Deindustrialization has helped create a right-wing turn in many Midwestern towns. Long traditions of labor militancy can explain why it hasn’t in others.
Frances McDormand is naturally great in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of a book about older Americans who give up the security of home for the hope of work.
Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, newspapers and magazines have been obsessed with constructing a mythology of a “forgotten” white working class. Hillbilly Elegy just reinforces the stereotypes it insists it’s illuminating.
We white radicals have a particular responsibility and crying need to organize as many white people as possible to break from imperialism and to see that their long term interests, as human beings and for a livable future for their children, lie in allying with the rest of humanity.
In the infancy of the Trump presidency, a new community defense network is espousing anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics to build coalitions in cities, small towns, and rural areas across America. Redneck Revolt recruits predominantly poor and working class white people away from reactionary politics. The organization advances an analysis of their class condition and white supremacy’s role in upholding the wealth and privilege of a small, white elite.
The working class constitutes roughly 63 percent of the U.S. labor force. Crucially, it consists of both men and women and is multiracial and multiethnic.2 White people are, of course, a big part of the working class, but if we settle on “the white working class” as a class in itself, and with the force of white supremacy, even a class for itself, we lose track of the role blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites play in the working class.
What an impoverished small town tells us about the dangers of not taking class seriously.
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