Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (Field Notes)

by Phil A. Neel

Since whites compose the bulk of the impoverished population, if not always its lowest rungs, the far left’s persistent refusal to address white poverty is a refusal to address the conditions of the single largest demographic composing the lower class in the United States—and one that has very clearly experienced the J-Curve of heightened expectations suddenly plummeting into a sharp reversal of prospects.46 This is an inherently politicizing process, and at this point the far right has been almost the only force attempting to shape it. They tend to target the perceived inequities pointed out above, combining xenophobia with a very simple economic calculus. The Idaho Three Percenters, for example, argue that the state ought not waste so many resources resettling refugees when it is already doing such a poor job of helping its own impoverished citizens. This is the gateway argument for their entire program of localist Islamophobia, which reaches its natural conclusion when they propose a world of bearded, rifle-toting patriarchs defending their respective compounds in the Rocky Mountains.