T his week’s column is being filed from Triadelphia West Virginia. Never heard of it? The nice lady at the front desk of the Hampton Inn and Suites when we checked in at 2 a.m. on our way back home from spending Yom Tov in Ohio said we were “only ten miles from downtown Wheeling.” Maybe that helps.

Of course having a little innocent New Yorker fun at the expense of West Virginia always runs the risk of drawing an irate letter to the editor from someone who was president of the Wheeling chapter of NCSY in 1973. Then again considering that this state didn’t even have its own Chabad shaliach until one arrived in Morgantown in 2007 perhaps that risk is beyond minimal.

So my Shacharis in Triadelphia may have been the first time words of kedushah were ever uttered in that spot on G-d’s earth. But who knows? The “Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War” exhibition at Yeshiva University Museum two years ago included the testimony of a Union soldier from Ohio who told of a Pesach Seder he held in 1862 together with “twenty of my comrades and co-religionists belonging to the Regiment…. There in the wild woods of West Virginia away from home and friends we consecrated and offered up to the ever-loving G-d of Israel our prayers and sacrifice.”

The hotel stay was very nice but I’ll admit to not being entirely comfortable in these parts. Pulling into the parking lot of the Hampton Inn I parked next to an SUV that displayed an image of a high-powered rifle above the words “You Go Ahead and Give Peace a Chance. I’ll Cover You In Case It Doesn’t Work Out.” Indeed of the 50 states West Virginia has the fifth-highest share of gun owners.

It also has one of the oldest least-diverse and least-educated populations of any state. It is in other words populated by archetypal voters for you-know-who in 2016.

Interestingly it’s also a state with a history of willingness to elect to high office people with execrable personal histories. For decades for example it kept sending back to the United States Senate a man named Robert Byrd. In the early 1940s Byrd recruited 150 of his friends to form a West Virginia chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (including a three-dollar fee from each member for a robe and hood). But at least he later disavowed his past misdeeds.

West Virginia stands out within the Union not only for its love of firearms; it has the fourth-lowest median household income in the country which is understandable given that its labor-force participation has ranked last in the United States every year since 1976 trailing the national average by at least nine percentage points. Among prime working-age adults age 25 to 54 West Virginia ranks dead last in labor-force participation rate. It also has the highest share of the adult population dependent on Social Security Disability Insurance of any state in the country.

And one more statistic: Over the last six years drug wholesalers reportedly shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia — a state of only 1.84 million people. During that time there have been 1 728 fatal overdoses in the state.

So to recap West Virginians are among the poorest most unemployed and most public-benefits-dependent Americans and also happen to be undergoing an opioid epidemic. And to hear some tell it including the current president during the 2016 campaign that’s because of a liberal “war on coal production ” which is in turn driven by the environmental lobby.

The problem with that claim according to the Brookings Institution’s William Galston writing in the Wall Street Journal back in the fall of 2016 is that the number of coal mining jobs has been falling steadily since the 1970s in both of the two great mining states of West Virginia and Kentucky. He observes that:

Many forces have combined to decimate coal jobs since their mid-20th century peak. According to a 2014 official report… the principal culprit has been the “automation and mechanization of mining processes which have improved mining productivity.” Another factor is “diminishing reserves of thick and easily accessible coal seams.” …As a result coal faces intensified competitive pressure from natural gas produced through hydraulic fracturing….

Both state reports also cite an additional factor: recent federal regulations of greenhouse gases and mercury. But neither regards these policies as a primary cause of coal’s decline. That argument would be absurd on its face because nearly all the reduction in mining employment occurred before the federal government even began trying to reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuels.

It is irresponsible for politicians to suggest that these mining jobs will return; they can’t and won’t. And even if mining recovered modestly it would make at best a small contribution to coal states’ economies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics mining and logging now account for only three percent of West Virginia’s total employment and less than one percent of Kentucky’s.

At this point readers may be wondering how one night in the Hampton Inn in Triadelphia has turned me into a mining industry wonk with a fascination for West Virginian labor-participation rates. The bottom line though is that all this is really about us. Mr. Galston continues:

Real economic recovery in Appalachia — the heart of Red America — requires facing some hard truths. Although neither state is a hub for high-wage jobs the real problem is that so few of their denizens do any work at all…. [W]e are dealing with longstanding deeply entrenched forces…

J.D. Vance the author of the surprise best-seller Hillbilly Elegy writes about running into a hometown acquaintance who said he had quit his job because he was “sick of waking up early.” Mr. Vance subsequently saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy.” This man he comments is not a victim: His situation is “directly attributable to the choices he’s made.” But nothing in his environment forces him to look in the mirror and ask tough questions about himself. On the contrary Mr. Vance insists: “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

The author of Hillbilly Elegy is a self-described conservative but he criticizes his fellow conservatives for failing to tell their constituents the truth. Instead the message of the right Mr. Vance says is: “It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”

For decades conservatives have castigated liberals for abandoning the language of personal responsibility and turning their constituents into helpless victims. Now led by Donald Trump populist conservatives are doing just that.

This is a veritable motif of the current administration. So many problems both foreign and domestic are said to be due solely to being taken advantage of by others of being made into “losers ” the worst possible fate in a Manichaean worldview in which we can only win if others lose in which winning is its own self-justifying value the highest one.

It is a worldview founded on perpetual blame-shifting and scapegoating which ironically is something Mr. Obama excelled at during his White House tenure. It is a mindset in which extreme loyalty is demanded of others but without even minimal reciprocity; just ask assistant attorney general Rod Rosenstein and national security advisor H.R. McMaster.

And it is of a piece with the long business career of the current president who did a great deal of losing (other than in playing a winning businessman on reality TV at which he succeeded brilliantly) but whose “winning ” too was often the result of a refusal to take responsibility for his mistakes and failures e.g. refusing to repay loans and thereby forcing lenders to renegotiate terms reneging on contracts and wages owed etc. Bret Stephens recently described him pithily as a man “who has sacrificed nothing in his life for anyone or anything.”

I wrote here recently of the danger in conflating our Torah values with those of conservatives. But surely notions of personal responsibility are bedrock of the Jewish worldview and a staple of political conservatism as well. How then can it possibly be that we who introduced into the world concepts like mitzvah mutual responsibility and owning up to truth who in our personal religious and communal lives treasure these models would be party to those who stand in diametric opposition to them? (Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 663)