I left Garden City early in the morning on Wednesday. This far west in the central time zone (the end of my time there, as I crossed into the mountain zone today), it’s dark until 7:30am, so my 5:45 start meant a couple hours of darkness. Part of the benefit of an early start, usually, is beating traffic. A place like Garden City is an employment hub, so plenty of trucks will be heading towards it during the morning commute. However, my early start was matched by plenty of locals; the 9-to-5 work day has little relevance to many in western Kansas. Whereas I saw many displays of wealth in rural Indiana, though, with sprawling estates topped by gleaming mansions, few homes offer any degree of opulence here. There are nice houses, of course, but the finest structures feel distinctly middle class. People are working very hard here, but I don’t know that many are getting wealthy, at least in this part of the state.
My perspective on this topic has been shaped as much by what I’ve read as what I’ve seen. The central text in that process has been Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. It’s a natural partner text for JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, as both memoirs offer perspectives on growing up in rural America, with each author managing a transition into higher education and the professional class. Vance focuses extensively on the cultural decline that he identifies as plaguing his home; while Smarsh avoids labels, many of the conditions are similar. Smarsh writes that, “Every adult I knew was addicted to something–mostly cigarettes or booze. Also pills, both prescribed and gotten by other means.” Similarly, she describes how “Violence like that is passed down from parent to child just like poverty and so many things,” adding that she was the only female in her family to not have a violent or abusive father.
There are some overarching differences between the texts that also make comparative analysis interesting–that of setting (Appalachia vs. Kansas) and gender (Smarsh, in particular, uses her avoidance of the young motherhood trap as a narrative frame)–but the most striking area of contrast centers on the American Dream. Vance believes in the American Dream. The reductive dismissal of Vance by some on the left as an old-fashioned bootstrapper is unfair, but he certainly believes in the opportunities available to those who exercise personal responsibility and have access to a stable and supportive social network. Smarsh believed in the American Dream. She grew up on it, internalized it, and saw the world through that lens. But then, as she dived into the research, she made a discovery: “if you are poor, you are likely to stay poor, no matter how hard you work… On the matter of my own country’s economic system… I had been sold a bill of goods.” Later, she concludes, “It wasn’t that I’d been wrong to be suspicious of government programs, I realized, but that I’d been wrong to believe in the American Dream.” Instead of debating the merits of Vance and Smarsh’s perspectives, though, I’m more interested in tracing how Smarsh arrived here.
Everyone knows the plight of the midwest in the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Only in the 1950s did those who stuck it out finally enjoy more than subsistence living, thanks to technological advances. After a couple of very positive decades, Smarsh describes the downfall. Land prices climbed in the 1970s and banks responded by offering farm mortgages with the farm’s productivity used as collateral, regardless of the family’s ability to otherwise pay off the loan. When land prices plummeted in the 1980s, the value of that collateral did as well; as a consequence, interest rates spiked. Family farms were foreclosed and 40,000 rural Kansans fled to cities. Growing up in that context, Smarsh saw the “farm crisis” ripple-effect up close, as stores and restaurants were shuttered, whole towns thinning out. There were nagging questions within that context, questions like: “If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?” However, Smarsh notes that answers didn’t involve class. Indeed, “Class didn’t exist in a democracy like ours, as far as most Americans were concerned.”
Smarsh’s family experienced some financial success, but it was thrust into instability following an accident. Her dad experienced chemical poisoning while working for a national company that produced and disposed of industrial cleaning products. Looking back on that moment, Smarsh describes how she was shaken by his reaction to this. “It wasn’t the inherent trauma of his experience that got to me but the lack of outrage he seemed to feel–like he knew damn well that dying on the job was his birthright, and his gratitude for having survived outweighed any well-deserved sense that he had been victimized.” There is no room for victimhood in the American Dream.
She then launches into a striking reflection on the devaluation and punishment of working class labor. “A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall is another. Waiting tables is one thing; working for an employer whose sexual harassment you can’t afford to fight and risk a night’s worth of tips is another.”
Smarsh explains that she has witnessed a profound shift take place. In the United States, she explains, there has long been a stigma associated with poverty. Indeed, “the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry… it’s about what your actions have failed to accomplish and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy.” However, it has now moved beyond shame: “Where once poverty was merely shamed, over the course of my life it was increasingly monetized to benefit the rich–interest, late fees, and court fines.” In this world, the poor are stigmatized and victimized, but the stigma–deeply internalized–blocks any acknowledgment of the systemic forces that keep people entrenched in poverty.
This builds to one of Smarsh’s key insights, a partial answer to Thomas Frank’s titular question about Kansas: “Impoverished people, then, must do one of two things: concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them.” To vote Democrat, by this logic, could be seen as a rejection of belief in the American system–that working hard and doing things the right way will bring success. It’s an act of betrayal.
I think back to Rick. It’s easy to see how his strident support for Trump flows naturally out of this dilemma. He has been raised loving America, believing in America, and there’s one party that reinforces the narrative central to his existence, a narrative that positions him at the center of it, as a noble, almost heroic, figure. The challenge for Democrats is to craft a message that doesn’t make him feel like a tragic one.
