In the Ghetto
By: Michael M. Rosen
Tags: Society, Culture, Poverty, Economics, Books

“Nothing happened to them,” runs Kevin D. Williamson’s refrain in Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America,” a region stretching from Northern Mississippi to Upstate New York whose struggling residents, unsympathetically but honestly limned by the longtime National Review writer, have become arguably the most scrutinized demographic in contemporary America.

Part Matt Labash-style gonzo travelogue, part Jacob Riis-mannered socioeconomic expose, part J. D. Vance-inspired tearful elegy, and part Ross Douthatian lament of decadence, Big White Ghetto covers the social, cultural, medical, and economic ailments distressing the American white working class. Appropriately enough, the peripatetic Williamson, NR’s “roving correspondent,” traverses the country to observe, diagnose, and treat these illnesses, which he accomplishes in his characteristically devastating fashion. The common causes: drugs, booze, dice, and smut — the cornerstones of American vice.

A common thread runs through this acerbic, illuminating collection of essays. All capable members of the white working class inhabiting these dying (if not already dead) towns, Williamson argues, need to quit their self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-destructive behavior and take This One Surprising Step That Changes Everything: relocate.

But while this advice should resonate among many, it’s not likely to appeal to a good chunk of the so-called left-behinds.

“Like its black urban counterparts,” Williamson contends, “the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades.”

Williamson’s depiction of this blighted region is bleak indeed. “All across the Big White Ghetto,” he notes, “‘WE ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS’ is the new E pluribus unum.” Plentiful opioids (prescription or otherwise), ubiquitous beer, and shuttered factories have crippled the region for decades. “It’s a classic economic death spiral,” he concludes. “The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs.” This death spiral can lead to white supremacy, flat eartherism, QAnon, and other dysfunctional philosophies that Williamson encounters and exposes during his travels.

Occupying the lowest-lying zone of the Big White Ghetto are the homeless, who live squalid existences on the outskirts of many (mostly liberal) cities in the American West and Southwest in what Williamson aptly characterizes as a “refugee camp for a particularly American kind of refugee.” The residents of these camps — “Americans who cannot or simply will not deal with the complexities and administrative burdens of modern life” — subsist on what ostensibly passes for compassion from rich, white progressives who disdain actually rehabilitating and integrating the refugees into civic life, preferring instead to isolate them indefinitely in camps.

Williamson also forays into non-white ghettos, such as the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago and elsewhere in that battle-torn city, some 80 percent of whose homicides — more than 750 in 2016, easily the most of any American city — are gang-related. He visits Philadelphia, “a combination of failed civic institutions, a deeply embedded racial paranoia that undermines law enforcement, and a local culture that shrugs at the urban chaos this produces.”

But Williamson trains his most powerful rhetorical weapons on the notion that the white working class has anyone or anything to blame but itself. Far from perceiving themselves as victims of malign globalist or elitist forces that have conspired against them, or complaining about factories that closed a half-century ago, residents of the Big White Ghetto should take responsibility for their lives and get the hell out of Dodge.

Here, Williamson has little patience for the likes of Michael Brendan Dougherty, his National Review colleague, who writes movingly and nostalgically about the fate of fading Rust Belt working-class towns like the upstate New York burg of Garbutt. Reviving their vigorous 2016 debate in the pages of NR and The Week, Williamson contends that “to invoke Burkean conservatism in the service of preserving a community that was exnihilated into existence around a single commodity and lasted barely a century is to indulge absurd sentimentality. Yes, young men of Garbutt — get off your asses and go find a job.”

For his part, Dougherty mocks this suggestion: “If the conservative movement has any advice,” he wrote, “it’s to move out of Garbutt and maybe ‘learn computers.’” Williamson is equally harsh in his rejoinder: “The truth about these dying communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. … If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.”

This guidance makes a good deal of sense and likely represents the only way forward for those in the Big White Ghetto who truly wish to thrive in contemporary America. But it’s not suitable for everyone, and it’s distinctly possible that Williamson has overlearned the lessons of his own remarkable life.

As he succinctly and candidly puts it, “I was born to a girl in her early teens whom I have not met, a trimester before Roe v. Wade.” He recounts a horrifying, deeply personal childhood story of domestic abuse, which he’s partially told elsewhere, that casts his upbringing in Lubbock, Texas in stark relief: his mother and stepfather(s) fall firmly into the category of self-absorbed “victims” incapable of asserting agency over their actions, and but for the grace of God, Williamson himself could easily have succumbed to their sense of helplessness.

But how widely applicable are these lessons? After all, most troubled youths aching to escape from the Lubbocks and Garbutts of the world lack Williamson’s prodigious gifts. Vanishingly few are talented enough to become successful journalists, bankers, or advertising executives. Instead, for many, the best-case scenario likely involves vocational training and middle-management employment in a stable company. More likely outcomes involve manual labor.

But quite apart from nostalgia, are those prospects, superior as they seem to a dead-end career in a dying town, sufficiently appealing to inspire them to overcome decades of inertia and relocate? Not for everyone, surely.

Of course, Williamson is no social scientist, and his polemical treatment of these challenges isn’t surprising, given the journalistic and impressionistic, rather than academic, nature of Big White Ghetto, which also suffers from the typical maladies afflicting compendia of previous columns, such as datedness (like the Philadelphia chapter on crime, which dates to more than 12 years ago) and an occasional lack of coherence (like the Portland chapter on Antifa, whose themes don’t quite connect to the rest of the book).

But Williamson remains one of the great magazine writers of our time — biting, insightful, assured, and fluid — and his latest book furnishes powerful, persuasive, and contrarian (though somewhat incomplete) guidance on a burning issue we cannot afford to ignore.