9 - The Fraying Fabric of Community

Summary

This chapter explores the rapid “coming apart” of white working-class communities across the American South as the New Age of Inequality (post-1980) settled in. As the economic doldrums took hold across swaths of the American South and its diaspora during the decades since 1980, social dysfunction emerged with a vengeance in white working-class communities, a phenomenon that captured national attention through J. D. Vance’s depiction in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Older industrial cites suffered and declined as the economy deindustrialized. The many challenges the faltering economy presented to white southern workers and their communities stimulated a visceral response from disaffected workers, a response manifest in angry efforts to reclaim white privilege and the aggressive championing of “traditional” values, and ultimately an unprecedented level of death and despair. The complex story of disruptive economic forces, lingering racial resentments, and fierce atavistic loyalties led white southern workers to choose clinging to cultural values over building alliances that might redress their economic grievances.