Award winning author and correspondent Chris Hedges talks about the origins of the ongoing media campaign against the “white working class”

Yesterday, Racket published an interview with Les Leopold, along with a review of his new book, “Wall Street’s War on Workers.” Leopold’s book is structured as labor’s sober answer to yuppie sneer-fests like White Rural Rage, but I thought another key angle to the subject was already captured by an earlier book: America: The Farewell Tour by

. Chris was generous enough to take a call on the subject, and our discussion is posted below.

City journalists now barely visit the rest of America, but when they do, they’re no longer conscious of the difference between visiting a place and living there. If you live somewhere long enough to see the former “downtown” disappear and be replaced by a Wal-Mart or Costco two miles away, or watch the plant that was the county’s main employer shutter, rust, and grow over with weeds, or if you can remember when the pill-popping streetwalker who works casinos in Biloxi on weekends was your science teacher or chair of the PTA, you’ll feel different emotions than someone merely told those facts.

I thought of America: The Farewell Tour when I read White Rural Rage because Hedges did what authors Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller did not: sit in diners with people like Christine Pagano after their AA meetings and just listen. Pagano went from being a new mom working in a diner and getting a cosmetology certificate to becoming hooked first on Oxy, then heroin, then moving to prostitution, then robbing johns with her boyfriend, being raped at least twenty times (including by cops), and finally ending up as, in her words, “no longer anything”:

She sent her son to live with her mother, a teacher. She moved in for a while with Baby in Jersey City. She eventually became homeless, sleeping in an abandoned flower shop. Her drug use soared. She would be awake for six or seven days at a time. She had as many as twenty clients a day…

Pagano’s story obviously isn’t typical, but isn’t atypical, either. You can go almost anywhere in America and find serious social wreckage. What downstream effect that might have on partisan political choices is hard to compute, but that’s not the first or even the third or fourth question I’d think to ask people in certain places, be they inner city projects or dead factory towns. Ideally you’d want to do a lot of listening before you ask anything at all, which is what Chris did. I asked him about the impact of these caricatures of the “white working class,” and he didn’t hold back:

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