http://www.nationalreview.com/node/426810/print The Privileged vs. the White Working Class
Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don’t rate in the eyes of our elites.
By Victor Davis Hanson — November 10, 2015
A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such).
That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal), psycho-social maladies leading to increased suicide, and legal and financial problems. In search of root causes, are we to think that the white working class eats less healthy foods than, say, blacks and Hispanics of the same class? Do whites visit the doctor less? Or are they more prone by nature to disease and culturally induced illnesses? The answer seems probably not.
The study’s findings belie conventional wisdom, which has focused almost exclusively on the plight of minorities, who in many areas have proven unable to achieve parity, ostensibly because of endemic and lethal white racism.
Indeed, the authors, Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, found their study rejected by several prestigious medical journals. Again, their conclusions are explosive — given that they raise questions about the conventional wisdom that “white privilege” trumps class considerations and is the key driver of minority despair and the inability to ensure equality of result.
We know whom Deaton and Case are studying by simply watching reality television. An entire genre has arisen of filming in mediis rebus poor, overweight, working-class loggers, truck drivers, fishermen, hunters, trappers, and the underemployed, who seem to win audiences by their now ossified muscular jobs and screw-you autonomy, and who apparently provide vicarious amusement through their anti-metrosexual appearance, their drawls, and their supposedly oafish working-class culture. Pajama Boys and the subjects of Esquire articles, these vanishing Alaskans, Montanans, and Alabamians are not.
When Hollywood seeks its generic villains — terrorists, crime-syndicate members, non-American bogeymen — they are increasingly of three types: working-class racist whites with Southern accents, Russian émigrés, and South African racists. Only that way do directors safely avoid the thought police.
Most commentators on the Deaton–Case article quickly pointed to obvious hypotheses for the disappearance of well-paying muscular jobs and the consequences to the white working class. After a lifetime of residence in the impoverished Central Valley of California, I can offer anecdotal agreement. The vast majority of so-called working-class whites with whom I graduated from high school did not go to college. Yet they started off their working lives in 1971 with good prospects at the nearby trailer-manufacturing plant, the fruit processor, the man-lift factory, and an array of high-paying welding and fabrication jobs. All such employment has now disappeared through globalization. Most of my classmates did not return to school. The ones whom I still keep up with are not enjoying the livelihoods that their parents took for granted. Instead, government and the protocols of government hiring were the new ways to upward mobility in California.
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