Help the Poor Move

For the past year or so, I have been involved in an on-again/off-again debate with a number of conservatives of the “paleo” tendency, Michael Brendan Dougherty prominent among them, on the question of what to do about economically stagnant and socially dysfunctional communities. This has taken place in the context of the election year’s attention to what we euphemistically call the “white working class” (its main problem is that it is not working) and its attraction to Donald Trump’s anti-capitalist populism. The answer I have come up with — that people should leave those communities, if they can, and seek better lives for themselves elsewhere — has scandalized some of my friends on the right.