A steel plant at the edge of this riverside town played a pivotal role in the family history of Sen. JD Vance.
The plant, Vance wrote in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” was nothing less than an “economic savior” for his grandparents. A steady job there for his “Papaw” is what lifted his grandparents “from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class.”
Its future looks bright too, thanks in part to a grant of up to $500 million from the Biden administration. The money is aimed at helping its owners replace a coal-fired blast furnace so that steel can be produced with clean hydrogen and natural gas — improvements that would cut climate and air pollution and help ensure the plant stays open for another generation.
But the political benefits for the Biden administration — and by extension Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — are less clear. This is true not just in Middletown but in similar communities across the country that are on track to receive funding from either the Inflation Reduction Act or the bipartisan infrastructure law, arguably the two biggest domestic accomplishments of President Joe Biden’s time in the White House.
Both measures remain largely unknown to the public, polling has shown. Perhaps as worrisome for Harris is that the federal investments may not do much to break the country’s partisan divide, even in places that have benefited from the spending.
People, as a group, aren’t completely amenable to reason. If they were, they’d start from their stated beliefs of “children are innocent” and “children must be supported” and conclude that the only possible logically and morally acceptable resulting outcome would be to feed all children.
That hungry children exist, and that this isn’t a scandal which the majority of people who hold beliefs about importance of children are regularly talking about seriously trying to address, it seems that some other factors must motivate them more. Two likely candidates, to me, are convenience and status. If you can conveniently gain status by demeaning outgroups then, amazingly, you can do very little and potentially gain a lot! “I might not have an education, and I might be on minimum wage, but at least I’m not Mexican / a feminist / an atheist” etc.
you cannot logic someone out of a position they did not logic themselves into.