Big White Ghetto, Kevin D. Williamson

National Review writer Kevin Williamson is not the first or only conservative commentator to take aim at what some people seem to like to call the "underbelly" of the conservative movement. Williamson will write about the people who have not just campaign bumper stickers on their cars but redesigned American flags flying from a truck bed that mesh the Stars and Stripes with a particular issue or candidate. Deepnding on your point of view these folks are either the salt or the scum of the earth -- but Williamson is clear that they, like most everyone else, are a little bit of both and in any event deserve better than being slogan fodder for whatever program solution is being discussed about them.

He's said a large part of this willingness to take a clear-eyed look at this group of people comes because it's his own history and upbringing as well. He had the same kind of chaotic home life and exposure to poverty of both income and choice that he writes about in Big White Ghetto, making him more than some sort of coastal anthropologist on an expedition amongst the natives to observe their quaint ways. Which means that he frequently sounds harsh in discussing this group, although from his perspective it's more realism than antipathy.

Ghetto collects several years worth of stories about different issues that orbit this group of largely unnoticed poor. Thanks to media portrayals and our own misunderstanding, many people aren't aware that the average poor person in America isn't necessarily a minority or a resident of an inner city. Entrenched and and sclerotic governmental assistance programs that no longer assist people much at all have deepened poverty rural and small-town America just as much as in the big cities. Areas of Appalachia form some of the major concentrations of this kind of poverty outside urban areas, and they give the title essay its name: They are the "Big White Ghetto."

Subsequent essays explore some of the cultural problems dealt with -- and created by -- this particular group of people. As often happens, the way a problem manifests in one economic group differs from the way it manifests in a different group. Lower-income folks get all of the problems that a bad cultural idea can generate, magnified and added to by the problems of poverty itself.

Most of these essays have been printed before, many in National Review, and they span several years. While all of them would have benefited from being more extensively revised to fit together as a whole, the earlier pieces especially seem disconnected from the later ones. Post-2016, these voices were definitely magnified through the lens of Donald Trump's populist appeals and any examination of them takes that into account -- but Ghetto doesn't review them in light of the new paradigm. Which also attenuates the thematic thread that's supposed to connect them all and leaves a big chunk of the book as just a collection of Williamson reprints.

Because most of what Williamson writes is entertaining and informative, that by itself isn't a bad thing. But it does mean that we didn't get the book-length examination of these cultural issues from him that could easily have been a five-star work...situations he knows as well as J.D. Vance does and reports as thoroughly as Saleena Zito does mixed with own refusal to sacralize any of the usual cows involved.