No Home for You Here

A Memoir of Class and Culture

Adam Theron-Lee Rensch

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789142006
• eBook ISBN: 9781789142624
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

No Home for You Here is a memoir of a life lived in the shadow of Ronald Reagan. Raised in rural Ohio, Adam Theron-Lee Rensch tells the story of a millennial trying—and failing—to leave behind the shame of growing up poor in the middle of nowhere. Interweaving personal narrative and political criticism with recent social and political history, No Home for You Here shows how the interrelationship of class, culture, and identity stifles working-class solidarity by constructing an imagined cultural divide that those in power use to maintain the status quo. With one foot on each side of this division, Rensch moves between the flat horizon of the Midwest and the densely populated streets of the city, bearing witness to the tragic effects of a precarious free-market economy on family and friends. Rather than wallowing in despair, however, No Home for You Here is a timely, passionate call for class consciousness in an era of economic crisis and staggering inequality.

References

Prologue: You Can’t Go Home Again

1 Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York, 1998), p. 698.

2 According to the Social Security Administration’s Average Wage Index. Admittedly, this data looks at individual incomes, and doesn’t reflect total household income or those with temporary or part-time jobs. But it also doesn’t look at those who hold multiple jobs, or whose income, even if above poverty level, is insufficient with respect to cost of living, for example those who live in expensive metropolitan areas like New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, www.ssa.gov, accessed October 2, 2018.

3 According to a Gallup poll conducted on Trump’s 500th day in office, his overall approval rating stood at 42 percent, a slight fall from the 45 percent he had after taking office. His support among Republicans, however, was 87 percent, second only to George W. Bush’s popularity in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

4 Even the relatively conservative Washington Post reported on this. Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters were not Working Class,” Washington Post, June 5, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com.

5 Jesse A. Myerson, “Trumpism: It’s Coming From The Suburbs,” The Nation (May 8, 2017).

6 Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York, 1990), p. 110.

7 Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, and Rachel Lienesch, “Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump | PRRI/The Atlantic Report.” PRRI (2017).

8 Emma Green, “It Was Cultural Anxiety that Drove White, Working-class Voters to Trump,” The Atlantic (May 9, 2017) www.theatlantic.com (italics mine).

9 Jones, Cox, and Lienesch, “Beyond Economics.”

10 This is one of the major flaws of Joan C. Williams’s White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston, MA, 2017). While overall a thoughtful study on the contradictions that structure white poverty, the book defines the “working class” exclusively by income. In the process, it neglects class relations entirely by truncating all labor below and above an arbitrary limit.

11 Marx offers a similar concept of class in a footnote to the title of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.” Implicit in these definitions is a relationship that reproduces itself through a mutual but unfair exchange: the workers receive a wage, while capitalists receive profits produced by those workers’ labor. At the very end of the third volume of Capital, Marx expands on this when he asks, quite directly, “What makes a class?” He first proposes “the identity of revenues and revenue sources,” given what he calls the three great social classes—wage-laborers, capitalists, and landowners—receive as the source of their income. But Marx quickly complicates this formula, showing that such a definition of class is still too abstract: “From this point of view, however, doctors and government officials would also form two classes, as they belong to two distinct social groups, the revenue of each group’s members flowing from its own source. The same would hold true for the infinite fragmentation of interests and positions into which the division of social labor splits not only workers but also capitalists and landowners—the latter, for instance, into vineyard-owners, fieldowners, forest-owners, mine-owners, fishery-owners, etc.” At this point, the manuscript ends, so where Marx would have taken the answer to the question of what makes a class is, unfortunately, impossible to say with certainty. What is clear, however, is that Marx was suspicious of expanding the definition of class to different “fields” of work, as well as limiting it merely to income. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. III, trans. David Fernbach (New York, 1981), p. 1026; Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Robert C. Tucker, The Marx–Engels Reader (New York, 1972), p. 473.

1 The Era of Big Government Is Over

1 “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.” (First Inauguration Speech, Washington, DC, January 20, 1981.)

2 The highest tax rate had been 92 percent from 1951–63, after which it remained between 70 and 77 percent under Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

3 My parents had originally wanted to name me Theron Lee Rensch, in honor of these two men, but worried it was too strange of a name and went with Adam instead.

4 Randall Rensch, “An Elite Class Makes America’s Decisions,” The Courier (1992, exact date unknown).

5 The plant closed in 2014, despite receiving a Job Creation Tax Credit and nearly $2 million in clean energy tax credits from the federal government in the 2010s. Meredith Morris, the company’s spokeswoman, told the Toledo Blade that the decision to close the plant “supports Dow’s continued focus on optimizing its resources to create maximum value for the company, its customers, and its shareholders.” (Tyrel Linkhorn, “Chemical Company to Close Plant in Findlay,” Toledo Blade (September 10, 2014).

6 Francis Fukuyama, who advised the Reagan administration (including then Vice President Bush) and assisted in its defense strategy against the Soviet Union, is credited with coining this moment “the end of history.” Although his prognosis that history was gradually progressing towards a universal acceptance of liberal democracy and capitalist markets would prove to be incorrect, it is a useful reminder for just how natural and inevitable capitalism appeared after the specter of communism suffered its biggest defeat. As Fukuyama wrote in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992): “The apparent number of choices that countries face in determining how they will organize themselves politically and economically has been diminishing over time. Of the different types of regimes that have emerged in the course of human history, from monarchies and aristocracies, to religious theocracies, to the fascist and communist dictatorships of this century, the only form of government that has survived intact to the end of the twentieth century has been liberal democracy.”

7 Cf. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York, 2008), p. 310.

8 Sundor made its announcement to close the Findlay plant, along with plants in Chicopee, MA, and Mount Dora, FL, on June 17, 1993. Roughly 350 workers lost their jobs. See Frank Standfielf, “Sundor Juice Plant is Closing Next Year,” Orlando Sentinel (June 18, 1993).

9 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1993), pp. 353–4.

10 Unlike Iceland and Sweden, which presently have remarkable 91.8 and 67 percent rates, respectively, union membership in the United States peaked at 37 percent in the 1950s. Nevertheless, unions were enormously popular, with almost four out of five Americans having a favorable opinion of union organizing in the workplace. Beginning in the 1960s, however, union membership began its steady decline, and by the 1990s, it had fallen below 15 percent (it is currently at or below 10 percent). The reasons for this are less complex than one might think, and can largely be explained by corporate influence on politicians to weaken labor laws: it is hardly surprising that when wealthy capitalists lobby congress to pass laws in their favor, such laws have a decent chance of being passed. In the 1940s, the passage of the Labor-Management Relations Act, also called the Taft–Hartley Act, weakened bargaining methods by limiting collective action such as strikes, ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: You Can’t Go Home Again
• one The Era of Big Government Is Over
• two White Trash Nation
• three There Is No Such Thing as Society
• four The Culture Wars
• five Inheritance
• six Conditions Are Fundamentally Sound
• seven Deaths of Despair
• Epilogue: The Stories We Tell
• References
• Acknowledgments