Jennifer M. Silva, We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2017)

This slim volume adds fascinating, often moving ethnographic detail to our understanding of what the hell is happening in American politics. Silva allows down-and-out working class residents of an anonymous Pennsylvania coal belt community to tell their own stories (she comments only occasionally and always empathetically and gently) - and what their experiences mean for how they think about politics. The common thread is that these people's painful experiences with physical and emotional abuse, unemployment, addictions, racism, and ephemeral relationships have for the most part left them deeply distrustful of elites, institutions, and politics as a way to improve things. Instead, they cope by means of anger, addiction, conspiracy theories, self-help, radical acceptance, etc. The book fits in the genre of ethnographies of the disaffected that has grown enormously since 2016, such as Kathleen Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land. I read the book in the hope that I might be able to use an excerpt in my How Democracies Die course. I was looking for something as perfect as the chapter from Robert Putnam's Our Kids, which I used to introduce Wealth and Power. This book doesn't quite provide what I had hoped - a before and after snapshot told through affecting personal stories. The "before" is, for the most part, missing. And the book studies only one slice of the working class, rather than the entirety of the electorate. But I do think I'll use a chapter of We're Still Here - for the connections it draws between people's life stories and whether they see democracy and politics as worth engaging in; for its portrait of the white working class and suffering, which many of my students will be unfamiliar with; for its suggestions about the deep anger that motivates at least some of Trump's base; and for its engaging stories.