White Working Class Despair is the Mother’s Milk of the GOP: Will It Feed a Republican Resurgence?

By Jim Miller

As the midterms approach, the Democrats are hoping to avert electoral disaster by mobilizing women outraged by the overturning of Roe v. Wade along with other voters horrified by the continuing threats to American Democracy.  In some places, they have also engaged in the questionable strategy of supporting far right candidates in the Republican primary who they think will be easier to beat.  

There had been some evidence in the polls that this might bring an October surprise and help the Democrats keep the House or at least avert a wipe-out, but bad economic news of late seems to be leaving them with the less than ideal prospect of hopefully keeping a narrow Senate majority with fewer losses in the House.  

On the other side, the Republicans are going to the seemingly inexhaustible well of fear, resentment, and economic anxiety.  As tired as this strategy may seem from the outside in urbanized areas of blue states like our own, it is still quite potent elsewhere because the American right has learned how to capitalize on the deep despair of America’s white working class.  

Thomas Edsall’s excellent column last week in the New York Times hit the nail on the head: 

• The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”

• This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.

• “Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”

• Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus 0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus 0.69 in 2016 and minus 0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”

• Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”

Edsall goes on to cite another researcher from the Brookings Institute, Carol Graham, who also focuses on the death of hope in a wide swathe of the American electorate.  This is, she argues, a key issue, but the despair of working class whites is disproportionate to their actual suffering: 

• “The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”

• There are, Graham argues, long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.

Edsall also cites David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald whose work shows how extreme distress has risen significantly in the U.S., particularly amongst middle aged white people without a college degree.  As they observe, “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”

But, as astute observers of American politics and culture know, this is not a new phenomenon.  Indeed, I was writing columns on how Case and Deaton’s earlier research exposed the ways the white working class was killing itself for the San Diego Free Press back in 2015, noting UN studies about declining American happiness and the epidemic of despair with no end in sight.  

In 2017 after the election of Trump, I highlighted Case and Deaton’s work as reported in the Washington Post:

• Sickness and early death in the white working class could be rooted in poor job prospects for less-educated young people as they first enter the labor market, a situation that compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity and other pathologies, according to a study published Thursday by two prominent economists . .

• [T]he new research found a “sea of despair” across America. A striking feature is the rise in physical pain. The pattern does not follow short-term economic cycles but reflects a long-term disintegration of job prospects. 

• “You used to be able to get a really good job with a high school diploma. A job with on-the-job training, a job with benefits. You could expect to move up,” [Case] said.

• The nation’s obesity epidemic may be another sign of stress and physical pain, she continued: “People may want to soothe the beast. They may do that with alcohol, they may do that with drugs, they may do that with food.”

Of course, as I argued then, the declining state of non-college educated whites is key here, and doing what we can to address economic inequality is important but, as much of the research on happiness shows, the roots of this crisis lie deeper.  

Back in 2015 when the first study on the intensifying despair of the white working class came out, I noted the economic devastation of many of America’s working class communities led to a corresponding and equally soul crushing loss of social capital: 

• Perhaps the worst thing that the devastation of America’s white working class communities from the old industrial towns of the Northeast and the Midwest to the small businesses of Everywhere, USA has done is kill community and with it a sense of connectedness and purpose.  

• Folks in the old American working class went from meeting in union halls to bowling alone to drinking or popping pills in front of the sad glow of the TV.  This made some of them lonely and desperate and others angry at all the wrong things with others still scrambling to save what was falling through their fingers to no end.  

Over the last six years, we have witnessed Trump’s opportunistic exploitation of that alienation, and how his policies harmed many of those he claimed he would help while throwing gasoline on the racial, regional, and other bitter factional fires threatening to burn down our democracy. 

This is the fuel that keeps the idea-free GOP afloat and some of the alienated folks who are drinking, overeating, and pill popping themselves to death are still addicted to Trump despite all the humiliation and loss.  In fact, that humiliation and loss might just give the Republicans enough fuel to overcome an embarrassingly terrible field of candidates at the national level.  

As the embrace of fascism globally illustrates, people are at their most dangerous when they are the most afraid and feel they have nothing to lose. Thus, there is no telling how this particularly disturbing American story ends, whatever happens in the midterms.  

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