Karen Tumulty has piece in the Washington Post on why West Virginia has moved from a solidly Democratic state to an increasingly Republican state (at least, on the national level). She’s starts out with an anecdote about Pineville, where Jack Kennedy made a famous speech two weeks before winning the West Virginia primary in 1960.
In late June of this year, another expression of Pineville’s values appeared on the terraced lawn of the old courthouse. There was no fanfare around the installation of the new stone monument, but like that Kennedy rally more than half a century ago, it was a way of saying how the town felt about where the nation is headed.
The stone is engraved with the Ten Commandments, and it instructs: “They are to be used as a historical reference and model to enrich the knowledge of our citizens to an early origin of law from past generations so that they will serve as a historical guide for future generations to come.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has complained that this is an encroachment of church on state, and an affront to religious minorities. A headline on the front page of the Charleston Gazette on July 4 asked: “Constitutional showdown in the making?”
But most here seem to agree with Melissa Mitchell, a stay-at-home mom who was getting things organized for a midsummer church picnic at a park near the courthouse.
“We love it, and we will fight for it,” she said of the stone marker.
Why? “Honestly, because everybody in this county hates Barack Obama. That is the biggest reason,” Mitchell said.
Animosity toward President Obama runs high here. He lost Wyoming County by nearly 56 percentage points last year, despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1.
One wonders why everybody hates Barack Obama.
Democrats, and some Republicans, say the right kind of Democrat could still win West Virginia in a presidential election.
“Bill Clinton would still carry the state, and Hillary Clinton will, if she’s the nominee,” said John Doyle, a Democrat who for two decades represented Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown in the House of Delegates.
What makes Bill and Hillary “the right kind of Democrat”?
According to the article, fully 27% of West Virginians receive some form of government aid, the highest rate in the country. They rank 47th in terms of overall health, which is why only one health insurer has agreed to offer plans in the state’s exchange. Despite this, they profess to dislike the federal government.
In April, Shawn Penwarden, having lost his job hauling coal, opened an ATV repair shop in Northfork. He has been busy enough to need a few more employees. But he said he’s having difficulty hiring because people want to be paid in cash. They fear working on the books might risk their government benefits.
“People only do two things here. They either work in coal for $100,000 a year or they get a check from the government,” Penwarden said. “It’s a way of life. So do we blame the people or the government?”
“I would blame the government,” he added, “but I don’t have any ideas how to reverse the trend.”
Isn’t this rich? You’ve got people for whom welfare and food stamps are “a way of life” to the point that they won’t take good work even if it is offered unless the pay comes under the table, and they think the Kenyan Muslim president is a socialist who is trying to take their hard-earned money and give it to undeserving blacks. President Obama is trying to screw them, but Hillary would be just fine.
All these folks are going to be getting another big government benefit in the form of subsidies that will help them get health insurance so that they can maybe stop being just about the most unhealthy place in America, but they’re still going to be paying too much for it for a while because no one wants to insure diabetics who have black lung.
If I sound angry, it’s because I don’t appreciate the hypocrisy and racism I see every time someone goes into these communities and asks the people what they think about politics. If these folks had their act together, they’d be at the forefront of making their state’s biggest employer, Wal-Mart, pay a living wage. They’d be clamoring for more choices on the health care exchanges and blasting away at the party that wants to slash food stamps and cut off unemployment insurance.
And they better figure out that coal isn’t the future and stop bitching about it. The jobs were always dangerous and never offered good pay, so get on with figuring out to make a living that doesn’t turn the oceans into a roiling vat of acid.
The bottom line going forward is that if the singular thing which people choose to use with which to identify their politics is their racism, and they insist on clinging to it like some kind of sacred chalice, then they deserve the rapidly diminishing return they get on that.
I have almost no sympathy for those people fighting this fight against the coming wave of cultural change that the demographics portend.
If they want to cut off their own testicles just to spite the black guy that’s trying to help them, then screw them. You can say that they simply are ignorant, and if they were better informed then they would think differently. I don’t believe that. They are getting exactly what they deserve from their bigoted ignorance.
They don’t even attempt the smallest effort to hide their racism.
It’s not just racism against blacks. A huge portion of Appalachians are descendants of Scots-Irish emigrants, who suffer from “defeated-peoples” syndrome that still echoes through the generations. The symptoms include a distrust of outsiders, even those offering help; passivity when collective action could accomplish something (no expectation that government or the law can help, so it’s not worth the effort to try); and a sense of bad luck’s inevitability (“This has always happened to us — we always get screwed”).
Appalachians are not the only ones afflicted by this. Native Americans, Poles, Mestizos, the Roma, and Tamils suffer from it, too.
This was the attitude of Sicilian immigrants also.
I’ll say it again…..
CLINGING TO THEIR WHITENESS
” . . . so get on with figuring out to make a living that doesn’t turn the oceans into a roiling vat of acid.”
Sure, or cling to your guns and racism for another generation or two.
“doesn’t turn the oceans into a roiling vat of acid.” or their local creeks and streams … same as in coal country in my state of Ky.
On the bright side, at least it’s not part of Virginia.
But VA is going more and more D as N VA becomes more and more like NYC or Ohio. If WV was becoming VA, we would see a state going from red to blue. WV is going the other way. There are no economic anchors holding WV to the Democrats. VA, on the other hand, is more and more Washington-centric in the N VA part. They want a strong, aggressive, active Washington/Federal government.
“There are no economic anchors holding WV to the Democrats.” Yes there are. As Boo noted, WV is heavily dependent on federal support, as are all rural areas in America. It’s just that they resent it and refuse to acknowledge it.
What makes Bill and Hillary “the right kind of Democrat”?
Anyone else find it interesting that West Virginia, given it’s original history, turns out to be one of the biggest bastions of racism left?
The stubborn racism is really all through the Appalachian region. It’s just that some Appalachian states have regions that fall outside this geography.
My understanding is that WV’s choices in the Civil War, if that’s what you’re referring to, were not out of any charity to slaves; rather they hoped to keep blacks out of WV entirely when all was said and done and many supported deporting freed slaves to africa. At the time, many residents of what became WV feared the competition of free labor.
I find it very interesting that the bastions of Union Democrats in the South before the Civil War are the most racist areas of the South politically today. And the old plantation belts, because of demographics are where black members of Congress in the South come from.
The right-wing Wurlitzer has replaced the influence of unions, such as the United Mine Workers. This phenomenon is not unique to West Virginia, but exists in areas where coal mines used to be a major employer and where the UMW was strong.
There may be some racism, but there are other things going on. This is the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” situation. The economic arguments are supposedly with the Democrats, but these poor white working class voters do not vote Democratic, regardless of their party membership.
If you sit there and say “racism” like people give a shit, the Democratic Party is going to continue to lose state houses. Every state, every single one, is vast stretches of West Virginia with small pockets of Chicago. That means that WI, MI, PA, and CO are the future – states that vote Democratic STATEWIDE but vote Republican on a local level. That is something new.
It’s possible that we can turn that around by aggresively publicizing the economic disadvantage of living in WI over MN for health care. I don’t see that happening yet.
Given the percentages of the Democratic vote in red states, it is incorrect to say that poor white working class voters do not vote Democratic. It’s that not enough of them vote Democratic and not enough of them feel strong enough to admit publicly that they vote Democratic to their neighbors.
What is going to change is that Republican overreach means those vast stretches that last year looked permanently Republican are now in play. And the local overreach in Wisconsin and North Carolina particularly mean that those rural regions in those states are now in play. How much remains to be seen.
But personal experience with Obamacare is going to change some attitudes by November 2014. And a lot of folks will realize how much the Republican Party has lied to them about Obamacare and will wonder what else the Republican Party has lied to them about. And that trend will start showing itself summer 2014.
For one election cycle at best. Assume they vote Dems in power. Assume even that Dems improve things.
The next cycle they will immediately vote for Republicans because they never wanted the Democrats in the first place, they simply had no choice. Now with things improved they can afford to vote what they want, which is someone who will kick the teeth in of all those people they don’t like.
And I don’t see how personal experience with Obamacare is going to change things enough to matter when personal experience with other assistance hasn’t. Republicans lied to people about SS, about Medicare. The individual program is supported but the group that created it, sometimes in the face of kicking and screaming opposition gets no credit.
I think many of the poor white folk vote Democratic, if they vote at all. And therein is the problem.
Personal experience with Obamacare is not very good right now. Give thanks that this is October 2013 not October 2014. And stupidly monitoring Angela Merkel to see if she is a Muslim terrorist doesn’t help the administration either. They haven’t even apologized! Just defended the program! Bureaucratic heads in the sand.
From my reading of the article, people are pissed off with the govt about several things. They see the govt is against them on the usual social issues like school prayer , abortion rights, and gun rights, but the big one is coal. They blame Obama for loss of coal jobs , they blame him for their dependency on govt handouts, since as they see it they wouldn’t need the handouts if coal was supported the way it used to be. Yeah, they’re also racists, but if the black dude in the WH was a black pro-coal republican I think they’d be happier.
It doesn’t matter to them that Obama is right on coal. They don’t believe in global warming anyway, and even if they think it is real, who cares about brown people drowning in Asia or polar bears going extinct? They have more pressing concerns. The Dems have to do a better job supporting these people — job retraining, some pork-barrel spending there, something.
Does job retraining actually have a decent success rate?
Only if there are jobs at the other end.
Automation is making that rarer everyday
CHINA is making that rarer every day. And remember that textiles used to be a huge industry in the South. In September I went to the Van Heusen store. Every shirt was made in Bangladesh. I kept thinking of the little girls burning to death in the ruins of the sweatshop and left.
The true problem is automation. In manufacturing automation is the main factor that has eaten away at that sector. And with every breakthrough in technology it reaches up into higher skilled or white collar workforce effecting more people.
But I’m not convinced technology is the problem. It’s an issue of power, and who has it. We can either be in a neo-feudal world (if we’re not there already) where technology screws everyone’s jobs, or where wealth is distributed with the rise of technology in-spite of it.
The decisions about the importance of the classes are made by power politics, not in some sort of ideal technological/economic process.
This isn’t a West Virginia problem, it’s a cultural problem. And it’s centered in the red states.
These folks have a great capacity for self-rationalization about their dependency that includes an emotional component/need to be able to look down on others. Anybody will do – atheists, urbanites, browns, non-Christians, not the right kind of Christians, etc.
It’s self-loathing transformed into externalized demonification. They know what they are doing is wrong, but the ‘others’ are worse, so they are fully justified.
High divorce rates, out of wedlock babies, low educational attainment, widespread welfare? It’s never as bad as the godlessness of the promiscuous browns in the blue states – conscience spared.
Logic, reason, etc. doesn’t work with folks caught in this emotional trap. The only way to be part of their world is to hate the same ‘others’ and pointing out their hypocrisy is counterproductive.
This is a fascinating but not unexpected article. The situation that it describes exists because the guy who started an ATV repair shop has customers who are paid low wages and on welfare, and he’s having to “make a living for himself”. And note that he’s reporting about other people, not about himself. It’s not a matter of an employer who would like to pay cash so that he could pay a sub-minimum wage, is it? Given this problem of credibility, I would check up on exactly how many West Virginians work in coal for $100,000 a year.
In Appalachian counties, there is a common phenomenon of folks always commenting on the dependency of the neighbors and never reporting their own dependency on assistance. That’s been true ever since the New Deal, which they dearly supported.
For the most part, these are people to cannot envision how to make money when coal leaves as it has been doing for several decades. And what President Obama has concretely done through EPA regulation on greenhouse gases is ensure the conversion of electric generating plants from coal to natural gas. That means declining demand for West Virginia coal.
Were this a time for infrastructure development, a massive project to run several lines of high-speed track through West Virginia would provide construction jobs now and the potential for future economic development. But to do what’s needed, you would have to once again have an Appalachian development program like those of the New Deal and the Kennedy administration. And you would have to get Joe Manchin, not to mention a whole bunch of Republicans, to vote for funds for their own states.
And you would also have to answer the questions, “Why not Detroit or Philadelphia or Chicago or Cleveland or Youngstown or any other rust belt area?” And the blue collar white workers in all of those places have attitudes similar to those in Appalachia. They now know what urban ghettos have experienced since the 1960s, but they can’t muster the courage to ask for help. Or the sort of anger that the labor unions had during the 1930s to demand justice and better conditions.
There is not one West Virginia politician who seems to have the passion and good sense of Robert Byrd or the young Jay Rockefeller in their advocacy for the people of West Virginia, instead of the West Virginia corporations.
There are good people in Appalachia, but they are never the ones that outside media interview; those folks don’t fit the stereotypes. And there are progressives who have done some very hard work for many many years in Appalachia on employment, corporate responsibility, safety, and environment issues. And most of those groups have deep roots in the communities they are working in, some being folks who are working in their own ancestral communities.
Chris Hedges characterizes West Virginia coal country as one of America’s sacrifice zones (another he identifies is Camden NJ) that have similar problems of just being cast out of the economic and political life of the country. I think that is an apt characterization. And the fact that there is an inflow of meager federal aid to these communities creates an anger that (1) folks have no alternatives but aid or have been caught up in despairing dependency and (2) that the aid is insufficient or the wrong kind to help in actually having the dignity of contributing something useful to their communities and society.
The ATV repairman has some of his dignity back after unemployment but has not lost his anger at a fundamentally irrational system. That his anger might increase its irrationality never occurs to him.
All I know is that I could have stayed in my remote northern california timber town and demanded to be allowed to chop down every last tree to save my “job” (which wouldn’t have gone to me, as a woman, anyway, or even if I were a man, because the better timber jobs often go to out of towners who have the training and move around from location to location).
But seeing that to be futile, I moved to a more economically robust area and made my life there. As sad as it is to say, there is no logical reason to believe a natural resource community can continue to provide employment indefinitely, especially when that resource is depleted, or in the case of coal, automated to the point that far fewer people are involved.
This is really the driving force behind the continued urbanization of America and many other countries, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
The issue is that all of the people who have the resources and personal networks to move largely have moved. And the current recession makes the possibility of getting a job even in job-growth centers remote. What could a coal miner do in Silicon Valley? Or Washington DC? Especially one who has been out of work and on government assistance of one kind or another for several years.
People have become trapped in these communities in the same way that people are trapped in urban ghettos. And in both cases, the infrastructure that use to enable them to live through tough time has been stripped away.
The statement above that poor white folk tend to vote Democratic when they do vote is true. Republicans tend to be like the ATV repair shop owner, having had enough resources to develop an alternative and living in the illusion that everyone can do what they did as easily as they did (even though they will poor mouth it as being hard).
I’m on a Dem Committee in a WV county. This piece is utterly right on the mark, and I have no earthly idea how to combat it. The right wing Wurlitzer is very strong here, and is further echoed via many a pulpit every Sunday.
The article’s point that Hillary could win here, despite being in favor of many if not most of the very same policies as Obama, speaks volumes. It is impossible for too many people here to even “see” Obama as the man he actually is. They see him through the lens of right wing media further reinforced by cultural attitudes cemented over the decades.
This is my county: http://www.economist.com/node/21558275
To what extent are exurban Washington DC commuters invading your county and turning it into a bedroom community dependent on the Beltway economy?
The article is about McDowell County, down near Bluefield, and this is no doubt why Karen Tumulty chose this particular county.
There are a lot of reasons why this is true, most having to do with the big-dollar requirements of infrastructure to make the area connected with the national economy. And the lack of political will after 1968 to invest in that instead of wars. Those broken promises are part of this story as well.
Yeah. Maybe we should get another proletariat.