The cover image on Chris Arnade's new book, Dignity. Credit: Chris Arnade
To misquote Jesus: books about the poor will always be with us. But once in a while someone writes something that does more than drone on about inequality or consumerism. It takes us there, to where the poor live and love and occasionally laugh. It lets them look us in the eye.
Dignity: seeking respect in back row America is one of those books. It helps that it’s written by a photographer, Chris Arnade, so the people he talks to actually do stare out from the pages. It helps as well that its subject is small-town America, so every post-industrial vista is haunting but somehow – to most British eyes – intensely glamorous.
The backdrop for Dignity is a kind of film-set noir. Rotting buildings hide under huge skies. Everywhere there are empty roads, petrol stations and McDonald’s restaurants and sinister looking clapboard churches, and in amongst all this rotting infrastructure: broken people. Often sad, spaced out on cheap drugs, but afflicted too by fits of the giggles, by shyness, by coyness, by the ability to jump in the air to bring life to some desiccated corrugated-iron strewn yard; even sometimes a haughty hauteur that says, “fuck you, I’m gonna be ok.”
But they are not going to be ok. This is not a sentimental journey. It’s a deeply unsettling examination of the pathology of what Donald Trump referred to in his inauguration speech as ‘American carnage’.
At the time, that phrase seemed so coarse, so jarring. Didn’t even George W. Bush turn to Hillary Clinton and say, “that was some weird shit”? Didn’t everyone who smelled nice from sea to shining sea raise his or her eyes to the skies and wonder what The Donald was smoking?
Well: hello polite America. This is what he meant.
Not all of the poor in this book are his people – indeed, most of them have probably never voted – but plenty of them, particularly the white people, understand very clearly that Trump was talking to them. On the day of that speech, Chris Arnade is in a strip club in Ohio. There are no customers.
“The dancers are playing Pokémon Go on their phones while the owner listens to Trump’s acceptance speech on hers.”
He asks the owner (he describes her as “in her sixties, blunt and bitter”) whether she likes Trump’s speech. “Hell yes I do,” she replies. “Something has to change. This country is broken. No decent jobs….. the world is just going to the shitter.”
In nearby Cleveland, in a bar: a similar conversation. Jo-Jo has been dismantling cars in a nearby junkyard.
“That dude is crazy,” he says of Trump. “He talks shit .. Shit that if I said I would get into trouble. But the man is rich so he can say what he wants.”
Arnade asks, “you like him?”
“I guess you can call me a Trump man. I like him because he’s going to make America great again, like he says. Right now guys like me who work for the minimum wage are getting screwed.”
Arnade writes, “as the bar fills up others are unabashed in their views, celebratory, giddy to have Trump addressing their concerns and talking their language. That everyone hates Trump makes them more confident, further cementing the feeling that they are members of an exclusive club …. A man yells ‘You get them Donald. They been getting us forever!’”
And so they have. Although, actually, not quite forever. The great calamity of poverty in modern America is not the material distance between the comfortable and the struggling. It is the social, the spiritual distance – and the fact that the upper middle classes (to use the British terminology) have stolen everything – all the stuff that’s nice and all the ladders to get to it.
Dignity serves as an excellent practical primer before, for academic sustenance, you might turn to the work of Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, whose book Dream Hoarders has outlined in painful detail how the top 20% in America lives insulated from, well, everything that’s in Dignity.
They never meet these people. They never see the places they live. And – this is the kicker, and the reason why the poor warm to Trump – they abhor them. Hillary Clinton was only able to say “we came out of the White House dead broke” because she literally doesn’t see the people in Dignity, who are actually dead broke. They are dead to her. They are un-people. Sexists. Racists. Folks to be stuffed in the dustbin named “deplorables”.
And now the party is doing it all again. Dear old Joe Biden was taken to task in recent days for boasting about how well he got on with racist segregationist Senators when he first got to Capitol Hill in the 1970s. And yes, racism is awful and does matter. But in the same speech to Wall St backers he said something I found much more shocking: he also talked about how much the lives of the rich would have to change in a fairer America. To summarise: not one jot.
“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done,” said Biden. “We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished.”
“No one’s standard of living will change,” said Biden. “Nothing would fundamentally change.”
The genius of the folks in Dignity is that, although they don’t grasp the nuances of politics, they already knew that before Joe said it. They know that modern America wants to motor on and leave them ever further behind. When Trump is gone, they’ll not even have the illusion left that anyone cares.
Worse: as well as being blamed for their own uselessness by the Clinton mob and the whole of polite society, they are tricked by modern life into a wretched sense of self-loathing. America, even as it becomes an aristocracy quite similar to Edwardian Britain – with all the upper class people marrying each other, taking the majority of places at decent universities, and ensuring no real social progress for those underneath – still uses the lexicon of meritocracy, suggesting to the poor that all of this is their fault.
Arnade nails it with almost the last words of the book: “We have said that education is the way out of pain and the way to success, implying that those who don’t make it are dumb, or lazy, or stupid. This has ensured that all those at the bottom, black, white, gay, straight, men and women, are guaranteed to feel excluded, rejected, and most of all, humiliated.”
Will anyone take any notice? Probably not. But for a brief moment, in these pages, an awful wrong is righted. Respect is restored to those from whom it should never have been robbed.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four. His Panorama documentary “Trump the Sequel”, is available now on Iplayer
JustinOnWeb 
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SubscribeIf this is not the classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is. After 4 years of suppressed Hunter Biden scams around the globe and money laundering, we have this before it even happens? Besides, isn’t seeking power and influence the main reason why people become involved in politics in the first place? It’s why it attracts only a certain type of person. Most honest folks wouldn’t last 8 hours in Washington.
I must have missed Fang’s article on the Clinton Foundation’s “charitable” endeavors.
Hey this is Lee Fang. You did miss it, maybe you didn’t look before you commented. I was the first to break many of the major Clinton Foundation foreign influence and corporate influence stories, including efforts by Morocco to use donations to the charity to curry influence.
I’ve also reported extensively about Chinese influence in American politics on both major political parties. I was the first to report Hunter Biden’s investments in a Chinese surveillance company and also broke the story of a Chinese billionaire buying the home of Obama’s ambassador to China and illegally funneling donations into a major SuperPAC. I am nonpartisan — I hold everyone accountable.
https://theintercept.com/2015/04/22/inside-morocco-clinton-influence-campaign/
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/02/hna-group-corruption-scaramucci-trump-jeb-bush-clinton-guo-wengui/
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business/
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/chinese-couple-million-dollar-donation-jeb-bush-super-pac/
a former Trump campaign staffer, who asked not to be named, told me.
What on earth does this mean? It should be clear by now that we’re sick and tired of this sort of comment. A campaign staffer. What does that mean? What does “former” mean, 2016, 2020, 2024 and why are they former? How close were they to decision making? Are they reliable or a total idiot. Do they have an axe to grind? Do they even exist?
Lee Fang is a highly respected independent journalist. This is what journalism does, use anonymous sources. Based on the credibility of the journalist, we can determine whether or not the sources are good. You seem very uninformed about how this works.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the source was Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro, or possibly even Lighthizer.
I’m well aware of anonymous sources and how they works, Your cheap shot is exactly that. The point is that the source was used to finish the piece and reflect what the writer was getting at, thereby giving his piece more credibility. It’s a pretty meaningless statement anyway. The interesting thing is that the anonymous quote has allowed you to fill in the gap with figures higher up in the food chain, thereby giving the quote more importance, when in fact it’s a statement with the inside knowledge of the doorman.
Are you the first person to put this information into the public domain? It is damned important and not what I would have expected from Trump.
No he’s not the first person to put this story into the public domain. There’s very little here to be concerned about. Wiles has done nothing illegal. There is no “story” in the story.
No surprise here. Just the beginning of what we can expect from the Democrats and all the hyenas in their camp. Obviously they are incapable of taking a good look at themselves, even though they’ve received a crushing and ignoble defeat. It’s not so much that they won’t look in the mirror as that they just don’t know how to do it. I’m sure we all know of someone like this. They’re actually crippled people who live with some patched-up idea of themselves to compensate for something gone wrong in their lives and they destroy everything around them in the process.
So governments shouldn’t be held to account by the press when hypocrisy or conflicts of interest occur? Or should it only happen when your preferred side aren’t in power?
So governments shouldn’t be held to account by the press when hypocrisy or conflicts of interest occur?
Your argument supposes that clients of a business enjoy perpetual devotion by owners of the business. Lobbying is a business, as is the practice of law. I suggest wait for acts, rather than support smears.
I don’t believe pointing out a potential conflict of interest in a woman just given a powerful government position is a smear personally. You’d be screaming blue murder if the opposition had something similar
Of course it’s a smear when it’s only a “potential” conflict. Are we now to be judged on what might happen in the future?
I take it you missed this part of the article: “John Kelly, a former Marine Corps. General, was an establishment figure who also spun through the revolving door and served on boards of several defence contractors. He later turned on Trump, accusing him of being a fascist who would govern as a dictator.”
Corrupt lobbyists and other political sellouts always return to the honeypot after leaving gov’t positions: see Scaramucci, Pence, etc. This woman sounds like a Republican version of the Podesta brothers.
If you mean having come from the corporate sector and having served her time as Chief of Staff she will then return to the corporate sector then yes you’re correct. But what’s unusual about that? From where do you think the government should recruit a Cabinet? Where would it find the people with the skills and experience?
You do have a point. Unfortunately all things media are now viewed with total distrust. We simply cannot trust what we read. Therefore we challenge everything. Stories will have to drop words like “presumably” for instance when trying to assert something they don’t seem to be able to prove, or stop including reasonably benign facts to give the piece more substance, as is done here with Nestle and Heinz. Just give us the facts then we’ll form our opinion, We don’t need others to do it.
NOW ties to China are an issue? Seriously? And how typical, the apocalyptic warning comes from an anonymous source. Perhaps this is all accurate but it also repeats the pattern that has led people to discount most media.
I think the media will continue to make it worse for themselves. It’s going to take a lot of work on the part of the media to turn Trump’s voters against him and in the process they’ll damage their reputation even more, all the while blaming Trump for their own demise.
Forget the anonymous source, do you not find her history extremely disturbing? And yes, most Trump supporters will consider her lengthy history of CCP company-lobbying to be an issue.
Having read the references and other stories I do not find her history “extremely disturbing”. Her history is very clear and available to the public. Nothing has been concealed. There is nothing illegal with companies lobbying the government. The company she is associated with operates legally as a consultancy to Chinese business and government. Wiles obviously has abilities that suit her new position. There may be moral considerations to be taken into account, but certainly not legal issues. Let’s see what eventuates before jumping to conclusions.
Ya. Not a good look at all. Ugh.
Oh what webs we weave as we plan to deceive
Ah but such are the ways of so called US Democracy now totally in the grip of lobbyists mainly from the Defense and Fossil Fuel Industries
A voting ballot paper in America is now only fit for hanging from your toilet roll holder
Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss!
Something I can see happening, and it’ll happen here in comments; most people who voted for Trump, more than likely, despise the Democrats and the media for their lies their deceptions and their policies. They won’t forget that in a long time. Because of that they’ll give Trump a lot of rope. They’ll ignore a lot of what the media might say about him, his cabinet and policies. The more the media try to pile in on the more his voters will ignore it. This is a total commitment both for Trump and against the left, which they associate with the Democrats.