Michael Kruse’s article is bad journalism,
factually and spiritually, but it is simply the latest and sloppiest entry in a
growing genre: the new American Gothic.
In a
recent article for Politico Magazine, Michael
Kruse takes readers on a ghastly tour of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, past the
neighborhoods marked “X” for demolition, to the house where a baby starved to
death, and onward into the living room of a woman whose son overdosed last
year. The place emerges as a gray hellscape soaked in fentanyl and the fumes of
closed mines, where hollow-eyed retirees shuffle past shuttered diners in a
trance of bitter grief.
The retort from Johnstown’s
city leaders is crisp, devastating, and will sadly never have
the readership of Kruse’s original narrative. “Simply put,” they write,
“Johnstown was just the convenient backdrop Politico needed
to validate its storyline.”
In portraying this otherwise innocuous steel town as a kind of
real-life version of the horror-genre video game “Silent Hill,” Kruse means to
answer the oft-pondered question, “Who on earth still supports President
Trump?” Unspeakably wretched white people, is his general answer.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
Or Silent Hill?
Kruse’s article is bad journalism, factually and spiritually, but
it is simply the latest and sloppiest entry in a growing genre: the new
American Gothic. The scene is buzzing with activity. Mark Zuckerberg has just
returned from Trump’s America and he cannot hide his tears. J.D. Vance is
serenading the lecture circuit with his hillbilly elegy.
Charles
Murray and Robert Putnam have delivered door-stoppers on the unravelling
American fabric, and The Economist recently revisited its cheery 2012
meditation, “The sadness of Scranton,”
with an essay on globalization’s losers that begins, “Even before the disaster,
Scranton had been having a poor century.”
Separately, these are all outstanding analyses by serious people,
and there are many other fine writings in this vein. But taken in their
totality, one could be forgiven for thinking that (1) most of America is
hurtling towards sodden annihilation, with northeast Pennsylvania at the helm,
or (2) that writing an “unsparing” (read: brutal) profile of an American town
or city is a rite of passage for participation in the public sphere. At the
very least, one would conclude that the news-reading public has an insatiable
appetite for images of wet mobile homes and disused barns.
These Reports Are
Greatly Exaggerated
Singular as these times we live in may be, it is worth pausing to
ask why these gloomy narratives are having such a moment in the sun. A thirst
to know the people who elected Trump president is not a sufficient answer. Love
or despise Trump, it simply is not true that the people who voted for him are
noticeably worse off than the average Joe.
If the
media’s interest was to discover “Trump’s America,” they would leave poor
Pennsylvania alone, and visit the suburbs of Phoenix, the county where
Trump scored the most votes in
2016. Or the fourth estate might visit Staten Island, the kind of financially
stable enclave where Trump did quite well. Or they
could profile white college graduates, who voted for Trump over Clinton by
a 4 percent margin.
Eye-watering poverty is there for those who seek it, from West
Baltimore to suburban El Paso to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge, but Trumpland as a
whole is relatively affluent. Why does the media focus on its destitute fringe?
In his notorious essay “The
Father Führer” for National Review last year, Kevin Williamson reveals
his hand: “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities [where
Trump’s base lives] is that they deserve to die… The white American underclass
is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and
used heroin needles.”
While the
majority of Trump’s 63 million voters do not actually belong to an “underclass”
and most probably came to him for a complex patchwork of reasons (such as
the 29 percent of Latino voters who
chose Trump), it serves a purpose for these authors to depict the whole lot as
a “basket of deplorables.”
The new American Gothic is indeed grisly. Its authors, consciously
or unconsciously, hate what Trump stands for to such a degree that they have
convinced themselves that his supporters must be utterly deformed by poverty
and addiction. The ultimate fantasy? That his base might just extinguish
themselves through their own dysfunction.
A New War on the Poor
To understand our current mood, it is worth taking a look at
President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. In the early 1960s, books like
Michael Harrington’s seminal “The Other America” exposed widespread
suffering in the United States, shocking a nation that believed that, at least
among whites, more or less everyone had partaken in the affluence that
blossomed after World War II.
Johnson launched the War on Poverty in part to protect his and
voters’ vision of America as the beacon of the free world. To win the public
over to this effort, Johnson and his team orchestrated a media blitz that descended
on the distressed cabins and coal mines of Appalachia. Half a century later,
most of America still thinks of the region through the lens of those
photographers and journalists, an iconography that broods heavily over today’s
reporting on the region.
Then as now,
media sensationalized the misery of poor whites, but in the 1960s, it was with
the explicit purpose of calling for specific, unprecedented remedies to their
suffering. Flip back to LIFE’s “Valley of Poverty” photo essay of
1964: “In a lonely valley in eastern Kentucky,” it reads, “live an impoverished
people whose plight has long been ignored by affluent America…President
Johnson, who has declared ‘unconditional war on poverty in America,’ has
singled out Appalachia as a major target.”
The legendary John Dominis, who shot the series, published these
photos of diseased children, tar-paper churches, and families scratching for
lumps of coal in the snow to illustrate what he and other Americans believed
was a solvable problem: these places just needed electricity, medicine, a
helping hand. While Appalachia may have had to endure the stigma
of “Deliverance,” it also got Medicare, food stamps, Head Start, and
a decade that saw the highest levels of federal spending on anti-poverty
programs of any era in our history except for the New Deal.
As a new generation of journalists descends on these same places,
looking for the same harrowing stories that were told half a century ago, they
might ask themselves whether, like their forbears, their analysis can also
claim to rally readers towards a grander vision of America, or whether their
lurid pessimism might instead be doing the reverse.
We live in
an era of enormous, even terrifying challenges, but most communities in this
country have what it takes to adapt and thrive. What they lack is confidence,
the framework for imagining a future that is better than the nostalgia-hued
past. Decades of dismal, simplistic reporting about small cities has not
helped. Smear pieces, like the Politico article at
hand, do tangible harm.
No one has all the answers for America’s small cities and rural
places, and that is a great reason to approach these communities with
curiosity, analytical rigor, and an open mind. Besides, photojournalists must
be running out of grey hills and rainy parking lots. A ray of sunshine might be
a welcome change of pace.
Carolyn
Zelikow directs the Hometown
Summit, a conference in Charlottesville, Virginia for small cities.
