Dying of Whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is killing America's heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl is my last hope. I'm hoping that this is the last book I read that tries to explain Trump.
Started: 4/21/2019
Completed: 5/17/2019
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: My Wife
Words for which I sought help:
metonymy -- the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant (e.g. suit for business executive)
Review:
I think that this meticulously researched book will be the last one I need to read to understand Trump and Trumpism. First, I truly have no stomach for reading more of the vile opinions of people who are drawn to a MAGA mentality. It is truly stomach churning for me. Second, this book carefully details the reasonable approach that these people are making. If I had their beliefs, I could imagine myself making their choices. I thought it was ignorance. It is not. These MAGA supporters are making a selfish decision--to protect their theory of what is right over their own life. That is a pretty principled stand and if the principles behind it weren't so racist, misogynistic, and truly selfish, I would find the stand admirable.
"Were it truly a post-racial America, cost concerns might have raised certain existential questions about citizenship and responsibility: What is life worth? What is our responsibility to each other? How can we balance individual behaviors and public wealth? But in the real world, cost generated in a feedback loop that we recorded in some of our focus groups, where white Tennesseans used "cost" as a thinly veiled way to talk about race. Or as the politician, Christian minister, and political commentator Mike Huckabee put it: 'We have a health care system that, if you're on Medicaid, you have unlimited access to health care, at unlimited levels, at no cost. No wonder it's running away.'
"Yet the graphs suggest that expanded marketplace options yield competition rather than price-gouging and that investing in the health of everyone ultimately lowers a variety of costs for...everyone."
This book ties racial policies to policies that affect health care, guns, and schools. Literally, this book shows that the GOP policies hurt the very people who espouse them. Those people do not care as long as it hurts the people of color more or at least as much. How foul. It is racism. Even as the perpetrators cry it is not, they lie freely to themselves and anyone who will listen. They don't, it would seem, even recognize the racism when they spell it out themselves.
One person interviewed by the author, talked about her relatives, "[They] are gonna support Trump no matter what he does. It's not all that much about his policies or anything. They just feel like, as white men in America, their voice wasn't being heard. Trump gave them their voice back." There is so much to unpack in that set of sentences, but it encapsulates the whole sense from the book. MAGA is white nationalism.
"...Thomas Jefferson famously wrote...'the care of human life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.' Somewhere along the road from then to now, a politics that spreads guns, blocks health care, and defunds schools seems to have forgotten Jefferson's basic principle." I don't think it was "somewhere" along the road, I think it was, frankly, the road itself as laid out by racists, bigots, and misogynists who protected their own.
Thanks to this book, I think I understand Trumpism. Though it was clearly not the author's intent, I think it is time to take a hard line. It is time to declare that the lies, greediness, and deceit must stop.
I think that this meticulously researched book will be the last one I need to read to understand Trump and Trumpism. First, I truly have no stomach for reading more of the vile opinions of people who are drawn to a MAGA mentality. It is truly stomach churning for me. Second, this book carefully details the reasonable approach that these people are making. If I had their beliefs, I could imagine myself making their choices. I thought it was ignorance. It is not. These MAGA supporters are making a selfish decision--to protect their theory of what is right over their own life. That is a pretty principled stand and if the principles behind it weren't so racist, misogynistic, and truly selfish, I would find the stand admirable.
"Were it truly a post-racial America, cost concerns might have raised certain existential questions about citizenship and responsibility: What is life worth? What is our responsibility to each other? How can we balance individual behaviors and public wealth? But in the real world, cost generated in a feedback loop that we recorded in some of our focus groups, where white Tennesseans used "cost" as a thinly veiled way to talk about race. Or as the politician, Christian minister, and political commentator Mike Huckabee put it: 'We have a health care system that, if you're on Medicaid, you have unlimited access to health care, at unlimited levels, at no cost. No wonder it's running away.'
"Yet the graphs suggest that expanded marketplace options yield competition rather than price-gouging and that investing in the health of everyone ultimately lowers a variety of costs for...everyone."
This book ties racial policies to policies that affect health care, guns, and schools. Literally, this book shows that the GOP policies hurt the very people who espouse them. Those people do not care as long as it hurts the people of color more or at least as much. How foul. It is racism. Even as the perpetrators cry it is not, they lie freely to themselves and anyone who will listen. They don't, it would seem, even recognize the racism when they spell it out themselves.
One person interviewed by the author, talked about her relatives, "[They] are gonna support Trump no matter what he does. It's not all that much about his policies or anything. They just feel like, as white men in America, their voice wasn't being heard. Trump gave them their voice back." There is so much to unpack in that set of sentences, but it encapsulates the whole sense from the book. MAGA is white nationalism.
"...Thomas Jefferson famously wrote...'the care of human life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.' Somewhere along the road from then to now, a politics that spreads guns, blocks health care, and defunds schools seems to have forgotten Jefferson's basic principle." I don't think it was "somewhere" along the road, I think it was, frankly, the road itself as laid out by racists, bigots, and misogynists who protected their own.
Thanks to this book, I think I understand Trumpism. Though it was clearly not the author's intent, I think it is time to take a hard line. It is time to declare that the lies, greediness, and deceit must stop.
