Do laid-off workers in Smyth County deserve their fate? Some online commenters say yes.

Some of you may need a stiff drink by the time you get to the end of this column. The good news: At least you’ll know what kind you should reach for.

We begin with a simple but unfortunate fact: Cardinal’s Matt Busse recently reported that the Ohio-based Speyside Bourbon Cooperage had announced that it would lay off approximately 75 workers at its Smyth County plant, citing “bourbon industry slowdowns.”

Reading comprehension isn’t what it used to be, because many people who were quick to comment on social media obviously hadn’t read beyond the headline. I realize this is not a problem we will solve today, or ever, but I feel compelled to try to douse this online flame war that’s been going on — because the issues involved here are ones that go far beyond this one story or this one round of layoffs.

Democrats, in particular, may want to pay attention, because the nature of some of these comments highlights why the party has had so much trouble attracting working-class workers and/or rural voters (two groups that are not synonymous but do overlap, particularly in this instance).

First of all, many people simply looked at the headline, saw layoffs, and assumed that this was the result of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. “A direct result of tariffs and yet I’m sure the corporate apologists will find a way to blame Joe Biden,” read one comment. Another commenter posted a picture of Trump with the slogan: “I did that!”

I am hardly an apologist for Trump, but this is not what the story said, so let’s review the facts. Whiskey sales in the United States have been falling since 2022, according to multiple sources that track such things, among them the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and IWSR, an international beverage industry tracker. It seems logical, under the cold calculus of capitalism, that a company in an industry that is starting to lose sales would, at some point, start to reduce expenses — and, unfortunately, workers are a big expense.

Now, it’s also true that every company in the United States that is somehow connected to international trade — whether as an exporter or an importer — has to be concerned right now about what Trump’s tariffs, and the retaliatory tariffs they’re inspiring, will mean for them. Tariffs are simply taxes by a different name.

The U.S. liquor industry is one that foreign countries are targeting for retaliatory tariffs. American spirits now enter the European Union tariff-free, but the EU has threatened a 50% tariff after Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. (Trump has countered by threatening 200% tariffs on imports of European alcohol, so stock up on Champagne for any June weddings.) In Canada, some provincial liquor stores (the equivalent of our ABC stores) have pulled American brands from the shelves.

How much of Speyside’s reaction is due to what has already happened (declining sales) and how much is due to what it fears might happen (further reduced sales due to tariffs)? We have no idea since the company’s not saying. A prudent business decision would take both into account, so there’s probably some of both going on here, but we have no way to assign a percentage to past performance and a percentage to future concerns. Speyside is hardly the only company in the liquor supply chain taking these actions. The Kentucky-based maker of Jack Daniel’s announced layoffs in January — before Trump took office and imposed a single tariff.

Figuring out what percentage of the blame we should assign here to business conditions (Biden-era inflation or simply changing consumer preferences?) and what percentage to Trump’s tariffs is not my point, though. My point is the callous reaction of some people who ought to be the natural allies of the workers who are losing their jobs.

Here’s one comment, the tenor of which I’ve seen lots of other places:

They voted 80% for Trump. Let them eat cake!

And another:

They are getting exactly what they voted for. Some of them are innocent, but more of them are MAGAts.

Those comments prompted this exchange on Facebook, which went like this:

Their kids didn’t vote, but now those kids are gonna go hungry because Dad lost his job. Don’t cheer this.

Spare me. The havoc they are wreaking on my community and the rest of the world???? They’ll be just fine, comparatively. I couldn’t GAF.

What about the 20% getting swept up in your disdain? What about those of us who tried to prevent this but lost? Your hatred for what MAGA stands for is valid, but you’re team-killing when you’re this cruel to the poor. Target the billionaires instead. Look up instead of pooping down. The kids in these red counties ARE NOT IN CHARGE. They aren’t cutting funding and deporting Ukrainians, but they are gonna have to watch their parents fight because an Exec has to balance a budget sheet!

You are SO privileged. You really reek of it. And whiny. The collateral damage in REAL war is devastating. … This is NOTHING compared to that. A baby slap on the wrist. So, quit your whining and come to a reckoning of what it may take before there is real devastation on the children of this country. …  You people who want everything so neat and tidy. How spoiled you are.

I’m not spoiled, I’m from Appalachia. I’m from here and I care about the people. I am privileged by my race and the fact I’m not poor. But that makes me understand that I must advocate for those who can’t, not cheer on their devastation. You say I don’t understand ReAL WaR but I know some Moms are gonna get beat in front of their kids tonight. That’s not neat and tidy. How spoiled YOU are to have such a [desire] for suffering that you relish it when it comes to THE MARGINALIZED YOU DON’T HAPPEN TO LIKE. Get real, you fake liberal.

Normally I don’t pay much attention to what people post on social media unless it involves a recommendation of new music, but this back-and-forth between two left-of-center commenters fascinates me because it encapsulates part of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party right now — and how difficult it is for Democrats to reclaim working-class voters even in the midst of whatever economic turmoil Trump unleashes.

The commenter most hostile to the laid-off workers at least has his math correct: Smyth County did vote almost 80% for Trump — 79.63%, if you want to be precise. There was a time, though, a time within memory, when Smyth County was a competitive county that often voted Democratic. Bill Clinton carried Smyth as recently as 1996. Mark Warner carried it in his 2001 campaign for governor.

Something has happened to turn Smyth into a solid Republican county. It’s not Trump; that realignment came long before him. It’s not Democratic antipathy to coal, either, because Smyth is not a coal county. Contrary to popular impressions elsewhere, most of Southwest Virginia has never been involved in coal production. Smyth’s realignment has come as part of a broader realignment that has seen Democrats, once the party of the working class, become the party of educated suburbanites, and Republicans, once the party of the country club, now become the party of Sam’s Club.

I’m quite aware that the people making these dismissive comments online about the workers in Smyth County aren’t “official” Democrats — they’re not officeholders or party spokespeople. Still, they constitute part of the party’s base, and their comments blur into the grand cacophony of voices on social media, so they’re not unimportant. If Democrats want to figure out how to talk to working-class voters again, they may want to figure out why some liberals are so keen to disparage the very voters they need to be connecting with by saying things such as “Let them eat cake!” or “They are getting exactly what they voted for!!”

Democrats like to talk a lot about the sins of “privilege,” but the reality is that in much of rural America, they are the ones who seem to be the privileged ones — with more education and higher incomes, and, by the nature of their occupations, less immune to the ups and downs of the economy that these workers in Smyth County are now dealing with. (A side note: I also sometimes see conservative commenters chortling over government workers in Northern Virginia getting laid off. The same admonition applies. Those liberals in Northern Virginia you so despise are paying the taxes that fund rural schools. See my previous column.) Showing some empathy may not win those voters back, but I can guarantee you that demeaning them when they’re down is not going to persuade them that they have made an electoral mistake. CNN recently released a poll that showed the Democratic Party’s favorability is at a record low. May I gently suggest that this is part (though only part) of the reason why?

Politically speaking, there are opportunities coming Democrats’ way, and they seem ill-prepared to capitalize on them. While we don’t know how much tariffs influenced the Speyside layoffs, it seems likely that there are more layoffs coming elsewhere — layoffs that will be directly connected to tariffs. Trump himself seems to admit as much when he talks about a “transition period” to whatever the new economic order is going to be. Many of the retaliatory tariffs that other countries are imposing will have a disproportionate impact on Republican-voting areas — partly because that’s where American manufacturing tends to be and partly because other countries understand American politics. (See Wednesday’s column for more details on that.)

Barron’s, a sister publication to The Wall Street Journal, pointed out the subtlety of some of those tariffs in a recent article: “Rather than an across-the-board tariff, Canada earlier this month imposed levies on peanut butter, orange juice, spirits, and other products whose production is centered in states that tend to vote for Republicans.” In other words, to whatever extent tariffs are a factor in the Speyside layoffs, it’s not because Smyth County workers are being punished for voting for Trump, they’re being punished because they’re part of a supply chain for an industry that is based in Kentucky, a Trump-voting state.

The New York Times recently compiled a map of where retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada, China and the European Union will hit hardest, based on the number of jobs in those industries — then it overlaid that with election results. In Virginia, seven localities were found to have 20% or more of their jobs at risk — six of those places voted Republican. Out of 28 localities that were found to have 10% or more of their jobs at risk, 25 voted Republican.

If this trade war does result in layoffs in those communities, Democrats will have a political opportunity, but they’ll have to come up with a better response than saying those workers deserved it.