I have grown up around and lived around both middle class and poor. I have been both. And I know some rural Southerners who skew hard right or try to find a centrist path forward. When you describe the “I am not poor like THOSE people” that is a little pastime some so called Christian and hard working people engage in called “projection.” They have a social script at church, school, work, etc and they cannot imagine putting themselves in certain others shoes, even when they might be one calamity or bad decision away from losing everything. And people “raised right” make bad decisions all the time- they just might not be as frequent and not without a social or familial safety net- a place to live if they can’t afford rent, someone to help get them help if they get in trouble with the law or have an addiction issue. People forget many others do NOT have family to help, rescue, or any government help. Not because of pride but lack of access, laws making it harder to qualify for help, etc. Everyone wants to believe they are somehow better, but refuse to look inward, to see the help they received in life and that all of us can be affected negatively by a catastrophe, an illness, a family tragedy, etc. I look at my cousin who is still addicted to opioids, and I think- that could have been me in the right circumstances. We are so quick to judge instead of empathize, because empathizing is hard and writing people off is easy. And we don’t have to look at ourselves or our own decisions and circumstances. I do not understand the person who does not see how having access to affordable or free healthcare for everyone would be a game changer for many in the US- why does someone have to go broke buying insulin or a device for Type 1 or 2 diabetes, or they are allotted only “ so much oxygen” for a respiratory issue or the drugs that keep someone alive are suddenly outrageous in cost? Why does capitalism have some moral
I have written elsewhere that the poor cannot handle any more societal shame heaped upon them. So shaming them to change their environmental impact behaviour will drive them further into the hands of populists.
This is different but the same. I have an aunt who is a mother of 2 women who are now moms themselves. She has no brothers and no sons. She has been married and divorced a couple of times and lives with her boyfriend now.
I also have a daughter. When my daughter was a teenager, the 2016 presidential race was on and my daughter looked at my aunt’s FB page only to find a screed about the unsuitability of women for the Presidency. She was not just against Hillary; she had bought hook-line-and-sinker the old screed that hormones make women hysterical and unreliable, and that the mere timber of their voices was intolerable in a person of authority. She is not even religious! I bet you can guess who turned into a hardcore trumpster, and remains one to this day.
Imagine being a woman, with 2 sisters and 2 daughters and coming out publicly as a misogynist! She aspires to the permanent subjugation of her own kind and is not embarrassed to say so.
She's right, of course. Just think about all those hormonal female world leaders who have gotten us into all these wars ... oh wait! That was MEN!
I have no patience at all for women who hate women. The right thing to say to them is, "Since you're a woman who thinks women aren't capable of doing anything much, why on earth are you even talking right now? Shouldn't you be in the kitchen making some dinner?"
Small differences in circumstances/behavior often provoke the greatest rage. i think about all the bloody doctrinal wars between Catholics and Protestants, for example. I absolutely get the resentment. Part of the problem are the various cliffs where if you earn above a certain cutoff you lose benefits. It should never be a cliff but a slope as earning more money should never be a penalty.
Those cliffs are what kept my single-mom friend at the restaurant in chains until she remarried. Each time she was close to doing better, SOMETHING would always happen, and she didn't have any resources to deal with it. She'd have to move back in with her parents and get back on welfare. It's a terrible system. Very few people actually prefer to draw welfare and do nothing. And those few are people no system is going to reform. Yet we base our system on those folks, not on people of good will who require some help. We could design a system to help people establish themselves before we withdraw all support and it would benefit everyone, but there's no political will to do so.
And you're right about small differences sometimes enraging people more than large differences. People are strange!
Getting into the weeds has been tonic. Thank you for leading us in. Backing out just slightly, and riffing off my own terrible suspicions while clutching this piece as a much-needed more in the emerging conversation among so many cultural (?) gradients (what’s the matter with Kansas? and I’m from rural Kansas, and Nebraska, and Missouri, and Texas) defining the lack of understanding you track like a really good hound (thank you, again! I don’t mind working like a dog…) two quick anecdotes.
First, caucusing in Texas in 2008. I was in a big room with a lot of other people, and it was clear to everybody who was who. There were the chicly-dressed and well-coifed huddled in a corner chatting with the Clinton operatives (who all had accents betraying northeastern origins), and there was the rest of us being treated by the Clinton operatives as though we none of us could possibly know what we were doing.
Second, skip to 2016. A gas pump conversation on Election Day with three young guys. They weren’t going to vote. I was trying to get them to vote (they had registered, they told me). The conversation revolved around Clinton having holed up on Long Island in August when she needed rest and how “he’s going to win, so what’s the point, my vote doesn’t matter.”
I don’t have anything against New York (I confess I might have something against Comey) or Clinton, but I wish she would have chosen to rest up in Arkansas. Those optics matter. Roots matter. Those three guys were right. I knew in August how it was going to go. That a relative few in higher-population areas see that and feel frustrated by how the Electoral College process has become a way to take the piss out of anyone who might reference us as “flyover states” no matter what the cost is, along with what you’ve got ahold of, at the knotty heart of a twisted, ugly truth about how being human plays out in USAmerican politics.
I still think we need a national program set up like foreign exchange students, but of rich and poor and urban and rural and red and blue adult "exchange students." Open some eyes, pop some bubbles!
Except we don’t have to be misers when it comes to the safety net. We just need tax billionaires back to the 1950s, which is where they want to go anyway. If everyone’s basic needs were met there would be no cause for resentment.
The best part about conservatives insistence that it's too expensive, who's going to pay for it, etc is that to takr that perspective is to start from the premise that the United States lacks a sufficiently broad wealth base and will be economically destabilized by the attempt.
So... they're arguing that the US is not, in fact, the richest country in the world. It would have to he a poor country to have such an explosively brittle economy.
Instead, we get... aircraft carriers. And none of the right-wing breathes a peep about who's going to pay for it; most of them come from hobo states whose economies would collapse without defense contracts, aka corporate welfare.
It’s not the main way people vote against their interests. They vote for monopolies. They vote for corruption. They vote for higher taxes paying police who do very little to keep crime low but who take money that could be used to improve their lives. They vote for billionaires to control things more stringently. They vote against environmental regulations that would protect their health. They vote against protection of their own labor rights. They vote against healthcare that would help them.
(Often they approve of these things but do not vote for them. E.g., some who approve of higher taxes for the rich and environmental protections will vote for the candidate who will do the opposite.)
My guess is the main reason they do this is propaganda and various kinds of emotional manipulation. E.g., the kind of thing you describe—that they’re being cheated by some other person, who is kept vague but racialized. The Welfare Cheat is Black. They are told outlandish stories about migrants coming to the USA and being showered with money for life, including new iPhones, etc.
Generally, they are told someone is cheating them—which is a way of creating suspicion of others so that politicians can fleece you. It’s a common technique of con artists to pretend they are saving you from a thief so they can rob you.
US citizens didn’t used to vote this way. American voters used to demand high taxes for the rich, and protection from the government against corporations, quality public education and many other benefits.
But the public has also seen a lot of shenanigans in the last 75 years, and isn’t quite sure where to turn. They generally turn to the person who promises to keep money in their pocket since most of them have lost any broader hopes. Whomever promises to slightly increase their economic standing plus most effectively marshalls suspicion against some ‘other’ will generally get enough voters, particularly white voters if the ‘others’ are not white.
That's a pretty comprehensive takedown of a lot of tropes, some outdated and some current, all understandable and some baseless. We get trapped by our ideals. And we are not abstract rational actors as the economists simplify us. There is a deep-seated, and useful, repugnance for free-riding, getting something for nothing, a subset of envy.
But, insofar as it relates to necessities of life, that tendency elides the question of why it is that matters are so arranged that only a favored few are entitled to a level of subsistence?
P
I assert that Jacob Riis had it right in The Protestant Work Ethic. Worldly success is a sign of devine grace and membership in the elect who will ascend to sit forever at the throne of God and failure is a sure sign of moral failure. Anything that interferes with the operation of that view is intrinsically wrong.
It asked to be asked in whose interest this worldview works.
It's the capitalism 🤷♀️ Capitalism is inherently fascist. It predominantly harms POC, women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, poor white people, and children. It predominantly benefits wealthy, white men. You know, the conservatives and neoliberals.
In California, you actually can’t get food stamps without having a job. And the amount that is typically awarded for food isn’t all that much. If you buy too many treats, you’ll go through your monthly allotment very quickly. Better to buy basic staples only at Food for Less, etc. Public housing is awful here, even though a ton of new housing is being built. And Obamaphones are $30 phones with terrible reception and data limits. I’m just saying that the state isn’t handing out new iPhones with unlimited data. When it comes to Medicaid, many doctors won’t accept it; you’re stuck at a clinic with awful doctors. You don’t want to get sick and need a specialist because you’ll be waiting months for your appointment. I’m just saying that being on public assistance isn’t a paradise, at least not in the city. It’s not easy to get the assistance either. It necessitates proof of work, income, and in-person interviews…. Newsom funded a free lunch program for everyone, but the food is terrible…
Stephanie Land (Maid) has a Substack and often describes the incredibly time-intensive trouble it takes to get just a little bit of help. It’s not a picnic to be any version of poor — neither assistance nor minimum-wage jobs gives you much to work with.
Because we live in a society that worships the rich and its inescapable. That's what success is defined as in every societal measure, every media outlet, every movie, every everything. If you are not able to practice hours of zen meditation a day and work your way up to radical self acceptance with all that leisure time (from being rich), of course you are going to never want to align yourself with the have nots. You want to, need to, think you are better a.k.a. capable of being rich. Otherwise you are admitting you have no free will and your destiny is sealed.
Yes and yes, again. But how do humans keep from comparing and judging? Some are skinny with need, others fat from stupidity or greed. Humanity runs the gamut just like your characters in Trailer Park..
You know how much I love to hear a reference to my book! Yes, there were some good and some bad in there. The one I despise most was Nathan, but I've heard people disagree as to who was the worst.
I know every one of these people in central Wisconsin! It’s saddening and enraging. I’m working in politics here to make a sliver of a change (at least for the next generation?), but I also want to throw my hands up sometimes and retreat to the city. I understand *why* people feel the way they do and sympathize with the way they’re being used and manipulated by politicians seeking power, but I don’t always have the constitution for this fight.
These people are everywhere. (You’ll find one of them in my book, The Trailer Park Rules! Angel is a classic version.) Understanding them does not mean being able to change or enlighten them.
Jun 27·edited Jun 27Liked by Untrickled by Michelle Teheux
I really enjoyed this piece. I just discovered your page. I too write here on SS--my work is quite a bit darker, edgier(?). I hate that word. There is much to unpack here as I have been asking myself this same questions since my political science degree at UCLA. I'm not sure I want to throw my hat in the ring here as my bandwidth is pretty low at the moment. There is an issue here that no one ever wants to address. While, it doesn't tackle the larger underlying socio-economic problems we face--and are getting worse. It is something that baffles me. Maybe when I'm not so exhausted, I'll get my dog in this fight--I definitely have one. Again, I'm enjoying your work.
You should check out my stuff. I write about all this stuff in a much angrier, albeit, funny way. Be warned. It's not for the faint of heart. I always implicate myself in the disaster that is America. I'm always happy to talk about my struggles--they are legion. FTR, I no longer call myself a "liberal" because the word's become pejorative and aligned with many things I simply can't and won't get on board with. Thank you for reaching out.
This is an excellent analysis- thank you for addressing a question I have never been able to figure out. Gives me some things to think about. And - I just bought your book. 📕
I have grown up around and lived around both middle class and poor. I have been both. And I know some rural Southerners who skew hard right or try to find a centrist path forward. When you describe the “I am not poor like THOSE people” that is a little pastime some so called Christian and hard working people engage in called “projection.” They have a social script at church, school, work, etc and they cannot imagine putting themselves in certain others shoes, even when they might be one calamity or bad decision away from losing everything. And people “raised right” make bad decisions all the time- they just might not be as frequent and not without a social or familial safety net- a place to live if they can’t afford rent, someone to help get them help if they get in trouble with the law or have an addiction issue. People forget many others do NOT have family to help, rescue, or any government help. Not because of pride but lack of access, laws making it harder to qualify for help, etc. Everyone wants to believe they are somehow better, but refuse to look inward, to see the help they received in life and that all of us can be affected negatively by a catastrophe, an illness, a family tragedy, etc. I look at my cousin who is still addicted to opioids, and I think- that could have been me in the right circumstances. We are so quick to judge instead of empathize, because empathizing is hard and writing people off is easy. And we don’t have to look at ourselves or our own decisions and circumstances. I do not understand the person who does not see how having access to affordable or free healthcare for everyone would be a game changer for many in the US- why does someone have to go broke buying insulin or a device for Type 1 or 2 diabetes, or they are allotted only “ so much oxygen” for a respiratory issue or the drugs that keep someone alive are suddenly outrageous in cost? Why does capitalism have some moral
Imperative over a human being’s health?
I have written elsewhere that the poor cannot handle any more societal shame heaped upon them. So shaming them to change their environmental impact behaviour will drive them further into the hands of populists.
Still, difficult not to despair
Despair is the appropriate feeling, I think.
This is different but the same. I have an aunt who is a mother of 2 women who are now moms themselves. She has no brothers and no sons. She has been married and divorced a couple of times and lives with her boyfriend now.
I also have a daughter. When my daughter was a teenager, the 2016 presidential race was on and my daughter looked at my aunt’s FB page only to find a screed about the unsuitability of women for the Presidency. She was not just against Hillary; she had bought hook-line-and-sinker the old screed that hormones make women hysterical and unreliable, and that the mere timber of their voices was intolerable in a person of authority. She is not even religious! I bet you can guess who turned into a hardcore trumpster, and remains one to this day.
Imagine being a woman, with 2 sisters and 2 daughters and coming out publicly as a misogynist! She aspires to the permanent subjugation of her own kind and is not embarrassed to say so.
I was done with her a long time ago.
She's right, of course. Just think about all those hormonal female world leaders who have gotten us into all these wars ... oh wait! That was MEN!
I have no patience at all for women who hate women. The right thing to say to them is, "Since you're a woman who thinks women aren't capable of doing anything much, why on earth are you even talking right now? Shouldn't you be in the kitchen making some dinner?"
That's why misogyny in women is called internalized self-hate. Sounds like she was drowning in it.
Small differences in circumstances/behavior often provoke the greatest rage. i think about all the bloody doctrinal wars between Catholics and Protestants, for example. I absolutely get the resentment. Part of the problem are the various cliffs where if you earn above a certain cutoff you lose benefits. It should never be a cliff but a slope as earning more money should never be a penalty.
Those cliffs are what kept my single-mom friend at the restaurant in chains until she remarried. Each time she was close to doing better, SOMETHING would always happen, and she didn't have any resources to deal with it. She'd have to move back in with her parents and get back on welfare. It's a terrible system. Very few people actually prefer to draw welfare and do nothing. And those few are people no system is going to reform. Yet we base our system on those folks, not on people of good will who require some help. We could design a system to help people establish themselves before we withdraw all support and it would benefit everyone, but there's no political will to do so.
And you're right about small differences sometimes enraging people more than large differences. People are strange!
Getting into the weeds has been tonic. Thank you for leading us in. Backing out just slightly, and riffing off my own terrible suspicions while clutching this piece as a much-needed more in the emerging conversation among so many cultural (?) gradients (what’s the matter with Kansas? and I’m from rural Kansas, and Nebraska, and Missouri, and Texas) defining the lack of understanding you track like a really good hound (thank you, again! I don’t mind working like a dog…) two quick anecdotes.
First, caucusing in Texas in 2008. I was in a big room with a lot of other people, and it was clear to everybody who was who. There were the chicly-dressed and well-coifed huddled in a corner chatting with the Clinton operatives (who all had accents betraying northeastern origins), and there was the rest of us being treated by the Clinton operatives as though we none of us could possibly know what we were doing.
Second, skip to 2016. A gas pump conversation on Election Day with three young guys. They weren’t going to vote. I was trying to get them to vote (they had registered, they told me). The conversation revolved around Clinton having holed up on Long Island in August when she needed rest and how “he’s going to win, so what’s the point, my vote doesn’t matter.”
I don’t have anything against New York (I confess I might have something against Comey) or Clinton, but I wish she would have chosen to rest up in Arkansas. Those optics matter. Roots matter. Those three guys were right. I knew in August how it was going to go. That a relative few in higher-population areas see that and feel frustrated by how the Electoral College process has become a way to take the piss out of anyone who might reference us as “flyover states” no matter what the cost is, along with what you’ve got ahold of, at the knotty heart of a twisted, ugly truth about how being human plays out in USAmerican politics.
I still think we need a national program set up like foreign exchange students, but of rich and poor and urban and rural and red and blue adult "exchange students." Open some eyes, pop some bubbles!
Yes. East-West vs Central and North vs South plus religious cultures contribute to the complexities today.
Except we don’t have to be misers when it comes to the safety net. We just need tax billionaires back to the 1950s, which is where they want to go anyway. If everyone’s basic needs were met there would be no cause for resentment.
OK, there is definitely a full post in that one phrase -- the 1950s WERE better in one particular way: The rich paid their taxes!
And they paid A LOT of taxes then too
Absolutely true! They still did just fine, though.
The best part about conservatives insistence that it's too expensive, who's going to pay for it, etc is that to takr that perspective is to start from the premise that the United States lacks a sufficiently broad wealth base and will be economically destabilized by the attempt.
So... they're arguing that the US is not, in fact, the richest country in the world. It would have to he a poor country to have such an explosively brittle economy.
Instead, we get... aircraft carriers. And none of the right-wing breathes a peep about who's going to pay for it; most of them come from hobo states whose economies would collapse without defense contracts, aka corporate welfare.
Gigantic, bloated contracts with bad actor companies like, say, Boeing.
Voting against welfare barely happens now.
It’s not the main way people vote against their interests. They vote for monopolies. They vote for corruption. They vote for higher taxes paying police who do very little to keep crime low but who take money that could be used to improve their lives. They vote for billionaires to control things more stringently. They vote against environmental regulations that would protect their health. They vote against protection of their own labor rights. They vote against healthcare that would help them.
(Often they approve of these things but do not vote for them. E.g., some who approve of higher taxes for the rich and environmental protections will vote for the candidate who will do the opposite.)
My guess is the main reason they do this is propaganda and various kinds of emotional manipulation. E.g., the kind of thing you describe—that they’re being cheated by some other person, who is kept vague but racialized. The Welfare Cheat is Black. They are told outlandish stories about migrants coming to the USA and being showered with money for life, including new iPhones, etc.
Generally, they are told someone is cheating them—which is a way of creating suspicion of others so that politicians can fleece you. It’s a common technique of con artists to pretend they are saving you from a thief so they can rob you.
US citizens didn’t used to vote this way. American voters used to demand high taxes for the rich, and protection from the government against corporations, quality public education and many other benefits.
But the public has also seen a lot of shenanigans in the last 75 years, and isn’t quite sure where to turn. They generally turn to the person who promises to keep money in their pocket since most of them have lost any broader hopes. Whomever promises to slightly increase their economic standing plus most effectively marshalls suspicion against some ‘other’ will generally get enough voters, particularly white voters if the ‘others’ are not white.
I also think things are complicated and people like simple explanations and answers.
People vote against their economic interests because they're voting their emotional interests. That's literally why.
That's a pretty comprehensive takedown of a lot of tropes, some outdated and some current, all understandable and some baseless. We get trapped by our ideals. And we are not abstract rational actors as the economists simplify us. There is a deep-seated, and useful, repugnance for free-riding, getting something for nothing, a subset of envy.
But, insofar as it relates to necessities of life, that tendency elides the question of why it is that matters are so arranged that only a favored few are entitled to a level of subsistence?
P
I assert that Jacob Riis had it right in The Protestant Work Ethic. Worldly success is a sign of devine grace and membership in the elect who will ascend to sit forever at the throne of God and failure is a sure sign of moral failure. Anything that interferes with the operation of that view is intrinsically wrong.
It asked to be asked in whose interest this worldview works.
It's the capitalism 🤷♀️ Capitalism is inherently fascist. It predominantly harms POC, women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, poor white people, and children. It predominantly benefits wealthy, white men. You know, the conservatives and neoliberals.
In California, you actually can’t get food stamps without having a job. And the amount that is typically awarded for food isn’t all that much. If you buy too many treats, you’ll go through your monthly allotment very quickly. Better to buy basic staples only at Food for Less, etc. Public housing is awful here, even though a ton of new housing is being built. And Obamaphones are $30 phones with terrible reception and data limits. I’m just saying that the state isn’t handing out new iPhones with unlimited data. When it comes to Medicaid, many doctors won’t accept it; you’re stuck at a clinic with awful doctors. You don’t want to get sick and need a specialist because you’ll be waiting months for your appointment. I’m just saying that being on public assistance isn’t a paradise, at least not in the city. It’s not easy to get the assistance either. It necessitates proof of work, income, and in-person interviews…. Newsom funded a free lunch program for everyone, but the food is terrible…
Stephanie Land (Maid) has a Substack and often describes the incredibly time-intensive trouble it takes to get just a little bit of help. It’s not a picnic to be any version of poor — neither assistance nor minimum-wage jobs gives you much to work with.
Because we live in a society that worships the rich and its inescapable. That's what success is defined as in every societal measure, every media outlet, every movie, every everything. If you are not able to practice hours of zen meditation a day and work your way up to radical self acceptance with all that leisure time (from being rich), of course you are going to never want to align yourself with the have nots. You want to, need to, think you are better a.k.a. capable of being rich. Otherwise you are admitting you have no free will and your destiny is sealed.
Old tapes, handed down from generations, play in our heads.
Shame is not intrinsic to a newborn, it is imposed from outside.
Work hard or we are worthless.
Thus if we feel worthless it is because we are lazy.
Hard cycle to break.
Especially if we know we work hard.
Then we lose our job.
Check my post on a Rural New Deal.
Yes and yes, again. But how do humans keep from comparing and judging? Some are skinny with need, others fat from stupidity or greed. Humanity runs the gamut just like your characters in Trailer Park..
You know how much I love to hear a reference to my book! Yes, there were some good and some bad in there. The one I despise most was Nathan, but I've heard people disagree as to who was the worst.
Pride is a sin.
Self respect is a blessing.
I know every one of these people in central Wisconsin! It’s saddening and enraging. I’m working in politics here to make a sliver of a change (at least for the next generation?), but I also want to throw my hands up sometimes and retreat to the city. I understand *why* people feel the way they do and sympathize with the way they’re being used and manipulated by politicians seeking power, but I don’t always have the constitution for this fight.
These people are everywhere. (You’ll find one of them in my book, The Trailer Park Rules! Angel is a classic version.) Understanding them does not mean being able to change or enlighten them.
I really enjoyed this piece. I just discovered your page. I too write here on SS--my work is quite a bit darker, edgier(?). I hate that word. There is much to unpack here as I have been asking myself this same questions since my political science degree at UCLA. I'm not sure I want to throw my hat in the ring here as my bandwidth is pretty low at the moment. There is an issue here that no one ever wants to address. While, it doesn't tackle the larger underlying socio-economic problems we face--and are getting worse. It is something that baffles me. Maybe when I'm not so exhausted, I'll get my dog in this fight--I definitely have one. Again, I'm enjoying your work.
Thank you! Look forward to hearing the thoughts of a polysci guy.
You should check out my stuff. I write about all this stuff in a much angrier, albeit, funny way. Be warned. It's not for the faint of heart. I always implicate myself in the disaster that is America. I'm always happy to talk about my struggles--they are legion. FTR, I no longer call myself a "liberal" because the word's become pejorative and aligned with many things I simply can't and won't get on board with. Thank you for reaching out.
This is an excellent analysis- thank you for addressing a question I have never been able to figure out. Gives me some things to think about. And - I just bought your book. 📕
Thank you, Pamela! Comments like yours keep me going.