Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Too Stupid to Know You’re Stupid

Joe Bageant returned to his boyhood home in rural Virginia after 25 years to find it ravaged by unemployment, poor health, alcoholism, drug addiction and fundamentalist religion. He traces all this to bad politics. The town is controlled by a mafia of local worthies who have run it into the ground in their own interests. State government collaborates in this destruction through anti-union and other neoconservative legislation. Nationally, the Democratic Party has long ago abandoned the working-class interests of the locals; and Republicans have exploited the political vacuum mercilessly by providing a stream of meaningless slogans and misinformation.

Essentially, Bageant believes that everything that could possibly go wrong with democracy has done so in Winchester, Virginia. He also believes that Winchester is a synecdoche for the entire United States, at least that part of the country that lies between the cities and what hasn’t yet been suburbanised. He wants the urban ‘liberals’ who have chosen to throw towns like Winchester under the bus of globalisation, meritocracy and social change to know that they’re not taking it anymore. They might not know what they want, but they know it isn’t the current state of affairs. And they’ll do just about anything to get even.

As an explanation and prediction of the rise of someone like Donald Trump, Bageant’s book is essential reading. At least a decade before Trump’s political appearance, their economically and intellectually impoverished nihilism was just waiting for his arrival. Today, Trump represents nothing positive to them... except themselves. Hence their intense loyalty to a man who in fact despises them. Bageant makes a compelling case for the systematic and complete corruption of democracy to which Trump is a cogent response not a cause. The folk of the Winchesters throughout the United States want revenge on the entire system; they wouldn’t mind at all if it were destroyed.

However, as a suggestion for what to do about the situation, the book is less than enlightening. Bageant sees education as the solution to the political problem - in the first instance the education of the urbanites who don’t have a clue about the dire condition of their neighbours; and then of the natives of places like Winchester who are unaware of the forces that conspire to oppress them. Unfortunately, education is and always has been a political issue. If democratic politics is corrupt, education is the first casualty, not the solution.

In any case, Bageant doesn’t really help his cause much by his description of what there is in Winchester to educate. He would like the rest of us to have sympathetic feelings for fellow humans who have fallen on hard times. They may have red necks but they also have hearts of gold and deserve a break. Maybe so. But their born-in-the-blood racism, obdurate resistance to comprehending their own interests, and profound ignorance of themselves as well as the world around them aren’t traits likely to ingratiate them to the folk that might help their plight.

Postscript 15Oct20: Things have got considerably worse since Bageant wrote about the place: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireS...

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