Andreas Whittam Smith: Are the rednecks losing their power?

Alcohol, Jesus and over-eating are the three preferred avenues of escape

Monday, 27 October 2008

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Just 10 days before America goes to the polls to elect a new President, I have at last begun to understand why the white working class generally votes against its own interests by backing the Republican candidate. This is the constituency which adores Sarah Palin. My enlightenment comes from a strangely-titled book, Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, first published in the United States a year ago. The second deck of its title reveals a bit more: "Guns, votes, debt and delusion in redneck America".

Mr Bageant was brought up in Winchester, which lies in the Shenandoah Valley, between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountains. His family has been scratching a living in this corner of the southern state of Virginia for the past 250 years. He describes himself as the scion of the restless Presbyterian Scots who, along with the English and Protestant reformers, pushed across America, developing the unique hunting and farming-based culture that sustained them through many generations. The remnant lives on, now sneeringly described as redneck America, yet sufficiently numerous to have contributed strongly to the election of George W Bush for two terms.

Mr Bageant left Winchester after serving with the Navy in Vietnam. His father worked at a gas station and his mother had a job at a textile mill. He returned 30 years later to a town that exists on a continuum "ranging from complete insecurity to the not-quite-complete insecurity of having a decent but endangered job". Here, nearly everyone over 50 has serious health problems and poor credit ratings. Alcohol, Jesus and over-eating are the three preferred avenues of escape.

Religion is the defining characteristic. Gallup surveys show that an astonishing one-third to one quarter of the American population identifies itself as "born again" evangelicals. Working-class whites, argues Mr Bageant, have always been evangelical Protestants. And what they have inherited from their Scots-Irish Calvinist ancestry, according to Mr Bageant, is self-loathing, a Southern, Protestant self-worthlessness. And so in their independent churches of various kinds, worshippers are exhorted to be "grateful for the blessings God bestows every day". Fundamentalist religion demands gratitude for what God grants.

From their Calvinist inheritance, rednecks identify two laudable qualities, hard work and self-reliance. As Mr Bageant observes, the forebears of today's rednecks were people for whom not working meant that their families would starve. So the work ethic is burnt into their genetic code. Rednecks work themselves to death and will never accept a handout. In the redneck mind, lazy is the worst thing a person can be.

These are admirable sentiments in their way. Yet they are taken so literally that accepting public help is seen as a sign of failure and moral weakness. And in turn this has allowed the Republican Party to describe all welfare provision as "entitlements" and thus associate the very term with the vice of laziness.

According to the conservative canon, if you haven't succeeded, it can only be because of your inferiority. To be self-reliant, therefore, is an absolute necessity. For to be seen to accept handouts broadcasts your inferiority to the wide world and betrays your hunting and farming heritage where all you had was your self-reliance and your religion. This is essentially why the Democratic Party finds it so difficult to mount arguments that immediately appeal to the white working class.

Hard work for little reward also leads to anger. The author writes that the source of rednecks' anger is the daily insults they believe they suffer from their employers, from their Government, and from more-educated fellow Americans – the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians and others who quietly disdain working folks. Or at least they perceive such insults. And so in Mr Bageant's view, there is a sort of an undeclared class war going on. Scots-Irish Calvinist values all but guarantee anger and desire for vengeance against what is perceived as elite authority: college-educated secular people, the Yankee liberals who run the schools, the media, and the courts and don't seem to mind if their preacher is gay.

This analysis gains support from the way in which the Republican Party, with Sarah Palin in the lead, is handling the final weeks of the election campaign. Recently, Mrs Palin told a rally that she was proud to be "with all of you hard working, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation". In other words, to vote Democratic is to be unpatriotic. And then more recently, referring specifically to Mr Bageant's beloved Virginia, a McCain spokes-woman said on television that while Obama would perform well in northern Virginia, "the rest of the state – real Virginia if you will – I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain's message".

Thinking about this notion of the two Americas, the "real" one and the "other" one, in light of Deer Hunting With Jesus, I suddenly recalled that the novelist Paul Auster's latest work, Man In The Dark, published earlier this year, has as its setting an American civil war that takes place now in the 21st century. He writes of "the sidewalks clogged with exhausted-looking men and women shuffling home from work, soldiers with rifles standing guard at the main intersections, a pinkish sky gloaming overhead".

So when the results of the Presidential election come in a week tomorrow, I shall look with keen interest to see how Virginia has voted. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win there was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It was also the last time a Democrat won a majority of white votes. But now Senator Obama has a good chance of overturning 40 years of Republican dominance.

As I write, the average of the tracking polls give the Democrats a lead of seven percentage points in Virginia. And in Mr Bageant's home town of Winchester, Mr Obama has even established an election office. And if the Democrats do have the landslide across America that the polls are beginning to suggest, then I shall believe that Mr Auster's novel is after all only a work of fiction, that the redneck constituency has lost its political power and that Mr Bageant has written its obituary.