We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

by Jennifer M. Silva, Teri Schnaubelt (Reading)

The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own -- the promise at the heart of the American Dream -- is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will instinctively rise up, the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics.

In We're Still Here , Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the
relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people.

We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Economics, The United States Of America, Social Science, American

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best "understanding Trump voters" books. The book (like Strangers in their own land) is based on interviews and anthropological analysis. Silva includes Black and brown people so that's a bonus and really does depict a full picture. The economy is failing people all over the country.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TV and talk radio. A large number of people do not have broadband and therefore often do not know there are newspapers and TV stations which make an effort to substantiate news.

There is a disparity in information: the rural areas have been kept the equivalent of “barefoot and pregnant” by a state legislature that couldn't figure out how to fund failing schools and provide broadband.

This book is a study of Jennifer Silva’s time interviewing residents of a former coal town in Pennsylvania, finding out what their lives are like, how they see their personal and professional trajectories, and who they vote for and why.

Not being a social scientist, I found the stories Dr. Silva shares with us confounding. Maybe someone can come up with solutions for these folks, but the reason they don’t vote is that they basically don’t trust anyone after the life they’ve led. In one of the first couples described to us, Silva writes,

“They are not single-issue voters who prioritize social issues such as abortion or fund control over economic interests, not do they place themselves into clear-cut categories of Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. Most of the time, as they attempt to come to terms with their past traumas and future anxieties, they do not think about politics at all.”

Right. Silva’s mentor/thesis advisor might have anticipated this and suggested a less-stressed environment. If Silva was just wondering what was going on in towns like Coal Brook, I would understand that, too, but she admits she’d been hoping to find out what white rural conservatives were thinking about politics when she began.

Soon enough she found out her interviewees were unschooled and inarticulate on the subject of “politics.” She did hear, though, these white residents’ dissatisfaction with Black and Latin “newcomers” to the coal region, former city dwellers and immigrants. So she changed her focus a little to include the newcomers. That was smart, and refocused this work into something approaching Arlie Russell Hochschild’s award-winning Strangers in Their Own Land.

Maybe someone, after reading outcomes for poor white folks who grew up in an abandoned coal town or poor city dwellers who moved in to live inexpensively and get away from inner-city violence, will figure out a way to point these folks in a different direction, in the direction of a life that is more fulfilling and less crushing. But this is way outside my wheelhouse.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silva asks the questions everyone else is asking - how is our political world possible? what are people doing? dreaming? what kind of skin does one grow to survive? what is happening in coal country, that corner of America where the dream was always violent but where things are getting... desperate? - but she writes down the responses with care and empathy not usually found. As a quasi-response to the saccharine, politically-conservative Hillbilly Elegy, We're Still Here is an intense rejoinder, but it's philosophical roots go deeper than that and into Silva's sociological project concerned with the lives of working class Americans in this tumultuous time. In this book, the fundamental question might be: why do people vote against their own interests, time and time again? Here's one answer:

The therapeutic self - inwardly directed, preoccupied with its own healing and transformation - would seem to stymie civic obligation and collective action. The emphasis on self-change renders structural barriers into individual obstacles that must be overcome through willpower rather than collective action, detaching the suffering of personal life from its social and political roots.

In other words, at the sharp edges of society people are more concerned with surviving neoliberalism in and through its tools than with mobilizing to build a new world. This is a testament to the pain and suffering to which Silva bears witness, and becomes if not cruel then saddening and enraging by turns. It is only human to return to those old emotions, and this is nothing but an intensely human book. Like Silva's last book this merits reading, and then some.

[Kay]

Normally when I read a book, I use little tags to note passages that interest me. I didn't even attempt that when reading this book because almost every page was so interesting. Although the title of this book does not clearly identify it, this is a sociology study of a disguised small town and its struggling working class - actually working poor residents. I started out thinking this would be dry reading and it is not, for Dr. Silva did extensive interviews and quoting to capture the views and life experiences of those she interviewed, dividing them into white men, white women, Latino and black men, and Latino and black women. She started this study prior to the election of Donald Trump although Trump was elected during the time she was interviewing. Interestingly she captures people who believe in hard work and the necessity of suffering and pain but who also find themselves destroyed by the very same thing as they turn to alcohol, drugs, fighting, and food to cope with their own pain and turning away from politics such as voting. Interestingly if they would have voted, most supported Donald Trump because he's not a politician. The second choice tended to be Bernie Sanders. Dr. Silva divided her book into the four groups based on her interview findings. White respondents saw the American dream gone from them and identified that opportunities simply were not available as they were back in the coal days (where their grandfathers seemed to die young of black lung and were described as being just as mean and dysfunctional). The Latino and black respondents were more optimistic having primarily come from violent inner cities so that the town offered a much lower cost of living and safer environment for their children despite the blatant racism. The limits of this book is it focuses on a relatively small sample - 108 individuals. There's no data on how the more affluent folks in town live as her goal is to give the the voiceless a voice, an opportunity to tell their stories. For that, this is a very successful and I highly recommend for anyone interested in this topic. Sociology is interesting!

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best ethnographic work I've seen to come out of the 2016 election, and not just because Silva managed to pick an area that was incredibly important in electoral college terms.

Some big themes that seem relevant:
* no one has any degree of trust in government, other major institutions, or their neighbors (in many ways this is a qualitative confirmation of some of David Shor's arguments)
* a major demobilizing force is a focus on self-help and self-actualization not on top of, but as an alternative to any engagement in politics, including engagement as basic as voting
* as always "white people screaming the n-word" style racism is extremely common and underemphasized relative to subtle microaggression racism that white-dominated professional environments obsess over

The biggest weakness was a lack of interest in the media environment that helps produce some of the conspiratorial, anti-government worldviews of Silva's subjects. At one point she mentions that many of her subjects independently brought up stories about people using food stamps to buy steaks for their dogs. That … came from somewhere, and I'd like to see a bit more on where exactly it came from.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Searing study of the politics of working class Americans (Black, white, Latinx, male and female) in a Pennsylvania coal town. Silva skips the Trump Country tropes and shows the complexity in people's lives, the ways in which poverty is chaos and the systems to support a middle class life have collapsed, and the utter alienation the people she interviews feel from politics. Though they see the exploitation around them, they have lost faith in government to help and many have narrowed their worlds to survival and self care. When you hear the barrage of election stories about people "voting against their self interest" remember that many of those people don't vote at all, and politicians almost entirely aren't trying to get them to. A powerful book on how far we far we are from the social institutions and political campaigns that can instill trust and hope and connect people to a common purpose. Absolute must-read.

[Ryan Splenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many words that I can use to describe this book, but I think just this one will suffice: devastating. Silva's goal was to discover the changing politics and political leanings behind the working class members of a small, coal mining town in Pennsylvania. Instead, she found a community completely devastated by economic hardship, a drug epidemic, and historic issues with class and racial tensions that keep the community from trusting anyone. What was supposed to be a discovery of a town's political support for candidates and parties ended up being a complex story of pain and apathy for many of the traditional institutions that Americans hold near and dear to our hearts. Nevertheless, this is an important work that paints a harrowing portrait of so many communities in our country.

[Margaret D'Anieri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title gives the basics. She profiles a number of people who are disengaged for the most part from the political system; people who live day to day just to make it through the day with a modicum of dignity. Their dignity and resislience in the face of local, systemic, and self-discrimination comes from their ability to see some sort of agency in their own lives and maybe for their immediate family. They have no allegiance though to anything bigger than the small and usually self-protective circles they try to hold on to. It’s a humbling book for those who have the advantages I do. The hope, if there is any, is that people might form communities of shared experiences of pain and disenfranchisement, and in that look beyond the personal to the systemic. It certainly gave me some empathy for those left out and left behind in our country.

[John Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent analysis of the political beliefs of the (primarily white) working poor and homeless people, and what motivates those positions. Done from a more personal perspective -- spending time with each of the people.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 4 out of 5]

A riveting look at the political alienation & self-isolation induced by generations of class warfare in Pennsylvania's coal country.

[Marcello Ursic · Rating 3 out of 5]

We are not so different from the “forgotten” rural white working poor who voted Trump in 2016 and 2020. The first step to creating a better future for our nation and the world is recognizing that fact and trying to build bridges of empathy and solidarity. We are all working class. We all spend around two decades learning how to efficiently sell our labor-power and then do so until we die. The system does not even necessarily benefit professional-managerial class workers, members of the petty-commentariat, and downwardly mobile creatives. Yes, we may accumulate more capital, a cushion to stave off the retrenchment of the welfare state, until many of us fall through its steadily widening cracks. Yes, we can use this capital to accrue more and better alienating consumer products—just never ask who made those products, under which conditions, and at what cost to our biosphere. We have a tenuous and superficial stake in the status quo, and the material comfort it provides us allows us to ignore its worst excesses.

While we rightfully decry the racism and sexism that exists in blighted rural communities like Coal Brook, such malaise also exists within ours—albeit in refracted or masked forms sometimes rendered most starkly in their explicit absence. I think of my hometown Portland, Oregon—one of the whitest cities in the United States, whose homeless population is still disproportionately black and brown. The bleeding heart liberals who populate Portland’s coffee bars, microbreweries, boutiques, outdoor suppliers, and tech startups turn into steely eyed fascists whenever the homelessness crisis is mentioned and support actions to criminalize homelessness altogether by 2024. I think of the summer I spent doing research in New York, taking my 90-minute daily commute from Little Bangladesh, Queens to Flatbush, Brooklyn and seeing the aggregated dress and skin color of my fellow commuters change radically as we passed through Manhattan. I think of professional class women who still shoulder the second shift while weathering sexual harassment from male colleagues and superiors alongside hipster sexism and weaponized incompetence from the men in their private lives. I think of the racially motivated police killings that continually rock even the bluest urban centers of our bluest states. Despite genuine legal and structural differences surrounding workers’ rights, reproductive rights, and the relative absence of organized civic racism, we are far from innocent bystanders or enlightened moral arbiters.

In this light, I would argue the largest distinction between the perceived “us” and “them” is a simple ideological one. The rural white working poor and the black and brown newcomers that have joined them—fleeing the inner-city crime, addiction, and cost of living that most progressive urbanites have the privilege to ignore—are more deeply in touch with the brutality of the material conditions and economic injustices that undergird all our lives. Time after time, they “are critical of mass incarceration, question the authority of the police, and endorse higher taxes on the wealthy and a downwardly redistributive welfare state” despite their lack of formal political education and emotionally exhausting daily lives (8). Part of their frequently lucid understandings of their plights is understanding that America’s political class of plutocrats, chosen by plutocrats do not have their best interests at heart. As Silvia puts it,

“when the policy preferences of low and middle-income Americans differed from the preferences of the affluent, there was no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. However, the preferences of affluent Americans were significantly related to policy outcomes, regardless of whether their desires were shared by lower-income groups.” (p.17)

If one has learned through painful experience that voting has a negligible effect on improving one’s lot in life, then the natural response is to become more apathetic about voting or retreat from voting altogether. By and large, those who decided to vote in 2016 did so either based on longstanding but crumbling familial tradition or because they perceive a candidate like Trump or Bernie as an outsider from the established political order that has left them behind, a rare someone who speaks for The Little Man or at least isn’t of The Swamp. The key question then is not why the white rural working poor (do not) vote as they do but why no positive collective pivot has arisen from their negative realizations, why they tend to retreat into individualized bubbles of pain management and self-help where nobody but themselves is above suspicion.

In contrast, much of the political engagement amongst urban progressives amounts to currying social capital—political engagement as an indicator of moral fastidiousness and intelligence that can include punching down at the “rubes” for being less educated, cosmopolitan, and voting against their perceived interests. Frequently, this means playing the game through the approved media and political infrastructure— tuning into NPR on the commute to the office, reading the New York Times over a bagel and cappuccino, occasionally donating $25 to political action committee fundraisers, and of course going to the polls. Such an understanding of politics as something separable from the mundane actions and aesthetics of everyday life, as something that inhabits a distinct landscape, a separate sphere, is one manifestation of (bourgeois) false consciousness. Even the neoliberal individualization of suffering and responsibility that plagues blighted ex-coal communities is present in progressive urban centers under the guise of self-as-enterprise hustle culture, over-medica(liza)tion, corporate wellness rhetoric, and the financialized and quantized optimization of everyday life.

Take for instance Silva. She is of our ideological camp and despite her training is not immune to this false consciousness, even with her sensitivity “to the hypocrisy of liberal elites who advocate for social justice while remaining blind to the casual cruelty they inflict on the people below them on the class ladder” (180). Despite the quality of her qualitative ethnographic research and the tenacious altruism behind it, which shines through in her methodological appendix, Silva seems to fall into several of the traps one would expect of a self-described liberal Democrat. One of the most frustrating and revealing was her tacit—and at times explicit—incredulity to entertain the notion that (bourgeois) electoralism may actually be next to useless for addressing the needs of her interlocutors, at least from the federal level. After all, the Democratic National Committee rigged the 2016 primaries, handing West Virginia to Clinton while Sanders had in fact won all 55 counties. And West Virginia was not the only state where this kind of targeted disenfranchisement occurred. Most of those who voted for Trump would have voted for Sanders given the chance. Most were only reluctantly for Trump because they thought something—anything—might change. In a way, they got their wish.

Furthermore, Silva takes for granted how the rural working poor won the political leverage they once had. It was not achieved through approved political infrastructure like voting. It was won through unionism, labor action, sabotage, civil disobedience, and other focused applications of labor power through class struggle. What we need is a collective working-class renaissance from coast-to-coast, perhaps one partially predicated through a mobilization of shared suffering as Silva offers; however, that mobilization will not and cannot occur through Clinton’s infamous injunction that we must all Pokémon Go to the polls.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was an excellent piece of anthropological inquiry. The goal of the book was to better understand the plight of today’s working class, from a town in the coal region of Pennsylvania, and how these struggles form into political views, some of which being seemingly at odds with respondents’ own interests.

While I expected to see overwhelming support for Trump, the main thread was instead a lack of political engagement. Most of them feel the system is rigged and that politicians do not have their best interests in mind, Republican or Democrat. I mean “rigged” in the strongest sense of the word - some interviewees feel that voting is irrelevant because an elite class actually pulls the strings and selects who will be president. When there is support for Trump, much of it stems from his image of not being a politician - as someone who will drain the swamp and is not beholden to special interests or the whims of public opinion. Of course we know this is not actually the case, but that does not seem to get in the way. The general sense of distrust among interviewees is palpable.

More importantly, though, most of them do not think about politics. They have so many more pressing issues in their lives, like paying rent, avoiding drugs, and finding decent work. As someone who is heavily involved in politics, it’s hard for me to imagine, but it’s just not very important to many of them.

Silva also describes how some of the white men carry hand guns with them everywhere and project an image of being in constant danger. I found this quote to be interesting - “Perhaps protecting others from harm becomes even more vital when the other cornerstones of industrial masculinity - earning a living wage...keeping one family together...falter.”

Aside from the connection to political views, the book was eye-opening in showing these people’s day-to-day lives. Some believe America already has equality of opportunity, but this could not be farther from the truth. Many of the interviewees’ upbringings were plagued by trauma, parental drug use, financial instability, and sometimes open displays of racism. It’s easy to get to home plate when you start on third base, but these folks didn’t even know anyone who plays baseball.

As a data scientist, I love to see numbers, but there are situations like this where you can’t get the full picture unless you really hear peoples stories. I’m grateful that Silva amplified them for us in this book.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silva conducted 100s of interviews with residents in a small declining coal town in Pennsylvania. She looks at the lives of men, women, whites, blacks, and Hispanics and the way their lives have changed with the decline of social things that tie us together like unions, marriage, churches, and social clubs and how it has affected their politics. I thought it was an interesting book, but I also didn't feel like I learned anything. At this point this all seems like well worn territory, although this book has a lot more in-depth research behind it most of it taking place before the 2016 election.

[Rachel]

I'm currently holding off on a rating for We're Still Here because I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. It's a pretty short read, though I wouldn't call it a quick one -- I kept having to put it down and take breaks due to frustration. I also don't know how I feel about how it was advertised -- I lost patience with articles about "understanding Trump voters" years ago, and was mostly drawn to We're Still Here because it purported to talk about the experiences of black and brown rural voters/non-voters, which is does, but more than half of the book and her sample size was devoted to white people. 

The book is about the pain and lack of community in the specific rural Pennsylvania town that the author conducted her interviews in, and there was certainly a lot of that, but in the vast majority of the cases, the reasons for voting Trump boiled down to either racism or misogyny or both, which is not news. 

It's something I'm struggling with -- people voting (or acting more generally) against their own interests is one of my pet topics, but I don't feel that We're Still Here did as good a job of that as some books. The interviews and reasoning were so fragmentary and disconnected that I couldn't follow the reasoning of the interview subjects, no matter how much sympathy I did or didn't have. The one time it did was talking about why black men will vote Republican, which was like, one sentence, which I've already managed to half forget, so. That's at least partially on me.

Overall, it's not what I was looking for when I picked up the book, but I think it does a decent job at being what it is? Which is a lot of interviews with people in a lot of pain. Another thing I found kind of frustrating was that the main point of the book was that the lack of community in dying coal towns is what causes so much of the pain and disengagement, and yet the book itself felt very... individualistic? Single interview after single interview, with very little information about the town as a whole. I had no idea how the stories fit in together. I don't know. There's a lot of people in a lot of pain out there, and a lot of them are sure against help of any sort.

[Billie Pritchett]

We're Still Here is sociologist Jennifer Silva's 2015-2016 political ethnography of Coalbrook, Pennsylvania, a town that once enjoyed the coal boom, but which is now the site of a multiracial population struggling to make ends meet.

Among the people profiled is thirty-year-old white working mother of two Bree Lopez who identifies as a Democrat, rails against the rich for not paying enough in taxes, and blames the pharmaceutical companies for hooking the region on opioids.

Bree's boyfriend Eric Kennedy, a twenty-five-year-old black man from D.C., does not identify with a party, but police brutality against black people ranks as a priority for him, and he casts himself as a supporter of Black Lives Matter.

When Bree is asked who she plans to vote for in the 2016 election, she says,

I’d probably vote for Trump. I don’t think I’m going to vote in this upcoming election. A woman can’t be president. (Hillary Clinton) is so easily bought, it’s not even funny. I can’t see her making rational decisions. We would be terrorized. But Trump’s like, k— them all... Is Trump racist? H— freakin’ yes, he’s racist! But you know what? He’s not full of s—. You know what you’re getting. And that woman is in the pocket of too many people. Now if there was somebody else worthy, I’d probably go in that direction, because it’s a joke. But at the end of the day, I would rather have President D— than President Sellout.

When her boyfriend Eric is asked who he'll vote for, he says, “When it comes to voting, I don’t really believe that a president is going to change anything. Because when you think about it, the president can’t do anything without going through other people.”

Examples like this abound throughout the book, recounting the many frustrations of working class and poor Pennsylvanians. The people's political ideologies are incoherent, but they are also a symptom of a generalized apathy toward an America that does not address their suffering, as evidenced in the runup to the most recent election where the American public watched Vice President Kamala Harris ignore lower-income voting blocs and skew further rightward, courting the endorsements of the likes of Republican House Rep Liz Cheney. This is a bad time.

[Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

nonfiction; oral histories from a PA coal-belt town, circa 2016 combined with a (very) brief background in socioeconomic history. 108 people were interviewed over many months), but maybe 40 of those are included in this book. Topics covered: public assistance (housing, food stamps), opiate epidemic and related drug dealing, drug addiction and treatment, reasons to vote/not bother voting (let's just say that nobody here is a fan of Hillary's regardless of party offiliation), reasons they moved to PA (cheap housing, less dangerous crime than the big cities), racism witnessed and experienced in town.

The author focuses on the class politics (and to some extent, racial politics) in this particular microcosm of society, providing a severe contrast to the America that has been featured daily on the news. I think the part that discusses the "crack epidemic" (p.34) should probably at least hint at the wider controversy behind the whole "drug war;" considering how racially charged the consequences have been (see The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness), but again, the author is just focused on the lives of these people in their relatively isolated community. So maybe not the most comprehensive text in terms of socioeconomic history, but I am finding the oral histories to be enlightening--since we so rarely get to hear these perspectives though plenty of "experts" offer their own speculative views.

At one point she attributes a long quote to two different men (with different aliases - everyone's identity is protected in this book):

1. Malcolm, a Black man who voted for Obama in 2012 and whose family consists of registered Democrats:

" 'I respect any veteran that put their time in the service. Me personally, I can't do it cuz I don't even know what the hell we fighting for. So I'm not going to be able to kill people that I have no problem with.' He muses, 'I feel like they brainwashed them [the soldiers] to believe that they [the enemies] are the bad guys.' " (p. 102)

2. Jeffrey, a Black man who voted for Trump in 2016:

" 'I respect anybody that's... any veteran that put their time in the service. Me personally, I can't do it cuz I don't even know what the hell we fighting for. So I'm not going to go to be able to kill people that I have no problem with. I don't have no problem for these guys. But I feel like they brainwashed them to believe that they are the bad guys.' " (p. 111)

Clearly, the organization and presentation of data is sloppy in this instance, and not enough information is provided to be able to trust her analysis of each participant's behaviors and backgrounds, but the words and stories and ideas of each participant is still of interest.

[Patti · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mother’s family is from Nanticoke, PA – just an hour south of Coal Brook. When I visited the area as a child, I was mesmerized by the black clouds rising from burning mounds of coal. Although much has changed in that area over the past 50 years, I remember it as a place of great economic inequality and environmental degradation.

So, I came to We’re Still Here not only to better understand how the Trump presidency came to be, but to become reacquainted with my homeland.

Silva’s book is not an easy read. The small font of this academic work tires the eyes, and the stories wear out the heart. It is almost too much. The individuals interviewed have survived multiple traumas and economic upheavals. Their stories include gun violence, abuse, incarceration, rape. Most relocated from urban centers to Coal Brook in hopes of a new start which is denied due to dysfunction in the area’s - and our country’s - social, economic, political, educational, and criminal justice systems. Racism and sexism abound.

Yet, I didn’t come away totally disheartened. The fact that so many people were willing to discuss their lives and vision of the world with Silva told me they were not as disengaged as she presents. Also, a number of them voted for Obama and supported Bernie. They talk about big money and corporations running politics. To me, that indicates a desire for social justice and systemic change. What’s missing is a community organizing effort to lead the way to greater political involvement. Maybe Silva’s work can serve as a starting point.

We need to know our local politicians, be able to hold them accountable, and see concrete change. That is a way to build meaningful political change – bottom up. Bernie, Stacey Abrams, AOC, Chloe Maxmin – to name a few – understand this and have changed lives for the better. My hope is that a Coal Brook community leader uses this book as a starting point to do the same.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

- Trump's appeal to the working class is that he (claims he) is 1) very smart, 2) already very wealthy and 3) running for president only because he loves the country. Unlike other politicians who play the field to well educated electorate with fancy words, Trump's no frill appeal spoke to them

- People in the lower strata would have an innate feeling of their well being is being robbed away from them (zero-sum thinking). An scape goat is desperately wanted

- Working class long suppress their own emotional inadequatecy with work. It's an innate feeling, and feeling of while other things in their life isn't perfect, their dedication to the society has made them "honorably discharged" by the end of their career

- Many of the ancestors of residents living in rust belt areas came as poor immigrants themselves, working at jobs with health problems (such as bad lungs from working from coal plants). However, as job shift overseas, no job is left for the current generation. It'd be wrong to assume those people, just due to them being white, "had a good life" like the traditional WASPY counterparts

- The identity of masculinity is challenged for the working class who can't find stable work today, since they can't identify with the traditional provider role yet they don't want to settle into any other roles

[Brad Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silva, a sociologist, immerses herself in the heart of Middle American coal country to understand the lives of its people and how those lives shape their political views. She masterfully weaves together countless interviews, which form the backbone of the book, creating a clear, compelling, and non-judgmental narrative about why many in this region support a particular brand of politician.

What stands out most in the book, however, is the overwhelming presence of poverty. The stories Silva captures are steeped in trauma, sexual abuse, political injustice, abandonment, addiction, and economic instability. It’s fascinating to see how the individuals she interviews often attribute their fate to personal responsibility, despite the structural challenges they face. Many recount tales of trying to pull themselves out of poverty, and despite the dire circumstances, there is an underlying thread of optimism.

The interviews also reveal a landscape rife with conspiracy theories and unconventional worldviews, though the blame for the region's decline is often placed not on governments per se, but on specific entities like Wall Street and Big Pharma.

Silva has done an excellent job of presenting these stories, offering a thought-provoking and insightful read.

[Jeffrey Bostick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few years back there was a boomlet in journalism and publishing for works aimed at upper middle class liberal audiences where an author would study "working class" Trump voters as though they were mountain gorillas. Exemplars of this genre like Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land have been picked apart elsewhere for their condescension, and their class and racial biases.

But Silva does not reproduce those failures here. Instead, this is a study of a multi-ethnic down and out working class living in the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region during 2016. The election is really only background noise in the book much as it is in the lives of these interview subjects most of which are several generations of despair removed from a time when politics could have anything tangible to offer them. Recommended for anyone with questions about the depth of social and political isolation in America who also isn't seeking superficial or self serving answers.

[Herb Neumann · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tulsa Library system is embedded in a ruby-red state. The overwhelmingly dominant political party is not known for its support of public education, is disinterested in public health, and looks askance at any program that might better the situation of the working poor. So many observers wonder why Republicans generally win their races by two-to-one margins, when it seems possible that Democrats offer some programs that might help many residents. Silva had this very thought on a much larger scale and decided to study the question. She selected an area in Pennsylvania that she calls the anthracite coal region and talked to a cross-section of people, carefully weighting her sample to include as diverse a group as possible. The study quickly turned into a broad study of many facets of life besides politics. The lengthy Introduction is central to understanding her interests and the Methodological Appendix clarifies her attempts to reach as broad a cross-section as possible in this research. The footnotes and references offer many avenues for further reading.

[Ed Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated the ethnographic study conducted by Dr. Silva across many facets. Having family in the Pennsylvania coal country, this book hits close to home. Her rigorous approach to qualitative research and her methodological appendix made my academic researcher self appreciate the content of the work even more. Most impressive, however, is that as a conservative, I am not generally aligned with the politics noted by the author or where the book takes you. Dr. Silva transcends the political while exploring it, and maintains an objectivity and exceptional storytelling approach that will help any reader better understand this forgotten segment of America. This is one of the best books I've read in the past year (and that numbers near 350). A must read for any politician of any party. It will open your eyes and make you think about our challenges in new ways.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This might have been a 4-star book if I had read it instead of listening to it. The narrator used fake voices and the ones for males (female narrator) were almost unendurable. I considered returning the book to Audible but the “voices” became less annoying as I got used to them.

The interviews themselves grew a bit repetitious after a while but they were informative. Life is hard and hearing people talk about their hard lives and how little faith they have in their government, community and the politicians who supposedly represent them is hard.

I very much enjoyed the author’s conclusion section and, surprisingly, her methodology section. I share her (negative) viewpoint toward Hillbilly Elegy. I identified with her description of her own life trajectory.

This was one of the books recommended by Carlos Lozada in his book What Were We Thinking.

[Reanin Mcroberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really good. I found some of the perspectives of the subjects familiar which is always appealing. On the one hand, I found it a little too academic but on the other I appreciated the rigor of her methods and valued it more knowing it wasn’t intended to be sensational or polarizing like a lot of books pushing some agenda or another.

I read it earlier in the year and noted this, which actually got me thinking about a lot of things going on right now:

“Convinced that democratic processes are rigged in favor of the wealthy, many working class people search for meaning in internet conspiracy theories or the self-help industry - both of which are solitary strategies that serve to turn them inward against each other.”

[Dennis Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America by Jennifer Silva is an odd book. It is an ethnographic study of rural America. It was originally designed to focus on white communities, but the book rapidly turned into a half and half comparison with newcomers of color. No one comes across as particularly good in the book, though there's more to be said in favor of the newcomers than the old whites. Its a story of copious amounts of drugs, racism, and the shroud of conspiracy and the strong belief that government and politicians do not care about them. Surprisingly, Trump support was far more apathetic than it might have appeared at first glance. There was a bit of an axe to grind. This was very much a "why do people vote against their interest and perpetuate all of the bad things in their lives by failing to vote for Clinton?" book, but it fits comfortably in an academic canon of literature investigating some of the rooted issues plaguing the United States. If the story painted here is generalizable, then our country is a whole lot more fragile and in need of support than most might suspect.

[Natalie Ramos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this in 2025 is tough. The book is about the people who live in a coal region of Pennsylvania in 2016. Much of the book discusses the political affiliations or lack there of the people in the town. Many of the people in town are cynical toward government and politics and reading their backstories it makes sense, but personally looking back at the 2016 election, the first Trump term and now 2 months into a second one I am honestly afraid of what will happen next. If you are interested in a sociological account of a rural town that is plagued by the repercussions of bad governmental interventions, I highly recommend this book. And if you do read it, try and come to it with an open mind.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Silva does a great job telling the stories of white, black, and Latino working class men and women in the rust belt! We’re Still Here is a nice change of pace from similar novels (Hillbilly Elegy, Dreamland) because it takes an objective stance and tells stories directly from the people living in the rust belt and shows how it forms their civic and political engagement. I encourage people to put yourself in their shoes and read this book to learn more about the life stories and perspectives of Trump supporters!

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of interview with people in coal country. The interviews give a good insight into people who might of voted for trump. The author makes it seem like there are only people of low economic means in the town. Really no one is in the middle class? Or was a just interviews with people who might vote for trump but many of the people said they don't vote and some voted democrat in 2016. I'm not sure the point if the boom but still interesting to read about these people.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting contrast to Hillbilly Elegy - similar themes but more academic and dispassionate. At times a bit too dry in the narrative but the individual voices provide fascinating and often dramatic stories and perspectives. With the country more divided than ever, this becomes an important study in a segment of the population that many centrists struggle to understand.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I keep reading, trying to understand the divisive America that is so different, in actuality, than what I believed it to be most of my adult life. This book explains various different perspectives in an understanding, empathetic way. The pain that threads throughout rings very true to me. I have often thought trauma affects mindsets very strongly. Informative, insightful, good read.