Somewhere in America 2

Part 1 here.

Somewhere in Manhattan, a woman entertains her friends in the spacious, two-bedroom apartment she shares with her husband. They’re having a good time, drinking wine and cracking jokes. When Trump was first elected eight years ago, she was shocked, horrified, and outraged. Her reaction to his second victory was much milder. The yokels elected Trump again, regrettable, but what are you gonna do? She isn’t going to have her access to abortion taken away. She isn’t going to lose her welfare. In fact, she may well benefit. The income from her nonprofit job has been continually supplemented by gifts and help from her millionaire parents. A $3,300 check for her birthday. Her Mom’s used Mercedes. (“You don’t need to thank me; it’s an old car. You’re doing me a favor by taking it off my hands.”) The security deposit and the first three months rent on her apartment. The portion of a medical procedure that wasn’t paid for by insurance. And, of course, all the expenses associated with her college education. She expects Trump to cut her parents’ taxes and wonders, mischievously, if she’ll get a bigger birthday check this year. It’s a thought she’d never be so gauche to say out loud. One of her friends brings up the subject of abortion, and she sneers at the hypocrisy of pro-lifers. If they care about “life,” why don’t they support providing free school lunches to more kids? In her mind, the heartland is a scene of Dickensian poverty, full of forcibly-born children growing up malnourished because “greedy” Republicans won’t spend enough on welfare.

Somewhere in West Virginia, a man proudly drives his newly purchased Ford F-series into the driveway of his three-bedroom, double-wide trailer. He’s happy he was able to save enough money to buy the truck, though he’s pissed inflation drove up the price. He doesn’t know much but, as a resident of one of the poorest parts of America, he can see that the problem in his community is that people are eating too much rather than too little. He’s staunchly opposed to socialism, which in his mind means vegetarianism and gay sex. Once, he encountered a socialist who attempted to sidestep the culture war. “Working-class people like you are getting robbed blind by the banksters in Manhattan!” That didn’t resonate with him at all. He saw a pic on Facebook of a bunch of illegal aliens crowing into a 500 sq ft apartment and thinks everyone in Manhattan lives like that. The really unlucky ones are homeless. The rest are living in the pod and eating the bugs. They’re exploiting people like him? LOL.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania, a man reads conspiracy content on TikTok. His annual income is less than $30,000, yet he voted enthusiastically for Donald Trump. Socialists would say he lacks “class consciousness,” that Ayn Randian economics, religion, nationalism, or “racial resentment” has bamboozled him into identifying with his “class enemies.” They’d be wrong. He’s got plenty of class consciousness and used to vote for the Democrats. He stopped voting in 2016, became an RFK supporter in 2023, and switched to Trump after RFK dropped out. Marx never foresaw that socialists would encounter class-conscious workers who accuse them of being shills for the bourgeoisie. It’s not enough to say the rich are exploiting the workers, you’ve gotta believe they’re running Satanic pedophile rings and poisoning people with vaccines.

Somewhere in Massachusetts, the leader of a chapter of Democratic Socialists of America decries the recent trend of identifying anyone who didn’t graduate from college as “working-class.” The real working class, he says, is anyone earning less than $80,000 a year. Capitalism has so oppressed the working class that many coal miners, truck drivers, and lumberjacks make so much money they are too tich to be part of it.

Somewhere in the South Side of Chicago, a Muslim-American of Lebanese origin opens his McDonald’s Franchise. Some of his relatives think he’s insane to live in what they’ve read is a crime-ridden area. He tells them that, yes, there’s a lot of crime, but it’s mostly young black men shooting each other. Life has risks; those suburban people take risks every day when they drive into the city and risk a deadly car accident. He likes living two blocks from his restaurant, but recently he’s decided, reluctantly, to move out to the suburbs. A close friend of his, also Lebanese, has a daughter who began “assimilating” into blackness, listening to rap music and hanging out with a group of mostly black friends. Now she’s dating an aspiring rapper named Cookie. Our McDonald’s owner thought about his own twelve-year-old daughter and said nope, no way, that ain’t happening. In 2016, it was obvious who he was voting for; no self-respecting person could vote for Donald “Muslim-ban” Trump. In 2024, the situation was different. Since he opened the restaurant, it’d been the victim of everything from an armed robbery to graffiti to knuckleheads smashing the bathroom mirror for kicks. The crime was not new; what was new was his sense that the Dems had no sympathy and instead saw him as the real criminal for daring to racially profile the demographic that was, in fact, committing a vastly disproportionate amount of America’s crime. And now they were gonna accuse him of “white flight” for not wanting his daughter to get impregnated by some gang banger. F*** them, he voted for Donald Trump.

Somewhere in the North side of Chicago, there’s a man for whom blacks are not his ingroup or an outgroup but a fargroup he doesn’t think much about. His father, a Lithuanian-American, white-flighted away from the South Side of Chicago before he was born, and he grew up in a mostly white, middle-class suburb. For him, the outgroup are Republicans like his wife’s family, who live downstate and are always posting nonsensical conspiracy theories on Facebook. He knows not all Republicans are like that and even follows some intelligent conservatives on Twitter. Even they, so often counter-signaling their fellows, reinforce his perception that the American Right is a malignant force he needs to keep his kids away from. You see, he’s dissatisfied with the way his life turned out. His resume lists a third-rate university and a series of unassuming jobs that are just barely white-collar. He had so much potential, but he was lazy, he got bad grades, he didn’t suck up enough to his bosses. Luckily, his son and daughter, ten and thirteen, both seem intelligent and driven, regularly being praised by their teachers. When he sees prominent conservative influencers telling them to skip college or trying to normalize teenage pregnancy, he says no, he doesn’t want anything to do with that trash.

Somewhere in Oregon, a man stews in mild frustration at a conversation he just had with his 19-year-old daughter. She’s been attending a private, $85,000-a-year liberal arts university out East. The money isn’t an issue. Last year, his bonus alone was $432,817.24. The issue is that she came home with all these weird ideas about “settler colonialism,” “heteronormative patriarchy,” and the like. She’s become a self-described socialist, and though her socialism mostly revolves around race and gender, it’s given her nothing but disrespect for his role in society. All those 60-hour workweeks he put in, to her it’s all “privilege” that rained down on the family for nothing. His wife, who, like him, is a moderate Democrat, thinks he’s making a big deal out of nothing. College radicalism is nothing new. They grow out of it, the hippie generation turned into Trump’s base. He doesn’t agree and, in the privacy of the voting booth, decided he didn’t feel like making Kamala Harris the President, though he didn’t have the stomach to tell his wife or daughter who he voted for.

Somewhere in Arizona, a white liberal woman teaches a class full of Venezuelan and Afghan refugees. Earlier in her career, when her students were mostly white Americans, she’d tell them how they didn’t know how good they had it; children in poor countries would love to be in school. Now, faced with such children herself, she realizes they are even more trouble-causing and averse to education than native-born Americans. She pretends not to hear as one of the Afghans, who arrived in America three years ago, screams at some recently arrived Venezuelans that “there are too many f***ing Mexicans at this school.”

Somewhere in Florida, a young white nationalist writes an essay for his Substack. Referring to the brouhaha over H-1B visas, he proclaims that America is a nation, not an economic zone. He posts anonymously lest fellow members of his nation retaliate against him for his activism on their behalf. A few do appreciate it; he has an income of about $40,000 a year through donations and subscriptions to his Substack. Despite his paeans to racial homogeneity, he lives in a heavily Hispanic area. Like non-white immigrants, he has no desire to live in a poor, lily-white rural area. Like non-white immigrants, he can’t afford to live in the posh, lily-white suburbs, and in any case, he doesn’t like those people. For the most part, he gets along fine with non-whites, and when he doesn’t, it’s an abstract, ideological hostility. He recently went to Target and encountered a Columbian who was carrying her newborn baby and speaking Spanish. The death of the West, he thought. Decades later, he’ll meet that baby at a white nationalist event where they’ll bond over their common opposition to the globohomo agenda.

Somewhere in California, a young man walks into a Walmart parking lot. He’s light-skinned, half-Hispanic, bald, mildly overweight, and has visible tattoos. He dreams of becoming the next Joe Rogan, alas, his social media career isn’t taking off. His boomer mom, stuck in the past, doesn’t understand social media and made him enroll in a community college he sometimes attends. His latest attempt to go viral was something he called the Walmart Chicken Challenge. Release a live chicken in Walmart and film the resulting chaos. When he did it, he found the chicken didn’t do anything interesting. Thankfully, the DA didn’t want to put another low-level, non-violent offender in jail, so no charges were filed. Walmart banned him for life, which upset him because it was the only place he could get the special Oreos he liked. But then he realized, what are they gonna do? The security guard ain’t gonna jump him. They can’t even stop shoplifters. Are they gonna call the cops and say, “this guy took merchandise and is offering to pay for it?”

Somewhere in Virginia, a young man plays video games in his room. He graduated from high school nine months ago and has never applied for a job. When his Mom asks why, he says he lacks motivation. She blames his autism diagnosis. She blames the COVID lockdown, which left him socially isolated and taught him school was optional. She blames the computer, which allows him to sit in his room all day and entertain himself. Lately, she’s started to wonder if she should blame the therapist, too. Is therapy just reinforcing his sense of helplessness? As annoyed as she is, she hasn’t thought seriously about kicking him out. She has a vacant room previously occupied by her more successful older son and has no pressing need for a second one.

Somewhere in Washington state, a woman takes nude pictures of herself for the few men who follow her on Only Fans. She’s the type of person who would have never thought she’d become a “sex worker.” She recoils at the idea of going to some porn studio and getting looked over by a bunch of sleazy men. But Only Fans lets her do it without leaving her room, with no probability of being assaulted or contracting a disease, with nobody needing to know. She sees her customers as pathetic loser incels, marks whose money she easily takes.

Somewhere in Michigan, an Only Fans customer has a different perspective, seeing the creators as his social inferiors, willing to degrade themselves for hardly any money.

Somewhere in an Arkansas trailer park, a pit bull lies dead in the street. Alerted by the sounds of gunfire, a woman looks out and is first confused and then delighted when she realized what had happened. The cops had shot dead her neighbor’s pitbull, to the horrified anger of said neighbor. Bout time, she thinks. That dog was a menace; its owner is the snootiest woman in the park. Sitting in her double-wide trailer looking down her nose at us humble single-wide trailer folk. Thinks she’s so good with her aluminum siding and brand-new SUV. Probably bought that car just to rub it the rest of our faces. Well now her precious $1,000 dog is dead.

Somewhere in Texas, an elderly libertarian cashes his first Social Security check. All his life, he thought he’d never collect any of the money he paid into the Ponzi scheme. He just feels sorry for the youngins who’ll never get anything back.

Somewhere in South Carolina, an obese man finishes his shift as a cashier at Kroger. His boss, always careful to be polite, imagines his life must be miserable. But it’s not. He’s looking forward to going to Burger King, coming home to his equally fat wife, and watching TV for five hours straight. Recently, he did a Gallup survey and was classed among the 86% of Americans who were “very” or “fairly” happy.

America is a country of junk food, vape pens, marijuana candy, kratom, multicolored tattoo ink, sports betting, crypto, Only Fans, guns, megachurches, SUVs, pickup trucks, pit bulls, do-nothing nonprofits, and “gender-affirming care.” It’s a country where the average recently constructed mobile home is larger than the average house built in 1955-1956.* It’s a country of mansions and McMansions with spare rooms for layabout adult children and businessmen who pay tuition that would bankrupt medieval princes just to educate their kids in anti-capitalism. It’s a country full of people busily marketing their ideas and their products to the poorest, least intelligent, and most conspiratorial people in America.

Many people, disgusted with such things, respond by embracing the narrative of an America growing poorer. Others will say, “what use is such wealth if it’s plowed into such maladaptive and decadent behaviors?” Muh GDP! Muh Line Go Up! But that’s the wrong way to look at it. In every large city in America, you can get lobster as fresh as if it were just pulled out of the ocean. You can download most notable works of classical or modern literature within minutes, and you don’t even need to pay for it. You can travel the world or go play golf. If you’re anti-materialistic, you can save up your money and retire early, buying one of the most fundamental things in the world: freedom. While MacKenzie Scott plows her fortune into woke nonprofits, other rich people are funding cancer research. Poh-pohing GDP is throwing out the good things with the bad.

The fact that America just keeps getting richer may seem to contradict the narrative of a nation divided by tribal warfare. Touch grass, man! Go out in the world and you’ll see this is all an internet thing, real people get along fine! But there’s no contradiction here. A man may well hate many of his fellow citizens, but the market gives him a strong incentive to put that aside and sell them stuff. The InfoWars-watching trucker unloads the boxes of coffee the blue-haired woke waitress will pour. America isn’t a nation, but it is an economy, and a very good one at that. Let’s hope it stays that way.

*In 2021, the average newly manufactured mobile home was 1,497 square feet. The average house that began construction in 1955 or 1956 was “about 1,200 square feet.” (See page 3 of this report.)