This “Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America” is at the top of Obama’s list of recommended books. I thought it would help me understand why a majority of Americans in 2024 voted for a lying, thieving, unfaithful criminal.

Beth Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio and left in the mid-1980s to became a journalist. Not surprisingly, she blames the loss of local newspapers as an underlying reason for the loss of pride-of-place. The solutions she offers are well-meaning but shallow.

The book describes the implosion of the middle-class way of life in her hometown: manufacturing jobs moving overseas, technology replacing manual and low-level white collar jobs, and the decline of labor unions. She clarified how the Civil Rights law was used to force Blacks into the labor unions, creating race tensions that were deliberately inflamed to weaken the union.

The middle class was further eroded by “the fact that government stopped thinking of higher education as a public good and basically privatized it to the tune of $1.75 trillion in individual student debt.” Author Macy emphasizes that her pathway out of poverty was paved by the Pell Grant that sent her to college. Government stopped adequate funding of Pell Grants as Neoliberalism shifted priorities from “the common good” to “shareholder value.” She quotes philosopher Richard Rorty who predicted in 1998 that globalization and growing inequality would eventually lead to widespread class resentment and, eventually to fascism:

      Members of labor unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves, desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let them selves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
      At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…
      One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2024 book “Stolen Pride” is referenced, pointing to a pride paradox where the shared working class value of self-sufficiency gets twisted into self-blame for the betrayal by “the market” of Neoliberalism. “Doubly blocked [by corporations and government policy], they become vulnerable to structural shame,” and more apt to embrace authoritarians, the radical right, and the notion that it’s okay to convert their shame to blame — of gays, immigrants, people of color, and liberals.”

It isn’t until the end of the book that the reader discovers that both of the author’s children are queer (her word) and one of them is transgender, revealing her anguish at the imminent loss of their fragile safety and social acceptance. She brings us into the world of Travis, a high school aged girl-to-boy transsexual. On page 111, counseling professor Tania Israel wondered if one of the reasons Beth Macy wrote the book was, “Maybe you just want your son to be loved, ya know?”

Another focus is her niece Liza who was trapped in a household with her sexually abusive step father and she could not get help from her mother, her pastor, or the police. The book does a good job of (1) showing how deep the hole is for people like Travis and Liza and (2) the blindness of the HAVES to the children of people who are violent, addicted, and under-educated.

 

Rigid thinking is a trauma response

Nikki King, the addiction scholar, is quoted on page 302, “Rigid thinking is a trauma response.” Trauma alters how the nervous system detects and prioritizes safety and danger. In an environment of diminishing opportunity and fading hope, a self-reinforcing loop organizes around protection rather than connection, narrowing perception and limiting available responses.

In a place like Urbana, where so many are stuck in minimum-wage jobs and burdened by families that need more than is available, people are surrounded by anger, resentment, and despair. As the demands for time and money increase, the nervous system organizes around protecting themselves from further demands rather than connecting to the people who are asking for attention, time, and money. To defend themselves from the onslaught of demands, a person’s perception tends to narrow to the easiest response. Creeping despair limits resourcefulness. The energy erodes for a range of useful emotional responses. The emotionally exhausted and financially-depleted person rattles into a rut of rage against easy targets, echoed by the people in their social silo.

Survival strategies become habitual, predictable, persistent, and
costly: physically, emotionally, and financially. People get stuck.

 

How to Escape the Trauma Feedback Loop

Resolving the problem of angry, resentful voters in places like Urbana requires many simultaneous approaches. Among them are

1. Making the effort to get out of the Trauma Feedback loop,
2. Improving access to more helpful news media and social media
3. Making education affordable and accessible including funding for transportation

The three simultaneous efforts to unpeel the Trauma Feedback loop are:

1. Learning to feel something other than rage. Becoming curious-not-furious
   
2. When activated, and making the effort to be curious-not-furious, ask yourself, “What story am I telling myself? What memory is this triggering? What am I predicting?”
3. Know how to calm your activated body enough to be able to make a rational choice about what to do. To be able to chose to RESPOND WITH INTEGRITY, prioritizing building families on a foundation of trust, and prioritizing trust in close relationships. Choosing not to lash out like a sleep-deprived toddler, or sulk like a teenager on junk food. Choosing instead to act like an adult with a fully-developed brain that can calculate the consequences of actions.

Calculating the Consequences of Actions

Is this a reasonable request, to expect full-grown people to engage their whole brains and take that nano-second to shape a useful RESPONSE rather than to react like a four year old on a sugar high? Studies on soldiers returning with PTSD show us that traumatized adults do not make rational decisions — they have emotional reactions. The Trauma Feedback Loop shows how this reactive behavior is self-reinforcing.

People trapped in the Trauma Feedback Loop display chronic hypervigilance, often ping-ponging between (1) emotional shutdown, withdrawal, and stonewalling and (2) anger, even rage, directed at the people closest to them or toward scapegoats like “woke” people. Research shows that even when traumatized adults have insight to their PTSD and make the intention to be more rational in their responses, ongoing physiological dysregulation hijacks that effort. The body always wins. When the nervous system is triggered, it will protect. The brain is designed for survival, not for singing Kumbaya.

For these adults economically trapped and traumatized by feeling helpless, this destructive behavior is not a failure of motivation, awareness, or effort —- it is a nervous system doing exactly what it is designed to do: to survive. The threatened brain does not pause to calculate the consequences of actions. This calculation of consequences is limited to people who feel relatively safe and relatively calm.

How to Interrupt the Loop

In order to learn, people need to feel relatively safe and relatively calm. The challenge is to create an atmosphere of trust to foster a physiological change inside the nervous system, in real time, by:

• Identifying early nervous system shifts before defensive reactions fully mobilize
• Tracking what is triggering the reactions at the level of bodily neuroception
• Slowing or interrupting defensive momentum without overriding safety
• Expanding access to a broader range of physiological and relational responses
• Supporting the nervous system in updating safety through lived experience — not explanation.

“Updating through lived experience” is also called “learning,” but people need to feel safe and calm to begin to remodel the nervous system. An atmosphere of trust works best.

When people stuck in the trauma feedback loop can reorganize their nervous systems enough so that their responses are usually kind and thoughtful, they regain trusting access to their families, curiosity about the people and world around them, a sense of agency both economically and socially, and emotional availability without getting hijacked back to the lash-out-numb-out survival reaction.

Banking, Business and Society are Built on Trust

While I have talked a lot about safety, I believe the real issue is trust. Would you go to work if you did not believe that you would get a check on payday?

I think a deep layer of rage is toward the betrayal of the “promise” after WWII that Americans who worked hard would be able to have the American Dream of a house and life better than their parents. If there were still good factory jobs and only three television networks, would we have the bifurcated communications environment of today? What went wrong?

Broadly, two things (1) undoing Glass-Steagall and (2) changing the law to require “maximizing shareholder value.”

After the stock market crash of 1929, banking and finance was reformed by New Deal reforms such as the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial and investment banking. Never again would the wealthy and powerful play monopoly with regular people’s money. Lloyd Blankfein refers to this in a recent interview.

Laws passed by Congress were undermined in the courts, as described in the book The Quiet Coup. Prior to that, most companies included employee and community welfare in their planning and actions. Neoliberalism was the fancy word for the greed that took hold again under Ronald Reagan during the 1980s under the guise of “smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation.” Academics like Milton Friedman and economists like Alan Greenspan jumped on the bandwagon and many Democrats followed suit creating the conditions we see in Urbana now. NAFTA was negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and signed into law by Bill Clinton, who further deregulated banking and finance.

Some people think that hitting rock bottom again, as we did in 1929, will wise Americans up and we will begin to create “new” New Deal. Conversely, maybe economically disadvantaged Americans will fall further into fascism. What I wonder is: when the middle-class “knowledge workers” suddenly lose their jobs to A.I. and they are forced into the some economic trauma as the working class of Urbana, will they too become reactionary fascists?

Corporations are creations of the law and Mehrsa Baradaran says we need to change the laws so these creations have responsibilities to the society that makes their profits possible. The gospel of “shareholder value” only reaped great rewards for those companies with a single or small number of major or exclusive shareholders.

For the most part, widely held companies were either driven out of business — so the valuable parts could be acquired — or bought up in leveraged buyouts to be broken up and sold by the “Barbarians at the Gate.”

The Evolution of Trust

Nicky Case created a 30-minute game that uses Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma to play out the probabilities of The Evolution of Trust.

Fascinating and insightful, it sets the groundwork for another prediction game that demonstrates why communities like Urbana, built by immigrants, become so hostile to new immigrants.

YouTube channel Veritasium (the element of truth) riffed off the graphics created by Nicky Case to explore the question “Can you really reach anyone in six steps?” The figures in green represent TRUSTED people. Think of them as people in Urbana. Reds are distrusted, let’s say new immigrants to Urbana.

In the leftmost image with three green trusted Urbana residents at the top, imagine they are all connected by the simple garland, no shorcuts. Trust grows organically at the edges — people come to trust those with whom they have repeated good interactions. Add the shortcuts of green-to-red and red-to-red and the system quickly becomes all red. Trust disappears from the system, the cooperators were crushed.

As trust erodes in our communities, our financial systems and society itself is undermined. I think the answer is to restore trust in ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our communities, and our citizenship. This has to be done on a one-to-one basis. We need to learn how to build trust with people who are not like us. We need to step out of our media echo chambers.

The Author’s Solution

On page 301, Beth Macy outlines her solutions:

• strengthen public schools,
• invigorate “real life with other human beings including those we don’t know,”
• support local news,
• run for local office and/or support candidates who are trying to change things for the better for most people.

My solution is less glib. The middle class resents paying taxes to support the jobless, blind to their own impending slide into joblessness via A.I. displacement. Life is not a football game. It is time to shift from us-versus-them thinking and to do the hard work of finding and executing win-win strategies. Stop wasting energy by protesting the Rich. The Rich will always be with us. In a democracy, we bear the load we can. We are all in this together. No one gets out alive, so pitch in and connect. Create ways to make things better for most people. Find a way to make the best of what we have. Share the wealth. Get smart and consider strategic forgiveness in what Nicky Case calls the Copykitten way of getting ahead while creating community.