The Clintons were feted here in the 1990s, but two decades on Hillary Clinton is viewed with cool suspicion. That’s because both the economy and values have moved on, too. Jobs went south to Mexico or east to Asia. Somewhere on the winding road from whites-only bathrooms to choose-your-gender bathrooms, many white, blue-collar Kentucky workers — and the state is 85.1 percent white — feel their country got lost. The F.D.R. Democrats who became Reagan Democrats and then Clinton Democrats could well be November’s Trump Democrats.
America is no longer white enough for that to be decisive, but it is significant. To these people, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is not the empty rhetoric of a media-savvy con artist from Queens but a last-ditch rallying cry for the soul of a changing land where minorities will be the majority by the middle of the century.
Hazard, set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, is a once bustling town with its guts wrenched out. On Main Street, the skeleton of a mall that burned down last year presents its charred remains for dismal contemplation. Young people with drugged eyes lean against boarded-up walls on desolate streets. The whistle of trains hauling coal, once as regular as the chiming of the hours, has all but vanished. So have the coal trucks spewing splinters of rock that shattered windshields. In the age of cheap natural gas and mountaintop removal mining, a coal town is not where you want to be.
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Roger Cohen, We Need ‘Somebody Spectacular’: Views From Trump Country
Cohen still has the gift of a well-turn phrase, and makes a nuanced case for the populist yearnings of a region left behind by the neoliberal excesses of the past decades.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/150255553162
