1 Introduction

During the post–World War II “golden age” of secure wages, low unemployment, and stable nuclear family structures, coming of age in America could be characterized as a journey with stable and predictable endings. Since the 1970s, however, the American economic, political, and social landscape has changed dramatically, deinstitutionalizing the standard life course. While the mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economy offered good-paying jobs for men with a high school degree, young men without college degrees have experienced a drop in available jobs, compensation, access to pensions, and employer-subsidized health insurance (see also Grimm et al., this issue). Industrial capitalism depended upon the ideal of a nuclear family for productive and reproductive labor, with a father who sold his labor for money and a mother who took on caring and domestic labor. This idealized family form maintained and reproduced gender and racial hierarchies, as working-class men often accepted the alienation and exploitation of their manual labor jobs in exchange for a sense of masculine dominance and racial superiority, confining men of color to the most menial and dirty jobs (Willis 1977; Lamont 2000). As industrial working-class jobs have become insecure or nonexistent for American men, the nuclear family has also become unworkable, destabilizing the gender roles and family arrangements upon which traditional definitions of adulthood used to stand (Giustozzi, this issue; Silva 2013; Weis 2001). While the breakdown of industrial capitalism and the unequal relationships upon which it depended has been experienced as “degrading” and “demoralizing” (Dublin and Licht 2005) to white working-class men, it has also opened up new emancipatory possibilities for imagining the relationship between “self and society” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995).

This freedom from older ways of organizing work and family life has unfolded alongside an unmooring from a variety of institutions that once anchored working-class individuals in communities both real and imagined. Culturally, while the working class of a generation ago may have turned to their church, their bowling league, their local political party, or their ethnic club for collective action and social support, levels of social connectedness and integration have declined for working-class youth today (Putnam 2015). While this disconnection might signal freedom from older social constraints—religion, gender, politics—working-class people are more dependent on, and at the mercy of, a ruthless labor market and social welfare state that has gutted the power of the working class. And yet, political participation—whether by voting, contacting a public official, getting involved in organizations, or donating to a political campaign—is also increasingly skewed in favor of people with more education, stronger social networks, and greater wealth (Braconnier and Dormagen 2007). American nonvoters are disproportionately younger and less educated, have lower incomes, and come from racial and ethnic minority groups (Schlozman et al. 2013). These patterns persisted even in the 2020 presidential election, a year of record turnout.

Researchers have linked rising economic insecurity, social unmooring, and plummeting social trust to political realignment or disengagement, theorizing how dashed expectations about how one’s life should turn out—the inability to achieve the same standard of living as one’s parents—spill over into racial resentment, disillusionment, and despair (Morgan and Lee 2017; Cherlin 2014; Bageant 2008; Frank 2004). One area of inquiry in this vein has examined how the white working class, once a bastion of Democratic membership and class solidarity, has shifted to the right and embraced political platforms that seem to work against their broader interests. Indeed, the phenomenon of the aging, embittered, white blue-collar man who embraces right-wing politics has enamored scholars for decades, leading to a flood of research attempting to explain Donald Trump’s presidency.

But what about the next generation of the American working class? Survey data point to the increasing social and political disengagement of working-class youth, as young adults from impoverished and less educated backgrounds are less prone to take part in social organizations, to volunteer, or to vote—the cornerstones of American democracy. Drawing on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which asks a representative sample of Americans about their civic habits including belonging to a voluntary organization, attending a public meeting, engaging in a boycott, working with others to fix a neighborhood problem, or contacting a public official, Putnam found that more than twice as many high school–educated youth were completely detached from civic life compared with college-educated youth, while more than twice as many college-educated youth engaged in more than one of these activities. Furthermore, the class gap in voting has increased over the last several decades: In the presidential election of 2008, 78% of college-educated youth between the ages of 20 and 25 voted, compared with 41% of those who did not have any education past high school. If disenfranchised youth feel that they have no voice or connection to mainstream politics, it is possible that they will turn away from legitimate means and embrace political radicalism or extremism (Putnam 2015). Disconnected young people are often difficult to reach in survey-based studies of voting behavior, yet uncovering their perceptions and worldviews is crucial to understanding the processes that lead to disengagement and withdrawal from the political sphere.

There are compelling reasons to believe that working-class young adults may create new loyalties, dissolve older attachments, and remake divisions of race, class, ethnicity, and gender (Abramson et al. 2010; Sartori 1969; Redding 2003). Young working-class Americans have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty, and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than the two generations that preceded them had at the same stage of their life cycles (Pew Research Center 2014). They appear to be less antigovernment than their older counterparts, despite having only a third-hand attachment to the politics of the New Deal (Molyneux and Teixeira 2010). They are less trusting of social institutions, less attached to political affiliations and religious identities, and more tolerant of gay rights and interracial marriage than generations of the past (Pew Research Center 2014). And they are the most racially diverse generation in American history (Frey 2018). This is a historic moment when the identity of the working class is up for grabs: Will working-class young adults be open to solidarities across race, social class, and gender? Will they turn to right-wing political agendas that divide them against each other? Or will they not do anything in the political sphere at all?

2 Theoretical Framework

In order to make more sociologically informed analyses of the politics of working-class youth, this study examines how young working-class men and women in a declining coal community in Pennsylvania envisioned and deployed political identities and behaviors before and during the 2016 presidential election cycle. While working-class white young adults may inherit political beliefs from their parents, growing up in a time of social disengagement and mistrust has the potential to disrupt older allegiances and prompt the creation of new identities and social solidarities. However, frustration and grievance do not automatically lead to collective political action. Will these young people decide anything is worth fighting for? This is an urgent question: Given that political attitudes are relatively unstable during early adulthood but solidify with age, how young working-class adults make these moral calculations now will cast a long shadow on the future of American policy and democracy (Alwin and Krosnick 1991).

I begin this endeavor by challenging the conventional view of voters who cast their votes based on the candidate and policies that best serve their economic interests. As Achen and Bartels demonstrate, most voters cast ballots based on how “someone like me” should feel. Voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—for the most part choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic facts to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents’ control; the outcomes appear essentially random (Achen and Bartels 2016). As Cramer observes, focusing on people’s “sense of who they are in the world” moves us away from the positivist conception that “people with particular combinations of … characteristics” will vote in particular, predictable ways. Instead, we need to focus on “how people themselves combine attitudes and identities—how they create or constitute perceptions of themselves and use these to make sense of politics” (Cramer 2016, pp. 19–22).

People configure these identities through storytelling, often in dialogue with real or imagined others (Somers 1994). It is the stories people tell about who they are, what they owe others and what they are owed, and where they should be that do the interpretive work of connecting the independent variable, social position, and the dependent variable, how people think about the political landscape and what is the right choice for them. As the narrative psychologist Dan McAdams writes eloquently, the stories we tell help us to “reconcile who we imagine we were, are, and might be in our heads and bodies with who we were, are, and might be” in the broader social world—whether that entails social class, gender, race, or place (McAdams 2008, pp. 242–243). Through narrative, the self comes to terms with its relationship to history and society. In this vein, we can theorize how the stories people construct about their lives create bridges between socializing experiences, especially within the family, and political identity (Silva 2019).

Narrative scholars argue that these stories of the self are not merely factual—a stable, chronological ordering of life events—but instead represent a reconstruction of one’s past and a projection of one’s future, explaining and justifying how one arrived at one’s current position in life and how one will propel oneself into an imagined future (McAdams 2006; Frye 2017). Narrative plays a central role in making sense of difficult emotional experiences, which are interpreted by the storyteller as they put their inchoate feelings into language (Kurakin 2020). Such stories may draw upon and mix metaphors, images, and cultural scripts from shared social life and may change across time and space, often depending on what people are trying to explain or what problem they are trying to solve (Illouz 2007).

Crucially, without the institutional girders of religion, family ties, work, or politics of generations past, people find themselves faced with the task of creating their own individualized life stories. In his seminal work on modernity and self-identity, for example, Giddens argues that in place of stable, traditional endings, selfhood has become an individual and ongoing process of construction and reconstruction: “[I]n the context of a post-traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive project … the altered self has to be explored and constructed as part of a reflexive project of connecting personal and social change” (Giddens 1991, pp. 32–33). That is, as external markers become unreliable, “what the individual becomes is dependent on the reconstructive endeavors in which he or she engages” (Giddens 1991, p. 75).

By taking people’s emotional experiences seriously, scholars have shed light on why people seem to make choices that contravene their economic self-interests. To provide one prominent example, Arlie Hoschschild spent many years studying conservative voters in Louisiana who rejected environmental protection from the federal government even as they witnessed the destruction of their natural landscape from pollution and environmental disasters. Hochschild uncovered a narrative she calls the “Deep Story”—a story about how white working-class people have worked hard and are patiently waiting in line waiting for the American Dream while the government allows the poor, minorities, and illegal immigrants to cut in line and take the reward from the deserving people. Her participants expressed feeling powerless, marginalized, and ostracized, and at the root of their alienation and fear was a loss of the feeling of honor. One way they restored honor, she found, was to equate risk-taking and lack of regulation with human freedom, despite the rampant destruction that such views brought to bear on their lives (Hochschild 2016).

Political scientists have a long tradition of tracing how political identities and ideologies are passed down over generations (Campbell et al. 1960). However, the transmission of political identity from parents to children is not a passive, seamless process, but instead arises out of a complex interplay of powerful institutions, family loyalties, and microinteractions (de Leon 2014). Children are not passive recipients of their parents’ political dispositions, but are active agents in their own socialization (Ojeda and Hatemi 2015). Young working-class men and women have inherited a complex legacy of rights, resentments, freedoms, and betrayals from their parents. At the same time, younger generations of working-class people have been found to have a distinctive emotional style, characterized by distrust, low expectations of loyalty, wariness of romantic commitment, and a focus on psychic and emotional growth (Silva 2013). Thus, according to Nie et al., they may be particularly open to the influences of the pressing issues of their own time: namely, the economic downturn of the Great Recession and related issues of debt, immigration, and government regulation (Nie and Andersen 1974). Furthermore, evidence suggests that young adults are “fed up” with the politics of their parents’ generation and are searching for new forms of engagement (Pilkington and Polluck 2015).

Narratives serve as badges of belonging as people construct life narratives for themselves that process experience in ways that orient them toward the good. Clearly, the relationship between class and politics in the United States is about much more than simple economic self-interest; it is also about fierce symbolic battles that demarcate moral boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Furthermore, I argue that understandings of economic policy are often shot through with cultural notions of self-worth and human freedom. Accordingly, I investigate the following questions: In the face of soaring economic inequality and rising despair, how do young working-class people solidify or remake divisions and solidarities across race, ethnicity, gender, and class? How do they justify their division and disengagement? How will they make sense of their struggles to attain the American Dream, and how will they console themselves when they fail? In doing so, I build on a long tradition in sociology that investigates the frames of meaning that organize the lives of the working class (Lane 1962; Aronowitz 1992; Halle 1987; Sennett and Cobb 1973; Rubin 1976; Milkman 1997; Weis 2001; Lamont 2000; Kefalas 2003).

3 Data and Methods

In this study, I take as a starting point that people’s experience of the world, whether or not we think their emotions and perceptions are valid or sensible, can have a real impact on their actions, health, and relationships because they treat them as natural, true, and ready-made. Capturing people’s understandings of their own lives can provide insight into the mechanisms that underlie the demographic patterns we observe when relying on quantitative data.

From 2015 to 2017, I conducted in-depth interviews with white, Hispanic, and Black young adults and their families in the coal region of northeast Pennsylvania. I was particularly interested in places that used to lean Democratic, reflecting the strength of the postwar, unionized working class—whether coalminers, steelworkers, or automobile factory workers. Over the past few decades, the Democratic Party has been losing voters from the white working class “who seem to correspond most closely to one’s intuitive sense of the heart of the white working class—that is, white voters who have a moderate income and are non-college educated” (Abramowitz and Teixeira 2008). The years following the Great Recession also saw an increase in working-class Americans leaving the Democratic Party but not joining the Republicans (Morgan and Lee 2017). Pennsylvania has historically been an overwhelmingly white state, with a minority of Black Americans in major cities, but the rural areas in between are growing more ethnically and racially diverse. In 2000, there were about 157,201 residents, or 5% of the total population, who identified as nonwhite and/or Hispanic. In 2015, though, 294,801 rural residents, or 9% of the total population, were nonwhite and/or Hispanic. I blur the line between working-class and poor, as these groups increasingly share far more work instability and insecurities in basic needs than they do with their professional middle-class counterparts (Lareau and Conley 2008). These “newcomers” are generally younger, poorer, less likely to be married, and more likely to be single parents than their rural white counterparts (Center for Rural PA 2015).

The coal region beckoned as a nexus of the social, economic, and political transformations currently rocking the United States—the decline of industry, a sharp decrease in labor power, growing racial and ethnic tensions and flux, and increasing political disengagement.

While I do not know whether the people I spoke with are representative of working-class populations more broadly, I suggest that this study is logically generalizable by uncovering processes that can help us understand the demographic patterns of political disengagement and distrust in other spaces of industrial decline (Luker 2010). I focused on building rigor through the depth of meaning captured through immersion in a particular site, the vividness of the data that could not be gleaned through other methods (Lareau and Rao 2016), and by purposely sampling a variety of different kinds of people in the community so as not to reduce a complex phenomenon into too simple a story (DeLuca et al. 2016).

In line with earlier qualitative research on inequality, culture, and class reproduction, I defined social class by educational attainment, recruiting respondents who held less than a 4-year college degree (Silva 2013; Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Silva and Putnam 2015). Class is a fuzzy concept in American sociology, especially because the stable, good-paying manual labor jobs for people with high school diplomas that once clearly signified “working class” have largely disappeared. However, since the 1970s, the 4‑year college degree has increasingly become the dividing line between “good jobs” offering salaries, benefits, autonomy, and opportunity for advancement versus “bad jobs” that treat workers as replaceable or even disposable (Kalleberg 2009). As Draut puts it succinctly, “As a result of the divergence in economic fates experienced by those with and without bachelor’s degrees, today’s middle class is overwhelmingly a professional class, comprising workers who get paid annual salaries, work in an office setting, and most assuredly do not have to ask permission to take a bathroom break” (Draut 2018, p. 2). In my expansive definition of working class, I included respondents who left high school/hold a General Educational Development (GED) certification, have high school diplomas, have some college, or have 2‑year degrees or certificates, as these groups increasingly share far more work instability and insecurities in basic needs than they do with their professional middle-class counterparts. I also kept my definition of class open because, if social class is to serve as the basis of a shared political identity, it would not be an automatic response to sharing the same education level, income bracket, or job, but would “happen” through concrete social relationships that generate shared political interests in ways that cannot be assumed in advance (Thompson 1966).

I spent hours with my respondents as they attended family dinners, church services and festivals, town meetings, drug addiction support groups, volunteer fire company shifts, and local sporting events. I walked participants through a written consent process before I began the interviews, providing the following explanation: “The purpose of my study is to learn about the political beliefs, life experiences, and family histories of residents of Central Pennsylvania. I am particularly interested in how you make decisions about who you vote for, what you value, and what kind of country you want America to be.” I offered USD 40 as a token of appreciation for their time and conducted 108 interviews in total.

When I entered the field, I first felt intimidated, as I was immediately recognized in local bars, restaurants, or sporting events as an outsider to this small town. I was worried I might be seen as a snooty college professor from a wealthier nearby town with high property taxes and home values, highly rated schools, and a low crime rate. At times, I drew upon my own background, as a first-generation college graduate, to make connections; my own father left high school to join the military and earned a GED, then worked as a firefighter, and has, like many of the people I met while interviewing, literally broken his body as a worker for 40 years. My mother, a self-trained, high school–educated landscaper, works 12 h a day and is in her 60s. I know, in an embodied way, how crucial it is for workers to be paid enough to build a secure, stable life with opportunities for growth.

Many of the working-class people whom I grew up around have turned to political conservatism or apathy over the last decade, rejecting their unions and their political affiliations, as the Democrats are perceived to have turned their back on them. As I have been highly upwardly mobile, earning a PhD and now working as a professor at a research university, I am aware of the tensions and contradictions between the working-class world I grew up in and the elite academic world I have joined, allowing me to go back and forth between these worlds daily. As a white woman in my early 30s, I believe that I was perceived as nonthreatening and caring, and I was generally invited into people’s homes (sometimes after they confirmed that I was not a cop). In turn, I was happy to help out however I could, whether by rocking babies, giving people rides to pick up their kids, stirring whatever was cooking on the stove, or buying Gun Bingo tickets from children for school fundraisers.

My interview style was built around “listening to people”—following along carefully as participants answered my questions, proactively thinking and reformulating clarifying questions as the interview progressed, using the interviewee’s own words in our conversations to build rapport and connection, and gently guiding people with follow-up questions (Lareau 2021). I began with questions about their childhood background, including their family structure, the jobs their parents held, and their experiences in school, organized religion, and sports. I asked them to self-identify their race and gender identity. I asked them to walk me through their memories of difficult times and happy times. I explored their generational history, including the kinds of memories and stories that had been passed down about their parents and grandparents, especially their involvement in unions, politics, and the military. I asked about their own work history and whether they had considered leaving the area for more opportunity; they walked me through a typical day and gave me an account of their monthly earnings and bills. I asked them about their mental and physical health and whether they had medical care. I asked them to describe the problems in the area, such as drugs, racism, and crime. I also asked about involvement in civic organizations, such as volunteer fire companies, ethnic clubs, and youth sports leagues. I explored where they got their news about current events and how they felt about social movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. Sometimes we would decide to meet again the following day. Other questions included the following:

What do you think the biggest risks to your sense of stability or security are? Walk me through a time when you felt like you just couldn’t make it. What happened? Who could you turn to? What did you do?

Can you remember any times when your race made getting ahead, or achieving a goal, harder for you?

What types of interactions have you had with the government? Do you feel that leaders and major institutions work in your best interest?

Are you registered to vote? How have you voted in the past? How do you feel about Democrats/Republicans, liberals/conservatives? Can you walk me through every election you can remember in your life?

What does “the American Dream” mean to you? Has it changed over time? Are there people who deserve a helping hand?

I also asked them about their heroes, about politicians they admired and disliked, and whether they could name any leaders who cared about “people like you.”

Once the interviews were transcribed, I created a set of initial codes that allowed me to grasp what was happening in the thousands of pages of interview transcripts. Line by line coding led me to document a wide range of details about our sample, including whom they planned to vote for, whether they used government assistance, whether they had health insurance, whether they trusted the government and politicians, and how they remembered their parents’ politics. I also constantly jotted down ideas and wrote ongoing informal memos from before I even started interviewing. I then focused on uncovering processes of meaning-making and problem-solving that are produced through the stories people constructed to explain and affirm who they are, symbolically organizing and reorganizing their past experiences and present circumstances into a narrative of a stable self (Ezzy 1998). Such narrative understandings of the self can have important implications for people’s behavior as they shape their ongoing behavior to fit their sense of self (Miles 2014). Drawing from political sociology, I was curious about “the construction of cultural frames and the identification of which social problems are seen as in need of attention or correction” and the way that politics unfolds through “specific social and cultural contexts and interactions, in domains of life that are not thought of as political at all” (Hartmann and Uggen 2015) I was also listening for evidence of people’s perceptions of political battles that demarcate boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion, rather than simple economic self-interest (Lamont 2000).

To be completely honest, the stories that my participants told me—especially about painful individual experiences and learning to survive on their own, ignoring politics in their daily lives—caused initial confusion for me. As Luker writes, sometimes an ethnographer does not know what she is looking for until halfway through the data collection (Luker 2010). Using the interview transcripts as raw material, I slowly realized how people connected their life histories to their politics, tracing how pain and distrust organized the selves of working-class people, in ways that seemed to vary across race and gender within the sample. I embraced the ongoing process of “puzzling out” what was happening in the data, working back and forth from existing scholarly knowledge, the data, and creative insights, repeating this process until I had identified a working set of concepts around which to organize the findings below (Timmermans and Tavory 2012).

For the purpose of this paper, I focus on participants who were 40 years old or younger at the time of their interview. This subsample breaks down into 33 people of color (14 women and 19 men) and 40 white people (23 women and 17 men). To provide a description of the participants, the vast majority of the white men were employed, holding jobs as factory workers, roofers, electricians, plumbers, or landscapers. While three planned to vote for Trump, and two planned to vote for Clinton, the remainder stated that they would not vote in 2016. About two thirds of the white women were employed in jobs such as home health aides, cashiers, servers, hotel housekeeping staff, or beauty technicians, while one third were not working. While three women planned to vote for Trump, and two planned to vote for Clinton, the majority did not plan to vote at all. Among the Black and Hispanic men, we observe more economic precarity, with men working as day laborers in construction or landscaping, with a third not working at the time. With the exception of two participants, none of the men of color planned to vote. Finally, among the women of color, most were employed, working in entry-level, low-paying jobs such as medical assistants, home health care, and call centers. One participant stated that “Bernie was my guy,” voted for Jill Stein, yet was “happy Trump got it rather than her [Clinton],” while the rest of the subsample said they did not plan to vote. Thus, looking at the sample as a whole, the vast majority of people in each group attested that they would not vote in 2016.

4 Findings

I now turn to analyze how the young working-class men and women in my sample—across race and gender—negotiate and even break with the political traditions they have grown up with. I reveal how they forge their own emotional style of clear-eyed skepticism, critical awareness, inward-focused healing, and unyielding disengagement. They freely let go of normative expectations of patriotism and the comforting belief that there is something larger and more meaningful than themselves. While most participants are quite critical of large corporations and government corruption, they see no avenues for engaging collectively with other people in the same situation; instead, the emotions they feel from their disappointing pasts, unstable presents, and grim futures crystallize their lack of trust in others and reinforce their deep-seated belief that, quite simply, “we are all fucked.” Histories of subjugation, both in terms of gender and racial identity, also shape how participants constructed their narratives and propelled their stories into the future, though these narratives converge in their lack of faith in American democracy. Relying on their smartphones, some young adults find convincing evidence of conspiracy theory—that politicians are “selected” from above, bought off by the wealthy elite in whose interests they serve.

4.1 Disillusionment and Isolation

A theme of distrust of government and disgust with politicians ran through virtually every interview with young people in the sample (as opposed to older generations in the sample who still believed that “America” stood for something noble and that they should have pride in their country). Participants expressed that the government did not care about people like them, and even believed that the government and other institutions were actively and purposely trying to harm them. In order to make these claims, participants told stories rooted in their own everyday observations and experiences as well as their understandings of national politics gleaned from social media.

Kristin and Jeremiah are a white couple in their early 30s who hold high school diplomas. Kristin works as a home health aide, and Jeremiah works in a factory producing doors and windows. Kristin has three children from her previous relationship as well as custody of her nephew, a toddler whose mother left him. Kristin carries trauma from her childhood—her parents were both addicted to drugs and were physically and sexually abusive—and is currently trying to escape her ex, who is a violent stalker. Right now, they say, “We got to get our bills caught up,” but as Jeremiah puts it, “The faster you work, the harder it gets; the more I do, the more I feel like I am going to break and end up having to stop.” When Kristin looks around her, and especially at her own family, she scoffs, “We work, we bust our butts, we try our best. And we’re not drug addicts or anything like that, but we struggle and there’s nobody to help, but people that are full-fledged heroin addicts don’t want to help themselves.”

When our discussion turns to politics, Jeremiah shrugs: “I think I voted one time. Actually when I turned 18 I think, 18 or 19. That was it, I just wanted to vote ’cause I was allowed to.” He continues, “Democrat is what I say I am, but right now I’m really nothing.

“One side you have a moron, the other side you have a moron. So either way, our country is headed for disaster. Right now I don’t care who comes in, our country is so far bad.” Kristin calls Hillary Clinton “a waste” who “broke trust with our country,” adding, “I foresee this world getting worse and worse and worse.” Jeremiah and Kristin both point to local institutions as evidence for their sense of hopelessness and isolation. For example, they describe how the local police officers are corrupt: “You can’t get the cops to do anything because everybody is friends with everybody. It’s so corrupt because all the cops, they were football players, and now look, a kid is dead. And they’re trying to say, well, he did this and this. No, the guy was minding his own business and they attacked him, beat him up.” Kristin says poignantly, “They’re all grimy, and it’s all about who you know and how you’re going to help them. It’s not about helping anybody else, it’s about how you’re going to help them make their job easier.”

Jeremiah explains his philosophy: “What is a government? They’re like, hey, look over here while we do this.” Like many other men in this sample, both white men and men of color, Jeremiah believes that the government fabricates national emergencies such as mass shootings in order to distract the people from their hidden, more nefarious actions: “I don’t like upsetting people by giving my point of view, but there’s just some things in this country that don’t add up. They really don’t.”

There is a long history of conspiratorial thought in American history—as Hofstadter identified in his groundbreaking 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Democracy,” just a few of its early incarnations include suspicions about Catholics, Jews, abolitionists, and Freemasons (Hofstadter 1964). Later iterations include the Kennedy assassination, government cover-ups of UFOs, government involvement in September 11, and the more recent Birtherism and allegations that Trump would be denied rightful accession to the White House. What distinguishes conspiracy theorists is less the factual accuracy of their claims—all may have elements of truth, and it would be absurd to believe that conspiracies do not exist (Walker 2013)—but rather “the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed”; conspiracy theorists “traffic in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values” (Hofstadter 1964). In this mode of thought, nothing is as it seems, and it is up to individuals to find the secret patterns that connect seemingly random events (Barkun 2006, p. 4).

Barkun argues that “fringe ideas” have spread rapidly to the American mainstream in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as new forms of social media allow users to connect and share ideas that once would have been isolated in small subcultures (Bail 2021). Conspiracy theories challenge the basic premises of democracy and the legitimacy of the electoral process through far-reaching and eclectic channels. People who believe in conspiracy theory tend to be pessimistic about the near future, afraid of the government, and less trusting of other people. They resonate with people suffering from the loss of dignity, security, and social disintegration—those who feel threatened by powerful actors and need to explain failure (Uscinski and Parent 2014). For Jeremiah and Kristin, this deep distrust is intertwined with stories of social and economic decline, as the bonds between people have withered away: “Now, you don’t know whether you should lock your door or keep a gun in your lap. I remember being a kid, my parents would leave the doors open at night, just lock the screen door ’cause you were able to trust anyone, and now you can’t. It’s bad when you have to have a dead bolt to lock your dead bolt in place. It’s pathetic.”

4.2 There Is No American Dream Anymore

This resentment and sense of moral decline was prominent among the white young adults in particular; while these emotions tended to correlate with voting for Trump among older working-class white people I met, the young people did not believe that any politician could turn the country around. Jacob, who “breaks his back” for a living and cannot afford health insurance, says resentfully, “I mean I was in Walmart the other day actually, and there’s a lady that was getting SSI [Supplemental Security Income] and food stamps. And she pulls out her food stamps card and goes and pays for her groceries, about 200 something dollars, pulls out the food stamp card, and there’s a wad of cash in her wallet. I’m busting my ass for a couple bucks an hour, and you have a food stamps card and a wallet full of money.” He believes that the government is helping the wrong people—for example, “[we] bring in these refugees, yeah, I can see helping another country, how about you worry about your home first? You have all these military veterans that are homeless, sleeping on the streets, that serve their country, and the government’s not doing shit for them.”

This sentiment is widely shared among radical right voters in the United States and Europe and connects to a cultural code of “violated reciprocity,” a concept coined by van Oorschot (2008). But Jacob is not going to vote. He says simply, “Every president that has ever gone in office screws in any way shape or form.” His views also bleed into conspiracy theories, as he also believed that “9/11, I see, was just an excuse to secure their oil rights cause the Middle East were trying to overrun all the oil rigs and everything like that. I think it was just an excuse to get troops on the ground to secure oil rights.”

In the coal region, despite the persistence of cheerful church festivals, rowdy fire company block parties, and packed Friday night football games, many of those left behind are living in, and dying of, despair. Recent research has revealed a health crisis in rural America, where opioid abuse, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide are reversing life expectancy gains among the white working class. In their groundbreaking study, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton point to the “accumulation of pain, distress, and social dysfunction in the lives of working class whites that took hold as the blue collar economic heyday of the early 1970s ended and continued throughout the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent slow recovery” (Case and Deaton 2017).

This sense of decay is captured in the words of another conspiracy theorist in the sample, Kyle, a young white man in his early 30s. Kyle was raised by his “abusive stepfather” who was a “pillhead” and his mother. He has had several jobs working at warehouses during the day and as a bartender and DJ at night. Kyle describes not having people to look up to when he was growing up because his father was in jail most of his childhood for sexual abuse of a child. Watching wrestling became Kyle’s source of role models. He says, “I watched wrestling, so I get a lot of the wrestlers’ personalities in there, like their sense of humor and shit. You grow off the things that you see. So that’s where I get my shit from.” Kyle also spent a few months in jail when he was 20 because his girlfriend “was cheating on me with [my daughter] in her stomach. I caught them. And I went to jail, though. I went to jail for that ’cuz I made threats over the phone. Told him I was going to kill him.”

When asked about family politics, Kyle reflects, “My mom doesn’t vote, but my sister-in-law does. My sister-in-law and so does my brother. My brother’s one of those survivalists. He’s got guns, he’s got toilet paper, water, cases of water.” Kyle describes his brother, a former “Bernie supporter,” as “just ready for whatever right now. He’s got tents, he’s just ready for North Korea and all that to take over.”

Kyle’s story of his life depicts a world in which social change through politics is a “joke” and the American Dream is a lie. He echoes: “Yeah, it’s really messed up in the world. This election’s a joke. It’s straight a joke. None of them should be elected. None of them at all. The only one I would really go for would be Bernie Sanders, if anyone. ’Cause he’s the one that actually did a lot for us already. He’s the only one in that group of people that helped us in any way right now. Like you think about that, Hillary Clinton’s a joke. Trump’s just a racist ass. And there’s another one I think. There’s Bernie Sanders, Clinton, Trump, and there’s another guy, I think he dropped out. He probably said, fuck this, this thing is a joke.” He summarizes, “There is no American Dream. There’s no fuckin’ American Dream anymore. America went to hell.”

4.3 Race and Contrasting Visions of the Future

In contrast, scholars have suggested that racial and ethnic minorities, who have long suffered the indignities of the labor market and been routinely denied social and cultural inclusion, have developed a sense of self-worth and resilience that protects them against utter despair. At the same time, intensive efforts to cope with blocked opportunity extract a heavy emotional and physical toll on minorities who must constantly push themselves to endure (Lamont et al. 2013; Geronimus et al. 2006). In a parallel way, people of color in the sample had similarly low levels of trust in major social institutions to the white people, but they did not tell a story of decline over generations as much as one in which the U.S. government has always been corrupt, self-serving, and hostile to vulnerable people.

William Lewis, a 24-year-old Black man, builds the concrete beams used in the construction of bridges. He currently works six nights a week and is hoping to start training on the forklift, which would mean an increase in pay to 18 dollars an hour. William’s grandfather migrated from Mississippi to the coal region and got a job working in construction. His father worked round-the-clock shifts as a cook at a casual dining restaurant throughout his childhood; he has not seen his mother since he was 2. “When my dad first had me, they were into drugs,” he recounts. “My dad gave up drugs to take care of me, my mom didn’t want to, she took me into a crack house. My dad broke into the house and stole me from the house and took me to the hospital ’cause I had pneumonia.” William pinned his hopes on a career in professional sports and excelled in football, wrestling, and baseball in school. His father had also harbored dreams of a football career but could not play college football because of a career-ending shoulder injury.

When he was 16, William and his father moved abruptly from one town in the coal region to another after William encountered “legal trouble”: “There was [a] messed-up situation, like I ended up getting a felony charge when I was in high school, and then they told me I couldn’t play sports for the rest of the year.” He elaborates:

These kids broke in a house, I stood outside, I didn’t want nothing to do with it, and then they ended up, they didn’t get in trouble, they said that I was the lookout and everything. So kind of screwed me over. There was a kid at a party who stole diamond earrings off of a chick, the cops came, and he still got to play.

Was he white?

Yeah. So Dad eventually said, forget it, let’s move. So I ended up missing football season that year, and then I came and wrestled for Coal Brook. It was all right. I don’t regret any of it.

Racial profiling and discrimination run through his story, profoundly shaping his life trajectory. “Actually,” he reflects, “the only reason I wrestled was a racist situation. I played basketball up until seventh grade, I tried out for the seventh and eighth grade team, and me and this other kid, a Black kid, we were awesome at the tryouts, then the coach cut us. Then I was like, I can’t not play sports. So then I went out for wrestling.” William “couldn’t go out with certain girls ’cause their parents was racist, I couldn’t hang out with certain kids ’cause their parents was racist.” When he was in ninth grade, he was arrested for selling marijuana, but not convicted: “I ended up not getting in trouble for it ’cause they couldn’t prove nothing about it. They kind of just wanted to slander my name. That’s what the cop pretty much said when he arrested me. But it was front page. Stand-out athlete caught in drug bust.”

William takes responsibility for his eventual downward spiral into heroin. “I ended up getting in trouble again here my senior year. That’s the thing, there’s like a quote, ‘If nothing changes, nothing changes.’ So if you don‘t change nothing about yourself, you’re going to end up doing the same thing. So what I did was just find the same people, just different faces.” He explains, “I became opiate dependent, on opiates like Percocet, Vicodin, and stuff like that. I eventually ended up doing heroin, and I sold heroin after I graduated to support my habit, and then I went, and then I got arrested. Heroin isn’t a drug you can just do and stop and walk away from. There’s not many people out there that have done it and walked away from it.” William describes the confidential informant system that led to his arrest as “so ass-backwards” because it puts addicts in need of treatment “back on the street” and enables them to keep using. He condemns the police for trying to arrest their way out of the heroin epidemic: “There are no actual drug dealers, most of the people are just selling to support a habit that they have. So, and the police know that, they just never try to get no one help.”

William is currently in his third year of drug court, an “intense form of probation” that he chose over “going upstate” and that is supposed to help him “do some type of work on myself.” He describes the weekly urine tests and meetings with a counselor as “definitely helpful, you need that accountability at first to get clean, you know. Definitely helped.” He currently smokes a pack of cigarettes per day but is not using any other drugs. His girlfriend, a white longtime resident of the region who is also recovering from heroin addiction, recently gave birth to their daughter, and he feels optimistic about their future. He wants to get married immediately and assume full responsibility for the household bills. But she wants to hold off, which leaves him frustrated—“She gets help [medical assistance and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children] now with the baby and stuff, and I could do it, everything, like I want to put her on my medical and stuff. But she is like why, it is extra money.” He is frustrated at their lack of forward momentum, especially when the priest at her father’s church “found out she was pregnant and that we lived together, he said she couldn’t take communion no more.”

William directs his mental energy toward managing his own feelings and reactions, telling a story of self-healing and self-change. He says earnestly, “I play music, that’s one of the biggest things I do. To me, keeping healthy means to play music, work, know I’m able to support a family, help around the house as best as I can, and help my girlfriend. I actually worked hard on myself. Like I said before, if nothing changes, nothing changes. So if nothing changed inside of me before I came home, nothing would have changed when I came home.” Avoiding “negative” interactions with other people is crucial to his journey of self-management. “Addiction’s a powerful thing, you can feed off of someone’s negativity,” he remarks. “If they’re living an unhealthy lifestyle, that can be something I would just feed off of that would eventually grow into me using.” Isolation becomes a strategy for self-protection.

William has “no intention to vote. I don’t see no point in voting. I can’t, I think it’s 2 years until I’m off probation, but either way I wouldn’t vote.” He believes unambiguously that “it’s rigged or they’re going to make whoever they want to be President.” He gets all of his information from social media and his girlfriend’s father, a vocal Trump supporter. He sighs. “Everything’s just all screwed, you know. The government just wants money, so everything comes down to money.” Unprompted, he explicitly condemns the collusion of corporate America and political elites: “’Cause all, like all businesses are corrupt in one way or another. They pretty much pay the government to leave them alone. So our country is ran by the government and big business. Which isn’t worried about the small guy.” He does not believe that either the government or large corporations operate in the interests of the “small guy” and has no faith in the existence of a larger “we” or common good: “[L]ike big corporations and big businesses, instead of just having … ’cause it’s cheaper to get something from China than it is to have a factory in the United States. No one’s ever worried about America, they just worried about their pocket.”

When I ask him if he is proud to be an American, he replies with a tepid, “Eh, I guess.”

He pauses to reconsider. “But … see when I hear we’re proud to be an American, like I feel like, you’re saying you’re proud of our government, which I’m not. So for me to say that, it’d probably be like … to be proud of it would be a false sense of pride.” For some young men especially, including Graham Hendry and William Lewis, explaining their own failures and frustrations goes beyond a rigged system and into conspiracy theories that make political engagement laughable. Fears of the enemy lurking within provide them with a sense that they are smarter than other people—uncovering the hidden truth establishes a lone-wolf masculinity in opposition to the hoodwinked sheep.

If William were forced to choose a candidate—Trump versus Clinton—“It probably would end up being Trump. ’Cause he’s a businessman.” Although it seems contradictory to denounce politics as being too influenced by big business on the one hand and then support a businessman on the other, William frames this decision as a vote for the small guy. “Trump’s really not like, he didn’t grow up in, like all them have a background of being involved in politics, you know? He just wants to take out the bigger people. Which is right, all the big organizations, he wants to split them up. ’Cause they take out all the small people.” The promise of an outsider is appealing, yet not appealing enough this year to pull him toward the polls. For William, change remains an internal battle: “It’s all really a perception and about how you adapt.” He fundamentally rejects the idea that his larger environment exerts power over his life prospects: “People are like, you got to get out of here, you got to get out. But like why do you have to get out? As long as you take care of what you need to take care of and do what you got to do, there’s nothing really holding you back here. People say this place is a black hole that holds you back, but the only thing that’s holding you back is yourself.” His skepticism and distrust make withdrawing from the political sphere look like a logical decision, but his sense of dignity—based on controlling his own fate and blaming only himself for failure—also makes it a powerful moral one.

4.4 Just Getting Through the Day

For some women in the sample, the exigencies of everyday life, especially in the family and intimate sphere, also provided a rationale for not engaging in politics. Working-class white women in earlier generations were expected to raise children, manage a complex household with limited resources, and contribute to the household responsibilities through cooking, washing, or taking in boarders. Marriage was a taken-for-granted, unexamined component of adult identity, anchored in distinct gender roles and mutual dependence, enabled by strong male wages and undergirded by family and community norms. Today, working-class intimate lives are marked by churning, as relationships begin and end quickly, children are fathered by multiple partners, and relationships are fraught with distrust and dashed expectations (Cherlin 2014). The service sector offers low wages, uncertain hours, and little flexibility to balance childcare and paid labor.

Many of the white women in my sample were trying to hold on to traditionally feminine roles of wives and mothers even as they are victimized in them; their distrust within the family reverberates into larger visions of a political arena where putting your faith in a politician is just setting yourself up for betrayal. Jesse, a 33-year-old white woman, chronicled a life of trauma: She was born addicted to cocaine, experienced physical and sexual abuse from a series of stepfathers, and was raised by her grandmother because her father was in jail for sexual assault. She describes her childhood: “I always tell my mom—I wrote her a letter the one time, because my therapist told me to, and I thanked her for teaching me what kind of mother not to be.”

Jesse now has six children. Jesse’s first child’s father cheated on her with her own sister while Jesse was giving birth. Soon after, Jesse reports that she was arrested for “bad checks” because this man was also writing checks from her account. Jesse’s current husband, a farm laborer, wants a divorce because she is constantly depressed and anxious. She describes her crippling, chronic illness: “With my PTSD, I can’t watch the TV show M*A*S*H, that music will send me into a bad anxiety attack. I can’t lay down straight on my back. I feel like my oxygen’s being cut off from being choked and from what my mom’s ex-husband did to me. So if I’m just laying there flat on my back, I’ll start hyperventilating. There’s so many things that I have to work on with my PTSD to prevent anxiety attacks. Sometimes when I’m focusing on one thing, something happens, and I just lose focus of what’s going on. It’s hard.” She summarizes her sense of watchfulness and suspicion that she carries with her always: “I know who to watch out for, who not to watch out for. I can usually tell just by the way someone approaches you, the way someone will talk to you, the way someone will look at you. I can psych them out. This is someone I can trust or not.”

Jesse has no hope for her future and dismisses the “American Dream” as “just a fantasy. There’s days where I wake up and I’m like, why did I [inaudible] today? What’s my purpose today? Why did I wake up? And then I look at my kids, and I’m like, what’s why. If it weren’t for my kids, I honestly think I probably would have committed suicide.” We talk:

I just want to get one of them signs. I’m putting it in my front yard. I don’t care who the President is, just as long as they leave me alone.

Yeah. Just leave me alone. I don’t care what you do.

Do you trust the government? Do you trust police or all these institutions in our society?

No.

None of them?

Uh-uh.

What makes you think that?

Mainly because of what I’ve been through. When I went to the cops for help, I didn’t get help. When I was getting therapy when I was in high school, I didn’t get help. I don’t know if they looked at me and it’s just flashing out, because of what I was going through. I don’t know what the whole scenario is or what they were thinking, but I feel like the main person I can trust is myself.

Acknowledging family trauma could potentially connect personal trauma to the political arena, but in an era of low trust and social isolation (Putnam 2015), narratives of self-healing seemed to provide a more accessible route to psychological resilience, stability, and dignity.

4.5 Embracing Isolation

Women of color also documented histories of poverty, racism, and trauma, while also maintaining a forward-looking, active emphasis on protecting their children that hinged on self-isolation. Tiffany, a Puerto Rican woman, described growing up in a deindustrialized city in New Jersey where she had to fight and sell drugs in order to survive, which landed her in prison just after the birth of her first child. She describes sacrificing her own dreams of the future in order to raise her sister’s children because her sister was addicted to crack cocaine. Tiffany explains about moving to Pennsylvania, “Since I been here, I’ve been good. I try to change my life up around here ’cause of my kids, you know. Nobody knows me, thank god.” Tiffany associates moving away from her home and the family who raised her with self-protection, and feels emotionally and physically safe only when she is alone with her children. She describes her worldview:

But I always trusting everyone and get fucked. I always get fucked. Always. Family too. A lot more family. So I just, that’s why .… My mom like, why you so far away, I’m like, Mom, I just need to be by myself. Yeah, I get stressed out, yeah, I cry, yeah, I’m whatever, but at the end of the day I would rather be by myself. I know I’m not going to hurt myself and would I be around people if they hurt me. You know what I mean? Like, I know I won’t do to myself, and I know my kids won’t hurt me. I’m far away. Saving myself. I have no family, I have no friends, I don’t care. I got my kids. They’re going to be my best friends.

Like many young people I met, Tiffany dismisses my questions about people that she admires or heroes in the public sphere. She replies: “Hero? Myself. I feel I’m my own hero. What I been through, the stuff I didn’t tell you, there’s a lot of stuff, rape, beating, in prison. So much, it’s crazy. I feel like I’m my own hero.” She says proudly, “But my kids, they good, I think. I always say to my kids, like when they argue, we don’t have nobody. You, me, and her. And they look at me. We only got each other. That’s right.” As Glenn powerfully writes, “[I]n the racial ethnic family, conflict over the division of labor is muted by the fact that institutions outside the family are hostile to it … Women do a great deal of the work of keeping the family together and teaching children survival skills. This work is experienced as a form of resistance to oppression rather than as a form of exploitation by men” (Glenn 1985, pp. 194–195). Tiffany does not have much hope for her own future—“For me? No. This is what it is”—but she does believe her children’s lives will be better based on her efforts: “I feel they’ll be all right. I think I’m doing things to keep everybody happy, so they’ll be all right.” She has no interest in voting or talking about politics at all. “Like, I don’t know where to vote. But I signed the paper they gave me. I don’t know where the hell it’s at, but I could ask somebody,” she laughs.

5 Conclusions

In this article, I bring the tools of cultural sociology and its emphasis on meaning-making into the core of my analysis. I examine the ways in which young people actively create and negotiate political interests that resonate with their everyday experiences, social relationships, and cultural and economic anxieties. The participants in this study reveal how they construct a world in which suffering is meaningful, trust and connection to others are dangerous, and rejecting the political sphere signifies intelligence and moral worth. They then treat this view of the world as if it were true, to quote Frye, snuffing out any possibility of collective political efficacy (Frye 2017). Understanding young working-class people’s self-narratives, in which they bridge their own micro, intimate experiences up to larger visions of the social world and their place in it, shows us how the unequal life chances they are born into become solidified by their own political withdrawal—which they view as virtuous and necessary. Decades ago, Bellah et al. questioned whether we have become too unmoored, possibly leading to a crisis of isolation and meaninglessness—“It is hard to find in [today’s individualized culture] the kind of story or narrative, as of a pilgrimage or quest, that many cultures have used to link private and public; present, past, and future; and the life of the individual and the meaning of the cosmos” (Bellah et al. 1985, p. 83). Today, we can trace how coming of age, rather than an entry into social institutions and roles such as worker, parent, spouse, citizen, becomes, instead, a disavowal of anything other than their own individual survival strategies and a rejection of existing channels for connection and change.

Critical scholars argue that the emphasis on self-change and self-protection over political action renders structural barriers into individual obstacles that must be overcome through willpower rather than collective action, detaching personal life from its political roots (Silva 2013; Hooks 1989). But working-class people are not “free agents who can construct any story of their selves that they wish”; they construct their narratives of the self in ways that protect themselves and their families from disappointment and betrayal in a lifeworld in which social institutions, both local and national, have failed them (Loseke 2007, p. 677). Without any institutions to mediate between individual, personal struggles and broader, collective political identities and practice, individual pain management becomes an emotional necessity, especially given these individuals’ high levels of distrust, lack of social safety nets, and fragility of family ties. We must ask ourselves under what conditions could suffering create other kinds of responses, prompting social cohesion, restored trust, and collective action?