There’s this red-state paradox that others have written about before. Red states tend to be poorer and rely more on federal help. But they’re also more opposed to the federal government. So I started by asking, how could that be? What do I not get? I wanted to go to the heart of red-state culture, which would be whites in the South. So that’s how I ended up in Louisiana. [...]
They feel their cultural beliefs are denigrated by the culture at large. They feel that they’re seen as rednecks, that they live in a region that’s being discredited. Many of them are deeply devout, but they see the culture at large becoming more secular. And then they see economically that this trapdoor that used to only affect black people and people one class below them is now opening and gobbling up them and their children too. So altogether it makes them feel like a forgotten tribe. "Strangers in their own land" is a phrase that kept recurring to me as I spent time there.
And the main point is that they feel the government, the federal government, has been an instrument of their marginalization. If you give it an arm, it’ll take a leg. I think that was the big thing that was getting in the way and causing their deep distrust of something they otherwise might need to recover the natural environment that they did want. [...]
Another thing, a lot of the people I talked to were doing really well now — but they had grown up in poverty, or their parents had, they’d struggled hard, and they’d worked hard. They were also white men, and they felt that there was no cultural sympathy for them, in fact there was a tendency to blame the categories of whiteness and maleness. I came to realize that there is a whole sector of society in which the privilege of whiteness and maleness didn’t really trickle down. And I think we have grown highly insensitive to that fact. [...]
There was one thing I found interesting about Donald Trump’s appeal to blue-collar men, though. He spends a lot of time shaming women and minorities and disabled people and even war veterans. So many different groups. But the one group he hasn’t shamed is those who are applying for food stamps or who may be needing unemployment insurance. If you look at the iconography of shame in Trump’s speeches, he leaves an exception for the blue-collar man who might lose his job or have a low-wage job that doesn’t pay the bills.
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