Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 174: The Urbs (w/ special guest Mike Davis)[Year Zero 4]

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Author and urban theorist Mike Davis joins us to talk about the political economy of rural America, and about what insights we can take from the 2020 election. GoFundMe for our cohost Aaron Thorpe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/aaron-thorpe-car-accident?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1 Check out our episode with Chapo about Hillbilly Elegy: https://www.patreon.com/posts/475-hills-have-44321527 And last but not least, support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Hello, Trailbilly family. On this week's episode, we are interviewing Mike Davis, who is an urban theorist, a professor at University of California, Riverside, and an author of such great books like City of Courts, Planet of Slums, Victorian Holocausts, and one of my personal favorites, one about the history of the car bomb called Buddha's Wagon, or maybe that's Buddha's Wagon. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Anyways, we're talking to Mike about the political economy of rural America, trying to map out some generalizations about it, its role within the larger national political structure, and why it votes the way it votes, you know, what implications we can take away from the

2020 election. So we really hope you like that. Because it kind of fits into the political economy category, we are putting this in our Year Zero series. So if you're sitting around this holiday weekend with nothing really else to do, and you haven't listened to the previous Year Zero episodes, I highly recommend you check them out. They're very accessible. They're funny. They're just like pretty much everything else we put out. We really think you'll like it. Two quick announcements before we get to the interview. The first is that Tom and I appeared on Chapo Trap House on their most recent Patreon episode talking about Hillbilly Elegy.

So if you would like to go check that out, go to the Chapo Patreon page. We dissected the film, talked about how bad it is. But if you'd like to hear the Trillbilly take on it, I believe we will be finally tackling that on next week's episode. So stay tuned for that. And finally, and most importantly, I just need to say that our co-host Aaron was involved in a car accident this week. Don't worry, he is alive and well, but he is a little bit banged up and he's

probably going to need a new car as well. So we are going to put a link to a GoFundMe for him in the description for this episode. So if you'd like to donate to him, please do so. He would really appreciate it, and he would just like me to tell you all that he's sending his warmest regards, his love, and thanks for everybody who's reached out to him. So without further ado, let's get to this interview with Mike Davis, and I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving and a great holiday weekend. Thank you. We were both long-distance truckers together. He was in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. So we were visiting VVAW people, and we went down to Harlan,

and the union organizers said, whatever you do, don't go out there to the mine. And we went out anyway, crossed the railroad tracks, and got attacked, kind of beat up. And then we treated back across the river tracks, flipped in the finger. I think his name was Cecil Price, who was the scabber, opened up on us with an M1 carbine. We raced back to Hazard and told this to the UMW guys.

They just broke up in laughter because we were so damn stupid. That's great. Now, yeah, no, there's, I mean, obviously, I'm sure you've seen the film. There's a great film about it. Barbecue couples film, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we live about, I don't know. What do you think, Tom?

So, you know, I'm Terrence. This is Tom. We live about maybe 45 minutes from where that took place, give or take. It's pretty close. Yeah, the other side of Pine Mountain. I don't know if you're familiar with Wattsburg. It's where Apple Shop was founded. Where what was founded? Where Apple Shop was founded.

It was like one of those war on poverty programs. Yeah. Yeah, it's in the 60s, you know, when they did the war on poverty, they had started these film cooperatives, these media cooperatives. And I think there's like five of them in the nation. And the only one that survived to this day is right here in Whitesburg. And it's called Apple Shop. I don't know how it survived.

Are you supported by the Appalachian Regional Commission or any of that? No, not anymore. Not anymore. We've burned those bridges. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, we've written a lot about, you know, so Tom and I have been involved in a lot of different, you know, things, anti-mountaintop removal, you know, anti-prison construction, which there's a lot of it here. anti-prison construction, which there's a lot of it here. But in the course of all those years, we've really gotten pretty intimate with the Appalachian Regional Commission.

They pretty much exist just to build highways at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're familiar with eastern Kentucky, Mike. And furthermore, have even visited, you know, a lot of people we talk to. That's a lot less to explain. Yes. But no, so like I was saying, I think today we're trying to, we're talking about rural America. We're trying to get some larger insights into what it actually is, you know, how it functions, why it votes the way it votes, and I think most importantly,

how the American left should be thinking about it and engaging with it. So, you know, I just wanted to start off with the basics. Just in purely economic terms, you know, and excluding some of the more, you know, overt political factors, you know, for the moment, how has what we call rural America changed over the last couple of decades? And, you know, for the moment. How has what we call rural America changed over the last couple of decades? And, you know, what are some of the forces that have contributed to that? Well, first of all, rural America is a very complicated thing to define since there are many rural Americas. And the Census Bureau hasn't helped because now any rural area that has a town with 50,000 people or more is a metropolitan county. Although, in fact, it may be, you know, largely

rural. But setting that aside, I think there are three kinds of rural Americas. The one that's, I think, been decisive for Trump is exurban America. Now, lots of poor people have, you know, have left the cities and so on and moved into rural areas, particularly black people returning to the South. But the big phenomena is wealthier conservative white people moving into rural areas with high amenity values you know historic towns wine country you know the best bass fishing around and and and exurban america by brookings institution standards, is more than 30 million people right now. Okay, so you have this kind of exurbia, which is a kind of form of gentrification of rural America, but it exists side by side with tremendous poverty. And then there are the non-metropolitan counties, again, as the Census

Bureau defines them, where more than 20% of the people commute to work outside that county. And that's even true in places like Central Appalachia, where you are. And that isn't really counted by the Census Bureau, but it's definitely rural America. And then there are finally the regions which have been devastated by a succession of economic changes. My mother is Irish, but my dad comes from the oldest, the last Welsh-speaking town in the United States, a place called Venedosia, Ohio, that boasts that its smallest town, it's not a town, it's a hamlet, a crossroads, to have a website. And I used to go there, you know, as a kid, and it was very prosperous. My great-uncle won the corn prize at the Ohio State Fair.

My great uncle won the corn prize at the Ohio State Fair. I went back in the 70s, and my relatives had all lost their farms. Younger people were working in non-union furniture factories 40 to 50 miles away. The 80s devastated these kinds of areas, which had had generations of relative stability and prosperity. I'm not talking about the Wheat Belt, which is kind of a casino. It's kind of like going to Las Vegas. But the Corn Belt,

incredibly stable, hit in the 1980s. The succession of other things, I mean, if you look at the southern Appalachian areas, the devastation wrought by the destruction of the textile industry in the last 20 years, and the utter failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations to address that. to address that. And that's why you find that up to a third of the manufacturing jobs in rural America, but particularly in that part,

in the foothill built of the Appalachians, just, you know, devastated by that. I mean, the point is, since the 1965 and the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission by the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson, I can't think of a single geographically focused initiative that's targeted poverty or instability in employment in rural America. Of course, there's a huge apparatus of policies to largely favor agribusiness and big farmers. But Appalachia, for instance, is really a total orphan of the Democratic Party. It's just been, you know, abandoned. I mean, you know, abandoned. I mean, a little hard to imagine people in rural regions becoming installers of solar energy installations or working as software specialists at now

totally automated trucking companies. I mean, the job loss through technological change, but also through decrease in national demand, it's going to take away five or 10 jobs for every one of these mythical green energy jobs. Now, obviously, I think we need to make a transition away from, you know, fossil fuels. But there's nothing concrete here. And what everybody, whether they're in Lima, Ohio, Erie, Pennsylvania, or Williamson, West Virginia, want to know of a candidate is what are you going to do to create more job opportunities and economic stability in my town or my county? And Democrats have failed that with some exceptions, but those exceptions are relatively few.

And I think if you look at the Trump vote from this election, it's kind of interesting. from this election. It's kind of interesting. He got about 70 million, possibly as many as 71 million votes, increases 2016 vote by eight and a half million or so. Polls have shown consistently from the inauguration, he's the only president who's never had favorable rating by majority Americans, only president, but he gets 40, 41% absolutely hardcore. So I did a little back of the envelope calculation. It's not scientific, but maybe useful. And you take the 70, 71 million Trump vote and fly the 40% percentage to the total vote and deduct it from 71%, we got about 55 million people

who just really seem to be the Trump hardcore. But there's another 17 million people who aren't. And the decisive thing about the election, and I think a principal reason for the disaster that befell Democratic congressional candidates, is the Democrats allowed jobs and the pandemic to become counterposed issues, which shouldn't have happened. Whereas the Trump campaign from the beginning, starting back in late April, when he unleashed the arm-carrying mobs in state capitals, demanding to liberate Wisconsin, liberate Michigan, and everything possible to counterpose that. Well, this is kind of what millions of ordinary Americans have had to face. The choice between endangering themselves or their families, particularly their old folks at home, and the need to pay the rent, the medical bills to keep from becoming homeless. And so what happened at the election, I think, was out of this 15 or 17 million,

however you want to calculate it, so many of these were people for whom further closures spelled economic disaster. So they made Sophie's choices, not necessarily liking Trump at all, maybe opposing him and everything else. But he was able to run as the goddamn jobs candidate. And Biden did very little, you know, to really counteract that. Yeah. You know, I was telling Tom this the other day, but I was in the doctor's office here

in town when they announced that Trump had lost and that Pennsylvania had gone for Biden and that he would now have the electoral votes to win. And I was talking to this woman who, you know, I've known for years who worked at the doctor's office. And she was just totally sort of devastated, like aghast. And this is a good person. You know, I don't consider this person to be necessarily a reactionary or a racist. I mean, maybe privately, I don't know. But she's always been very helpful to me, and I know what her thoughts are about health care and these other things. And her very first reaction to me was, I don't know what's going to happen to my husband.

My husband's a coal miner, you know, and I don't, I don't, she just had a lot of uncertainty about the future. And I think this is probably one of those people, like you said, who had to make this choice. They probably weren't really thrilled about it, you know, but they weren't getting anything offered to them by the Democrats. And so, you know, and I think that this person also makes up a part of, you know, earlier you differentiated three different kinds of rural America. This is someone who lives in a region that has been completely emptied out of its resources, you know, just stripped raw from coal and timber, and also in the process emptied out of many of its population. And so, the social fabric itself has been disrupted. And so, yeah, this is a person

for whom electoral politics, you know, mainstream politics just doesn't have a whole lot of valence unless it's in the form of someone talking about their job. And so, yeah, I guess I'm just trying to kind of add a sort of anecdotal evidence to what you're saying. I feel very much like where I live and the people I talk to, they articulate on a regular basis material concerns and demands that aren't necessarily mediated by some of the more cultural war things that we're told by Democrats motivate rural voters. And that, to me, is a scary situation. You know, I mean, like, if these people are articulating material demands, but they're not being met by, they're only being met by one of these parties, and even then it's just, you know,

it's, they're not actually uh they're doing it cynically you know the republicans to me that seems like a sort of dangerous um formula for the future well i mean of course the republicans are doing theater here about one instance is when bush ran against kerry And look at West Virginia. Kerry went to West Virginia. He had really absolutely nothing to say about the economy. Bush went there and said, I'll put a tariff on steel. And of course, steelmaking was a very important part of the West Virginia economy. I mean, I think most folks, independently of even religion and ideology,

I think most folks, independently of even religion and ideology, you know, first of all, look at family survival, a household survival strategy that they've adopted, and then choose, as you say, who seems to respond best to, you know, the life and death needs of American households. And we're also talking about, I mean, the Democrats take a, you know, they look at national GDP and so on, and they're prepared to do something about poverty, particularly urban poverty. Not enough, but something. What we need are geographically targeted job creation programs, not opportunity zones, not these retraining skills where you teach coal miners to be Xerox technicians if your job won't exist a few years from now. going a few years from now. The real targeted geographically specific economic policies,

controls on the movement of capital and the role of finance, particularly the piratical part of finance like private equity and hedge funds that just move in the community to loot everything they can in the short term from a local plant or industry and then take their profits and run, leaving the plant or industry as a failing concern. And most of all, the one thing that I haven't heard anybody talk about in the election, we need a massive expansion of public employment. And not just in Green New Deal, we obviously need to rebuild public health care and pay teachers better, but increase the number of teachers. A tremendous shortage of caregivers.

And the private sector is not going to address that. And the private sector is not going to address that. The private sector is no longer the engine of different kind of public sector, not one that's controlled by corporations or by the industries that, say, departments are supposed to regulate, who in fact own the industries. We have to talk about a much higher degree of democratic, local, and regional control. But otherwise, it just becomes like homelessness. It becomes an insolvable problem because it's impossible to frame solutions because of the interests involved. I have four kids. My two younger kids, they're just finishing high school. younger kids, they're just finishing high school. And they were amazed when I told them that I remember when homelessness basically did not exist in this country. It's been so naturalized, taken, you know, for granted. And likewise, with the distress of rural America, including Native America, including the plight of small

black farmers in the Mississippi Delta and so on, or people who live in the border counties of Texas, New Mexico. Yeah. You know, once again, earlier you had distinguished these sort of, you know, three different kinds of rural America, and we're talking about one of them. I wanted to talk about a different one, though, that has risen just in the last couple of decades and seems to be, you know, earlier you pointed out these sort of maybe 50 million hardcore Trump voters. This seems to be a large slice of that pie. I'm referring to what you referred to as exurbia. Can you talk a little bit about what the exurbs are and what gave rise to them and their relationship to the geography around them? Well, exurbs are the kind of highest stage of sprawl. And let me give you an example right here in san diego county i grew up in what's called east county an area that i've met people who use his feet tell me they won't even get off the freeway

in that area it was so associated with being you know redneck and and conservative right i grew up on the literally the last suburban street before the countryside began where my parents who fled ohio during the depression ended up owning a little avocado orchard and the east county area you know there were people who kept horses, people who came from rural places and wanted some of it, and biker bars and, you know, little crossroads places. Today, and this is a mountainous area, where if you go up a thousand feet or more, you have magnificent views of the coast 30 or 40 miles away. It's not chock-a-block with McMansions because for a million dollars, you can hardly buy anything on the coast. But for a million dollars in the backcountry, you can build mansions. And I mean really huge homes, up to 5 000 square feet there are even a couple of

castles in areas where i used to take my 22 with my friends and you know hunt jack uh jack rabbits but then if you go further out at an inconvenient distance there's still working class communities. People can't afford to live in the city. They live out there. And that includes people I grew up with and still stay in contact. My ex-brother-in-law is a retired firefighter. And the change out there has also been dramatic, but in a different sense. And the change out there has also been dramatic, but in a different sense.

The in-your-face racism, the total domination by conservative right-wing conspiracy theories. And I remember not too long ago, last year, talking to a young woman who worked for the state park out there. Her husband is Mexican. And they were fleeing the area, the community called Descanso, because they've had their towers slashed, and the lies been right in their face, threatened with violence, because he's an immigrant.

And there's always racism in these areas. But now Trump has allowed it all to rise to the surface and become public. So even in this microcosm, in a place, an area that you consider, well, everybody lives at the beach and stuff. But in fact, the American West starts about 40 miles from the ocean. So you have this combination of, you know, incredibly upscale, affluent people. And then a little further out, what's always been considered our local version of Appalachia. And you can see this everywhere across the country. I mean, there are a few instances where the exurbs are, you know, liberal.

You know, Asheville, North Carolina, Mendocino, California. And by the way, exurban growth is the most dynamic and the largest on scale in the South, as middle class people or upper middle class people move to you know, attractive rural areas. And of course, in large part, this is just another, this is the kind of highest form of white flight with other people who have the same prejudice as you do. There's a book that was written in 2008 called It's called The Big Sort.

About this process. Oh, yeah. We know the author, actually. Yeah, I know Bishop. Yeah, I used to work for Bill Bishop. Very interesting book. Yeah, no. So the process, I guess, that you're outlining, that you're saying here, is that, yeah, you have these affluent upper middle class and upper class people, you know, fleeing the cities and the suburbs themselves and creating these communities that have a relationship to the countryside.

But maybe in some cases it is more material, maybe in some cases it's more cultural, right? But regardless, it gets all sort of sorted into the same rural umbrella. Yeah, and it tends to displace the productive economies of rural areas. You know? Right. It displaces farmers. I mean, you look across the western United States and in all the fishing towns on the west coast, states and in all the fishing towns on the west coast and all the mining towns to the interior west local productive activities and jobs have collapsed but in turn making those communities

very attractive for people who can take their inflated coastal equity you know, real estate, and either buy a second home or move to these kind of places. So you get this sometimes intense conflict between the inmate migrants, who were much wealthier than the kind of left-behind working-class people, for whom the, I mean mean in your part of the country in Pennsylvania and South Texas of course fracking sort of came to the rescue

in a lot of places but what's happened out here you were mentioning this about Eastern Kentucky so maybe I'm not so right to say this is a mainly Western phenomenon. But the one replacement job source is, of course, in prison construction. Yeah, absolutely.

People who were once proud copper miners or ranchers or, you know, fishermen find the only real living available is working as prison guards. And, of course, that's true in South Texas and in other Latino border counties where often ICE is the only high-wage employer in town. Do you think that happens, Mike, because they tend to try to place those projects in places where there's not a ton of political organization, tax bases are small? I mean, it's kind of like landfills, right? It's the kind of junk projects they sort of just dump on that people in the city might put up a big NIMBY-style fight against or something like that. Yes, of course you're absolutely right and particularly in communities which have no other available

source of replacement employment particularly since the the loss of this one-third of the manufacturing jobs that were situated in rural counties or semi-rural areas. And I'll never forget, I did a tour years ago and wrote an article about a desert prison in a place called Calipatria out by the Salton Sea in Southern California. And some of the guards were just absolute Nazis. But I started talking to a couple of young Chicano guys. And they explained, well, you know, I went to junior college, but this is agriculture.

There aren't any future here. You know, but my family's here and so on. So I became a prison guard. And I hate it. And it's dangerous. You know, and I feel I'm almost evil doing doing the job but hey you know what are the uh you know what are the alternatives of course the military has long represented um that as well which is why there's such a high disproportion of people from poor areas of the

country in the military but nothing is going to get better from this point forward and the job losses that are now going to occur, I mean you look at trucking in some experience

being a trucker you go to a truck stop anywhere, half the guys you talk to are small farmers, you know, keeping the farm by spending 280 days a year out on the road. And those jobs are eliminated, as it certainly seems to be the case, within the next decade. I mean, it's disastrous. I mean, I forget. I think there's 3 million owner-operators in the country. And because so many of them are tethered to rural places, the loss of those jobs would be absolutely disastrous. And, of course, what are the ultimate effects?

Well, we all know so well, you know, it's diseases of despair. It's the fact that in Appalachia, at least in central and southern Appalachia, 50% of low-skilled men are out of the labor force. 50% of those are disabled. Job losses in these areas are a major public health problem. But who can provide the jobs if not the public sector in one form or another? And of course the whole enterprise opportunity zone stuff is just a way of pitting places against one another. And so you build a big auto plant in Tennessee.

They give away the tax revenue to the next generation, undercutting other places to get it. It's ridiculous. I think the, if you look at the sort of march of time and how the opportunity zone has evolved over time so opportunity zone was a clinton initiative right i think it started in the 90s under obama obama had a similar one called promise zones so it kind of gets more dystopian over time it's like is its opportunity and its promise under biden it'll probably something be something even more bleak um i'll never forget i'll never forget that when they sent the promise zones bureaucrat down here to eastern kentucky to to basically throw this sort of pep rally right because we were announced as one of the promise zones counties and she had

like the whole like tony robbins like ear like microphone earbud piece thing in and she was like in this like restaurant and everybody's there and i remember her saying there's something exciting going on in eastern kentucky what is it and everybody's like prison prison prison and i thought to myself, we're throwing a goddamn pep rally for a proposed prison, and that's going to solve all of our woes. And it was just the darkest thing you could imagine. tax subsidized places, of course, stimulate job flight within the United States from one place to another. If they help one rural community or small industrial city, it's taking away jobs from a similar place elsewhere. elsewhere.

And, you know, this idea that kind of economic Darwinism will solve the problems of working class Americans. I mean, it's just crazy. It's a huge giveaway of fiscal resources and largely companies who don't need it. I mean, why did VW in Chattanooga meet all these tax breaks, for example?

They're going to build the port somewhere anyway, but the present system allows them to launch this bidding war between localities. And there are a thousand examples of that, particularly in the south and the southeast, but also in parts of the Midwest. It's not a one-to-one, but I think one of the biggest things that people sort of in the NGO world here have been working on for the last several years is really pining for this thing

called the reclaim act which would basically release some funds out of the abandoned mine federal abandoned mine lands fund and like redistribute it to you know parts of east tennessee eastern kentucky west virginia southwest virginia so forth and one of the biggest stumbling blocks just when you said like the idea of pitting regions against the country, against each other, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to this is Wyoming's congressional representatives are like, hell no, we're not going to do this. Wyoming's had the most productive coal field in the country for the last 15, 20 years, and they've put a lot into this.

And it's like, not saying that anybody in Appalachia or Central Appalachia or whatever doesn't deserve to have some of those funds redistributed or whatever, but it's right when you're talking about that sort of pitting, even with public things like that. Yeah, it's worse in and the federal government, use the power they down on the local or regional scale. In so many places, also in the areas we're talking about, the major replacement industry turns out to be health care. I spent some time part of the summer in Birmingham, Alabama, back in the 1980s. Friends who worked in steel and a soap factory. You go to Birmingham today, that's all, you know, all gone. But it's become a big regional health care center.

regional health care center. And of course, your area is starved of health care investment, or it's private health care and things like these nursing homes owned by private equity, where 100,000 people have now died of COVID. So there is something that government can do in terms of how it geographically allocates investment and with a preference for areas of high unemployment, poor areas. That's, you know, that's obviously not a solution, but it's important unused power that the public sector has, power the public sector has, depending on who controls the public sector. Yeah, I grew up in southeastern New Mexico in a little oil town called Hobbs. And just about an hour away in West Texas, there was a little town called New Deal. You know, and there's all kinds of little towns like that in West Texas that were, you know, that benefited from the New Deal.

And, you know, their politics were sort of oriented around that. I mean, this has kind of been the story of maybe the 20th century. And I kind of think that it sort of explains why there's kind of this industry now in the sort of punditry world, in the commentariat world, where people try to explain really what's happening in rural America. I mean, because as we were saying, a lot of these, you know, this is kind of the subtext here, a lot of these places, whether it's some of those more agricultural regions in West Texas or here, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, these places were Democratic strongholds, you know, up until fairly recently. And, you know, and so they've slowly,

gradually started going Republican in the last maybe three or four decades. As a result, there's kind of been this rise of, like I was saying, sort of rural explainers. One of them is Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? You know, I think there's some correct things in it, and I think there's also some things that gets wrong. I mean, why do you think, what explains some of these political changes, and what are some of the arguments that people sort of employ to try to understand them? Well, I actually wrote a reply. I really like Tom Frank's stuff. But I wrote a reply to that book called What's the Matter with West Virginia, looking at the vacuity of Democratic proposals or ideas about saving declining regions. by the way, doesn't bear up under close inspection. I mean, his thesis, of course, is that you have all these people voting against their direct economic interest and class interest when they vote for Republicans. And he gives the example of these counties in

western Kansas, also in Nebraska, that have these would seem to be incredibly low low incomes but almost 100 percent Republican but if you look at what these counties really are we're talking about big ranchers who are living on drought subsidies and taking huge tax donations They're not voting against their economic interest at all. Now we have a kind of second or third generation Moynihanism. Daniel Moynihan was the conservative Democratic senator from New York who blamed poverty in the inner cities on the collapse of the black

family and the corresponding failures of character that that supposedly created in younger black people. Now we have hillbilly elegies which I guess hundreds of thousands of urban people now take as God's truth you know about Appalachia

and rural America but you're blaming the people themselves Charles Murray one of the most noxious conservative writers no accident he conservative writers. No accident, he and J.D. Vance are now colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute.

Indeed, but now he talks about, he says, well, these poor white Americans are becoming like urban blacks. They'll lack all motivation, self-discipline. I mean, this takes you right back to the 19th century middle class depictions of working people. I mean, I think one of the great heroic untold stories of the last generation or two has been the heroic persistence of people in places that they love. in places that they love. People who could move, but don't. You know, who get by on far less because they're not going to be driven out of the mountains or, you know, away from local areas that are so rich in heritage.

And the character factor is probably the opposite of what people like Murray are talking about. I mean, you're talking about some of those, you know, rugged, resourceful, creative people in American society. I saw that also. I'm the only native Californian in my family. I have a huge working class family, six adult nieces and nephews, and the endless number of exes and children and so on, who live in Washington. And the kind of traditional working class in Washington is, you know, is a model of

that. If the pulp mill closes, well, you go fishing in Alaska. That falls through. You try something else. So the depiction of people who aren't able to make smart economic choices because they supposedly don't have disciplined characters, that's the opposite of the truth. I mean, large parts of this country have been held together simply by, you know,

the desperate creativity of people. But the resources for that are running out, including the resources for regional migration. I mean, Las Vegas is almost like a sedimentary geological deposit. Each strata records a recession in some part of the country. The oldest stratum, people from Butte, Montana, who came in the 50s after the collapse of mining.

There's a huge stratum of people who fled the steel valleys. And I never forget, I worked a little with the Culinary Workers Union and went around visiting workers at home. They were trying to organize the MGM Grand, which they eventually succeeded. But I remember talking to one woman, and she said, well, we were third-generation steelworkers, but when the

mill closed down in North Pittsburgh, we eventually lost everything. So we moved to Texas, because everybody said, go to Texas and get jobs. Went to Texas. Our marriage almost broke up. My husband started drinking. So finally we came

here. And because the casinos are unionized and the hotels, now, you know, we have a decent income again. We just put a down payment on a house but she says i don't get it

he says in pittsburgh we made things useful things we could see ourselves as part of this huge productive american economy what do we make here in las vegas and there's millions of people who have asked that question. In an economy, we're 80% of the jobs in the private sector or in services of one kind or another. Yeah, I used to live in Las Vegas, and that was one of the things that happened. Nobody would go be a teacher or any you know or any of these sort of

professional jobs or anything else because you could just make more money parking cars on the strip and they were unionized jobs and so forth but thanks to to the union if if you uh went somewhere uh else where the casinos and hotels aren't organized this is entirely different entirely different story i I mean, Las Vegas is fascinating. Each of those casinos has a workforce equivalent to a medium-sized industrial factory

or auto plant. And the working conditions are not that greatly different. Same way in the healthcare industry. One of my kids was asking me, well, there really isn't a working class anymore in America

because there aren't factories. And I said, you know, I've been fighting cancer. I've made a couple hundred visits to clinics and hospitals in the last couple of years in a big hospital you know is the equivalent of of a factory has same kind of social conscious and one of the things we've seen this year is the tremendous politicalization of the health care sector that creates 70 percent 17% of the jobs in this sector. The most progressive union in the country right now, arguably Nurses United. So there are, I mean, other focuses for traditional union organization and fight back.

organization and fight back. But finally, in your region, of course, one of the things that has unleashed support for Trump has been the defeat of union organization in the southern auto industry, given that most of the foreign automakers are located in places like Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, and kind of half the American auto industry are now on right-to-work states. And the UAW is organizing campaigns. I think a lot of what happened is dictated by the history of failed trade unionism in these places.

Because even if you go look at, after the 2016 election, I picked 15 industrial counties in the Midwest that had voted for Obama, but then shifted to Trump. And I showed in every case, I went back and read all the local newspapers for a couple of years. And in each case, it correlated to major job losses and continuing plant closures But what was interesting And it's the same in this election Is the Trump vote Is much higher

Than the Republican vote On a local level People are still Democrats On a local level Particularly voting for Democrats Who are pro-union. So this isn't the kind of wholesale, you know, full immersion conversion experience that seems to be happening at other parts of Trump town.

This is a, you know, a conditional phenomenon, you know, dictated by fairly realistic calculations, I think. I mean, better to have somebody who at least talks about controlling the export of jobs and reindustrialization than somebody who just doesn't get it at all. just doesn't get it at all. Now we see that Biden has actually taken on a lot of Trumpian ideas about trade

and productions. This last election, I think in a hundred years, I don't think any election profiled labor movements been smaller or more marginal, despite the heroic work

that various local unions did in key parts of the country. So you have to cast a lot of phenomenon that's occurring in terms of de-unionization. But it's not just the Democrats here or urban liberals middle class liberals who don't get it. You see this thing across Western Europe where former red belts bastions of the left and of unionism

have turned to parties to the far right the north of england the north of france lombardy in italy eastern parts of germany and and so on i mean these include areas that had communist governments, local governments, or socialist local governments for 50 or 60 years after 1945. And now I'm in the grip of Le Pen and various other right-wing demagogues who do offer what seem to be solutions to regional decline. I mean, they talk the language about it. And of course, they pin the blame on exactly the wrong people, poor immigrants and so on. Yeah.

I mean, earlier we were talking about Harlan County. I mean, if you were to tell somebody that communists were organizing in Harlan County in the 30s with the National Mining Union and that they had a substantial base there, too, I mean, I think you would blow people's minds. I mean, there's nothing inherently conservative or left or whatever about a region and its seclusion or whatever. I think it just depends on, you know, how active the workforce is there. And I don't know, the organizations on the ground and who's doing the organizing. I mean, I think that is an interesting question because, you know, maybe this gets a little too much into theory or something, but I guess one of the questions I have and maybe the left in general has is, like, how should the left be thinking about rural areas? I mean, as I mentioned in one of my questions to you, I think the left has always kind of had a bit of a troubled relationship with the rural areas.

I mean, granted, Marx was writing in the 19th century when he wrote that, you know, when he basically said the peasants were a sack of potatoes, more or less. But, I mean, is that still the case today, or can the left still engage with these areas in a way that, I don't know, makes their political affiliation not such a foregone conclusion, so to speak? their political affiliation not such a foregone conclusion, so to speak? Well, to go back to the classical period of socialism between roughly 1880 and 19 and the beginning of the Second World War, this is a huge debate among socialist parties, their attitude toward the countryside and toward peasants and small farmers. And you ended up with two entirely different models.

You had the orthodox Marxists in Germany and Austria-Hungary, who basically proposed state ownership and offered nothing, even to the most radicalized parts of their countryside, to peasants. But in southern France, the roots of socialism, the power of local socialism and famous socialist leaders like Jean Jauré lay amongst small wine growers,

amongst radicalized peasants. Similarly in Italy, the most radical group of all at the time of fascism in Italy were not the auto workers in Fiat and Turin and so on, as militant as they were. But it was small peasants and farm laborers. This is one of the main goals

of Mussolini, was to smash their unions and destroy their power. So if you look back at traditional Marxist views of the countryside or rural areas,

you need to factor in this rich and complex debate that's occurred, and all the counterexamples to show that radical movements can take root in these areas. Of course, American history is rich in that. Farmers' Non-Parlament League, you know, in the Dakotas, you know in the dakotas the farmer labor party and uh minnesota but i think urban people are so far removed from uh memory of rural roots have so little experience the big exception of might see my own mexican family i mean, so many Mexican people are still tied to a village or a place or a jito. They have strong ties to the countryside and the way

that people who fled the Great Plains in the Depression became aircraft workers in Southern California still kept touch with Oklahoma. I thought during Occupy, and I wrote about this, my wife and I went out and joined Occupy Old Central, Imperial County, where Old Central is. It is the most semi-futile county in California. Large farms

which have used violence over the decades to resist unionization, and a low-wage workforce that has always the highest unemployment rates in California. Well, there was an Occupy El Centro, and I thought the great potential of the movement was not its growth in big urban centers, but the fact that little groups were springing out all over the country, in small towns, rural places.

We've also seen it Lives Matter in places you wouldn't expect to see support. Groups have emerged and sometimes suffered repression because of it, small minorities. I mean, there's no red part of America, except for white Alabama, perhaps, where there isn't some core of movement and activism. It's just those places never get the resources. And the most dramatic example of that is, of course, in South

Texas, particularly in the seven populous border counties, where the Democrats have totally neglected. And now everybody's wringing their hands over how well Trump did in South Texas. And maybe it's because they all worked for ICE or something. But Bernie Sanders swept that whole area. Right. 600,000 votes down there, thanks to a movement of, you know, young peonies and their families. San Jose politics detonated a kind of social consciousness and activism that Biden absolutely failed to do.

The Democrats hardly spent a cent in areas like that. So that's why I think you have to talk about the places that the Democratic Party has made into its own orphans, whether that's Puerto Rico or Appalachia or border counties. The Republicans don't tend to do that. They tend to run a candidate everywhere. And they have

a parallel network of free enterprise, free market think tanks, and ALEC, the American legislative thing, that pressed policy that's given to Republican state legislators. And they have, of course, the Koch-funded Americans for prosperity. And Democrats have nothing like that on a state level, and seem to not get, in any sense sense what was once proposed as the 50 state strategy if not to leave any Democrat

behind and build in rural places and declining in industrial places. Republicans are there the Democrats only show up in a national election. Yeah I mean in 2016 and this year I mean I saw Republicans are there. The Democrats only show up in a national election. Once in 2016, I see a Hillary Clinton bumper sticker or anything, you know, and it's the same with 2020.

I may have seen one or two Biden stickers, but, you know, it was very clear that Bernie was articulating something that actually resonated. You know, are you familiar with Charles Booker, Mike? Have you ever heard that name? Remind me. He ran in the primary. So in Kentucky this year, Mitch McConnell was up for re-election. And in the Democratic primary against, it was Amy McGrath who eventually went on to run. She was running against this insurgent left candidate named Charles Booker.

He was black. He was from Louisville. And he was running, in my opinion, a very fascinating campaign. I believe he called his campaign the Holler to the Hood or the Hoods of the Holler. Right, Tom? I mean, basically linking the urban areas, the exploitation of people in urban areas with the rural areas. And he almost won. I mean, he surged pretty late, but he came within only about 5,000 or 6,000 votes of winning that primary.

Yeah, Amy McGrath had raised at that point $53 million to his $800,000, and she narrowly beat him. And of course, she went on to lose to Mitch McConnell by 21 points. Well, I mean, we also saw that in the fact that on a state level progressive initiatives uh won with the democrats lost i mean the most surprising example is in

florida were a 15 minimum wage got 60 of the vote and of course, Biden lost it by a dramatic reduction in previous votes. But there's another question here I'd just like to briefly outline. And that's the nature of the left itself. And also of unions. Because obviously, kids who have the support of family incomes or college degrees that allow them to easily transition back in full-time union posts and end up dominating them rather than the accession of grassroots workers, you know, the actual workforce. Same problem on the left. I mean, the great energy out there has been amongst working class kids and first generation immigrant college graduates. My two kids, younger kids, identify as Mexican good in inner city high school. And while it may be predictable given the home environment that they would lean to the love, what's astonishing is how radical their friends are who are parents of Somali

taxi cab drivers or Mexican immigrant landscapers and so on. And these kids love Bernie Sanders, but I could not convince them that it was a good idea to vote for Biden. In fact, I felt like a Menshevik arguing to the Bolsheviks in my house. But the future of the left depends so much on building organizations of organizers that create niches for poorer kids to become organizers and to make full-time commitments to the struggle.

commitments to the struggle. And that's really an internal question the left has to face in a direct and honest way. In other words, the leadership needs to look more like the base. And one of the things about AOC that everybody loves is, you know, she's really reflective of her base. I mean, she comes from more or less the same socioeconomic background. And that's, you know, almost astonishing in modern American politics, particularly in national level politics. So we have to do everything possible to create new ways to

basically subsidize full-time organizing commitments from local people and younger poor people whether they're in the inner city or in the hollows. I love that slogan. It was great. Like I said, we were pretty shocked and pleasantly surprised that he almost won. I mean, that to me is incredible.

You've got this establishment candidate, Amy McGrath, that Chuck Schumer and all the Democratic establishment publicly backed against Booker, the insurgent candidate. And he still came within a pretty good shot of beating her. And the difference, and why he did so well in eastern Kentucky, just the summer before, I don't know if you saw, Mac, where the Harlan County miners had blocked the coal trains from, you know, taking coal out of Harlan County, Booker was right there with them before he was a national entity or anything like that. And I think he sort of tapped into making those connections between poor, mostly white people in the hollers of Appalachian, eastern Kentucky, and poor black folks on the west end of Louisville,

places that actually don't look too dissimilar. If you were to visit both of them, we know we've just blindfolded, but it was powerful. Yeah, I mean, that's what a generation ago, the Jesse Jackson's first Rainbow Coalition presidential primaries just had an amazing ability to win both people in the ghetto but Midwestern industrial workers under the threat of job loss. Sanders, of course, has repeatedly demonstrated that.

demonstrated that. I mean, the whole question of racism is, of course, something we need to look at in a kind of more analytic and scientific way. I mean, certainly Trump is tapped into a deep reservoir of white supremacy. But on the other hand, if you look at counties that voted

for Obama, including in 2012, the flip to Trump, it's not immediate obvious that the white workers in those counties who changed their vote did so as part of a racist backlash, like the 68 Walls vote, the Reagan Democrats in the early 1980s. And I think one thing that gives you hope is that if you go to

places like, I don't know, Dubuque, Iowa, Stockton, California, you see poor kids of every race and ethnicity running together. White kids who have been totally in the rap for 20, for a full generation with black friends. And I think the generation that my kids belong to, Generation Z, I guess it's

called, are going to be the most astonishing in that regard. And far more radical, because they have to be radical. Their life situations dictate it. Kids want radical reform. They want to support you.

They understand the need for deep, profound, structural change in the economy. There's not been a generation like this, at least since the CIO generation of the 1930s. And I'm sure that's true in a lot of places in so-called red states as well. Yeah, we've definitely seen that and experienced it. I'm wondering, and maybe we can just start wrapping it up but i'm wondering like this is the question i keep coming back to and over the course of 2020

i kept coming back to watching bernie's campaign unfold and watching charles booker's campaign unfold here do if these candidates and if these policies are actually going to become resonant in these areas and if furthermore even more importantly if we're talking about building institutions that can facilitate the rise of leadership that is more reflective of the base do you have to articulate some kind of politics that is different and maybe even go so far as to say oppositional to the democratic party i mean or or is there still space within that dynamic to pull the party to the left or the only reason i ask is because where i live i feel like as you were saying earlier i definitely feel like it's true in terms of local elections.

People still will vote for Democrats every now and then. But I do feel like in terms of national politics where I live, the word Democrat is becoming poison. They're becoming so far disillusioned from them that I'm not sure if you'd be able to pull them back in. I'm not sure if you'd be able to pull them back in. And so I wonder if you have to articulate something that is different or outside of it and maybe even antagonistic to it. I don't know. Well, I mean, I think the principle lesson we should draw from 150 years of American history, it's impossible to convert the Democratic Party into an instrument of social liberation. The whole idea of social

Democrats eventually becoming the majority in the party is an illusion which I don't think is held by a lot of the people who voted for Sanders or the squad. And the squad people themselves seem to have a very problematic estimate of the ability, their ability to maneuver inside the party. Now, this doesn't mean that you don't support Democrats. I mean, a smart person always, if given a choice between their enemies, will always select the lesser evil. But the problem with political campaigns is the excitement and the energy of mobilization dissipates after the election is the election is over i mean we've seen this again and again and you cannot afford once people are are aroused and in movement and in struggle

you cannot afford to uh see wholesale uh demoral. And that's why it struggles in the workplace and in the community. There's solidarity movements have an enduring value to keep people active and political conscious that campaigns never have. The problem after Super Tuesday was the Sanders campaign had always portrayed itself as two equal tracks running parallel to one another.

The movement in the streets, in unions, Black Lives Matter on one hand, excuse me, and then the primary campaign on the other. But after Super Tuesday, when Bernie conceded, there's no call to mobilize back in the streets. So not only, it wasn't only because of the pandemic, But everything became focused on the Democratic Party. And what I think was his biggest mistake ever was when the Sanders delegates entered into these negotiations with the Biden camp

over the 2020 Democratic platform. They ceded Medicare for All, which in light of the pandemic was the worst possible decision. One was unnecessary. After the concession by Sanders, thousands of people would have just dropped off and became inactive, except that Black Lives which needs to be reoriented to ongoing movements. But as I say, those movements have

to be capable of supporting people from the base and encouraging them to become full timers or deeply involved part timers. And I don't see much indication on a large part of the left, whether it's DSA or other groups, that they really give proper attention to the sociological and class composition of the left itself. Yeah, I definitely agree. And I say this because I feel kind of disconnected from the left in many ways. I mean, we run this podcast,

and it has a pretty big following among the left, but I also live in eastern Kentucky, where there's not a lot of left organization, and so it's just a few of me and my leftist friends. And so I feel that I feel in some ways like I'm on the outside looking in. And I feel, yeah, that there's not that kind of sort of reflection and attempt to bring in, you know, some of the areas like the ones that I live in. But at the same time, I guess that's probably on me and Tom as well in some ways that's incumbent upon us. But it's just a weird time, you know,

for the left to be sorting itself out. We happen to be in the middle of a massive crisis. You know, it's weird. Like the left was in this process of building itself back up into something formidable, and then this crisis hit, and it's like, well, we're just constantly trying to find our footing now. I don't know. Of course, because, you know, sometime in late February or March, people went to bed in the year 2020 and woke up in the year 1932. in the year 2020 and woke up in the year 1932. And we need an organizing strategy to build the bridge between the social democratic demands of Sanders' campaign

and the perception of its possibility before, and one that deals with the extreme economic conditions of today and certainly of you know the next couple years and maybe whole generation and i'm often asked by people well what should what should be our hope where do you find hope and uh question never makes sense to me um i don't think hope's a scientific term i think anger and grit and you know and love are what propel and keep people inside struggles. But is the existing left in any way prepared to deal with the depression that's enveloped at least a large

part of the country and not going to recede in any foreseeable recession? I mean, the point is to recede in any foreseeable recession. I mean, the point is to be on the side of and to be receptive of how working people

understand the world and what their needs are. I'm always amazed. I have friends in san francisco for instance we've never met a republican they have never had a personal conversation half my bloody family are uh uh republicans same here some of them voted came around and voted for Obama. It was a great day when that happened. But now are back, particularly my nephews are now probably Trump supporters again. They're listening to clear communications, radio, and so on. But they keep trying to recalculate what it is they believe and how that corresponds to their economic situation. They live up in kind of the greater Seattle area but aren't part of the software economy.

They worked in air freight and for Boeing, which is a totally different reality now with a lot of job decline. And so many of the categories we use to analyze current reality are just too vague and you know abstract which is why it's so important to listen to people like you two guys who know your your communities in your region and see the complexity of how in your region and see the complexity of how people understand their situation and act with honor and the possibilities that exist for radical change. But commitment should never depend on a specific quotient of hope or on the outcome of an election. It should be defining character trait and the way it's always been in previous generations of

American class fighters and Activists. Well, I think that's a really good spot to go out on And you know, thank you You know for taking time out of your day to talk with us mike uh yeah my this was great thank you so much it's it's my pleasure and uh keep me in contact with what's what's going on yeah for sure kent. I actually have been there several times, and I just kind of fell in love with the toughness of people. And it would be nice to occasionally hear more about what you guys are doing. So best of luck. Well, we will definitely keep in touch, Mike.

And thank you so much for your writing and analysis. Do you have anything you want to – I know you got a new book out. Do you want to plug it before you go? Well, John Wiener, who's one of the editors of The Nation, and I wrote an 800-page history of L. of LA in the 50s. That's a movement. And sometimes an almost microscopic detail. But it was an attempt to have a conversation with under 30 activists today. Because some of the major issues of the 60s are exactly the same issues people are fighting about today.

So activists seem to really enjoy that book. And then I have a republication of a book I wrote 15 years ago on avian flu with a new long introduction on coronavirus. And he was originally titled The Monster at the Door. It's now titled The Monster Enters. But I'm not encouraging anybody to buy my books. It's always a death sentence to have your books, like, on a college curriculum. Good books should be things, things diversity things that you find by accident like i did when i was 14 and found found for glory in the local library check your local libraries for my expense or if you happen to slip on a banana peel and you know land in a

radical bookstore yeah check them out um well again, Mike. And we will definitely keep you in touch. And, you know, we will look forward to speaking with you again. And stay safe out there, my friend. Okay. All power to the Hollas. Thank you. Thank you.