a former political writer, I was shocked by the November election and have been trying to listen and open my mind to why it happened, and why so many people like me completely missed it. I am trying to grasp it, and in a way, I did see it, as I am surrounded by struggling white working class men and women, and I see their suffering every day.
I just am not used thinking of white people as suffering as much or more as some other people. They don’t seem to have advocates in Washington fighting for them. And journalists are too busy sitting in New York and Washington studios yelling at one another to go and talk to actual Americans about their problems and concerns. I don’t think a single reporter in American saw this rising “sea of despair.”
They white working class are essentially the people who brought Trump to power, if you look at the refined polls and stats. They made the difference, and when I asked Mickey why he voted for Trump and believed in him so strongly, he said “because he understood that white people can hurt too.”
I fear for Mickey in a year or so.
Mickey is 39 years old, he drinks heavily – he is at the Bog bar counter almost every night of the week. He has lost a cousin to a drug overdose, his brother is an addict, his father, an out of work factory worker, is an alcoholic. His first cousin committed suicide, and his sister is experimenting with opiods. It is not, he says, all that rare of a story.
Why on earth wouldn’t he vote for someone – anyone – who promised to do something about his life and everyone around him? No one else in the campaign was speaking to him at all.
Anne Case and Angus Eaton, the economists who wrote the new study, first reported in 2015 that the death rate of midlife non-Hispanic white Americans had risen steadily since 1999 in contrast with the death rates of blacks, Hispanics and Europeans. Their new study shows that this mortality spike continues to rise, it is almost unique to America among western countries.
The two Princeton professors say the trend affects whites of both sexes and is happening nearly everywhere in the country. Education is a critical factor, say Case and Eaton, people with college degrees report better health and happiness than those with only some college, who in turn are doing much better than those who never went to college at all.
The statistics in the new study are staggering, especially when I recall that this issue was never mentioned once in the Presidential campaign, apart from President Trump’s ability to capture the anger and frustration it has caused.
It speaks to my own myopia and that of the media to see that working class whites in mid-life are now dying at a much higher rate than African-Americans and Hispanics at mid-life, that is not something I ever heard a journalist mention before, it is not something anyone could have gleamed from the Presidential debates or campaign.
As bad as this problem is, it is frightening that so little attention has been paid to it, while our political system has focused so intensely – and correctly – on issues of liberation and equality.
Of the many candidates who ran in both party’s primaries, Donald Trump is the only candidate I heard mention it at all, and then only the most general way, as it related to jobs and outsourcing. To me, he exploited this despair, I have yet to see him say or do anything to address it.
It is a national tragedy.
Overdose, suicide and alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 for white non Hispanics ages 50 to 54, were up 130 per cent from 1998 to 2015. Among women, deaths in those categories were up 381 per cent.
This is much more than a health issue, it is a social catastrophe and a national emergency that the country seems to have almost completely ignored until last November.
People like me who have been wondering for months how someone like Donald Trump could possibly be elected leader of the world’s first and most powerful democracy, can stop scratching their heads. You can just read the study, it is available on the Brookings Institution website.
Mickey is filled with rage and anger at the Washington political establishment, he said he would vote for a dinosaur “if he promised to burn those buildings down.” And Mickey is a nice guy, I have known him for some time, he is no bigot or racist.
He has seen his whole world crumble. He is without hope for himself or his children. His wife, he says, is now a borderline diabetic.
He lives in a sea of despair and swims in beer at the Bog. His wife cleans houses for the rich second homers who vacation here when they are not in New York City. “She pays the mortgage,” he says,”my mother says I am the first man in the history of my family who couldn’t pay the mortgage in his family. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Ultimately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high-school-educated working class after it’s heyday in the early 1970’s” say Case and Deaton, “and the pathologies that accompany that decline”
As the Congress debates health care, Case and Deaton report that poor health is becoming more common for each new generation of middle-aged, less educated white Americans. And they are going downhill faster.
I have been working hard to help undocumented agricultural workers and immigrants and refugees, and I plan to keep on doing so. I have never consciously lifted a finger to help working class whites, I’m not even sure how I would do it around here, or anywhere else.
It is simple enough to join the ACLU and fight for immigrants, there is no equivalent place to go for Mickey and his peers.This is not a demographic that knows how to lobby or ask for help, or asks for money and support online.
They are not on Washington’s agenda. The new budget calls for cancelling the few job training programs that exist in Appalachia. Many revolutions in history have been built on much less than this.
I think I have a sense now about why it is that Donald Trump was elected, and shame on me, the answer lives and works all around me, I just wasn’t thinking clearly enough to connect the dots. White people do hurt, too, and my wish is that people might grasp that their individual suffering is not unique or limited to them, but is increasingly a shared experience among middle and working class people in America.
They are all exploited and abandoned by the same corporate and dysfunctional political system. I am sad to see that there is no suggestion that Donald Trump will really help Mickey and the millions of people like him.
If they all ever get together, true change might be possible.
Mickey doesn’t believe in taking “charity,” and feels utterly betrayed by every politician he has ever heard from or seen. He seems to think the clock can be turned back to the 1970’s, Case and Deaton’s “heyday.”
Economists say that is no longer possible. The political scientists say that demagogues appear when government breaks its promises to people. I can see the truth in this.
When he has a couple of beers down, Mickey admits that he expects to feel the same way about Donald Trump that he did about other politicians in a year or so, or even sooner. He is not impressed by the weekend jaunts to Mar-A-Logo or the fact it costs taxpayers about $3 million dollars a trip. “What kind of man of the people is that?,” he asks. “That’s college or job training for everybody i know in town.”
Mickey is despairing, but he is not dumb.
That unease about President Trump began for him when he read about all the billionaires coming into his cabinet, and the Republican plan to take health care away from his parents by making it too expensive for them to afford.
“It’s not a new story,” he said,” it’s the same old story.”
And I didn’t really get it, even though it was right under my nose.