Pain Killers, Booze and Suicide

The bottom line is that the mortality rate for middle-aged white men in the United States is climbing. The reason is that they’re only being used as Republican voters.

Things aren’t going well for whites in the U.S. If until now that was just a perception, an observation in a nation whose society and demography have been undergoing a radical process of change, now, it’s a proven fact. Middle-aged men and women in America don’t have much more than drugs and suicide. The previous American social core is bogged down in a deep, self-destructive crisis.

A study by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton at the elite Princeton University shows that mortality rates for white Americans aged 45 to 54 years are increasing, a trend running counter to mortality rates in other industrialized nations — and counter to the trend for the entire United States in general. African-Americans and Latinos show no evidence of following this trend.

Even more notable, however, is how whites are dying: The main causes in that segment are suicide, drug overdose and chronic liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse.

Pain killers, booze and suicide — what’s up with the once so self-confident Americans who doubted nothing and were convinced that life would bring them no less than the fulfillment of the American dream? With few exceptions, the American dream is over for the middle class and has been largely replaced by deep despair.

The Jobs Are Elsewhere

It may be true that unemployment figures have fallen to the lowest rate in years, and the economy is rebounding, but the jobs aren’t necessarily where the middle-aged white man has taken to the bottle. It’s different on the East and West coasts, in Silicon Valley with its high-tech industries and in urban centers like New York and Washington, where the movers and shakers are ready to bring change and profit from it.

There, life expectancy is higher than in the rest of the country, which Americans themselves refer to as the “fly-over states” — those states quickly left behind in the flight from one coast to the other. That’s the rural, conservative America that was first and sincerely idealized in country songs, the “heartland” of the United States.

But those who cause that heart to beat feel disconnected; the fear of becoming irrelevant is so great that many find life bearable only when they’re in a haze of drugs. The country is changing and taking less account of white America’s traditional values.

The money that financed the American dream for the middle class is now being earned by others. Moral and ethical questions about equality have long since been answered to their detriment — a U.S. president who was recently featured on the cover of a gay magazine can no longer be “their” president. Religion no longer serves as a unifying element in society, and fear of the unknown as well as the fear of alienation, despite the years gone by since the 9/11 attacks, has not abated but rather has become more potent.

The U.S. has always drawn its identity and its strength from the fact that it is a nation of immigrants. A nation of states emerged from those beginnings, and that diversity has been celebrated as the embodiment of the nation. For many conservatives, that worked, and diversity was acceptable as long as it was in the minority, and the white way of life and white culture were always dominant. But that dominance began to erode and continues to erode. The year 2050 is the year many conservative whites fear most because, according to most predictions, that’s when whites will become a minority.

Dubious Theses rather than Solid Content

This identity crisis among conservatives is not just a societal problem that has gone public several times in the form of racist incidents over the past few years; it’s also a problem for a Republican Party that addresses that target group with increasingly shrill tones and still hopes to gain political capital and to win elections that way.

In the current primary Republican campaign, the leading candidates are former neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Donald Trump, neither one a career politician. Trump, with his usual loud-mouthed style, again went for dubious theory over solid content, choosing to speak on the subject of himself as president of the U.S.

Experts and liberals like to dismiss Trump as a fast-moving phenomenon in an otherwise absurd three-ring electoral circus. But his continued presence in the race at this stage is due to the fact that he’s more skillful than his opponents at exploiting the fears and the identity crises of the white, older generation. His slogan, “Make America Great Again” is aimed directly at the national heartland.

Stolen from Ronald Reagan

What’s significant is that Trump stole his slogan. A Republican Party icon — Ronald Reagan — came up with that slogan for his presidential campaign in 1980. Reagan brought fulfillment of the American dream to white America in the ‘80s. Now, it is the longing for what once was that motivates Trump. His popularity and the fundamental shift to the right by the Republicans who seek to continue adopting extreme conservative themes is perhaps the last gasp of a target group whose core will inevitably disintegrate but that continues to hope that it can overcome its own identity crisis. It is the desperate wish to try to avoid the inevitable once again.

If the Republicans stay that course but fail to recognize that they could appeal to the conservative values of Latinos as a target audience rather than alienating them with immigration propaganda, they will come to a political dead end. The middle-aged white man incapable of change is already there.