He started there, traveled far, and returned, able to see what he had escaped with a clear, but compassionate eye. The book’s subtitle is “Dispatches from America’s Class War,” and the class he champions is sometimes called “the white working poor” — other times less flattering names, like “hillbilly,” “redneck,” and “white trash.” The book is an attempt to help Bageant’s “fellow progressives” better understand “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”