One of my favorite singers of all times happens to be an Appalachian Mountain bluegrass artist born in 1925 in West Virginia. Her name is Hazel Dickens and she is not completely unknown, even though bluegrass music is a small niche that is popular in just a few places in the country. She actually won two awards for her music. She was the first woman to win the Merit Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association and she won a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the highest honor in folk music.
But Dickens was best known for her feminist, activist, pro-labor union, pro-coal miner songs. She was a coal miner's daughter, born and raised in Montcalm, West Virginia, in Mercer County, the heart of the "Billion Dollar Coalfields," and most of her brothers, uncles and cousins, along with her neighbors growing up, were coal miners as well. Her father was also the pastor of a small Primitive Baptist church. When her singing career got going, after she had relocated to Maryland in the 1950's like many other young people from Appalachia, she devoted a considerable amount of her talent to writing and recording songs about the hazards of coal mining and the unjust pay and treatment of the miners.
She was an activist in every sense of the word, making appearances on behalf of striking coal miners at union gatherings and writing songs about specific events, such as "Mannington Mine Disaster," and "They'll Never Keep us Down." She also appeared in two movies depicting the fierce conflicts between miner's unions and the ownership of the mines, including one of my favorites, Matewan, and Harlan County USA. It would be difficult to measure her influence and the benefits her activism provided for coal miners everywhere, but especially in the heart of Appalachia.
Democrats, take notice. In the life, music and political activism of bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens, a coal miner's daughter from West Virginia whose singing voice was trained in the acapella harmony of hymns in a Primitive Baptist church, are the roots of everything that made the Democratic party great.
Mercer County, West Virginia, gave 71% of its votes to Donald Trump in 2020.
If the Democrats can figure out why people who were not helped by Trump's election in 2016 in any way would still vote for him with those kinds of majorities, the party will be a shoe-in to win elections nationally, across the board, everywhere. Trump never delivered on his promise to "revitalize" the coal industry, in fact, never even revisited the issue once the 2016 election was in the books. But there's more to it than that. In spite of all the labor unrest, the regular, almost ritualistic strikes that occur at the end of every contract period, the low wages, the poor benefits and the effects of unsafe working conditions that include a significantly elevated risk of cancer, early death from black lung disease, and accidents which take multiple lives, many of the state legislators and the congressmen and senators the coal mining regions send to Washington are coal company investors and owners. They tend to elect some of their own oppressors, whose interests are diametrically opposed to their own.
What's The Matter With Kansas?
That's the title of a great book by Thomas Frank, who outlines how the political culture has shifted from the activism of economics, particularly the push for fair wages, benefits and economic opportunity for the working class to social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. These social issues are elevated to priorities while the politicians who claim to support them simply use the support they get to undermine the middle class and push the wealth into the hands of a small group of corporate elite whose only concern about the unborn is how to keep using them to motivate voters and undermine the politicians who really care about the well-being and prosperity of the middle class.
It should be difficult to convince people to vote against their own interests, since the evidence of doing so shows up in their paycheck, but they are deceived into believing otherwise. Try to convince a Trumpie that the bulk of the big "tax cut" went to the already wealthy, and if they're middle class they more than likely saw their taxes increase and you'll get blank stares. Show them how it works on paper and they're not interested. If a politician declares that they are against abortion rights, and don't support LGBTQ rights, nothing else matters and it won't be long before everything that they do, no matter how contrary it is to the moral and social values of the voters, is right in the minds of their "base."
I'm offended by the thought that some politician thinks of me as being part of a "base." And that's one of the reasons why Democrats seem to have such difficulty wrapping their minds around this and figuring out how to undermine the GOP and get some of these voters back. The party is too diverse to fit into one "base" and while this may sound like back patting and self-praise, too educated and made up of too many free-thinkers to be moved that way.
But We Do Need to Figure Out How to Get These People Back
The movie that I mentioned earlier, Matewan, illustrates the difficulty of the problem. It's not a feel-good kind of movie where the hero, the union organizer, comes to town, rallies the population and all the miners to his side, and wins the day when they get their union. What actually happens is that the stranger comes to town to try and organize the miners into a union and the mining company does everything it can to undermine the effort, including conspiracy theories, using the church, bribing the neediest and poorest, playing on people's sympathies and triggering an honest to goodness shooting war.
There's another movie that gives even more insight into the kind of self-defeating behavior that occurs when issues get complicated around jobs, local politics and money. Dark Waters, another movie set in West Virginia, is considered an "accurate" depiction of events related to the poisoning of the local water supply by a chemical company that is also the biggest employer in the area. Even as all the information was coming out about the fact that the company knew exactly what it was doing, and had kept the information hidden and buried for years, as the poison caused all kinds of birth defects and health problems, one of the characters makes the statement about the executive leadership at Dupont, "But they're good people, they'll do the right thing."
Uh huh.
The Elements Are in Place; The Narrative is What's Needed
Biden's "Build Back Better" is clearly popular, not just in West Virginia, but in other places where there are infrastructure needs and also employment needs. It isn't the answer for everything, but if it's matched with the right narrative, it will be a big step toward meeting a lot of needs in a lot of different places. Democrats need to figure out how to sell this, though, especially in West Virginia because doing so will increase the pressure on Senator Manchin, and he needs a push in the right direction right about now.
It's also popular in Arizona and I would suggest the same strategy. Democrats have some great "go-to" people who are good at this sort of thing. One of the best ways to damp down the social agenda gab is to point out that the wealthy are finally going to start paying their fair share of taxes, or at least, we are headed in the right direction and that's how we're paying for this.
The Republicans would have had a strategy in place to put pressure on their own party's more reluctant members long before now. I'm getting a little concerned that while the Democrats are starting to wring their hands about 2022, there's very little out there that seems to be motivating voters. Virginia's elections are less than a month away. What's going on and is anyone listening?
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