This article was written by Wilkes Democrats 3rd Vice Chair Michael Cooper, Jr. and was originally printed online at 'National Affairs'. The full article is found HERE.
If there are winners and losers in 21st-century America, I come from the losing side. Hit hard by the Great Recession and by deindustrialization, my hometown of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, has suffered one of the worst declines in the country since the new millennium.
In 2000, when I enrolled as a freshman at Wilkes Central High School, the median income in the county was $47,992 a year. In 2014, when I came home to Wilkes to practice law, the median income was $33,398. In a county with a population of 69,000, there were 4,451 fewer jobs in manufacturing, 46 fewer retail stores, and a net loss of over $60 million in payroll. The face of the losing side of globalization, Wilkes was featured during the 2016 election on PBS NewsHour, Morning Joe, and the cover of the New York Times as a home to Americans "living among the ruins of a lapsed golden age."
But behind all the statistics and concerned news reports were real people, whose savings and way of life had been wiped out. Working-class Americans have been left behind by the brain drain, the Big Sort, the Age of Acceleration, and the Metropolitan Revolution. Worse, disconnected from each other, atomized by the internet, and ignored by the political establishment, they are now dying younger from alcoholism and addiction. The system has failed them.
So white working-class Americans in the Rust Belt and rural America sought revenge against incumbent politicians, the media, government bureaucrats, dynasties, and the ascendant coalition of minorities, single women, and college-educated millennials stealing their place in society. Their economic anxiety and cultural despair caused racial resentment and the return of illiberalism, and Donald Trump was their revenge. He won the presidency by encouraging their anger and channeling their grief into tribalism, scapegoating immigrants and refugees as the cause of complex problems beyond their control: the drug epidemic, lack of mobility, and a culture in decay.
But protectionism, xenophobia, and isolationism will not save the working class from robots and smart phones and self-driving cars. Economies built on manufacturing were destined to suffer when America transitioned to the service sector and high tech, and there were always going to be growing pains. But policymakers and elected officials underestimated the costs, and so did the Americans who experienced them.
It is well past time to address this failure, and it's going to take more than electing someone who channels people's frustrations. Progress will require new thinking and an all-hands-on-deck approach. Working-class Americans need honesty and realistic, concrete plans for the future.
I have had more luck than most, and, while I love my hometown, I don't pretend to know and understand everything that motivates my neighbors. But I do know that, in Wilkes County, in the hollows of West Virginia, in the steel towns, the bonds of community came apart, and we were powerless against the forces of globalization. The time has come to reconnect those bonds, to restore economic and political power to those who feel helpless, and to find paths forward for those who deserve new victories. We can make all of America great again if we start from the bottom up.
DECLINE AND FALL
In the 1980s and '90s, when I was growing up, Wilkes County was the very image of rural America, full of family farms on rolling countryside. Surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, my home of North Wilkesboro began as a railroad town in the 1890s, and by mid-century was full of factories that built a thriving middle class. It was home to the nation's largest mirror factory, and the American Furniture Company employed thousands. North Wilkesboro Hardware, founded by L. S. Lowe in 1921, ultimately became a Fortune 500 company. Apart from Lowe's, the town's claim to fame is being one of the birthplaces of NASCAR.
My family lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood. My mom taught at an elementary school, and my dad worked in the corporate headquarters of Lowe's. He read The Art of the Deal, sold Amway on the side, and dreamed of being rich. My parents were a success story. The first in their families to go to college, they were descended from farmers who settled in the mountains of North Carolina two centuries earlier. They were able to use their savings to open a small used bookstore on Main Street in North Wilkesboro, where flower stores and sandwich shops lined the streets. I grew up in the store reading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and P. J. O'Rourke, and books about the Civil War, daydreaming of life outside of a town that seemed overly peaceful. I graduated high school in the spring of 2004, when the Iraq War was in its infancy. If there were signs of wage stagnation and declining mobility, we didn't notice, as we turned our attention to distant threats of terror.
The collapse happened so slowly that no one noticed the crisis coming. [MORE]
Read the full article at the National Affairs site:
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/redeeming-ourselves
National Affairs is a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, society, culture, and political thought. It aims to help Americans think a little more clearly about our public life, and rise a little more ably to the challenge of self-government.