March 26, 2020 29
to see their personal misfortunes in
political terms, blaming their govern-
ments and even taking to the streets to
protest fiscal policies they see as harm-
ful, as the French are doing now.
But white American men tend to be
especially hard on themselves. They
often find in their occupations the
self-worth and community that other
groups find in kinship and class con-
sciousness, so their sense of personal
worthlessness can be profound when
jobs are unstable or disappear.
For Falling from Grace, Newman
interviewed men laid off after a down-
turn in the computer industry during
the 1980s recession. Even though the
entire industry was affected, most men
dwelled only on what was wrong with
them. The problem, they explained to
Newman, wasn’t a ruthless corporate
culture or the laissez-faire government
that had just hiked interest rates, caus-
ing the collapse of fragile businesses,
but themselves. “If people... are not
prospering, that’s their problem,”
John Kowalski, sacked from his com-
pany after thirty years of service, told
Newman. Meanwhile, friends stopped
calling; wives accustomed to a comfort-
able lifestyle glowered and complained;
children shrank away in confusion.
The decline in blue-collar jobs has
been far more sustained than the peri-
odic glitches in the white-collar econ-
omy, but whites without a BA haven’t
thus far used their considerable po-
litical clout to improve their situation.
As has repeatedly been pointed out,
many don’t vote, while others support
corporate-backed Republicans hostile
to the very programs many poor whites
depend on, including food stamps, job
training, social security, Medicaid, and
unemployment and disability benefits.
During the run-up to the 2016 elec-
tion, the sociologist Jennifer Silva in-
terviewed people in the Pennsylvania
coal region, which delivered Trump
a two-thirds majority, to find out how
they made political decisions. Penn-
sylvania’s coal mines, which once
employed 175,000 people, now em-
ploy just 837. With those jobs went an
entire way of life. The work was dan-
gerous and dirty; thousands died in
accidents or succumbed to black lung
disease; miners depended on company
stores and homes, and those who lost
their jobs faced destitution; but they
nevertheless had a profound sense of
solidarity. Most marriages lasted a
lifetime, and communities were held
together by social clubs, churches,
unions, and friendships.
Today, Coal Brook, the (pseudony-
mous) town that Silva describes in
We’re Still Here, is a depressed waste-
land of bars, chain stores, fast food res-
taurants, and drug rehab centers. Most
of the white, black, and Hispanic men
and women Silva interviewed struggled
with drug or alcohol problems, had
spent time in jail, and/or were unem-
ployed. Virtually all said that voting
was pointless because the system was
rigged in favor of the rich. When Silva
turned up for an interview on Election
Day wearing an “I Voted” sticker, she
was mocked as a gullible fool.
“All politicians are bought off,” de-
clared Joshua, a twenty-eight-year-
old white ex-con in drug recovery.
“Once they get thrown into the ma-
chine they become puppets like all the
rest.... I’m not a fan of either [Trump
or Clinton]. It’s like choose shit or a
shit sandwich.”
Bree, a white waitress suffering from
chronic pain whose black boyfriend
was recently released from prison, felt
similarly:I love women, and I think they can
do anything a man can do, but that
woman should not be the President
of this United States, so help me
God, but neither should that jack-
ass. So it’s like, who the frick do you
pick? I’m like, you’re not giving us
much of a choice here. Either way
we’re going to be destroyed.Very few of the people of color in-
terviewed by Silva bothered to vote at
all, but some whites held their noses
and voted for Trump. “Oh, he got us
rednecks!” said Steven, a sixty-two-
year-old janitor. Danielle, a twenty-
eight-year-old child abuse survivor
with debilitating anxiety, put it this
way: Trump is “so in your face, like
eff you, I don’t give a crap what you
think of me. I think he belongs in this
area because that’s what we are.” Bree
agreed: “At the end of the day, I would
rather have President Dickhead than
President Sellout.”The French sociologist Pierre Bour-
dieu was the first to observe that what
made the new “precariat” class—as
he called the intermittently employed,
low-wage workforce—so vulnerable
was that its solidarity had been ruined.^3
When workers are made to feel replace-
able and lucky to have even a lousy job,
they become cynical, competitive, de-
pressed, and easier to exploit. A grow-
ing number of researchers are finding
that instead of turning to politics, many
poor Americans are turning inward,
focusing on their own personal strug-
gles with trauma and pain.^4 One of
Case and Deaton’s most striking find-
ings is what I’ll call the “pain paradox.”
On national health surveys, sixty-year-
old white Americans without a BA are
two-and-a-half times more likely to
report that their health is fair or poor
than same-aged whites with a BA. Even
though working-class jobs involve less
risk and physical exertion than in the
past, each generation of non-BA whites
since the Baby Boom has reported
more pain, at younger ages, than the
previous one. Non-BA blacks, who tend
to do the most physically grueling jobs,
are 20 percent less likely than non-BA
whites to report pain at all ages. Even
odder, non-BA whites actually report
more pain at age sixty than at age
eighty, whereas the reverse is true for
blacks, whites with a BA, and popula-
tions in nineteen comparison countries.
The pain experienced by non-BA
whites is so severe it’s keeping many of
them from working altogether. In 1993
4 percent of forty-five-to-fifty-four-
year-olds without a BA were out of the
workforce for health reasons; today,
13 percent are. In Virginia’s coal re-
gion, the journalist Beth Macy found
that in one county, 60 percent of men(^3) Pierre Bourdieu, “La précarité est
aujourd’hui partout,” Grenoble Con-
ference, December 12–13, 1997.
(^4) “Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms
of Diagnosis, Disability, and Struc-
tural Stigma under Welfare Reform,”
by Helena Hansen, Philippe Bourgois,
and Ernest Drucker, Social Science and
Medicine, Vol. 103 (February 2014).
Exploding Stars and
Invisible Planets
The Science of What’s Out There
FRED WATSON
“Watson explains and entertains to
equally strong eff ect.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Despite the complexity of the
universe, you feel as though you’ve
always been part of unraveling its
mysteries as you read Fred Watson’s
entertaining book.”
—Amanda Bauer, head of education
and public outreach, Large Synoptic
Survey Telescope
Nature and Value
EDITED BY AKEEL BILGRAMI
“An outstanding collection of essays
in which some of the world’s leading
thinkers subject the fundamental
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Essential reading for those who are
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—Amitav Ghosh, author of
The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable
“This admirable and inspiring book
off ers a number of converging
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predicament and to see it whole.”
—Charles Taylor, author of
A Secular Age
The First Political Order
How Sex Shapes Governance and National
Security Worldwide
VALERIE M. HUDSON,
DONNA LEE BOWEN,
AND PERPETUA LYNNE
NIELSEN
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Those days are over. Thanks to
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democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem
Sex in the Brain
How Seizures, Strokes, Dementia, Tumors, and
Trauma Can Change Your Sex Life
AMEE BAIRD
“[An] intoxicating read about our
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