Kansas Journalist on How the Right Co-opted White Rural America

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, in the United States, Storm Helene has sown destruction in the rural Midwest, across poverty struck Appalachia, life-threatening flooding leaving residents in limbo. White working-class regions like these have been stereotypically attached to the Republican MAGA movement. But our next guest says the picture is far more complex. Author Sarah Smarsh tells Michel Martin about her latest book, “Bone of the Bone.”

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Sarah Smarsh, thank you so much for joining us once again.

SARAH SMARSH, AUTHOR, “BONE OF THE BONE”: Thanks for having me back, Michel.

MARTIN: We last talked with you about your memoir, “Heartland,” and now, you’re back with a collection of essays, things that you’ve written about over the course of 10 years. Is there a through line? Is there a connecting tissue among those two?

SMARSH: Well, for sure they’re of a piece. And while this new collection, “Bone of the Bone,” involves the last essayist and journalist, I actually, for more like 20 years, have been writing about, indeed, the common theme between “Heartland” and this new book, which is socioeconomic class, which, to my mind, remains an under discussed and maybe poorly articulated aspect of the American experience. So, I’ve been talking about that, writing about that for a long time, has a lot to do with where I come from, and this collection is a different form but very much the same message.

MARTIN: As you pointed out, we don’t tend to talk about class in this country in the way that people in other countries do. So, do you remember when you first figured out that there was this thing about class and that it did affect your life?

SMARSH: I do. So, growing up, my fifth-generation wheat farm in Kansas, where I was raised, was technically below the poverty line, as we say. So, indeed, we were poor by federal measures. I never would have used that word to describe myself because we had enough to eat and we had a roof over our head. There’s a lot of work that went into keeping those two things true and a lot of precarity about those situations. But nonetheless, you know, I wouldn’t have considered myself, quote/unquote, “poor.” When I left the farm to become a first-generation college student, even at a state university I found that, you know, I was rubbing elbows with kids who they got a car for high school graduation from their parents or, you know, their parents sent them checks and were paying their way. I couldn’t find a word for it. And not only that, but while I did get academic scholarships and I, you know, got a Pell Grant because of our income and all that, nonetheless, there — my identity itself was often presumed to be economic privilege along with the racial privilege. One of those certainly true and the other one was not so much. So, I found that the language was lacking.

MARTIN: One of the things that I always really noticed about this book that I maybe — I don’t know that I really saw as much in “Heartland,” but I feel like I definitely see it, and this is the rage. There’s a lot of anger at being ignored. There’s a lot of anger at being kind of misrepresented. Do you feel that — you think that’s true?

SMARSH: Well, I think it’s true, certainly. I would like to think and hope that — because for me, this would be a mark of good writing that there’s a controlled fury about it, if you will. I’ve already done the thinking through and processing of what I believe to be true that I’m then conveying with, as you say, sort of like the rage or the anger and the fire that was — that relates to my early life experiences and the — today, you know, the poverty and disadvantages that my loved ones and family face still. I do think that the earlier pieces, the book is structured chronologically from 2013 to present. And I think that the — in the earlier pieces there’s more of that emotional component specifically.

MARTIN: One of the things that you write about is the difficulty of writing about the so-called white working class and just how hard it is to have gotten these pieces published and seen, you know, and out there. And I wonder — and, you know, you have a lot of — you know, you speculate about a lot of the reasons why that might be. But I do wonder whether the kind of the rise of Donald Trump as a national figure. Are more people interested in your work because of it or does it cut in another way, in a way, kind of reinforcing some of the things that make you crazy?

SMARSH: Right. Yes. Yes, I do. I think it cuts in all sorts of ways. For sure class and specifically the white working class, the white working poor is now, you know, a kind of fixture in headlines as a concept or a demographic or a term, and it is specifically because that political movement and that political figure has artfully and successfully leveraged, you know, political tools of manipulation, in my view, to, you know, garner a shift to the right among that group in terms of voting habits. There is, I believe, a kind of convenient obsession with that particular group in our national discourse that diverts attention away from the people I’m really mad at, which is people who have immense power, people who are – – you know, you might call them the puppet masters of our political moment, you might call them mediocre people who have billions of dollars and a little moral compass, whether it’s corporations or the factions behind dark money or — you know, I’m interested in, yes, we absolutely should be talking about that very dangerous political movement that is MAGA and how it came to be and why it is. The — what I’m interested in talking about, where my anger is, is upward, toward the top, the very top, the top of the pot, top. At a moment of historic wealth inequality that hurts everyone, not just those white working-class people, and of course, the working — there’s another issue is that the working class, of course, is itself racially diverse and diverse in every way. So, it has brought that — the term to the fore in ways that it was missing from our discussion previously, but in ways that I believe are problematic and misleading.

MARTIN: So, let’s talk about that. I was struck by one of the essays, it’s called — that you wrote for The New York Times, it’s called “Liberal Blind Spots are Hiding the Truth.” So, why don’t you pick up from there and just read a little bit from that essay, if you would.

SMARSH: Sure. Most struggling whites I know live lives of quiet desperation, feeling angry at their white bosses, not at their co-workers or neighbors of color. My dad’s previous three bosses were all white men he loathed for abuses of privilege and people, including himself. It is unfair power that my dad despises. The last rant I heard him on was not about race or immigration, but about the recent royal wedding, this piece from 2018, the spectacle of which made him sick. What’s so special about the royals? He told me over the phone from a cheap motel after working construction hundreds of miles from home. But they’ll get the best health care, the best education, the best food. Meanwhile, I’m in Marion, Arkansas. All I want is some chickens and a garden and a place to go fishing once in a while. What my father seeks is not a return to times that were worse for women and people of color, but progress toward a society in which everyone can get by, including his white college educated son who graduated into the Great Recession and for 10 years sold his own plasma for gas money.

MARTIN: Yes, and you go on to point out just how — I don’t know what word to use, integrated, you know, diverse, your dad’s circle is. I mean, he works with people from all different backgrounds. But how then do you explain, you know, the appeal of somebody like Trump? I mean, somebody who’s rich, somebody whose dad was rich. How do you explain the appeal?

SMARSH: It’s hard to do it because, you know, as that passage bears witness to, you know, my family and my immediate community have not — we don’t get it either. You know, there was an idea about 20 years ago, a book came out called “What’s the Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Frank. That hot button cultural or social issues had been leveraged or seized by the far- right or, you know, conservative movements to convince some people to, quote/unquote, “vote against their own best interests in economic terms,” and that might be abortion or other kind of cultural and social topics. It never quite sat well with me, and the notion seems to suggest that people are stupid. I know they ain’t stupid. I think it’s more like this, if we’re talking about a place and the people who have been on the losing end, in a lot of ways, simultaneous with in the case of white voters, racial privilege, I would say that the Democratic Party, for a few decades, didn’t have much of a ground game, if you will, in those places. And there’s the Electoral College results in strategic use of resources, where are we going to invest and where are we not? And, you know, I’m in my mid-40s and I’ve never experienced a Democrat knocking on my door during a campaign season. So, that’s one. And then, at that precise moment, let’s say during my ’80s childhood, the Reagan era or even into the ’90s, during my adolescence, all of a sudden, I’m hearing on radio stations, on those long drives down country highways, Rush Limbaugh or conservative talk radio, then following from that was Fox News and now, of course, our social media era, there are messages that have co-opted the terms and the symbols of that place to somehow suggest that a rural identity means these particular political ideas or that those things are synonymous. That was — that’s intentional. It’s been successful. If nobody’s looking at you, it’s — it feels like an invalidation. It feels like you’re unseen. It feels like maybe you’re growing the food or extracting the resources that are fueling other people’s lives who are looking down on you while you’re doing that work and nobody’s talking to you. And then, if somebody shows up and talks to you and looks right at you, even if it’s a bunch of lies and just, you know, to my mind, a horrifying message, we are — politics is an emotional business. It’s not necessarily so rational as it is felt. And I think that’s true across party lines in a lot of ways.

MARTIN: Is anything getting better when it comes to the things that have made you crazy all these years?

SMARSH: I think so. I really think that even though, you know, I just got done telling you all the ways I think we don’t talk about class necessarily productively, at least we’re talking about it, kind of, ish. And I would say that, you know, that’s an improvement over the big void that I sensed as that first-generation college student in 1998 going like, I don’t even have a word for what’s going on here, but there’s something. So, I believe we have begun that conversation and we’re new at it. We’re early. We need a — just a diverse spate of people and experiences and professions to figure out how to do it, to improve the language. But yes, I think we’re — we’ve begun the journey and that is heartening to me.

MARTIN: You’ve certainly done your part with your work. Some people might argue, so has J. D. Vance. He came to fame because of his own memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which then was made into a movie. And now, he’s, you know, become, you know, an important public figure, candidate for the vice presidency. Whether he wins that job or not, he’s in the United States Senate, right? I’m just curious about what you make of him.

SMARSH: Right. When you asked about if the Trump era, if you will, had sort of been a boon for me professionally, in terms of like, are now, are people more interested in what you have to say sort of thing, actually, I turned down a lot of invitations right around that moment with that the “Hillbilly Elegy” was — had come out, to be a sort of Trump whisperer, if you will. Because the — it wasn’t my message. It wasn’t right to me. Let alone I didn’t know how to explain it myself. And so, I do think that, you know, pretty clearly, he kind of found a groove in that sense and then wrote it into politics, with a capital P, for — as his own professional shift. That book always had a lot of red flags in it for me.

MARTIN: Because why?

SMARSH: Yes. So, I don’t begrudge anybody, even if I don’t agree with their politics, he’s telling his story about where he came from. And I was like, you know, cheering for anybody that they beat the odds to have their story told. That said, it did strike me as kind of a conservative polemic, particularly toward the end of the book. What felt to me like a lot of finger wagging at the very place that he comes from and the people that he comes from, penning their, you know, poor outcomes or negative life circumstances on their own decisions with some sort of moral framework relating to character, as someone who I’ve never — I’ve always rejected the narrative about getting out, so to speak. You know, I have been very fortunate to — in my career. But I live in rural Kansas today and I went back with an intention to write about and document, that space and experience not in the rearview mirror, and it seemed to me like he was writing a story about the pain and that’s real about where he came from, but also, with a very specific framework about you get what you deserve kind of felt like what was an undercurrent or an underpinning, and I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but it’s how it struck me. And that does kind of correlate more with the conservative politics, in my view. So, I’m not all that surprised that he went into — that he sought elected office and that he’s now, you know, kind of exemplar of that kind of conservative, I don’t want to say appropriation of, but claiming of certain symbols as though country or blue jeans or cowboy boots means a certain set of beliefs. I know firsthand that that’s not true, even on my own dirt road.

MARTIN: Well, so before we let you go, who are you hoping will find your book?

SMARSH: You know, it’s always lovely if someone says — and you might appreciate this as a professional communicator, if someone says, I read this and now, my eyes are open to this thing that I didn’t know before. Boy, does that make my heart sing. But the thing that really is just the most moving and gratifying for me is if it’s someone for whom — it’s not that they didn’t know about this thing now they know, it’s that they always knew this thing, and nobody said it for them, and now, they feel seen in some way for having read it. You know, there’s kind of an old writing adage, like, write the thing that you wish existed, or that you would like to read yourself. And “Heartland” and then this collection, “Bone of the Bone,” these are messages and ideas that that I didn’t access, weren’t available to me as a kid in a struggling rural space. And so, if now someone in that space feels seen, that would be my greatest hope.

MARTIN: Sarah Smarsh, thank you so much for talking with us.

SMARSH: Thanks, Michelle. Always a pleasure.