America’s Classes of Despair

Back in March 1965, during the heart of the civil rights movement, a white paper entitled The Negro Family, a Case for National Action from the Office of Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, projected the long term impact for those in the African-American community facing dire poverty, inferior educational opportunities, family instability, lack of access to even basic medical care and the concomitant escape of many into common drug use and criminal activity. The tone of the paper stressed the deeply rooted notion of inequality that permeated almost every aspect of that African American demographic. 

The document stressed an embodiment of a potentially permanent underclass, one without hope locked into its substandard demographic niche by a society designed to foster middle class white America without much concern for everybody else. The projections and warnings in that treatise were uncannily prescient. But as wrong as this social reality is and always will be, those poverty-stricken African American communities learned to live under those conditions… uncomfortably but generally accepting. We still see racism all around us, the fostering of white supremacy even by an entire political party led by a president catering to those in his constituency who hide their racism under words like “nationalism” or the return-to-yesteryear “Make America Great Again,” an unequivocal reference to the dog-whistle racist slogan from almost a century ago.

Welcome to 2019 where a radically changing world seems to be creating yet another permanent underclass: undereducated white workers struggling in a globalized economy with accelerating automation fueled by exploding applications of artificial intelligence. They live in our Rust Belt or in coal mining regions typified by Western Pennsylvanian and West Virginia or pockets of unskilled or semi-skilled workers in states like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. In terms of hard numbers, these Americans are being crushed in a modern world.

Life expectancy is dropping, suicide rates soaring, addiction rates skyrocketing, blue-collar jobs vaporizing, upward mobility gone, medical costs unaffordable, no quality public education, and hope has left the building. This is the core of Donald Trump’s former working-class constituency, an unmovable anchor in his unwavering base. And the people most negatively impacted by his policies aimed at enhancing those at the top of the economic ladder. Slammed by attacks on the Affordable Care Act, denigrated by the assault on food stamps and targeted for pain from the overall GOP strategy to cut taxes, pare social programs to the bone and eliminate financial and consumer protections from those who need them most. 

Welcome to America’s newest entrees to the permanent lower class: under-educated working-class whites. Enter the United States Congress, specifically, the Joint Committee on Economics, chaired by Arizona Republican Senator, Mike Lee. Specifically, their report – Long Term Trends in Deaths and Despair (September 5^th) – that examines the net effect of life itself in these pockets of marginalized traditionalists, working class Americans used to high pay in a post WWII economy, now pushed off as of little value in a modern world. They’re not used to living in this alternative economic universe. Poverty is nothing they understand. Betrayal. A massive change from prior generations who took pride in semi-skilled labor that is no longer valued. For many, the big payoff is simply death. The drugs proliferating to enable escape from this reality have never been so cheap… or so deadly.

The Congressional report, rife with supporting research and confirmatory statistics, presents a dismal picture of this segment of Americana. “Mortality from deaths of despair far surpasses anything seen in America since the dawn of the 20^th century. (The trend for middle-aged whites reveals a more dramatic rise but only goes back continuously to 1959.) The recent increase has primarily been driven by an unprecedented epidemic of drug overdoses, but even excluding those deaths, the combined mortality rate from suicides and alcohol-related deaths is higher than at any point in more than 100 years. Suicides have not been so common since 1938, and one has to go back to the 1910s to find mortality from alcohol-related deaths as high as today’s.

”At the same time, a long-term perspective reveals that while drug-related deaths have been rising since the late 1950s, the current increase in suicide and alcohol-related deaths began only around 2000, as the opioid crisis ramped up. Suicide and alcohol-related mortality trends track each other well over the past 45 years, and after accounting for the changing age distribution of the US, combined deaths from the two causes were as common in the mid-1970s as today.

“Self-reported unhappiness probably has been on the rise since around 1990 (though not all sources agree). That predates the increase in deaths of ‘despair’ by a decade. Moreover, unhappiness likely fell over the 25 years preceding 1990, while deaths of despair rose and then plateaued. And one data source suggests stable levels of unhappiness over the long run.

“Rising unhappiness may have increased the demand for ways to numb or end despair, such that the cumulative effects show up years later in the form of higher death rates. But the proliferation of a uniquely addictive and deadly class of drugs has meant that the supply of despair relief has become more prevalent and more lethal, which would have increased mortality even absent an increase in despair. Given the lack of correspondence between trends in economic and social indicators, unhappiness, loneliness, and deaths of ‘despair,’ it may be more productive for policymakers to focus on the overdose epidemic than on despair per se.” 

Lay a map of blue-collar unemployment and under-employment over a parallel map of opioid addiction or suicide deaths and see the startling overlap. But what really brings this home is the projection that, unless this pattern is broken and broken soon, this segment of America will slide into permanence as America’s newest member to an escape-proof underclass. For liberals who look upon Trump’s base with “deplorable” disdain, remember, when they first cried for help… you simply ignored them.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and peeling back the labels reveals the pain… and the harsh reality when we ignored their cries.