McDOWELL COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the most fertile soil for the planting and cultivating of demagoguery was perhaps to be found in the population of McDowell County, West Virginia.
The people of McDowell County either have vivid memories of or have heard multitudinous stories about “back then when times were good.” But, over the past three decades or so, they have been metaphorically standing on train tracks watching, powerless and paralyzed, as a speeding train bearing “bad times”—and, by extension, the end of “good times”—bore down on them.
“Back then when times were good,” McDowell County was arguably the coal capital of America. Decades of decline in coal use, however, led to a steep, irreversible drop in coal demand. And any drop in demand for a commodity implies a proportional drop in the jobs needed to produce it. Which, for McDowell County, meant that coal jobs left and, with them, “good times.”
McDowell County, which was once considered the coal capital of America, is now the poorest county in West Virginia, which itself ranks among the poorest states in the country. Over 50% of the households claim less than $25,000 in annual income compared to 25% nationally. The median annual income is only $22,500, compared to a national figure of $52,000. Nearly 35% of McDowell County families live in poverty and 60% of families with children under five don’t meet the poverty threshold.
Population has declined by 80,000 since the 1950’s and the county has lost 38% of its residents in just the past two decades—symptomatic of an unemployment rate that is now more than twice the national average.
The life expectancy for men in McDowell County is 64 years—roughly comparable to the life expectancy for men in Namibia. The life expectancy for women is just over 73 years—roughly comparable to that of women in Mongolia.
Unsurprisingly, McDowell County has not escaped the substance abuse issues—opioids, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, you name it—that beset so many communities in coal country. Indeed, its population has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in West Virginia.
Thus did a perfect storm of factors make the people of McDowell County fertile ground for the seeding of demagoguery: The collective memory of “good times,” the collective experience of feeling helpless and powerless to stop the transition from “good times” to “bad times,” the angry sense of grievance at losing what has been lost, the need to blame and even demonize someone/something for the losing of that which has been lost, the sense of hopelessness and desperation about both present and future prospects, the perception that those in power are blind to their plight and a willingness to believe the cognitively-dissonant promises of a bombastic demagogue whose claims that he would “take care of you” and bring back the “good times” were at the edge of being messianic in nature—“Only I can fix it!”
More than willing to suspend logic and reason in favor of magical thinking, McDowell County rewarded Donald Trump’s messianic/autocratic demagoguery by giving him 91.5% of the vote in the Republican primary—by far the largest percentage he received in any one county during the primary season.
TRUMP’S PROMISE
Hence the cruelty of Trump’s bogus promise to the people of McDowell County and others in the equally-devastated coal communities of Appalachia: A miner’s hard hat carefully placed on his incoherent coiffe, he would, to raucous cheers at one of his campaign adulation-fests, tell the people of coal country that “we are going to put coal miners back to work.”
It was an almost heinous thing to say, a promise made ugly and cynical by the fact that Trump knew all the while—and was told by executives in the coal industry—that he was making a promise he could not keep. It was akin to promising starving people that loaves of bread would arrive via truck at 3 p.m. on Tuesday and then leaving town so as not to be there when the people gathered and the promised truck bearing the promised bread didn’t show up.
Trump knew that coal wasn’t coming back. And it isn’t.
The coal mining jobs that, when “Coal was King,” fueled the “good times” in McDowell County? Trump knew they weren’t coming back, either. And they aren’t.
BLAMING BARACK OBAMA
Donald Trump’s infantile insecurities are never more on display than when he—on an almost daily basis—points an accusatory finger at his predecessor, the cerebral, articulate and scandal-free Barack Obama, who seems to cast a shadow longer than Manhattan over The Grifter from Queens.
His demagogic attempt to demonize President Obama in coal country generally took the form of blaming the fall of “King Coal” on Obama’s environmental policies; i.e., (1) his advocacy of energy sources—including renewables—that might mitigate the effect of massive fossil fuel use on climate change, (2) his executive orders that established environmental protections for the waters, wetlands and woodlands of coal country, (3) his executive orders that established environmental protections for federal land and national parks, and (4) his leadership in bringing the global community together in a non-binding agreement—the Paris Accord—that sought to reduce on a world-wide basis the degree to which human agency is fomenting climate change.
Of course, blaming the crisis in coal country on President Obama’s environmental policies is absurd on its face.
For one thing, the trend-line decrease in coal use/coal production/coal jobs far pre-dates the Obama administration—coal-related jobs fell by 2/3 just between 1948-1970. For another, I have yet to find a non-partisan industry analyst who doesn’t lay the precipitous drop in both coal demand/production and traditional coal mining jobs on the doorstep of (1) technological innovations in automation and mechanization, (2) new strip mining techniques, (3) increased competition from the natural gas industry (read, fracking), and (4) the rapidly developing renewable energy industry.
Gary Cohn, Trump’s own chief economic adviser, recently told reporters that “Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as a feedstock. Natural gas…is such a cleaner fuel. If you think about how much solar and…wind power we’ve created in the United States, we can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly.”
But, treating reality as “Fake News” or “Alternative Facts,” Trump has pushed ahead to end Obama-era environmental policies, still claiming that his evisceration of environmental protections will “put coal miners back to work.” He has even announced, in a statement so breathtakingly false as to make one’s head spin, that the unspoiled federal lands and national parks he plans to make available for drilling and mining “will be better off and even more beautiful than they are now because of what we’re doing.”
Whaaaaa?
I can’t wait to take a selfie of myself standing next to a drilling rig hard by Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. And I’m placing bets on whose head they will cut off just above the eyebrows when they start strip mining atop Mount Rushmore.
I mean, C’mon, Donald.
LYING THAT THE PROMISE WAS KEPT
Against all the evidence, however, Trump’s EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, who has a long history of carrying water for the Koch Brothers, keeps trying to push the false narrative that Trump is already fulfilling his promise to “put coal miners back to work.”
During a recent appearance on Meet the Press, he made the astonishing claim that “since the fourth quarter of last year, until most recently, we’ve added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector…In the month of May alone, almost 7,000 jobs.”
Uh, no.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that there were, at the beginning of Q1-2017, only 50,000 coal jobs in the entire country. It further indicates that only about 1,000 jobs had been added in the first four months of the Trump presidency and only 400 in the month of May. And, much, I’m sure, to the chagrin of both Pruitt and Trump, the data indicates that more than 1,400 coal jobs had been added in the last four months of the Obama presidency.
Ouch!
The Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, gave Pruitt’s claim the maximum Four Pinocchios.
Check out these three facts that I suspect Mr. Kessler would rate “True”: (1) Coal hasn’t come back, (2) Coal isn’t going to come back and (3) Donald Trump knowingly lied to the people of coal country when he told them that it was.
EPILOGUE (1)
The realization that Trump lied to them about the return of “good times” has added another layer of despair to the hopelessness that hangs over McDowell County like a dense fog.
It gets worse.
Under the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion, over 75,000 West Virginians gained access to affordable health care, the medicines they had needed for years but couldn’t afford and even treatment for alcohol and drug abuse.
When Donald Trump showed up during the campaign and promised to “repeal Obamacare” and “replace it with a big, beautiful health care plan that will cover every American and lower the cost of premiums and deductibles,” many of those who had gained coverage through the ACA were unnerved. Having been unable to access medical care for years before President Obama’s health care law became the law of the land, they wondered why Trump and his Republican friends were calling them “victims of Obamacare.” And wondered what could conceivably be done to make it better.
Still, they had put their eggs in Donald Trump’s basket and trusted him to do what was in their best interest. However, as millions of Americans have discovered since the details of #TrumpCare were released, trusting Donald Trump to do anything he has promised to do and believing he gives a damn about the “best interest” of anyone other than himself is a sucker’s bet.
The massive gains made in health care accessibility for the people of McDowell County and the state of West Virginia will, if #TrumpCare is passed and signed into law, fade like a wisp of smoke into a people’s history shaped by misplaced trust and broken promises.
The temptation for many is to point an accusatory finger at coal communities such as McDowell County and say something along the lines of “You got what you asked for” or “Elections have consequences and now you get to live with them.”
But to do so is to demean and diminish the degree of desperation that permeates these communities and to not understand the attraction that magical thinking has for the hopeless.
It is also to ignore the danger posed by a demagogic snake-oil salesman taking advantage of the powerless with a faux populist message of hope that may well be cognitively-dissonant on its face but comes to the beleaguered like manna from heaven. Tyranny, after all, is given birth by nothing more than a group of people who can no longer see the distance between what they want to hear and the truth as the rest of the world knows it.
EPILOGUE (2)
During the five mission trips I have made to McDowell County over the years—accompanied by bright, fresh-faced college students who, at the end of a week of distributing cases of bottled water, boxes of good food and rebuilding bathrooms and bedrooms and porches and steps, as oft as not asked me, “Who will help them when we’re gone?”—I have come to know these wonderful people as one of the “forgotten tribes” upon whose strong shoulders America was built.
I have listened to their stories and laughed so hard that I had to wipe tears from my eyes. I have listened to their stories and had to turn away so they wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I was once drafted to preside over a hastily-arranged wedding between two young people who wanted to make sure they were “properly married with a preacher and all” before their first child was born. When one of the pallbearers for an old miner’s funeral was too sick to attend, I quickly filled in—jeans, t-shirt, boots and all.
The memories are so thick I almost have to push them aside like a dense spider-web to get to ones I want to talk about.
But one memory is so powerful that I don’t have to dig deep to find it.
We were rebuilding an old widow’s living room—tearing out ceiling tiles and sheetrock, ripping moulding off and pulling up flooring and then replacing it all.
I had gone to her home early that first morning to survey the landscape and, all dressed up in her Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes, she wanted to serve me coffee in the very living room we would soon be tearing out. She brought out her best silver coffee service and her best china for the occasion. I was touched and humbled.
There were three framed pictures hanging side-by-side on the wall above the living room couch. One was the rendering of Jesus that one once found on the old fans handed out by funeral homes during the heat of summer. To the left of it was a magazine cover picture of John F. Kennedy. And to the right of it was a magazine cover picture of Lyndon Johnson.
It seemed, at first, an incongruity of monumental proportions. Jesus. John Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson.
And then, from the deeps of my memory, I remembered the history.
When John Kennedy campaigned in McDowell County in the run-up to the historic 1960 election, he had been so personally affected by the poverty he saw that he made a promise: When elected, he was sending help to them. He followed through on his promise and did so in a big way. His first executive order established the foundation of the modern Food Stamp program. And the first recipients were the people of McDowell County.
Lyndon Johnson was thinking of the terrible conditions he had found in McDowell County and the rest of Appalachia when he declared “war on poverty” in 1964. Thousands of people were lifted out of subsistence living by the federal programs that served as the ammunition for LBJ’s “war”: Medicare, Medicaid, free school lunches, the list goes on and on.
When we came back later that day to begin work, I carefully took those framed pictures down and tucked them safely away. And when, a couple of days later, we were done, I carefully put them back in their places of honor.
Jesus. John Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson. Three men honored by an old widow because she believed that they had kept their promises to her and her neighbors in McDowell County, West Virginia.
Something which has proven, over the years, to be the exception to the rule.
