A Must Read

With the Democrats suffering yet more losses in rural America last November, including the Mississippi House and the Virginia Senate, I recently read Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

The book takes place in Bageant’s hometown of Winchester, VA at the northern end of the Shenandoah’s and is an earthy and telling tome about how the party of Roosevelt and Truman has lost the support of white working-class voters.

Bageant (who died in fall 2011), takes us inside the Rubbermaid factory where workers toil away making plastic dishpans and trash barrels amid monotony and noise. To get through the day, they wear headphones and through them listen to the angry rants of Rush Limbaugh and other right wing talk jocks that slam all government programs as evil and wasteful. Then on election days, they go out and vote Republican, helping to elect people who then whittle away at their health care, Black Lung benefits and OSHA regs that are there to prevent injuries in the workplace.

There is some of Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter with Kansas thesis in Bageant’s view from Winchester. His friends tell him that too many Democrats are elitists who look down on people who drink beer from a can or grab a shotgun off their living room wall to go out into the woods and put meat on the table.