Hillbillys in the USA are suffering under globalism and cultural contempt, by Helen Andrews.
Mortality rates for middle-aged white Americans have risen since the turn of the millennium, fueled by suicide, drug overdoses, and liver disease, as well as heart disease and diabetes. The illegitimacy rate for whites is close to 30 percent. There are towns in the Midwest where more than a third of working-age men are employed fewer than 20 hours a week. These signs of distress have gone neglected as LGBTQ identity politics and Black Lives Matter antics have monopolized [media] attention…
To the extent that white-trash America’s troubles figure at all in the national conversation, the suggestion has been that they have only themselves to blame. If these bitter clingers get outhustled for low-skilled jobs by immigrants who can’t speak English, then that just goes to show what poor-quality workers they were in the first place. If China is outcompeting them in global trade, well, the free market doesn’t give prizes for effort. As Kevin Williamson has written in this magazine, “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. . . . Nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.”
But the cultural changes dictated by big government and the global elites in the big coastal cities did them no favors:
Many Rust Belt factories long had family-based employment programs, actively encouraging workers to bring their brothers and cousins out from Kentucky. … A man is less likely to slack off or quit on a whim if he knows it will reflect badly on the uncle who got him the job. Family-based hiring systems fell foul of federal anti-discrimination law, and the old bonds of morale and mutual supervision have gone with them. …
Efforts to boost homeownership have had the perverse effect of immobilizing families who might have moved to better job markets if they’d had a lease instead of a mortgage. …
One reason white communities are so demoralized now, relative to periods when their material conditions were worse, is that their cultural resources have been eroded, in many cases by government programs. It is not just that welfare has replaced delicate networks of mutual aid. Licensing requirements for foster parents have made it difficult for extended families to take in relatives from troubled homes. Squadrons of social workers and therapists have undermined the ethic of self-reliance and tough love that once gave hillbillies the grit to see through hard times. …
