Anger in Appalachia
May 18, 2016
MICHAEL COOPER, an attorney in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in U.S. News, wrote in March of Trump’s appeal in the area. (As with all my posts on Trump, this is not an endorsement, but a look at his popularity.)
I live in Trump’s America, where working-class whites are dying from despair. They’re dying from alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide, trying to take away the pain of a half century’s economic and cultural decline. In the foothills of Appalachia, Wilkes County, North Carolina, is second in the nation in income lost this century, where the number of manufacturing jobs decreased from 8,548 in the year 2000 to about 4,000 today, according to Stateline.
On the losing side of automation, globalization and the “rural brain drain” our community was powerless to stop furniture factories from closing down or Wal-Mart from coming in. And after decades of decline folks were too beaten down and disorganized to fight back when pharmaceutical companies flooded the area with OxyContin. As a result, Wilkes had the third highest overdose rate in America in 2007 and busted 50 meth labs in 2013. [Overdose rates dropped 69 percent by 2011 after North Carolina responded to the crisis.]
Now, I walk into the courtroom every week and see the faces of childhood friends in a town where 23 percent of the population lives in poverty and 25 percent never finished high school.
So if there are winners and losers in America, I know the losers. They lost jobs to China and Vietnam. And they’re dying younger, caught in an endless cycle of jail, drug charges and applying for disability to pay the child support bill.
They lost their influence, their dignity and their shot at the American Dream, and now they’re angry. They’re angry at Washington and Wall Street, at big corporations and big government. And they’re voting now for Donald Trump.
Mark Jaws writes:
Why does this otherwise sharp author insist Trump will not win the general election. Hillary has always been a pathetically poor candidate, incapable of connecting with the Average Joe or Jane. Conventional wisdom has been wrong before, and it may well be wrong this time.
Laura writes:
I don’t know. He wrote two months ago, but still his prediction was off then.
John writes:
What do these Appalachian people have to complain about? After all, don’t they have they have white privilege?
