Jonathan M. Metzl - Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland

B EFORE D ONALD T RUMP could implement his agendain some cases, before he even took the oath of officereporters and pundits were already tallying the negative implications of his proposals for many Americans. This isnt surprising; changes in government policy inevitably create winners and losers. The twist here was that Trumps plans would hurt the working-class white populations who formed the core of his own base.

Trump Voters Stand to Suffer Most from Obamacare Repeal and a Trade War announced an NBC.com piece soon after the 2016 presidential election, quoting George Washington University economist Michael O.

Moore. I think youre going to get a disproportionate impact on people who supported Donald Trump but maybe dont realize that his policies may end up hurting them instead of helping them, Moore claimed. Salon echoed Moores assessment: Donald Trump is about to victimize his own voters. Meanwhile, a lead editorial in the New York Times announced that Trumpcare Is Already Hurting Trump Country.

Trump didnt bother denying any of it. During an interview on Fox News in March 2017, Tucker Carlson told the president that counties that voted for you, middle-class and working-class counties, would do far less well under the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Yeah. Oh, I know that. Its very preliminary, Trump replied.

As promised, the new administration soon pushed a steady stream of cuts to health care delivery systems, financial regulations, environmental

Of course, voters endorsing politicians whose policies seem likely to hurt them is nothing new. Many Southern and midwestern states boast long histories of leaders who enact laws that disadvantage their own constituents and constituents who nonetheless repeatedly vote for these same politicians. As I show in the following chapters, that dynamic took on particular urgency in the decades leading up to the Trump presidency, when an emerging American conservatism promised to make white America great in ways that directly harmed lower- and middle-income white voters who supported conservative politics and policies in the first place.

This book details a seeming contradiction that I observed with increasing frequency during six years of research across the midwestern and Southern United States. Between 2013 and 2018, I traveled to places like Franklin, Tennessee; Olathe, Kansas; and Cape Girardeau, Missouriin Sarah Palins once controversial words, the real Americaand asked people about urgent and contested political issues facing the American electorate, including health care, guns, taxes, education, and the scope of government. I wanted to learn how people balanced anti-government or pro-gun attitudes while at the same time navigating lives impacted by poor health care, widening gun-related morbidity, and underfunded public infrastructures and institutions.