When people are out of work, there's a lot of blame to go around. President Barack Obama faults the "failed policies of the past," which he says Mitt Romney would bring back. Romney says Obama had four years to fix things and couldn't.
So Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans blame Democrats, libertarians blame the Federal Reserve, businesses blame regulations, regulators blame Wall Street, and everyone blames China.
But whom do the unemployed themselves blame?
I spent much of 2011 driving across the country and interviewing jobless Americans. Those out of work do not need belated coaching on where to direct their anger. They began pointing fingers long ago — the moment their jobs were taken away against their wishes, through no fault of their own.
Most people I interviewed knew they shouldn't blame themselves, even if they couldn't resist. Wendy Hamilton, a 33-year-old with a master's degree, lost her job at a nonprofit organization in Omaha, Neb., just weeks before we spoke.
"I believe it doesn't matter how confident you are, how old you are, what class you're in," she told me. "When you get laid off, there will be a moment of, 'It's my fault.'"
Most emphasized that they did not blame an immediate boss — or, really, anyone they worked with. More often than not, the person delivering the bad news of a layoff did not make the decision.
In the global economy, we accept a brand of capitalism that disconnects corporate leaders from the employees affected by their decisions. This geographic, civic and economic separation is what many unemployed people blame for their joblessness.
In DeWitt, Neb., William Petersen patented Vise-Grip locking pliers in 1924. For 60 years, the Petersens owned and operated the plant that manufactured the pliers. They lived in the town of 500 or so, buying uniforms for the little league team, helping build the ballfield and paying for a firehouse. When the family made tough business decisions, they knew the people who would be affected by them.
"The Petersen family, basically, they were this town," said Randy Badman, a 62-year-old former supervisor at the plant who, on the day he was laid off in 2008, received a security escort across the factory floor where he had worked for 36 years. He told me that he and his wife expected the end when, in 2002, the Petersens announced that the company had been sold to a conglomerate headquartered in another state, governed by shareholders scattered across the globe.
"You could hear this sucking sound, all these companies going to China and Mexico," Badman says.
Badman blamed his unemployment on people "at corporate" he couldn't name who, on the day after he was laid off, met with his former subordinates to ask what he did every day.
Sometimes anger and blame are directed at political leadership — anger that supersedes politics. I found that jobless folks thought Democrats and Republicans had synthesized into a single, unresponsive entity.
In Reno, Nev., I spoke with Scott Cooksley, a 46-year-old former casino restaurant manager laid off in early 2008 as gamblers and home buyers fled the city. Jobless and homeless, he told me about two important people in his life: Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan. The latter might not have agreed with Cooksley's call for government to intervene on behalf of workers.
"My grandparents went through the Depression, and they had the jobs programs, all the social programs," he said. "Maybe all they were doing is giving people a room and food, but gosh darn, they were working, at least they felt better about themselves. Why can't they do that here?"
In Indianapolis, Nancy Lee, 53, was laid off as a construction project manager in 2008. Discouraged by the experience, she left the business.
Lee was not defined by her anger. Like many people I interviewed, she stressed that a corporation's survival depends on employees just as much as it does shareholders and that both deserve equal esteem and financial security.
Yet waiting for corporate leadership to reconnect with the demoralized American work force is not an option.
"Corporate's not going to listen," Badman told me just down the street from the shuttered Vise-Grip plant in DeWitt. "They wouldn't listen to us. But who are we? Who was I? We weren't anybody."
D.W. Gibson is author of "Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy." He wrote this for The Washington Post.