In 2008, Pres. Obama remarked:
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
A recent article in the American Conservative explains the appeal of Trump to poor, working class whites in a book review interview with J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues . . . . Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.
From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. . . . [T]hese policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.
These Trump supporters don’t relate to elites, feel dismissed and put down by them, and Trump’s willingness to blast the elites is what makes him appealing. While those college-educated corporate types may find his insults undiplomatic and embarrassing, the tone is familiar to the impoverished Appalachian south. Many of them are fiercely proud and still carry the culture of honor from their ancestral Scotland.
He goes on to explain the inherited problems that exist among the poverty class, particularly in term of lack of effective role models and support structure.
I learned domestic strife from the moment I was born, from more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends I encountered, to the domestic violence case that nearly tore my family apart (I was the primary victim). So predictably, by the time I got married, I wasn’t a great spouse. I had to learn, with the help of my aunt and sister (both of whom had successful marriages), but especially with the help of my wife, how not to turn every small disagreement into a shouting match or a public scene.
What about the charge that poor whites are voting against their interest when they don’t vote Democrat?
Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop. They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that’s partially true. Some of these family problems run far deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves.” Again, they’re not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded. But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.
And Vance goes on to point out that empathy and respect alone don’t solve problems:
I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.
Another observation that was interesting is that while these now-Trump-supporters were offended when Obama talked about them clinging to their guns and God, he (perhaps ironically) hit on the very things that can help lift them out of poverty: religion and the military. By replacing their lacking support and role model structures with the discipline and mentoring that they lacked at home, they can help individuals reverse the cycle of poor decision making and judgment that creates more poverty.
For a kid like me, the Marine Corps was basically a four-year education in character and self-management. . . . If you have good mentors (and I certainly did), you are constantly given tasks, yelled at for failing, advised on how not to fail next time, and then given another try. You learn, through sheer repetition, that you can do difficult things. And that was quite revelatory for me. It gave me a lot of self-confidence. If I had learned helplessness from my environment back home, four years in the Marine Corps taught me something quite different.
The other thing the Marine Corps did is hold our hands and prevent us from making stupid decisions. . . . A lot of elites rely on parents or other networks the first time they made these decisions, but I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. The Marine Corps ensured that I learned.
Pres. Benson famously said:
“The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ would take the slums out of people, and they would take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”
Part of the purpose of religion is to elevate those who are in poverty through improvements to social structure, better choices, and access to mentoring. These are things religions often do better than struggling families. I have frequently heard the idea at church that we need to teach people, particularly the youth, that they can do hard things. This is used to justify Trek excursions, camping, Eagle projects and missions.
The tension lies in the fact that Mormonism has been more successful at elevating the economic status, family stability and education levels of its membership than many other religions. We are always going to be in the “elevating from poverty” game, though. From the article, the author talks about his dad and the influence conservative religion had on him:
His Christian faith gave him focus, forced him to think hard about his personal choices, and gave him a community of people who demanded, even if only implicitly, that he act a certain way. I think we all understate the importance of moral pressure, but it helped my dad, and it has certainly helped me! There’s obviously a more explicitly religious argument here, too. If you believe as I do, you believe that the Holy Spirit works in people in a mysterious way. I recognize that a lot of secular folks may look down on that, but I’d make one important point: that not drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of willpower when you didn’t grow up in privilege. That feeling–whether it’s real or entirely fake–that there’s something divine helping you and directing your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.
At the same time, those who are middle class, upper middle class, and academics often have even better support within their families and through their education than they may be receiving from their wards. Those with vast personal resources and support aren’t the main target audience. The place where growth happens is most often among the humble who come unto Christ without being compelled to be humble; the target audience for church messages is the upwardly striving poverty class. They are looking for something in their lives. They are seekers.
When those who have already amassed education, stability, and financial resources encounter some church messages, they may not feel the need to “cling to religion” as much as someone without those educational, familial and financial resources. The messages are less sticky. When the messages they hear in curriculum and from leaders are not as wise as what they know from other sources, they can become disaffected or critical. Maybe that’s inevitable.
That’s why we have a lay leadership, though. We go from being the recipient of advice to the dispenser of it or as Tracy Jordan says on 30 Rock: “The mento has become the manatee.”
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
This was a nice exploration of the essay and the related matters. Well done.
Another good post, hawk. You’re on fire lately. There are a number of threads to tease out here and I’ve only got time for one or two comments:
1. I’d love to know your source on the Mormon church being better at others at elevating the economic status of its members. It may be that outside the US, this is more the case, but in my experience over the last thirty years or so, the folks in my various wards have been pretty stratified. The folks at the lower end of the economic ladder tend to stay there, needing financial assistance from the church, etc., the blue collar folks tend to raise blue collar kids and the professional, white collar class tend to be the ones who send their kids to college. I’m just not seeing a lot of what I’d call upward mobility, but YMMV.
2. Given my observations in point 1, I might disagree a bit with the whole elevating people out of poverty thing. Instead, I might suggest that what you’re describing here, particularly in the Mormon context, is a kind of replacing of one sort privilege for another. As I stated, in my ward/stake, I don’t see a lot of what I’d call “upward mobility” and instead see mostly stagnation. I’m wondering if part of this is because people eschew economic privilege for what I’d call “spiritual privilege.” Christ teaches that materialism, worldliness, perhaps even becoming too attached to the idea of “upward mobility” is contrary to his father’s will. And so I wonder if part of the desire for “upward mobility” is transferred from the worldly realm to the spiritual. Given Christ’s emphasis on the spiritual realm, it could be that those who are members of the economic underclasses care less about the things of this world and more about the world to come as they cleave to the church’s teachings. In that sense, and really, I think, in Christ’s own teachings, the poor actually become the privileged, they become spiritually “rich”, just as the meek will inherit the earth. So I’m not sure that the holy ghost is a kind of self-help guru designed to pull us out of poverty as much as it is a witness of whether we are on the correct spiritual path. Certainly, most of us would agree that a life of poverty is far from ideal, and that it’s our duty as Christians and as just plain old feeling human beings to do whatever we can to eliminate it. And I’m not suggesting that Christ requires people to wallow in abject poverty/misery in order to gain salvation, but if people believe that Christianity is more about chasing the spiritual realm than the worldly, maybe the “upwardly striving poverty class” is striving for more than material comforts. Maybe the “something in their lives” is a spiritual something, not a “worldly success” something. I don’t know. It’s a complicated issue.
I really liked the OP.
Brother Sky, I don’t know where you are, but I have definitely seen the children from struggling and broken families in my stake who nevertheless remained active get set on paths where they are very likely to do financially better than their parent(s). In fact, in my nearly 20 years in my stake, and the fact that I’ve often had callings working with the youth, I’ve found a tremendous amount of satisfaction in seeing these kids leave home full of hope, manage to succeed in college and in other endeavors, and start families on solid foundations. Admittedly, my stake is loaded with high calibre people who are very dedicated, care very deeply about these youth, and are definitely not stagnant. Not every stake has resources like that, but there’s no doubt in my mind that many of these kids benefitted more from church that anything the state could offer them.
The problem definitely lies in the uneasy alliance within the political right between classical liberals and traditional conservatives.
The traditional society was 1) agriculturally based (like in the South, as opposed to the industrial North), 2) based in a subsistence/guild economy regulated through 3) the decentralized evaluation of morality.
The modern society – as advocated by classical liberals – is 1) capital/factory based, 2) based in a money-market economy regulated through 3) the centralized enforcement (as opposed to evaluated) of the state.
There are irreconcilable differences between these two ideals that were bested articulated around the turn of the 18th century in both feudal Germany and the southern states. These differences are best summarized in terms of the “creative destruction” of the entrepreneurial market in that while the classical liberals focus (with good reason) on the creative aspects of the market, the traditional conservatives focus (with just as good of reason) on the destructive aspects of that same process (these effects are especially acute within the agricultural sector). The latter simply does not see “efficiency” or “cost/benefit ratios measured in dollars” as the most important things in the world.
The worst part is that the political left – by trying to combine a form of morality with the state apparatus of modern society – only makes things worse since the centralized state – massively strengthened by leftist politics – is itself part of the problem. (This is why communists have always despised social democratic, welfare liberals, etc.) The social connections and integration of decentralized morality of the past are simply not powerful enough to withstand replacement by the a-moral money market and the impersonal bureaucracy of the centralized state.
Thus, traditional conservatives find themselves both economically impoverished and socially alienated within modern society. The services previously provided by local congregations have been taken over by an administrative, and utterly impersonal state which is totally unable to provide the social capital that were built into the traditional institutions it replaced.
As the OP noted, however, these contradictions between church and state administration are partially compensated by moderate overlap of interests between the profits of the classical liberals and the honor morality of the traditional conservatives within the military industrial complex.
If the real problems are the money market and the centralized state, then there seems little hope for a full resurgence of such traditional moralities. The best that they can hope for is a drastic reduction in state administration and the panoptical dependency that comes with it in order to provide a fertile ground the the growth of voluntary and decentralized moral communities and social capital – these always being the best protection from the destructive side of the market. Unfortunately, a reduction of state administration is in conflict with their current investment in the military industrial complex.
We were just discussing this on a recent road trip. One idea we batted around:
There’s a segment of Americans that we might call “end times evangelical survivalists” who believe the government is about to collapse. These are folks who store gold bars in a basement safe for when the banks fail and are well stocked with food, guns, and ammo.
Some, we think, believe that the imminent collapse is foretold in Scripture, some that it’s we-told-you-so Godly vengeance for the world’s wicked ways, some are just disgruntled, frustrated, down-and-out troublemakers. Pick your poison.
Anyway, we were speculating there’s a segment of the population that wants Trump elected because they believe that the U.S. will descend into chaos. They actually *want* chaos, either because they feel it vindicates them, they can profit from the looting, or they just want it for kicks… like putting an M80 in the commode at school.
We just couldn’t imagine any other demographic that would support him. Other than a suicidal demographic with nothing to lose.
Martin: Yeah, my sense is that it varies widely depending upon region and economic circumstances in addition to, as you point out, just the general leadership resources (or not) the youth have access to. Hopefully, both church and state are doing something to encourage our young people to educate themselves, though looking at some of the public school curricula, I’m a bit skeptical. Also, though I think this is changing, there is a stark gender difference when it comes to what we encourage our young women to achieve vs. our young men.
Kat, I do think that there are extremists in most religions and I do think that the Republican Party has moved a bit more away from the center then the Democratic Party has, though the Democrats have created an astonishing percentage of their own problems. And it is merely obvious to observe that the language of extremism is, of course, going to appeal to extremists. I do think that’s one of the appeals of Trump. I also think, though, that there are a lot of desperate people out there who feel that they are at the end of their rope (even though they may not actually be) and it makes a kind of sense that they would cling more to Trump than to Hillary, who appears to represent “the establishment,” whatever that might mean to people. Honestly, when you think of how much alike Romney and Obama were when you got down to brass tacks, it makes a perverse kind of sense that an extremist would appeal to people who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Because really, who isn’t dissatisfied with the status quo on some level or another?
Agree. The crux of our thinking was whether these folks did not care about Trump per se except as a means to anarchy and chaos. In other words, they were fantasizing that electing Trump would cause the United States to collapse in fulfillment of their apocalyptic vision. Realistically, that would not happen, but perhaps such people believe it would.
The other possibility we discussed was what we called the “Jerry Springer Syndome”. That is, the average American functions at the level of the typical talk show guest who wants a paternity test to find out who the baby daddy is. Trump’s supporters basically know not what they do.