“Economic anxiety!” is a favorite punchline among a particular segment of the political commentariat. Center-left writers employed by the likes of Vox and the Washington Post have spent four years mocking the notion that the maladies or voting records of working-class whites in middle America were rooted in material hardship.
Obviously, it was racism, they argued. Or old straight white guys are just upset that they’re losing their privilege. “Many of these people haven’t been left behind,” one Vox writer explained to a scholar who had studied rural America, “they’ve chosen not to keep up. But the sense of victimization appears to overwhelm everything else.”
It turns out that while culture, and specifically the strength of community institutions, certainly is behind the social maladies plaguing parts of middle America, the first domino to fall in these stories of collapse is often a factory.
“Automotive assembly plant closures were associated with increases in opioid overdose mortality,” researchers concluded in a new study published in a journal by the American Medical Association.
Researchers studied manufacturing-heavy counties, distinguishing between those that had experienced an auto plant closure between 1999 and 2016 and those that had not. They found a much higher rate of opioid deaths in those where a car factory had shut down.
“The largest increases in opioid overdose mortality,” the authors wrote, “were observed among non-Hispanic white men aged 18 … to 65 years.”
America’s opioid epidemic, then, isn’t merely a story of unscrupulous drug companies foisting a deadly product on the population. That “supply-side” story is important, but the “demand-side” story is just as crucial: Men without a job, and thus without a sense of purpose, have tried to find satisfaction, or at least escape, elsewhere.
The plague of opioids is a plague of aimless men. Men who could have found their direction assembling transmissions, and could have used those earnings to raise a family, are instead left alienated — and soon, addicted.
In other words, economic anxiety is real, and those who are mocking the notion are mocking millions of deaths.
