Blowing Up “The Big White Ghetto”

“Williamson puts his finger on a certain, pervasive resignation that hobbles so many lower-class Americans—a resignation that must be explicitly attacked if our nation is to live up to its promises…”

There are certain writers tuned in to American politics and culture who have earned the right to be heard or, rather, read. Thanks to the power of their prose and the acuity of their analysis, I have a hard time ever scrolling past their articles. Ross Douthat and David Brooks at The New York Times; Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias (formerly at Vox, now at The New York Times and Slow Boring, respectively); Jonah Goldberg and David French at The Dispatch; and Kevin Williamson at National Review come to mind.

In his recent book Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America,” Williamson is peak Williamson, reminding readers of why he is always a must-read. There is the wit, the irony, and the sharp analysis. These are the qualities of his writing that readers of his “The Tuesday” newsletter are quite familiar with by now.

A collection of some of his previously reported National Review pieces from over the past decade, Big White Ghetto presents readers with a deluge of social maladies. Williamson introduces us to heroin addicts in Alabama, opioid addicts, and welfare fraudsters in eastern Kentucky, pornography devotees in Las Vegas, down-on-life gambling addicts in Atlantic City, and homeless encampment residents in Austin, Texas.

These are diverse, different places filled with diverse, different people. The unifying thread that ties these hapless Americans together is their sense of helplessness and their seeming lack of awareness that there are other, more success-prone ways of living one’s life.