We're Still Here

<strong>A deep multi-generational story of pain place and politics.</strong> <p/>The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own -- the promise at the heart of the American Dream -- is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will<br>instinctively rise up the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics. <p/>In <em>We're Still Here</em> Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep multi-generational story of pain place and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black white and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania Silva<br>reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor unions marriage church and social clubs have diminished. In their place she argues individualized strategies for coping with pain and finding<br>personal redemption have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction <br>joblessness family disruption violence and trauma. Instead Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships loyalties longings and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people. <p/><em>We're Still Here</em> provides powerful on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.<br>