Deer Hunting with Jesus

I recently read Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. I highly recommend this book. If you are at all interested in lyrical prose, politics, and social class this is a book not to be missed.

Bageant combines great writing with razor-sharp insights that only one descended from the white, rural, American working class can make. The book is preachy, angry, sad, outraged, poignant, funny as all hell in parts and a sophisticated analysis of the politics of the American class and caste system—all at the same time.

The book explains the phenomenon of working-class people who seem to—in droves—display political behavior against their economic interests by consistently voting Republican in elections and adopting conservative attitudes. Bageant dives deep into the subject by retelling the story of moving back to Winchester, Virginia, his hometown, and hanging out and socializing with his childhood friends and neighbors.

Rather than take the easy way out of condescending to his subject matter, Bageant shows compassion and understanding in explaining working class political beliefs and behavior in Winchester, Virginia. He cites the narrow worldview, lack of education and latent racism of his subjects as contributing to the state of affairs. But he reserves his roundest condemnation to middle class Democrats and liberals who seem to have abandoned small towns and rural folks like the ones in Winchester.

Bageant argues that Democrats and middle-class, progressive liberals do not really have any meaningful social contact with working class folks. They operate in totally different social spheres which often do not cross. Despite Democrat and liberal claims to represent the interests of the common man, most people who consider themselves progressive look down on the values and culture of Winchester folks and do not make a serious effort to engage rural, working class whites politically. And that is a mistake. According to Bageant:

The fact is that liberals and working people need each other to survive the growing economic calamity delivered to us by the regime that promised to “run this country like a business.” Sooner or later, despite the Democrats’ wins in the 2006 mid-term elections, the left must genuinely connect face-to-face with Americans who don’t necessarily share all of their priorities and especially with Americans who have not been voting, if the left is ever to be relevant again to working America. If the left is not about class equity, what is it about? (page 15)

All in all, Bageant’s book is an excellent primer for anyone who is interested in working class culture and its potential for progressive politics. To this Asian-American, middle-class liberal, much of what Bageant had to say were eye-opening and it would not be remiss to say that I have much to learn if I want to be part of an effort among progressives to reach out the white working class as political allies.

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