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Middle America Is Dying Hard

WEIRTON, West Virginia — Most people in this town will tell you they’d rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.

It isn’t just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, and the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there’s also the demise of the tax base, which affects the school district and the quality of the roads.

Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked here at Weirton Steel. Now, the last 900 workers left have just lost their jobs.

“It’s just another scar to add on what people in power have done to our lives and our community over the past 40 years,” said one employee who declined to give his name, adding, “Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives?”

He points to different buildings downtown, and all of them for him were “used to be this” and “used to be that.”

Ryan Weld of Wellsburg, 43, grew up in downtown Weirton, right behind the local funeral home.

“When I was growing up in the ’80s, the mill was still going at full tilt with Weirton Steel employing 10,000 people, including my grandfathers,” he said.

The Republican state senator said things started to slow down here in the mid- to late-’90s after the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted: “That dramatically changed the landscape of downtown; it went from a bustling Main Street to dead. I am part of the last age group that remembers the shops and stores and restaurants of downtown.”

He believes NAFTA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, essentially made it hard for companies like Weirton Steel, which had to follow strict and expensive Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, to compete with places like Mexico. The towns all up and down the Steel Valley died hard.

“The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to properly enforce trade laws is nothing but empty mills and unemployed workers,” Weld said. “That was true in the ’80s and ’90s, and that is true today.”

Forty years ago, the Democratic Party started to slowly shed its working-class base, but not quickly: Democratic officials would still show up for decades at union rallies, putting their arms around workers’ shoulders and telling them they have their back while at the same time enacting regulations and trade agreements that stripped them of their livelihoods and dignity and made ghettos of their once beloved communities.

By the 2012 Obama reelection, they traded their New Deal Democrat legacy voters for ascendant groups: minorities, young people, college-educated elites, and single women, all done without so much as a Dear John letter.

The Republicans inherited them, but most of their strategists running messaging and campaigns had no idea what to do with them, at least on the national level.

And then there is the press covering the voter who will decide the next president: Few if any of them come from places like Weirton or Youngstown, Ohio, so they have little understanding of their worldview. Things that give people from here purpose, such as living close to extended family, are not as valuable to someone who has been transient for most of a career.

In short, we are heading once again into an election where very few people in Washington truly understand how remarkably devastating this mill closure is. Instead, it is a wire story at best, soon forgotten if measured at all. They truly do not understand how much the loss of the dignity of work has changed American politics. That this tone-deafness is still happening 14 years after Barack Obama was given notice in the 2010 midterm elections and eight years after Donald Trump won the presidency is pretty staggering.

The Democrats once attracted these voters, but they’ve moved on to the social justice crowd and don’t appear to want to anymore. I’m not sure if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., does, the press does not, and the new “very online right” is certainly not the reflection of a center-right voter in middle America. The online right just seems hell-bent on making them seem like Taylor Swift conspiracy theorists. (P.S. They’re not.)

Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College, said Washington elites on both sides of the aisle, media elites, and now online conspiracy elites just don’t get Middle America even after this recent economically and politically difficult decade.

“Few things bond people/citizens together, like trying to make a living in the real world, the dignity of work, and raising a family,” he explained, adding that these bonds cut across all divides—geographic, racial/ethnic, religious, gender, ideological/party, and even at times socioeconomic.

“If there is one thing we have learned over the past decade, it is that this bond over the difficulties of making an honest living can and does create unlikely coalitions of voters,” he said. “Even disparate voters, from the likes of Bernie Sanders supporters to Trump supporters, can agree on this.”

Indeed, economic dignity and survival make strange bedfellows.

Brad Todd, founding partner of OnMessage and co-author with me of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” said one thing is for certain about 2024: “We are about to read a million new stories that quote zero people who are actually going to decide the election.”

Brauer said the dignity of work is at the very core of the American experience, “Yet the elites of this country still just don’t understand, while average Americans just keep getting financially squeezed more and more.”

Weld said it is incumbent on local elected officials such as himself to be the advocates of Middle America.

“I do what I do because of that. The empty buildings were already there when I was in college and high school, and it pisses me off,” he said. “I don’t think anyone fought hard enough for that from happening. We shouldn’t keep having to read again and again another story about a town dying hard and a vacancy of no one caring.”

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the Beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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About Salena Zito

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner, and co-author (with Brad Todd) of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: WEIRTON, WV - JUNE 27: Thirty six year steel veteran and United Steelworkers local union 2911 president Mark Glyptis looks over the idled BOP Caster at the ArcelorMittal Weirton Steel Plant on June 27, 2009 in Weirton, West Virginia. Although the steel plant in Weirton has been idled for over two years, Glyptis holds out hope that it will eventually start back up. The Weirton plant was the first mill in the Ohio Valley to be idled and since it's closing the rest of the plants in the area have followed suit, halting almost all of the steel production in the area and leaving thousands of workers without jobs. The future is uncertain for steel towns of the Ohio Valley and other areas as demand for steel is the lowest it has been in roughly 70 years. Operating utilization at U.S. steel mills has dropped to levels not seen since the Depression. (Photo by Rick Gershon/Getty Images)

Notable Replies

  1. I have witnessed first- hand the death of a town because the plant shut down or moved. Corporate America makes the decision to move into areas in part based on the ready access to raw materials, easy transportation or the concessions local officials are willing to offer to entice them, but mostly because there isn’t much competition there for a labor pool; when changes in regulations or outsourcing makes that location unprofitable, they close the doors and move on, most often without a single thought about the devastation they are leaving in their wake. Some blame the unions, some blame corporate greed, some blame the constant insistence by educators that one must go to college to be successful, all of whom had a part in a drama that has played over & over again in the last 30-40 years. But more than any other factor, the steady creep of globalist support in our leadership and a sneering distain for those who work with their hands, has lead to this.

  2. The United States has been on a suicide mission since NAFTA and Chinese entry into WTO. It’s obvious now that the people whom we elected weren’t the people we elected.

    I remember posting a negative comment on WSJ story regarding Chinese takeover of US manufacturing about 20+ years ago. The striking thing was the absolute hatred displayed by others whose only priority was $$$. That’s the attitude of the business class in this country (Learn to Code!). I wouldn’t stop to help them if they were bleeding to death in a ditch. What’s also disgusting is the naïve attitude displayed by many in the America First movement that we can somehow, after 20+ years of this, onshore manufacturing when so many of the people with specific skills and know-how (think fiber or shoe manufacturing) are no longer alive. I guess the peasants don’t need mentors.

  3. Avatar for Unsk Unsk says:

    Don’t deride the online Right, Salena. You need to listen more.

    The tragic stories about NAFTA and the Chinese entry into the WTO are all true but they were over twenty years ago and are not the principal cause of most of the middle and lower working class’s recent economic troubles.

    • First, one has to look at the causes for our most recent debilitating round of inflation which is hitting the lower and middle classes really hard and cannot be blamed upon NAFTA and China’s entry into the WTO.

    Our recent bout of inflation has two principal causes:
    • First and foremost the inflationary effects of greatly debasing the dollar with the monetary disaster of the $9 Trillion dollar 15 year “ Quantitative Easing “ money print.

    This QE money print was done largely to aid the Democrat agenda and in the last few years partly to ameliorate the COVID nightmare which was at it’s root, caused by the rogue and psychotic CIA’s insane “Gain of Function “ research program and it’s consequences.

    This ridiculously scary program was given to of all people the Red Chinese BioWeapons lab in Wuhan after several dangerous lab leaks here in the US of their insane lab experiments . Then in Wuhan under the direction of the CIA contractor Eco Health Alliance, the Red Chinese were able develop to COVID and release it to the world.

    • Secondly, in the process of expanding the money supply by trillions for Quantitative Easing the Fed lent those same $9 Trillion to member banks and Hedge Funds at near zero interest rates under it’s Zero Interest Rate Policy as well as paved the way for Corporate Bond rates to go to near zero.

    The Fed gave Corporate America this incredibly preferential treatment while at the same time it raised rates on credit cards, small business loans, small commercial property loans, and loans for start ups while in many cases denying them credit altogether.

    The net result of this move was a multi / trillion dollar transfer of wealth and power to greedy and often woke Corporate America from the middle and lower classes as a result of the tremendous financial nearly free money comparative advantage given Corporate America in the marketplace of business deals which allowed Corporate America to buy out and/or squeeze out it’s smaller competitors.

    This financial advantage led to a near monopolistic stranglehold and dominance over many markets by Corporate America which allowed them to cut staff and salaries, cut service and product lines and raise prices on their way to greater profits. Over the last 15 years of QE, Corporate profits grew by 50% and their stock valuations quadrupled all while the financial fortunes of the middle and lower classes went into steep decline.

    Not to denigrate the negative effects of NAFTA or China’s WHO membership, but the real reason for grave current misfortunes of the middle and lower classes are the Fed’s wholly illegal preferential Corporate machinations of QE and ZIRP.

  4. Well stated. Zito is good, but she often has tunnel vision.

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