Dear Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

by Joe Bageant

The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream

by John Zogby

In one of his early books, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntingdon wrote: "Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. America is not a lie, it is a disappointment. And it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope."

Barack Obama may or may not justify the hope to which many Americans, and particularly the educated young, are so ardently responding during the presidential campaign. But by most other measures, America and its global audience have yet to emerge from an extended phase of disappointment.

Their disillusionment springs from different sources. For foreigners it has usually been about George W Bush, the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq. For most Americans, almost 80 per cent of whom now believe the "country is on the wrong track", Bush's foreign policy is the easiest part to fix. More central to most American lives is the fear that the economic opportunity older generations took as their birthright is gradually slipping away. Few would recognise the term "median wage stagnation". But most are familiar with its attributes: rising healthcare premiums, wages that fail to keep up with inflation and the sense that, for the first time, the next generation may not be better off than this one.

John F Kennedy said that a rising tide lifted all boats. That may no longer be the case. Most Americans are worse off now than they were in 2001 at the start of the last stage of economic expansion. And the median, as opposed to average, household income is only marginally higher than it was a generation ago. Is the American Dream fading?

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the mini-classic Nickel and Dimed (2001), has brought out a collection of her most biting journalism and certainly thinks so. In language only she could deploy, Ehrenreich explains why the debate about whether the US is heading into recession is irrelevant to the large swathes of America that for years have endured flat or declining incomes.

For people living in the "real economy" as opposed to those who measure success by macroeconomic numbers, recession has never been far away. "With all this talk of how to stimulate it, you'd think that the economy is a giant sex organ," she writes. "If we have learnt anything in the last few years it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being . . . If there is a real economy, then what in hell is the economy?" To pose the question differently, who nowadays best symbolises the American economy?

"Henry Ford realised that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords," she writes. "Wal-Mart, on the other hand, never figured out that its cruelly low wages would eventually curtail its own growth, even at the company's famously discounted prices."

While bitterly funny in places, much of Ehrenreich's writing sends you scurrying for the proverbial Prozac: "Maybe you grew up believing America meant bacon cheeseburgers, Martin Luther King, rock and roll, and Saturday afternoon softball," she writes. "But - as you've probably noticed - the operative images in today's world are Guantánamo, food pantries, and a dollar that can barely hold its own against the peso."

Yet to judge by much of blue-collar Sam's Club America (named after Wal-Mart's discount cards), there are other, more distracting, things to worry about. Meet the folk of Winchester, a small town in Virginia that used to have a textile mill and a middle class who once proclaimed, "We may be poor but we ain't coloureds."

People are nostalgic for those days, says Joe Bageant, a son of Winchester who left to become a journalist in California and elsewhere. In Deer Hunting With Jesus, he returns home to see what has changed.

Bageant finds it hard to love his roots even as he sympathises with those he once left behind. These Nascar-loving, $8-an-hour- earning, strip-bar-frequenting, Dollar-store-shoppers may be his, mostly Scots-Irish, stock. But they also voted overwhelmingly for Bush.

These are people, says Bageant, who "cannot, and do not care to, find Iraq or France on a map - assuming they even own an atlas . . . Here, nearly everyone over the age of 50 has serious health problems, credit ratings rarely top 500, and alcohol, Jesus, and overeating are the three preferred avenues of escape."

Still, Winchester always has the nearby town of Romney to look down upon - an economic wasteland just across the state lines in West Virginia. In Romney, things have got so bad, says Bageant, that people brand women snobs "for being too good to have a boyfriend in jail". Winchester's new jobs might be non-union and come without health benefits but its workers have the comfort of knowing their roots and the thrill of hunting at weekends.

Deer Hunting With Jesus is sometimes funny. But mostly, like Ehrenreich's journalism, it leaves you feeling depressed - and a little wary of caricature, although for Bageant such caricatures are obviously personal. "By the time my people hit 60, we look like a bunch of hyper-sensitive red toads in a phlegm-coughing contest," he writes.

Written for the other America, which drives Priuses, lives in cities, holds passports and is still in shock about Bush's re-election in 2004, Bageant's book is also intended to provoke. "What, liberals wondered [on the day of Bush's re-election], happened out there in the heartland, the iconographic one they'd seen on television, the one bright with church spires, grange halls, stock-car races, and community heritage festivals?"

The answer is popularised by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005) and echoed by Bageant and Ehrenreich: Republicans are good at seducing the working classes into voting against their economic interests. They simply whip up a plebiscite on abortion or gay marriage.

In the now notorious phrase Barack Obama used on the stump this April, blue- collar Americans displace their economic bitterness by clinging to "guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them". Such thinking offers a seductive path through America's complex electoral morass. But it fits the facts only partially.

With the exception of Bageant's south, where desegregation led the white working classes in the Republican column, most blue collar workers vote Democrat. And most wealthy Americans vote Republican. Some of them even drive hybrids. In 2004, almost two-thirds of those earning more than $200,000 a year voted for Bush - while a similar proportion of those earning $30,000 a year or less chose John Kerry.

Yet divisions over race, religious values, geography and age do help to explain why such a large minority of voters apparently abjure their economic interests in the polling booth. As Bageant points out, most Christian fundamentalists come from places such as Winchester.

"They are whiter than Aunt Nelly's napkin and, for the most part, they are working class and have only high school educations," he writes.

Neither author offers an elevated estimate of the IQs of working class Republicans. "How the married gays will go about wrecking heterosexual marriages is not entirely clear," writes Ehrenreich. "By moving in next door, inviting themselves over, and doing a devastating critique of the interior decorating?"

If it seems as if the American Dream is entering its death rattle by the time you have finished these two books, then the noted pollster John Zogby does his best to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

But his book The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream sometimes wanders into a dreamland of its own. If the other two require Prozac, Zogby hands out Ecstasy.

"To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower, we are a great nation because we are a good people," Zogby writes. "In three decades of polling, I've found that while individuals make mistakes in judgment, America as a whole rarely does. A collective wisdom emerges from a poll or a vote that is greater than the sum of its parts. That indeed is one thing I know for sure."

Zogby concedes that his profession may in part be "glorified meteorologist". But he also likens pollsters to "priests or philosophers trying to make sense out of the always confusing human condition". This is helpful since his conclusions often require a leap of faith.

Zogby's core thesis is that America's future is bright because those aged 18-30 subscribe to more progressive and cosmopolitan values than their elders. The young are far less racist, sexist and ignorant than those over 60. And they are more idealistic. For example, they express more willingness than older generations to pay higher prices for energy to curb US carbon emissions.

Similarly, a larger slice of Americans in their 20s say they would like to live abroad for a year or so. The "First Globals", as Zogby dubs the 18-30 bracket, are also far likelier than Woodstockers or Privates [the oldest two of Zogby's four generations] to define their lives "in terms unrelated to their primary source of income".

All of which, and many similar examples, ring true. But then most such responses would surely also have been true of the Woodstockers in their day. It's one thing to say that America's youth responds more idealistically than its elders to pollsters' questions. But to conclude, as Zogby does, that there is a "youth movement" that is building a New American Dream is another.

Are twentysomethings, as Zogby predicts, moving America into a "new age of inclusion and authenticity"? Maybe so. But we can be sure that most of the young will gradually be swamped by their careers, some increasingly remunerative and others - pace Ehrenreich and Bageant - grindingly stagnant.

Unless and until policymakers can re- establish the economic and social mobility that once set America apart from others, the future of the American Dream will remain in doubt. None of the authors offers a convincing roadmap of how to restore it. But Ehrenreich and Bageant at least grasp the under-lying problem.

Zogby concludes: "My hunch is that these young Globals will be the first generation since the GIs of the second world war to give freely of themselves to make the world a better place." It is a noble thought - although, in the absence of a Nazi declaration of war, quite a tricky one to fulfil.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/557ce61c-602d-11dd-805e-000077b07658.html