My friend Shawn is a very smart man, an honest-to-God genius. When we were in high school together, I struggled with trig while he skipped class and still scored a four-year ride to Tech. He can do calculus in his head and quote batting averages for ballplayers who spent no more than a month in the bigs years ago. But smart as he is, there are some things he just doesn’t get, and most of them have to do with the political climate, which steadfastly refuses to make sense no matter how much he bashes away at the problem. How, for example, did the American people come to believe that a coke-hoovering, Ivy League-educated third-generation scion of Connecticut bluebloods was a good-ol’-boy Texas populist and elect him president twice? How could they not know that the administration lied to Congress about WMDs in Iraq? How could the party of Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, and Big Agriculture paint itself as the friend of the working poor, the elderly, and the family farm? How can people honestly believe that deregulation and tax breaks to the wealthy are of any benefit to minimum-wage America? These things and more are pure poison to Shawn’s need for a logical universe.

Shawn’s problem, which I’ve been telling him for years, is that he doesn’t understand this country because he’s not really in touch with it. A college-educated professional who reads the newspaper every day and doesn’t attend church, he’s lost in an America where only two percent of the population reads more than one book per year, where newspaper circulation is dwindling while the circulation of Us Weekly skyrockets, where millions of people support Middle East wars because they hurry the End Times along that much quicker, and where history and geography and the Byzantine workings of appropriations bills are way down on the list of most people’s priorities, below things like their outrageous mortgage payments and that hospital bill that’s about to bankrupt them.

Forget Red States and Blue States. Forget Roe v. Wade. Forget The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy versus the gaggle of latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, abortion-loving yada yada yada. The real divide in our society is class. Always has been. The white working poor, millions of them - Toby Keith sings to ’em, Larry the Cable Guy makes ’em giggle, Jesus is coming to rapture ’em up - constitute, arguably, the real battleground for the hearts and minds of the American people, and the battle is won by the party who knows how to speak to them. Once upon a time it was the Democrats who had their number, but the Dems’ pro-blue-collar populism somehow evolved into the abstract babble of boutique liberals and policy wonks. Now it’s the Republicans who talk the talk, in short jingoistic soundbites. “Axis of Evil.” “Mission Accomplished.” “No Child Left Behind.” Remember the key demographic that put Bush in office twice, the so-called “NASCAR dads.” In other words, angry working-class white guys.

In Small-Town America

Joe Bageant knows this contingent well. He grew up among them, a God-fearing Scots-Irish boy from the blue-collar town of Winchester, VA, located at the dog’s-ass end of the Shenandoah Valley. After 30 years out west as a journalist and editor, he returned to his hometown, a drying husk in the shadow of the Rubbermaid plant, populated by the people hopelessly alienated by the left and ruthlessly exploited by the right, living entire lives on a substandard minimum wage and paying out the nose to predatory lenders for a double-wide on a raggedy patch of grass, just to have something to call theirs. Bageant’s book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (Crown, 2007), is a long-overdue reintroduction to our friends and neighbors and a welcome alternative to our current climate of partisan discourse, to both feel-good Hillaryisms and foam-flecked Coulterisms. Bageant is a small-town liberal, fierce and unapologetic, and his book makes a solid case for why by rights there should be a hell of a lot more of them.

On Bageant’s rolling tour of his hometown he introduces us to Dottie, who sings Patsy Cline songs down at the Dairy Queen with an oxygen tube in her nose, struggling to keep herself in heart medication and failing every time an unexpected expense knocks hell out of her whisper-thin budget. Her mother, who suffers from black lung after a lifetime in coal country, languishes in a managed-care facility run by doctors of suspect credentials who must be badgered to examine her beyond a passing glance in the dining hall. We meet Joey, who blew out two lumbar disks and a hip during decades on the line at Rubbermaid, but ended up owing six grand on his back and is S.O.L. on the hip because the company dodged the claim. We meet Tommy Ray, who’s had four jobs in two years, quitting each for a new job paying pennies more an hour, sitting on seven maxed-out credit cards as proof that he’s got the necessary stuff to get a mortgage on a trailer that’ll depreciate by half the second it’s delivered. And Carolyn, who has festooned her truck with the magnetic “Support the Troops” ribbons she bought thinking that her money was actually going to support the troops.

“The American Hologram”

Bageant uses Winchester’s stories as a springboard to illustrate the clash of the American Dream against the American reality. While we are constantly fed the picture, in Norman Rockwell’s rosy hues and Thomas Kinkade’s splashes of light, of small-town America as the place where all is well in the glow of God’s love and the Puritan work ethic, the fact is that 34 percent of the population will work all their lives without cracking $35,000 a year (that’s the poverty line for a family of four) and will spend those lives bashing their heads against an ever-diminishing rate of return, at all times two paychecks away from homelessness and praying for the Angel of Outsourcing to pass over their twice-mortgaged dwellings but racking up debt to pay for the stuff that is the right of every American to acquire. For a full third of the nation’s people, breaking even is a dream at best, yet the right tells us it’s our patriotic duty to keep on spending, while the left says, well, nothing. Bageant writes:

The brutal way in which America’s hardest-working folks were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.

It’s something Bageant likes to call “the American hologram,” a weird mashup of the Horatio Alger myth, fundamentalist Christian dogma, and a nostalgia for an idealized ’50s that barely existed even at the time, that says that wealth is the product of healthy ambition and clean living and that if we only make the right moves we could all be millionaires too. It’s what makes us gamely swallow such tropes as “the business of America is business,” the historically disastrous policy of trickle-down economics, the notion of a national sales tax which would actually cripple the underclass in short order, and the deregulation of industry and public utilities that has wrecked the environment and driven our bills higher, not lower as promised. It’s what gives corporate weasels the sheen of benevolent despots, Bestowers of Jobs, and makes us so grateful that we accept their rationales for downsizing and the evisceration of worker benefits. It’s the rhetoric of the so-called free-marketeers, aimed directly at the working poor and as contrived as any photo-op of the President clearing brush on his ranch, and it depends entirely on Americans failing to look up from accumulating their stuff long enough to take a gander at the big picture:

Working people do not deny reality. They create it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction. Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. That’s what they voted for - an armed and moral republic. And that’s what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.

Obviously, Bageant is fond of the phrase “hammering humanity,” but he makes a strong case for the image. While he rails at length about the shortsightedness of the folks he describes, they are still, to use his phrase, “my people.” This is not a hatchet job on rednecks so much as a call for a return to fairness and dignity for the people who do the hands-on work that keeps the republic going. This can only happen when the national debate stops abstracting the working class and actually pays attention to the flesh and blood, the sweat and blown lumbar disks. Yes, it’s necessary to raise hell over Pvt. Lynndie England and her Abu Ghraib cheesecake photos, but it’s also necessary to take a good look at Lynndie England the girl from down the road in West Virginia, who wouldn’t have been in Iraq at all had the Army not offered her a signing bonus worth more than she would have made in a year yanking the guts out of chickens at the poultry plant. Whichever side of the aisle you’re on, it’s hard - or it should be hard - to dissemble about America’s choices abroad when so many of her policies are being carried out by people with damn few choices of their own.

And ultimately this is what Bageant means, that while the right waxes about a small-town America that always sounds suspiciously like Mayberry, and the left mourns for its flown populism even as it waits breathlessly to discover which tune Hillary Clinton will use for her campaign theme song, the lives of the working poor, a third of the nation, remain unobserved and unaddressed in any meaningful way. Fair wages and inclusive health care and job security would be good places to start. Real education reform, rather than the dodgy Draconianism of No Child Left Behind. Social Security that’s actually secure. And more people to speak for the blue-collar class who aren’t Bill Engvall.

John G. Nettles