West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On?

Months ago, in the quiet, eagle-bedecked confines of his office on Capitol Hill, Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, sketched out a social-policy bill not unlike the Build Back Better proposal that he torpedoed on Sunday, in a rebuke to his party, his President, and millions of people in his state. It was still in the early blush of the Democrats’ control of Congress and the White House, and the Party was pursuing an all-in-one proposal that would bundle the repair of bridges and roads with expansions of child care and other social services. Dangling the appeal of his pivotal vote, Manchin encouraged the Biden Administration to split the bill into smaller parts. “I’m saying we can get an infrastructure deal—a traditional infrastructure deal,” he told me, in May. “Then we come back on human infrastructure and look at the needs.”

But Manchin’s definition of Americans’ “needs” was always the problem. Even after his party split the bills, and after it spent many torturous months wheedling and flattering and acceding to his cuts, Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will be indolent and dependent. All over West Virginia, he told me, businesses “can’t find workers. They won’t come back to work.” Dispensing with the euphemisms a few months later, he told reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”

The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive. To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.

If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.

Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak. After he persuaded the Biden Administration to drop from the bill the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the centerpiece of efforts to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, climate protesters surrounded Manchin’s silver Maserati.

Jim McKay, the director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that lobbied Manchin to support the bill, told me that the senator was “conspicuously absent” from “personal meetings with West Virginia families.” McKay said, “Unfortunately, while his staff did have some meetings—which we are thankful to have had—personal contacts with Senator Manchin were extremely limited.” Dodging uncomfortable meetings is not unique in politics, but the accusation carries a special sting for Manchin, whose status as a Democrat in a red state makes him especially keen to project an image of a man who refuses to “go Washington.” McKay said, “I look forward to when Senator Manchin reconnects with average people.”

To anyone who knows the details, Manchin’s self-narrative—of a coal-country football star from the tiny town of Farmington—has always passed over his wealth and status. The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets. Joe’s uncle, A. James Manchin, ascended to the positions of West Virginia’s secretary of state and treasurer. Joe’s daughter, Heather Bresch, went to work at a pharmaceutical plant in the state run by Mylan, eventually becoming its C.E.O. and collecting an estimated $37.6-million exit package when she retired, in 2020. Joe, for his part, has prospered as a coal broker, building a net worth of between four and thirteen million dollars, according to his Senate disclosures. In West Virginia terms, Manchin has been a member of the gentry—corporate, political, and personal—for decades.

Walt Auvil, a member of the West Virginia Democrats’ executive committee, who has criticized Manchin for years, told me this week that “no one who matters to Joe has been rescued from poverty by the childhood-tax credits that his stance will end. But it has cut child poverty here by about a third.” Auvil added, “If it does not personally benefit Joe, his major contributors, and/or his family, he is unmoved.” Manchin has always been a brake on the progressive capacity of his party, but the stakes of his opposition matter today more than they ever have. His invocation of an “entitlement mentality,” as an argument for opposing reform and for instituting means testing and work requirements, stands in contrast to what his constituents say they need.

The growing criticisms of Manchin call to mind the reaction that some in Appalachia had to the image promoted by the author turned politician J. D. Vance when he published, in 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir of his rise from a harrowing childhood in Ohio to the Marines, Yale Law School, and a career in venture capital. Vance urged his fellow-Appalachians to “wake the hell up” and adopt his belief that their woes “were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”

Although the book became a best-seller during America’s struggle to understand Trump’s rise, it also generated resentment from some in the “culture” that it depicts. Dwight B. Billings, an emeritus professor of sociology and Appalachian studies at the University of Kentucky, called it “an advertisement for corporate capitalism and personal choice.” In a 2019 essay in the Lexington Herald–Leader, Billings wrote that, in Vance’s telling, “the problem boils down simply to the bad personal choices individuals make in the face of economic decline—not to the corporate capitalist economy that creates immense profits by casting off much of its workforce or the failure of governments to respond to this ongoing crisis.”

Bit by bit, Manchin, like Vance, is losing the credibility of his connection to the very place at the heart of his identity. In 2018, Vance, who is now running for the Senate, in Ohio, as a Republican, having renounced his earlier opposition to Trump, spoke at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference. He was booed by a group calling itself the Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners (Y’ALL); the members turned their chairs around and sang the coal-miner anthem “Which Side Are You On?”

In West Virginia today, Manchin is facing his own chorus of skepticism. For all of the senator’s warnings against entitlement, McKay, the child-welfare advocate, notes that his opposition to the Build Back Better bill “means more parents will have to leave a job they love because they can’t afford the cost of child care for their children.” McKay added, “West Virginia has several counties without a single licensed child-care center. That problem will now persist indefinitely.”