Nobody Explains America Better Than George Packer | Post 18 | Ohio

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Across the USA

6 min readNov 4, 2016

I suspect I’ve been traveling through Trump country. I’m halfway across Ohio, plotting a route at its waist belt, and with each passing gutted town and rough barn I hear the words of journalist George Packer, who, on trips to Appalachia and the Rust Belt, “sometimes felt that I’d travelled farther from New York than if I’d gone to West Africa or the Middle East.”

Online, Packer’s recent New Yorker piece is titled “Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt,” but the print version’s headline is better: “The Unconnected.” From political to personal angles, Packer surveys how “abandonment” of the “white working class” is at the heart of the Trump (and Clinton) mess, how, for the W.W.C., “institutions of a healthy democracy — government, corporation, school, bank, union, church, civic group, media organization — feel remote and false, geared for the benefit of those who run them. And no institution is guiltier of this abandonment than the political parties.”

Packer says that “Trump’s core voters are revealed by poll after poll to be members of the W.W.C.,” and while I, on a virtual trip, cannot be sure W.W.C. Trump supporters live behind the doors I see, it’s stretches like this that make me think I’m in the America Packer talks about and that Trump speaks to:

And here’s the first driveway after that field:

From the West Virginia border to the rural parts north of Columbus, through 96 percent white counties, Street View gives me the sense I’m clicking through the “heartland towns that abandoned the Democrats in the eighties to bask in Ronald Reagan’s morning sunlight; the communities that Sarah Palin. . . called ‘the best of America . . . the real America.’” “Those places,” says Packer, “were hollowing out, and politicians didn’t seem to notice.”

In his article, Packer provides historical political analysis, tracing Democratic loss of working class white voters back to the party’s 1968–1972 upheavals (Chicago convention, George McGovern), which began moving the party from one of unions to one of educated professionals. He notes how, quietly, “culturally, the Republican Party was getting closer to the working class.” On the individual level, Packer gives us Mark Frisbie, the down-and-out owner of a dying welding shop in rural Florida who can’t understand his “Arab or Indian” doctor. “Immigrants, politicians, banks, criminals, the economy, medical bills,” writes Packer, “You heard Frisbie’s complaints all over the country, especially in small towns and rural areas.”

Places like this?

So who is Mark Frisbie voting for? “Do they have that line for ‘None of the above?’”

When Packer talks with Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary tells him Democrats are now “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity” while Republicans splice “social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people.” Explains Packer: “These alignments left neither party in synch with Americans like Mark Frisbie.” And Summers: “All these regular people who thought they are kind of the soul of the country — they feel like there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them.”

Packer says Trump has made the W.W.C. “a self-conscious identity group. They’re one among many factions in the country today — their mutual suspicions flaring, the boundaries between them hardening.” But, Packer asserts, a “disaster on this scale belongs to no single set of Americans, and it will play out long after the November election, regardless of the outcome. Trump represents the whole country’s failure.”

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has been asking each of his readers to think of something they can do — beyond voting — to ensure Donald Trump doesn’t win the presidency. (See, e.g., “How You Can Fight Donald Trump Right Now.”) Another, constructive appeal would be to ask each American to think of something they can do to understand our “disaster” and “the whole country’s failure.” I submit you can do worse than take a drive through Trump country via Street View — with George Packer as your soundtrack. (Here he is on NPR.)

Doing so is useful for me. Coastal and heavily educated, I am one of Packer’s “informed, sophisticated Americans [who] failed to see Donald Trump coming. . . too reasonable to fathom his fury-driven campaign.” I am “at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural education.” People like me are “buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods. . . isolat[ing ourselves] from contamination by the packaged food sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop there. The people who buy food at Kmart know it.”

Street View, as removed and virtual as it may be, at least enables Americans to witness where we all live. And maybe we’ll encounter surprises. The sub-head to Packer’s article poses a question: “The Democrats lost the white working class. The Republicans exploited it. Can Clinton win it back?” Very soon after I encountered that field of anti-Obama signage, I pulled up to the Drexel J. Thrash Training Center.

What kind of training could possibly be going on in Knox County, a red plot that went nearly 2 to 1 for Romney in 2012? In short, it’s a facility for construction workers, offering training in everything from advanced asphalt to horizontal boring. But its courses are only open to members of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. Here’s a screen-grab of LiUNA’s website: