My best friend died of loneliness

Like Mike, America’s white working class is alone. Like Mike, it is being crushed by its isolation.

Since 2000, white working-class Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 have been one of the only demographics in the world that has seen its life expectancy fall. These deaths are mostly suicides. Some are officially blamed on alcoholism and addiction, but that’s just suicide in slow motion. Whatever we call them, they’re a lagging indicator of an economy in transition.

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Just as the working class is succumbing to our increasingly digitized, globalized, automated, post-industrial era, the working stiffs—the assembly-line workers, welders, mechanics, miners, and their kin, the people who once made up the working class—are tacitly acknowledging they have no role anymore.

I know this feeling well. It’s where I come from.

[This is a lengthy, heartfelt, and resonant essay — but still a bit dislocated. Bloodworth argues that “markets” created the destruction that victimized Mike and that Democrats need to return to championing working-class families. However, it was the Left that pushed the breakdown of families (via no-fault divorce, the first step in Mike’s poverty and victimization) and then through the government programs that incentivized further family breakdowns. Even the education system, long dominated by the Left, failed Mike. I think Bloodworth needs to take a closer look at the long trends here and question whether government has been the answer or the problem. — Ed]

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