Now, I’ve met a lot of open-minded, big-hearted men and women who live and work in poor, rural communities. It’s hard to fault them for wanting to shake things up politically after so many years of disappointment. But anger and resentment do run deep. As Appalachian natives such as author J. D. Vance have pointed out, a culture of grievance, victimhood, and scapegoating has taken root as traditional values of self-reliance and hard work have withered. There’s a tendency toward seeing every problem as someone else’s fault, whether it’s Obama, liberal elites in the big cities, undocumented immigrants taking jobs, minorities soaking up government assistance—or me. It’s no accident that this list sounds exactly like Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
But just because a situation can be exploited for political gain doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. The pain—and panic—that many blue-collar whites feel is real. The old world they talk wistfully about, when men were men and jobs were jobs, really is gone.
Don’t underestimate the role of gender in this. In an economy where most women don’t have any choice but to work and few men earn enough to support a family on their own, traditional gender roles get redefined. Under the right circumstances, that can be liberating for women, good for kids, and even good for men, who now have a partner in shouldering the economic burden. But if the changes are caused by the inability of men to make a decent living when they want to work and can’t find a job, the toll on their sense of self-worth can be devastating.
It all adds up to a complex dynamic. There’s both too much change and not enough change, all at the same time.
When people feel left out, left behind, and left without options, the deep void will be filled by anger and resentment or depression and despair about those who supposedly took away their livelihoods or cut in line.
Trump brilliantly tapped into all these feelings, especially with his slogan: Make America Great Again. Along with that were two other powerful messages: “What have you got to lose?” and “She’s been there for thirty years and never did anything.” What he meant was: “You can have the old America back once I vanquish the immigrants, especially Mexicans and Muslims, send the Chinese products back, repeal Obamacare, demolish political correctness, ignore inconvenient facts, and pillory Hillary along with all the other liberal elites. I hate all the same people you do, and, unlike the other Republicans, I’ll do something to make your life better.”
When my husband was a little boy, his uncle Buddy in Hope, Arkansas, liked to say: “Anybody who tries to make you mad and stop you from thinking is not your friend. There’s a lot to be said for thinking.” Like so much wisdom I’ve heard in my life, it’s easier to say than to live by. The far easier choice is to play the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey blame game—which is what has happened to Democrats in too many places.
One of the most important but least recognized facts in American politics is that Republicans tend to win in places where more people are pessimistic or uncertain about the future, while Democrats tend to win where people are more optimistic. Those sentiments don’t track neatly with the overhyped dichotomy between the coasts and the heartland. There are plenty of thriving communities in both blue and red states that have figured out how to educate their workforces, harness their talents, and participate in the twenty-first-century economy. And some of the most doom-and-gloom Americans are relatively affluent middle-aged and retired whites—the very viewers Fox News prizes—while many poor immigrants, people of color, and young people are burning with energy, ambition, and optimism.
As an example, in 2016 I got whacked in Arkansas as a whole, but I won Pulaski County, home of Little Rock, the state’s vibrant capital city, by 18 points. I lost Pennsylvania, but I won Pittsburgh with 75 percent of the vote. Trump may think of that city as an emblem of the industrial past—he contrasted it with Paris when he pulled out of the global climate agreement in 2017—but the reality is that Pittsburgh has reinvented itself as a hub of clean energy, education, and biomedical research. As I saw when I campaigned there many times, people in Pittsburgh are determined and optimistic about the future.
So I can’t say what was in the hearts and minds of those men and women standing in the rain in Williamson chanting “Go home Hillary!” Did they despise me because they’d heard on Fox that I wanted to put coal miners out of business? Did some think I turned my back on them after they’d voted for me in the Democratic primary in 2008? Did they turn against me because I served as Obama’s Secretary of State and believed climate change was a real threat to our future? Or did their rage flow from deeper tribal politics? All I knew for certain was they were angry, they were loud, and they hated my guts. I gave them a big smile, waved, and went inside.
Dr. Dino Beckett, the director of the Williamson Health and Wellness Center, was waiting for me, along with about a dozen locals and Senator Joe Manchin. They were eager to tell me about how they were working to turn around their struggling community. They had started an incubator to help local entrepreneurs get new small businesses off the ground. The county was trying to turn abandoned mining properties into industrial parks that could attract new employers. They knew they needed better housing infrastructure, so they put people to work refurbishing homes and businesses. They realized that many of their neighbors were struggling with opiate addiction and other chronic health issues such as diabetes, so they opened a nonprofit health clinic. A recovering drug addict who had become a counselor told me how meaningful the work was, even if stemming the epidemic of substance abuse was a Sisyphean endeavor.
To make sure I heard a cross section of perspectives, Dr. Beckett had invited a laid-off coal worker he knew from their children’s school soccer team, Bo Copley, along with his wife, Lauren. Bo was a Republican and a fervent Pentecostal, with a T-shirt that said “#JesusIsBetter.” He lost his job as a maintenance planner at a local mining operation the year before. Now the family was getting by on what Lauren could earn through her small business as a photographer. When it was Bo’s turn to speak, his voice was heavy with emotion.
“Let me say my apologies for what we’ve heard outside,” Bo began, with the chants of the protesters still audible. “The reason you hear those people out there saying some of the things that they say is because when you make comments like ‘We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs,’ these are the kind of people that you’re affecting.”
He passed me a picture of his three little children, a son and two daughters. “I want my family to know that they have a future here in this state, because this is a great state,” he said. “I’ve lived my entire life here. West Virginians are proud people. We take pride in our faith in God. We take pride in our family. And we take pride in our jobs. We take pride in the fact that we’re hard workers.”
Then he got to the heart of the matter. “I just—I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend, because those people out there don’t see you as a friend.”
“I know that, Bo,” I replied. “And I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant.” I badly wanted him to understand. I didn’t have a prayer of convincing the crowd outside, but maybe I could make him see that I wasn’t the heartless caricature I had been made out to be. I said how sorry I was and that I understood why people were angry.