Sympathy for the Devils

Part 3: Rednecks

From Merriam-Webster:

redneck noun (sometimes disparaging) : a white member of the Southern rural laboring class

I’m a little embarrassed. I don’t have much to say about this particular group—nothing that isn’t derived from the media, hearsay, or very brief and shallow instances of personal contact. But that’s sort of what’s at the heart of the matter.

A long time ago—January 2004, to be exact—The Onion published a satirical op-ed attributed to one “Duane Bickels” titled “Yee-Haw! My Vote Cancels Out Y’all’s!” An excerpt:

So maybe you ain't a patriot like I am. Now, when I say patriot, I'm talkin' about most of our athletes, country-music stars, and guys like me what agree with them. So, say you ain't a patriot, and you're fixin' to vote up a candidate what's some limpo what'll give in to the crybaby liberals, the damn screechin' women, the commies at the United Nations, and the other America-haters. Fine by me! I got a vote here that does just as much good as yours, and mine's marked "No Limpos!"

Or say you wanna take away the money we need for our Army tanks and rifles and fightin' planes what let us keep our eternal vigilance of freedom by invadin' other countries. And say you want to give it to the damn schoolteachers, which let me tell you never done old Duane any damn good, and still, they most times drive a newer car than I do. I learned all I got from my daddy—another guy without any fancy book smarts, by the way. If he didn't need them books, then why do anybody else? Well, hey, I might not be educated, but I do got me a big ol' flag, $300 from the government, and a president that, like I told you before, kicked him some ass. It's things like that what make me happy my vote gonna meet y'all's toe-to-toe and take it down!

2004. Bush was up for re-election. My friends and I were horrified by the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Bay. We hated Bush and were terrified at the prospect of him winning another four years in office. And we read The Onion week after week. I feel like I remember this piece coming up in conversation at least a few times that year.

We were Daily Show-liberal college students studying the humanities. Most of us came from the New York metro area. We believed ourselves clever, progressive, and enlightened. On the right side of history. The Onion article filled us with angst and loathing because we could see the truth in it. One person, one vote. And—discounting the arithmetic of the electoral college—our vote counted precisely as much as that of some southern trailer park dumbass who never read a book in his life, didn’t have an opinion in his head that Fox News and talk radio didn’t ejaculate into his ear, was more likely than not a racist and a homophobe and misogynist and definitely a jingoistic Islamophobe, probably believed in Creationism, and had a personal affection for George Bush because he saw that fake folksy moron as a guy he could imagine having a beer with.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Aggressively and proudly ignorant motherfuckers like “Duane” were going to deliver another election to Bush and give the neocons and the religious right another four years to complete their project of turning the United States into a nuclear-armed theocratic feudalist state. Fuck those people, we said.

Of course—we didn’t know any of those people. But we listened to Bill Hicks talking about them. We watched Jon Stewart reacting to clips of them every now and again. We saw them sent up on South Park, The Simpsons, and that one Family Guy episode where the family gets put in the Witness Relocation Program. We heard tales of them from friends who’d passed through the region of central Pennsylvania not-so-affectionately referred to as “Pennsyltucky” or the southern states. We avoided eye contact with the occasional specimen at a gas station or a roadside produce stand somewhere during a long road trip. We had their number. They were backwards and intolerant religious fanatics, savage warmongers, and paranoid gun nuts who flew the Confederate flag over their crappy little front lawns and disdained “book-larnin’.” They thought Larry the Cable Guy was funny. What benighted backwoods retards these people were.

But still—we didn’t know any. Not on any kind of personal level.

That’s the thing about the uneducated, culturally conservative exurban or rural working class types who resemble the caricature of South Park’s Darryl “Pissed Off White Trash Redneck Conservative” Weathers.¹ The educated liberal professionals of the metropoles, despite their strong opinions of them, generally don’t have anything to do with them. They’re a dire phantom. A political and cultural effigy to be spat on. Something to feel embarrassed about when we cash in our paid vacation days, visit Florence or Berlin or Paris, and strike up a conversation with English-speaking locals. They’re as real to us as the Demogorgons are to Stranger Things fanatics, and we have just as vivid and dimensioned an idea of them—but they’re still just an idea.

The first two subjects in this fun little study were creatures of the internet. The redneck is different. He is not a digital phenomenon. We can get the random specimen (someone whom we might suspect fits the redneck profile) banned from Twitter for saying shit too clearly racist, homophobic, antisemitic, etc. even for the hellsite’s Musk Arc, but what does he care? We’re not hurting his social capital. We’re not cutting off any hydra’s heads. He never needed a message board, a subreddit, or a hashtag to form an awareness of and project himself as a constituent of a community of people like himself.² He lives, works, prays, and drinks with people like him. There are whole towns of him. And that’s what drives us crazy. He is to the educated urban liberal what the so-called Saracens were to medieval Christendom. A despised enemy of whom we have a definite conception, and who we know for certain is really out there, but is too far afield to do much of anything about.

Not long ago I picked up Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, a 2007 opus by the late Joe Bageant. Think of it as the leftist predecessor to the much more widely known and talked-about Hillbilly Elegy. It is a book I truly wish I’d read when that Onion article was still lingering in the back of my mind, and one that deserves far more recognition than a two-sentence Wikipedia entry. Here’s the opening passage:

On the morning of November 2, 2004, millions of Democrats arose to a new order. Smoke from neoconservative campfires hung over all points southward and westward. The hairy fundamentalist Christian hordes, the redneck blue-collar legions, and other cultural Visigoths stirred behind distant battlements. In university towns across the country, in San Francisco, Seattle, and Boulder, in that bluest of blue strongholds, New York City, and in every self-contained, oblivious corner of liberal America were a man or woman can buy a copy of The Nation without special-ordering it, Democrats sank into the deepest kind of Prozac-proof depression. What, they wondered, happened out there in the heartland...And why had the working class so plainly voted against their own interests?

Two years later, Democrats regained, for the time being at least, a majority, and liberals have had time to contemplate what they see as the deeply uncultured mob that trounced them in 2004. They have watched panel discussions on PBS. They have argued about where political strategy went wrong. But the one thing the thinking left and urban liberals have not done is tread the soil of the Goth—subject themselves to the unwashed working-class America, to that churchgoing, hunting and fishing, Bud Light-drinking, provincial America.³

November 2, 2004? Christ—he could be talking about November 9, 2016. I see a correlation between the book’s bare-minimum Wikipedia page and the fact that urban liberals and their representatives in the chattering classes were thrown into convulsions when Trump was elected. If the lot of them had read Deer Hunting with Jesus—or if Bageant had been around to warn them (he died in 2011), and if they’d listened—we wouldn’t have been nearly so shocked when the latest avatar of right-wing populism carried the day.⁴

Deer Hunting with Jesus is mostly about Bageant’s hometown of Winchester, Virginia, and is very much a “sympathy for the devil” kind of book. Bageant is unsparing in his criticism of his people, but they are still his people, and he (correctly) believes that the educated urban liberals who rhetorically hammer them at every opportunity don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. Because how could they?

He writes about the fucked-up economics of homeownership in a trailer park.⁵ About members of the working poor absolutely screwed by the healthcare system and predatory lenders and lawyers. About banana republic-styled cartels operating under the banner of “small business.” About being confronted with the choice between enlisting to serve in Iraq or working at a non-union chicken-processing plant.⁶ About fundamentalist churches and gun culture—about people who cling to guns and religion because it situates them in a kind of continuity and coherence that people like me don’t appreciate and can’t understand. About men and women who feel they’re getting squeezed harder and harder, who face indignity after indignity from their employers, their landlords, their health insurance providers, and from the apparition of contemptuous metropolitan liberals who always seem like they’re prospering. About how

the brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically 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.

I guess there’s no avoiding it. Let’s do block quotes.

If you spend your days at a soul-numbing repetitious job, your evenings rotating your tires, rewiring your house, or hauling your aging mother a load of firewood...or recovering on the couch from said job while contemplating the late fees on your credit card, when are you supposed to find the time or wherewithal to grasp the implications of global warming? You are brain dead, so a couple of evenings a week you stop at Royal Lunch and pour beer on your dead brain...Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial theater of the free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism. It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation that allows working people to accept the American empire’s wars without a blink.

During political discussion around here, it is not uncommon to hear someone talk about the Middle East or some Asian or European country “getting out of line” and “needing to be put in its place.” Any day of the week I can easily show you a hundred people who believe we should bomb France (though I doubt many of them could readily find it on a map). For a certain kind of American, it seems, bombing anyone anywhere helps purge some unarticulated rage—rage that the easy truisms that once seemed to lend nobility to the dullest of lives are no longer believable. So long as Americans agreed they were brave and true and exceptional—people toward whom the entire world looked, for example—and so long as they wrapped themselves in the cloak of that self-anointed goodness, their lives had meaning. No insight required. Just add religious faith. Being an American was something to cherish, something worth defending, preferably on the enemy’s turf.

So what happens if you are Tom Henderson and you’ve put in more than twenty years at the plant and let every unique aspect of yourself atrophy so you could do the American Dream by the numbers, only to find that cloak of goodness torn? Twenty years at the same job and the same church, thirty years of good credit, and you look up to find that your wife suffers from chronic depression and that terrorists crashed airplanes into New York. And whispered rumor again has it that Rubbermaid is moving your job to Asia, and television pundits loudly proclaim the impending death of the Social Security system you've been counting on to be there for you, though you’d never admit it openly because, well, it’s a handout. An entitlement.

“America didn’t used to be this way,” Tom laments. “People have fucked up this country.” He’s not sure who. It certainly wasn’t him. But in the harsh new light outside the cloak of goodness there are some very likely suspects, starting with “weirdo university professors, union racketeers, and the rich California ACLU types. People who never worked for a living,” he says. “It all started to go to hell during the sixties.” So Tom is antiliberal and willing to bomb Tehran.

I just remembered something.

It was February, 2009. I’d taken some (unpaid) time off from the bookstore to visit a friend in Wisconsin. I didn’t fly; I wanted to drive. I was still doing a webcomic back then and needed to get an update wrapped up so I wouldn’t have an 80 percent-finished strip in the back of my mind while I was spending time with someone I might not see again for a very long time. I pulled into a highway rest stop in the middle of Indiana and sat at a table with my laptop. I forget what day of the week it was, but it was a weekday.

It took a second for it to register. A man saying something like, “boy, I wish I had time to fuck around on a computer instead of working.” He said it loud because he wanted me to hear it, and there was contempt in his voice. I looked up and saw three white blue-collar types sniggering and headed for the door.

Nothing I could have said in my defense—nothing that wouldn’t have made them turn around, come over, and really distract me from what I was doing—would have meant anything to them. I clearly wasn’t from around there, and I was flaunting my idleness. They were affronted, and I guess I can’t blame them.

Bageant:

In the redneck mind, lazy is the worst thing a person can be—worse than dumb, drunk, or mean, worse than being a liar and a jailbird or crazy. The absolute worst thing that a redneck can say about anyone is: “He doesn’t want to work,” which is generally followed by, “Hell, I don’t want to work either, but I have to.” By the same logic, educated liberals who have time to read, who in fact read so much that they join book clubs, are suspect.

Imagine how they must feel about the post-covid “laptop worker” whom they’ve all heard about by now: someone who gets out of bed at 8:30 in the morning, answers some emails, takes a shower, composes a few more emails, takes their laptop down the block to Starbucks to sit through a Zoom session on a headset, then types some numbers into a spreadsheet and browses Reddit or Instagram while waiting for more emails to come in—and earns a substantially higher income and gets much better benefits than them.

Even rednecks are smart enough to notice the screws are being put to them. Wages have been stagnant for decades in spite of increased productivity. Where offshoring hasn’t thrown American laborers out of work, the threat of it is enough to cudgel them into accepting whatever lousy bargain their employers put on the table. So-called low-skilled workers have increasingly been made to compete for jobs with immigrants willing to do the same work for less pay.⁷ NAFTA, the 2008 financial crisis, and post-covid inflation have incrementally made life harder for people who attended lousy high schools and never went to college, who don’t own much in the way of assets, and who can’t do much of anything but work with their hands and strain their backs. And thanks to modern communications technology, they can tune into talk radio and absorb internet ragebait telling them that metropolitan urban liberals “who never worked for a living”—who never really worked worked, those photographers and videographers and bloggers and graphic artists and consultants and office supervisors and lawyers and librarians and marketing researchers and social media managers and those workers of every variety of bullshit job—are apparently getting by just dandily.

There is a condensed version of the overarching narrative. Wealth flows into the metropoles and stays there, while the kinds of productive labor that formed the hearts of provincial economic hubs are made untenable through the “natural” operations of capitalism: technological improvements obsolesce positions and reduce staffing needs, overseas plants can turn out the same products for a fraction of the domestic cost of labor, regional firms get bought out and are either “rightsized” or altogether gutted, and so on. None of this is directly the fault of the nonbinary college graduate managing a Starbucks in downtown Manhattan, the Seattle engineer who drives a Tesla to work, or the black woman with a master’s degree who heads a DEI department at a New England university. But to all appearances, these people aren’t hurting much—and all of them seem to be waging a cultural crusade against everything the white working-class conservative holds dear. So that’s where “Duane’s” rage is directed: toward the soft, affluent, think-they’re-so-smart liberals who (he’s told) want to take his guns and outlaw his internal combustion engine, who ridicule his religion and his patriotism, who want to groom his children into becoming transgenders and homosexuals, who say he should feel ashamed for being white and/or American, who try to tell him it’s okay for the blacks and the Antifas to burn down a city block and call him a racist for thinking otherwise, who yearned with all their hearts for the covid lockdowns to have lasted forever…and so on. Having been hoodwinked into not seeing the people who are really robbing him for what they are, or otherwise believing that their dominance and his position in the scheme of things are features of the right and natural order of the world, he is easily persuaded to ignore the economic base and direct his rage and resentment towards the cultural superstructure—towards perceived attacks on his values and against his identity. Simple enough when it looks a hell of a lot like the most committed evangelists of liberalism, progressivism, wokeism, or whatever you’d like to call it, are consistently among the winners of the twenty-first-century economy. If the system is working for them, then they must be screwing it up for him.⁸

But this is all speculation—trying to guess at the illusions and rationalizations of millions of people I don’t know. I don’t have much to go on but intuition, what I’ve read in Bageant and others, seen in tweets and and Yahoo News comments, heard during the occasional ten minutes listening in on AM radio during long dives, and so on. These are ideas about media entities and of the folkways of places Where There Be Dragons.

Another Bageant excerpt. This one features a reach-lift operator named Nance Willingham (“thirty-three, hillbilly cute, and a single mother raising two kids with the help of her mom”):

Nance’s political and cultural world is entirely defined by media of the lowest and broadest common denominator, by her church, and by her workplace. Especially her workplace. When it comes to plants like Rubbermaid and the folks who work in them, you are talking about people who are not on political mailing lists, couldn’t care less what is on the internet, and would not know a BlackBerry from a garage-door opener. They spend eight hours a day listening to talk radio through earphones as they work. And they are aware of the politics of their supervisors and bosses.

It would be wrong to say that supervisors put pressure on workers like Nance to vote conservative. They don’t have to. They merely let their politics be known, and the desire to curry favor with the boss does the rest. In this work environment employees suck up reflexively. Consequently, people like Nance listen closely to the alpha-male supervisor in the break room for clues about opinions they should and should not hold and express—not only about politics but also about anything else that might go against the grain in the plant environment. Naturally, there is the ever-present antiunion pressure. From the first employee training and indoctrination sessions, Newell Rubbermaid makes the corporate position clear. This is not really necessary. We learned the lesson as kids. I remember my ninth-grade history teacher at Handley High School spending an entire classroom hour on “communist labor unions.” The same teacher, rest his soul, also told us that “coloreds are happy enough to have a coon tail on their car antennas and a plate of fried chicken on their table.”

Meanwhile, inside the radio headphones of Nance and everyone else allowed to tune in while working at Rubbermaid, talk radio squawks, honks, and howls indignantly about the state of the Republic. The rants of Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and other right-wing talk jocks are interspersed with debt consolidation commercials. “Sometimes I listen to contemporary Christian stations, but they play the same thing over and over and over,” explains Nance. So she keeps drifting back to talk radio (“Today our guest is John Lee Clary, former Ku Klux Klansman now ministering for our Lord and Savior. His new book is named From Klan to Christ! Good morning, John!”) and sometimes local modern country stations, where ultraconservatism is a given. The politically indifferent and nonreligious listen to classic rock.

It is safe to say that radio supplies the workers with most of their knowledge of things political. Most do not subscribe to a newspaper, and the political influences of their favorite network, Fox, is somewhat overrated out here—except in the hypnagogic sense, which is admittedly no small thing. But that intimate radio space that fills the void of shift work...ahhh! If you’ve ever done “eight straight” cutting tabs off molded plastic or stacking pallets, you know how powerful the sound of the relentless “one voice speaking to the many” is to those working in headphone radio space, that bubble of radio reality within the roaring of the machines. For eight hours it is a voice inside your head that sounds like your own voice. Ask any assembly-line worker, night janitor, or house painter.

My twenty-something self would have lamented that they’re not listening to NPR or some wonky podcast and educating themselves on the real facts. But why would they when the voice from the radio sounds nothing like they do, doesn’t talk about anything they want to listen to, and typically speaks of them as though they aren’t listening? For that matter, why should we expect them to be autodidacts when nothing at all in their experience indicates any causal connection between poring over any particular books on any particular subjects and getting a wage increase, a better job, or anything else that would substantially raise their standard of living?⁹

Progressives like to gasp and gnash their teeth at proposed “bootstraps” solutions to poverty—especially when their exponents are conservative white pundits talking about urban black communities. We don’t seem to grasp that when we blame redneck types for their own backwardness and ignorance, we’re ignoring a multitude of environmental impediments that might as well be custom-designed to keep them in the dark, ensure their hostility against the kind of politics that have the best chance of improving their station in life, and perpetuate the cycle of “voting against their own interests,” as we educated urban liberals like to say. And I reckon we’re willing to overlook the effects of lousy public education, economic malaise and alienation, the pressures of conformity, the opioid and methamphetamine crises, the brain drain phenomenon, and any number of other determining factors of the intellectual and ideological makeup of white working-class communities in places we fly over or speed past because these are people we just plain don’t like.

Bageant, one last time:

There is no good reason why for the past thirty years the uncertainty and dissatisfaction of people like Tom and Nance was automatically snubbed as unenlightened by so many on the left. If the left had identified and dealt with the dissatisfaction early on, if they had counteracted the fallacies the Republicans used to explain that dissatisfaction, if they had listened instead of stereotyping blue-collar angst as “Archie Bunkerism” (itself a stereotype of a stereotype delivered unto their minds by television) and maybe offered some gutsy, comprehensible, and practical solutions, we might have witnessed something better than the Republican syndicate’s lying and looting of the past six years. Real movements take advantage of the protest-potential to be found among dissatisfied and disappointed people—people disenfranchised by bureaucracy, technology, and “experts.” Rightists tapped into that dissatisfaction by lamenting the loss of community and values and attributing it to the “cultural left’s” feminism and antiracism, the gay movement, and so on. The Republican message, baloney though it is, was accessible to Nance. The Democrats didn’t have any message at all.

Remember—this was published in 2007. The more things change, right?¹⁰

If it’s true the Democrats have nothing to say to Nance or to “Duane,” it’s not at all the case that affluent educated folk in the suburbs and cities who consistently vote Democrat have nothing to say about them. And in the situation of the global village, they can’t but know what we think of them, whether they’re informed by talk radio, right-wing cable news, memes and ragebait links passed around local Facebook groups, or the hearsay of petite bourgeoisie neighbors loaded with invidious talking points. Even if they’re deep in a part of the boonies into which no latte-sipping laptop-working urban liberal will ever intentionally wander, they can’t but know we hold them in contempt. Rolling coal and other such provocations would be inexplicable otherwise.

And we’re not much interested in changing their minds about us or about the world—because that would entail living where they live, working where they work, drinking with them and going fishing with them, attending church with them, and making an effort to hold back the bile whenever they say something that offends or stupefies us. In other words, to have any chance of making inroads with them—to try and enlighten them, if you’d like—we need to be willing to meet them where they’re coming from. Approach them as equals out in the world. “Tread the soil of the Goth,” as Bageant says.

And we really don’t want to do that.¹¹ Missionism isn’t our bag. Which means that affluent metropolitan progressives, the sort of people who tend to get the most apoplectic about the uncouth populism, self-destructive ignorance, and potentially violent reactionism of the provincial white working class, are also the least inclined and most poorly positioned to take proactive measures to mitigate it. Inveighing against stupid, mean, hateful rednecks (or against our idea of them) in the comments section of the Washington Post or arguing with trolls on social media who seem to be holograms of them is our preferred approach. It’s far more convenient to write them off as hopelessly stupid moral failures (placing their idiocy in a causal relationship to their depravity), wash our hands of them, and hope they’ll all kindly drink and dope themselves to death before they get their next chance to vote another Bush or Trump into office to spite us.¹²

A winning strategy for sure.

1. Bageant tells us this descriptor contains an oxymoron: “rednecks work themselves to death and will never accept a handout. White trash folks do not have the same hang-up.”

2. Tellingly, the subreddit r/rednecks is a ghost town. The subreddit r/RedneckEngineering is significantly more active and lively—but when the first post you see involves a “gaming table” it’s a pretty good indication that we’re not dealing with a userbase of people who’ve ever worked the night shift at Waffle House for three-plus years. Circa 2007, and according to Bageant, they frequented town message boards. I imagine today they’re on Facebook groups.

3. People like me and my friends don’t drink Bud Light. We’re fussy urban liberal connoisseurs who’ll pay two or three bucks more for a pint of a hazy IPA or a nice saison. The exurban or rural right-winger would not have cared a whit if one of our candy-ass beer brands attached Dylan Mulvaney to its name. As far as he’s concerned, Budweiser made the deliberate choice to snub him in an effort to impress us. Probably hard not to take that kind of thing personally.

4. John Gray: “What liberals call populism is the political backlash against the social disruption produced by their policies, which liberals don't understand—or deny.”

5. This is a more recent event—but I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Alden Global Capital?

6. Bageant, in a section about Lynndie England (who did work at a chicken-processing plant before enlisting):

These so-called volunteers are part of the nation’s de facto draft—economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes. Thirteen hundred a month, a signing bonus, and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken’s ass.

And don't forget the big bucks for college later. Up to $65,000...Perhaps many poor and working-class kids do go to college on their military benefits. But I can count on one hand the number I know who did it. Let’s be honest: graduating from a small-town redneck high school not knowing where Alaska is on a map of the United States is not exactly the path to the birdbaths of Harvard Square. I suspect that down inside Lynndie knew her lot in life from the start; she wore combat boots and camo outfits to high school. She swore she loved it. If you are doomed to eat shit, you may as well bring your own fork.

7. Bageant:

[I]n what can only be called a selfless contribution to cross-cultural understanding, Rubbermaid brings into the Winchester plant ever-increasing numbers of what some Anglo workers call “little brown guys” to work alongside the corpulent, red-faced natives. Leased from temp agencies, they work for less and are disposable, expressing their gratitude by disappearing on command. Contrary to logic, however, few Anglos appear openly resentful. “It’s what we gotta do to keep the plants in this country and stay competitive. I ain’t prejudiced. I got nothing against Mexicans,” one employee told me. And so have others. I can only conclude they are lying through their teeth, have been indoctrinated by the company, or are so damned dumb they can barely stand up. My money is on the lying.

8. Them—and very probably also the melanated recipients of “handouts” whom he sees the urban liberal openly and insidiously preferring over god-fearing, hardworking, patriotic men like himself.

9. My wife grew up in an immigrant family. Both her parents worked. When she was young they depended on food stamps and kept all the lights off after sunset to save on their electric bill. She sometimes likes to remind me that contemplating an 800-page tome by Thomas Piketty or working through a calculus textbook just for hell of it are luxuries that a whole lot of people can’t afford.

10. Money quote from the linked ProPublica piece:

“No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said. “It’s a shame. They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”

11. Except when a bunch of us participate in staging takeovers of their turf. That’s a different story, and it evidently doesn’t make them like us any better or more inclined to listen to us.

12. For a while it was also popular to hope that their chafing against covid lockdowns and their aversion to vaccinations and masks would thin out their ranks.