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Twenty years before Donald Trump earthquaked the political system, Simon & Schuster published “The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats.” Google Books said of its author: “Culture maverick Jim Goad presents a thoroughly reasoned, darkly funny, and rampagingly angry defense of America’s most maligned social group — the cultural clan variously referred to as rednecks, hillbillies, white trash, crackers, and trailer trash. As ‘The Redneck Manifesto’ boldly points out and brilliantly demonstrates, America’s dirty little secret isn’t racism but classism.”

More succinctly, Goad delivers a bare-knuckle defense of working-class white culture.

“Goad takes on a great theme: America’s white underclass do not fail because of individual character defects; they have been handed socio-economic straitjackets at birth,” wrote Charlie Dickinson for the online Eclectica Magazine. “The thread Goad follows is socio-economic oppression: The Haves keeping the Have-nots in want. With engagingly satiric style, he shows how ‘white cash’ has always pitted ‘white trash’ against blacks with a divide-and-conquer ploy. The message is clear: If the Balkanization of our society and our growing multicultural wars are to end, then first rooting out the classism among whites is a necessary step.”

James Carville, lead strategist in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, demonstrated with his class-oriented attack on Paula Jones how the Clintons would treat women who accused Bill of sexual harassment. “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park,” he declared, “you never know what you’ll find.”

Jones “wasn’t fancy or rich, just a working woman sexually harassed by Bill when he was governor of Arkansas,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. “But she was denigrated by Clinton’s top advisers as ‘trailer park’ trash, as someone so craven she’d crawl on dirt for the cash to slander Bill.”

Joan C. Williams, a University of California Hastings College of the Law professor, wrote in her recent New York Times column, “The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension,” that to win in 2018 and 2020, Democrats must “address the widespread working-class revolt against global elites. … (B)ecause in four years the Electoral College will again give outsize power to the whites in Rust Belt states who delivered the last election to Mr. Trump.” Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by a 39-point margin among whites without a college degree.

Williams contended that social equality should be “not just for some groups, but for all groups,” and that means attending to the “hidden injuries of class.”

Illustrating those hidden injuries, Williams cited a recent study in which “316 law firms (were sent) resumes with identical … work and academic credentials, but different clues about social class,” finding “that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than … men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example.”

Ralph R. Reiland is associate professor of economics emeritus at Robert Morris University and a local restaurateur (rrreiland@aol.com).