If SNAP Benefits Get Cut Off, White Grievance Will Eat Itself
As the federal government shutdown enters its fourth week, more than 41 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are facing the very real possibility of missing their November benefits. This is a man-made public health crisis that could drive millions of families already teetering on the edge straight into hunger. With Congress still deadlocked over spending cuts and political brinkmanship intensifying, state agencies are warning that food aid could run out within days unless lawmakers act.
Mainstream news outlets are covering the SNAP funding threat as a technical consequence of the shutdown. Their stories are full of “may,” “could,” and “if Congress doesn’t act” language. They keep quoting agency spokespeople, economists, and state officials. And they keep tallying numbers instead of lives.
But this is not a procedural delay. It’s a slow-motion act of state violence. It’s about the powerful manufacturing suffering on purpose. The cold, hard truth is, this government is perfectly willing to starve its own citizens to make a political point. And this time, the pain won’t stop at Black and Brown folks living on margins. It’s coming for the white, working-class faithful who built their politics on the illusion of innocence, grievance, and self-reliance.
The mainstream conversation stops at partisan debates between Democrats and Republicans. But there’s a deeper story about how racial capitalism depends on cruelty and white grievance to sustain itself, and how austerity is both punishment and profit. This is the emotional economy that keeps racial hierarchy alive.
To understand how we arrived here, you have to see how hunger has always been one of America’s favorite weapons.
Come, go back in time with me for a minute.
It’s not the first time the nation has flirted with hunger as a political bargaining chip. From plantation rations to Depression breadlines to welfare reform, America has long used hunger as a moral test to decide who is worthy of help and who deserves to starve. More recently, there have been a handful of major “SNAP-in-jeopardy” moments in U.S. history. Each one had slightly different causes, from shutdowns and debt ceilings to budget standoffs..
Back in the 1995-96 standoff between Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress, the federal government shut down for 21 days and threatened everything from national parks to basic social-program operations. In 2013, during the 16-day shutdown under Barack Obama, the United States Department of Agriculture’s contingency planning revealed that food-aid program funds could be exhausted within weeks before a last-minute deal restored them. In 2018, under Donald Trump, the longest shutdown in U.S. history forced states to issue February SNAP benefits early and created chaos for low-income families and food retailers when the money ran out weeks before month’s end. Each episode left millions of Americans wondering how close Washington was willing to let them starve to make a political point
And now, in 2025, we’re here again. Different year, same cruelty, as we watch leaders in the richest nation use hunger as leverage.
But what’s unfolding now is more dangerous. Inflation has already thinned grocery budgets, pandemic emergency allotments have expired, and food banks are still recovering from years of record demand. This time, the margin for survival is smaller, and the cruelty more deliberate.
What also makes this crisis different isn’t just the scale of potential hunger, it’s who will feel it. As always, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and disabled communities will be hit first and hardest because poverty in America is still structured by race and ableism. These are the families already juggling inflated grocery prices, wage gaps, and greedy landlords raising rents. They’ve weathered generations of disinvestment, redlining, and political neglect. But what makes this moment distinct is that millions of white, working-class households, many in deep-red counties, are now standing on the same cliff, about to feel the same hunger they once believed was somebody else’s problem.
If the government allows SNAP benefits to run out, the consequences will reach far beyond grocery store shelves. The collapse of the white self-sufficiency myth will hit hardest among many MAGA voters who are older, working-class white Americans in counties that depend heavily on federal aid programs like SNAP, Social Security, Medicare, disability, and farm subsidies. In fact, some of the highest SNAP participation rates in the country are in overwhelmingly white, Republican counties across Appalachia, the Deep South, and the Midwest.
On the ground, food insecurity would spike across MAGA country. Economists estimate that every dollar in SNAP spending generates more than a dollar and a half in local economic activity. Pull that thread, and small-town economies unravel fast. Dollar stores and small-town groceries, which rely heavily on SNAP transactions, would lose revenue and shut down. Food banks, already stretched thin, would be overwhelmed.
Poor white families who’ve long relied on the program to feed their kids would face the kind of economic desperation they’ve been taught to associate only with non-white “urban” poverty. That shock would destabilize communities already hollowed out by addiction, unemployment, disinvestment, rampant drug abuse, and climbing suicide rates.
The irony is that these same regions consistently elect politicians who rail against “welfare” and campaign on cutting “entitlements.” These are the very people who’ve benefited most from the cruelty they endorsed. If they lose their SNAP benefits, the fallout will be dramatic and expose the contradictions at the heart of their movement.
Politically, it would expose the false promise of MAGA populism. Trump and the GOP built their brand on a kind of cultural revenge politics by convincing poor and working-class white Americans that their enemies were immigrants, Black people, and “the liberal elite,” and not the billionaires and corporations actually hoarding wealth. But once those same voters experience real material loss, they may start to see who truly benefits from MAGA economics. Or they might double down by blaming scapegoats rather than systems.
So in a sense, if MAGA voters lost SNAP, the movement would fracture. The working poor might finally realize that their leaders’ promises of “freedom” and “self-reliance” were just slogans to mask economic cruelty. But the hardened ideologues, the ones who’d rather starve than admit the government helps them, would dig deeper into grievance, conspiracy, and racial blame.
The end result wouldn’t just be hunger. It would be a reckoning between the myth of white self-sufficiency and the reality that America’s safety net, imperfect as it is, props up millions of white lives. The MAGA base would have to face an uncomfortable truth: that they, too, are dependent on the very government they claim to despise.
When the cupboards empty and the denial sets in, white grievance will finally meet its mirror. The hunger won’t just be physical; it will be ideological and spiritual. A movement built on resentment will discover that it cannot eat its rage, that cruelty offers no calories, and that white supremacy cannot fill a plate.
For generations, white America’s suffering has been redirected outward and weaponized into punishment for everybody else. But when the SNAP cards stop working and the stomach growls echo through the same towns that voted for hunger, the reckoning will be internal. The lesson here is that the empire always devours its own first, and this time, white grievance will eat itself.
It didn’t have to come to this. But cruelty causes its own famine.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
SEE ALSO:
Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Will Destroy Medicare, Food Stamps
Food Stamps At Risk As Government Shutdown Continues
Why The Food Stamp Fraud Case Of A Michigan Mother Matters
When The Government Starves Us: How SNAP Cuts Target Black Survival
Federal Workers Line Up For Food Drive Amid Government Shutdown
