In an echo of arguments by Thomas Frank and others, Isenberg worries that today we once again are seeing 'a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest.' Read Full Review > At times, the author justifies her choice by implying a sort of equivalence of hardship.

At a time when so much of the national debate over inequality centers on racial divides, Isenberg maintains that 'class has its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race.' Still, it’s hard to skirt over race when dissecting class in America. Throughout this book, references to race are fleeting and awkward, appearing in parentheticals or occasional asides. Isenberg looks upon old American traditions and scoffs, reinterpreting history through the prism of class divisions among the country’s white population, one more caste system in the land of the free. has authored a gritty and sprawling assault on this aspect of American mythmaking. 'Class,' she writes, 'had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race.' Thus we get a history of class in America that discusses white tenant farmers at length, but scarcely mentions black sharecroppers or Mexican farmworkers. But Isenberg falls prey to one of the most common and pernicious fallacies in American popular discourse about class: For her, America’s landless farmers and precarious workers are by default white. Isenberg makes a strong case that one of the most common ways of stigmatizing poor people was to question their racial identity. In the book’s most ingenious passages, Isenberg offers a catalog of the insulting terms well-off Americans used to denigrate their economic inferiors. Ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to The Beverly Hillbillies, Isenberg provides a cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority. Isenberg’s story is not, as her subtitle suggests, 'untold.' But she retells it with unusual ambition and (to use a class-laden term) in a masterly manner.

White trash the 400 year history