It’s Not Rage, It’s Resentment?
Rural Americans are misunderstood!
Colby College political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, who last year co-authored a book with Columbia University Press titled The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, has a feature in POLITICO Magazine titled “What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything.” It’s long but, essentially, it argues that a competing book that misrepresents the literature is getting a lot of play.
The setup is long:
If you’ve been watching television or tracking trending topics over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen or read something about “white rural rage.” This is owed to the publication of a new book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, whose thesis is that white rural Americans, despite representing just 16 percent of the American electorate, are a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”
In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Schaller gave this unvarnished assessment of the rage he sees overflowing in the heartland. Rural whites, he said, are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” He called them, “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists.” On top of that, rural whites are also “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”
This premise has triggered a backlash towards rural voters from some on the left. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, said she’s tired of handling rural voters “with kid gloves,” and time has come to pop the “racist, homophobic, sexist bubble” they all live in. Daily Beast columnist Michael Cohen agreed, writing that “these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.” David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief at Mother Jones, piled on, agreeing that “white rural voters [are] the slice of the public that endangers the constitutional future of the republic.”
This latest obsession with rural rage is nothing new. After 2016, when rural voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put former President Donald Trump over the top, Democrats tried to figure out why they had gone so sour on the Democratic Party. Some liberal thinkers called out the left’s reflexive condescension and dismissal of rural voters that escalated during the George W. Bush administration and peaked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Some said the party should increase attention to rural issues and nearby rural communities.
But don’t be misled. The publication and widespread celebration of White Rural Rage among progressive circles is doing something different than those post-2016 post-mortems. It is not an attempt to understand the needs and concerns of rural America. Instead, it’s an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.
The people doing the work of protecting democracy in rural America recognized this immediately. The morning of the MSNBC interview, I woke up to a mountain of messages and threads from rural organizers, community activists and local officials from across the country. Each one was distressed over what they considered the authors’ harsh and hurtful accusations about the communities they cherish and strive to uplift.
What seemingly set apart this book is that the authors claimed to have data backing up their assertions. “We provide the receipts,” Schaller said in the interview. What is their data, my friends and colleagues asked, and why do they get it so wrong?
Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.
Hmm.
I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party.
But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.
The problem with this “rage” thesis is much larger than the fact that my research, and that of others, is being misinterpreted and misunderstood. What the authors are getting wrong about rural America is exactly what many Democrats have been getting wrong for decades — and appear to be doing so again in this critical presidential election year.
While I’m also a political scientist, I’ve followed this debate mostly through the media over the last eight years or so and certainly see plenty of evidence for the rage thesis. But, it turns out, Jacobs is making what at first seems like a semantic argument but is really something different.
Academics can and do disagree on what is motivating non-college-educated whites to vote for Donald Trump. I don’t pretend that we have settled on a single answer. I do know that there is something particular about Trump’s appeal in rural America and that demographics alone do not explain it. In rural America, women are more likely to vote for Trump; so are young people; so are poor as well as rich. Place matters.
But ruralness is not reducible to rage. And to say so is to overlook the nuanced ways in which rural Americans engage in politics. They are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect. This, as I have recently argued in a new book, is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” that is expressed as a belief in self-reliance, rooted in local community and concerned that rural ways of living will soon be forced to disappear.
In recent years, that rural political identity has morphed into resentment — a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals and the political party that seeks to empower them, Democrats.
Yes, such resentment is a real phenomenon in rural areas. But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.
This comports very much with my own understanding of what’s happening—indeed, going well before the rise of Trump. There’s a longstanding view, that we saw at least as far back as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in 1992, that “real Americans” and their values are being increasingly marginalized.
This is, in one sense, a combination of sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. But those labels are too dismissive and, indeed, compound the problem. The society is changing at a rapid pace, highlighted and exacerbated by modern communications technology.
Research both by me and by others has illuminated how resentment is driven by the complex rural identity that, while occasionally intersecting with national political currents, is rooted in the unique context of rural life. Rage, both as a soundbite and as presented in the book, oversimplifies and misrepresents these debates. And so does the assumption that all the holders of these views are white, and that this rage is motivated by racism. Racism exists in all parts of the country and is embedded in American politics. But what the research shows is that while there are deep and persistent racial resentments in rural communities, despite a slight correlation between the two, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.
The link is to a September 2022 article in Political Research Quarterly Jacobs co-authored with B. Kal Munis titled “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide.” I don’t have time to dissect it but the Abstract says this:
Drawing on a unique battery of questions fielded on the 2018 CCES and in two separate surveys—one in 2019 and the other during the 2020 election—we study the extent to which Americans feel animus toward communities that are geographically distinct from their own and whether these feelings explain Americans’ attitudes toward the two major political parties and self-reported vote choice. We report results on how place-based resentment predicted vote choice in the 2018 midterm and 2020 general elections and how those feelings relate to other widely studied facets of political behavior such as partisanship and racial resentment. Rural resentment is a powerful predictor of vote choice in both election years examined.
A January 2023 review essay by NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall (“The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs“) cites that article and several others:
In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters, saying, “It had three elements: (1) a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, (2) a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources and (3) a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”
David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, described how the urban-rural partisan divide was driven by a conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s in his book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”
[…]
In retrospect it is clear, Hopkins goes on to say, that “the 1992 presidential election began to signal the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”
Hopkins compares voter trends in large metro areas, small metro areas and rural areas. Through the three elections from 1980 to 1988, the urban, suburban and rural regions differed in their vote by a relatively modest five points. That begins to change in 1992, when the urban-rural difference grows to roughly 8 percentage points and then keeps growing to reach nearly 24 points in 2016.
“For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party now draws most of its popular support from the suburbs,” Hopkins writes in a 2019 paper, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018.” Democratic suburban growth, he continues, “has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”
[…]
Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University whose research — presented in “The White Working Class” and “Majority Minority” — focuses on cultural and class tensions, has a different but complementary take, writing by email that the rising salience of cultural conflicts “was accelerated when the Clinton administration embraced corporate neoliberalism, free trade and moved Democrats toward the economic center. Many differences persisted, but the so-called third way made it harder to distinguish between the economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans.”
[…]
One of the dangers for Democrats, Gest continued, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”
Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists at Colby College and Utah Valley University, argue that mounting rural resentment over marginalization from the mainstream and urban disparagement are driving forces in the growing strength of the Republican Party in sparsely populated regions of America.
In their 2022 paper “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Jacobs and Munis contend that an analysis of voting in 2018 and 2020 shows that while “place-based resentment” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, it “was only consistently predictive of vote choice for rural voters.”
In this respect, conditions in rural areas have worsened, with an exodus of jobs and educated young people, which in turn increases the vulnerability of the communities to adverse, negative resentment.
[…]
In their 2022 paper “Symbolic Versus Material Concerns of Rural Consciousness in the United States,” Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Zack Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, sought to determine the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.
Trujillo and Crowley conclude that “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” Stands on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”
While rural America has moved to the right, Trujillo and Crowley point out that there is considerable variation: “poorer and/or farming-dependent communities voted more conservative, while amenity- or recreation-based rural economies voted more liberal in 2012 and 2016,” and the “local economies of Republican-leaning districts are declining in terms of income and gross domestic product, while Democratic-leaning districts are improving.”
The Trujillo-Crowley analysis suggests that Democratic efforts to regain support in rural communities face the task of somehow ameliorating conflicts over values, religion and family structure, which is far more difficult than lessening economic tensions that can be addressed through legislation.
[…]
A May 2018 Pew Research Center report, “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” found large differences in the views and partisanship in these three constituencies. Urban voters, according to Pew, were, for example, 62 percent Democratic and 31 percent Republican — the opposite of rural voters, 54 percent Republican and 38 percent Democratic. Fifty-three percent of those living in urban areas said rural residents have “different values,” and 58 percent of those living in rural communities said urban residents do not share their values. Sixty-one percent of those living in rural communities said they have “a neighbor they would trust with a set of keys to their home” compared with 48 percent in urban areas.
[…]
Those whom [Saint Joseph’s University sociologist Maria] Kefalas and [her late husband Patrick J.] Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa, etc. (states where the public university is just exporting its professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare. It’s more like apartheid.”
Urban-rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.
Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the calcification of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded in the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.
That’s a long way of saying that Jabobs makes a strong point here: the scholarly literature presents a picture of something that 1) long predates Trump, 2) is way more complicated than rage, racism, or the like, and 3) is rooted in real grievances.
Back to Jacobs’s POLITICO essay:
I sympathize with the idea that, as Schaller and Waldman and many other commentators have pointed out, in terms of policies, Democrats arguably do more for rural areas and rural residents than Republicans do. After Democrats passed Obamacare, rural residents stood to gain the most in states that expanded Medicaid, but two-thirds of uninsured rural residents missed out because they lived in states that refused to expand coverage — and those states were almost exclusively governed by Republicans. Paul Krugman is often quick to point out that “ because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside.” And it is true that the Biden administration is currently overseeing billions in new federal spending that is disproportionately going to rural communities across America.
So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics. And Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.
That would be a massive mistake, one that does truly threaten democracy. Democrats have an opportunity to do better in rural America. We need them to do better, not because Democrats’ policy fixes are always the solution, but because our political system only works when competitive elections hold officials accountable. One-party dominance throws the system off-center, misrepresents interests, sows distrust.
So, this is frustrating, right? Democrats are objectively offering up and even passing programs that are trying to address the grievances rural Americans have and are being thwarted by Republican politicians whose interests are served by stoking the grievances. And it’s Democrats who need to change?!
Given that these folks may well hold the key to the swing states, probably so.
The first step for Democrats is to start thinking — and talking — about rural America right.
Reading White Rural Rage won’t help with that. The authors have no expertise in rural issues and conducted no original research for the book. They approached the topic as journalists and committed the same errors countless reporters have made when they share with the outside world what they saw from a few days traversing some small town in “ flyover country” — an occurrence all the more routine as local newspapers in rural America shutter.
So, we have some resentment of a different sort here. Which, like the other, is understandable: painstakingly-researched university press books by scholars presenting original data tend to get less public traction than those written by media hacks.* The Rural Voter, at 488 pages and doubtless replete with hundreds of footnotes and complicated data presentations, is likely a less scintillating read than a popular press (Random House) book written by professional storytellers weaving together a narrative from secondary sources. And, of course, being a columnist for the Washington Post is a hell of better platform for promoting a book than an assistant professorship at a liberal arts college. Especially when the book plays to the prejudices of other columnists and talk show hosts.
The authors of White Rural Rage make two persistent types of error in analyzing the data on rural Americans.
First, they routinely fall victim to the logical fallacy of composition when they attribute group characteristics to individuals. For example, they suggest that since authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, and rural residents support Trump, rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian. (That’s like concluding that because Massachusetts tends to vote Democratic, and Massachusetts is a wealthy state, wealthy people must vote Democratic … but the opposite is true.)
As it happens, the opposite seems to be true in this case as well; leading authoritarian experts find no geographic dimension to growing authoritarianism in the U.S., and the study the authors cite early in the book to “prove” that rural residents are “more likely to favor violence over democratic deliberation” says nothing about violence, or deliberation or authoritarianism. Work by scholars they cite actually shows the opposite, too: Rural residents are less, not more, likely to support political violence.
I must admit, that’s a result I find highly counterintuitive. Rural areas, certainly in the Deep South, have long been associated with “honor cultures,” which tend toward violence to defend against perceived disrespect.
This same logical fallacy comes into play when they weave together a string of facts about Christian nationalists: Because white evangelicals are most likely to support Christian nationalist beliefs, and because 43 percent of rural residents identify as evangelical, they assert that the hotbed of Christian nationalism is in rural communities. The same goes for their assertions about QAnon. Perhaps the worst guilt-by-association error is found right in the title; even in the reddest of rural counties, 20 to 30 percent of voters — still largely white — routinely support Democrats. One might ask why, given all the supposed rage, are some rural Americans still voting for Democrats, election after election? You wouldn’t know it from the title or press tour, but Schaller and Waldman must frequently hedge their bets in the text, acknowledging that just a minority of rural residents often believe the most headline-grabbing factoid.
I’m not sure I understand this objection. Is anyone arguing that all rural Whites are enraged and voting Republican?
The second persistent error is that they cite polling data with little attention to issues of quality, which less sloppy scholars would question to make sure their conclusions were valid. For instance, some of the most salacious data points on race and immigration are taken from polls with just a few dozen rural residents; anyone trained in statistics would recognize that is too small a sample size to consider the result representative or reliable. The “birther” claim they like to throw about — that rural residents are more likely to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States — comes from a “study” by a polling firm called Public Policy Polling, a firm with dubious credentials that not only seems to exist primarily to lampoon conservative voters, but that also, in this case, drew results about “rural America” from just two states.
And I’m not cherry-picking examples. I’ve reviewed every publicly available survey and poll the authors use, have published my concerns on each one here, and have concluded that only two surveys in the entire book conform to basic standards of survey research and even attempt to try and present an accurate picture of rural America.
So, this is damning. One presumes this is a function of 1) the authors having a preconceived thesis and 2) the dearth of high-quality polling on the matter. Since the available low-quality polls mostly supported their thesis, they were obviously right.
What’s more, the rage thesis conflicts with findings from more rigorous research. As recently as January of this year, my colleague Dan Shea and I searched for exactly these types of attitudes. Interested in whether President Joe Biden’s campaign message about democracy being on the line would resonate with rural voters, we tested the hypothesis, drawing on a representative sample of rural voters.
Bottom line: The “threats” to democracy just aren’t there. Our research found that just 27 percent of rural voters — including 23 percent of rural Trump voters — think that if the opposing candidate wins in November, “people will need to take drastic action in order to stop [Biden or Trump] from taking office.” That’s the exact same proportion — 27 percent — as voters in urban and suburban areas who hold the same view. Nor are rural voters more likely than urban voters to say that the opposing party is a “threat to the future of America;” while 38 percent of rural Trump voters strongly believe that about Democrats, 36 percent of nonrural Biden voters think that same thing about Republicans.
To be sure, 27 percent isn’t a negligible number of people in a country of 330 million. But the threats to democracy that lurk in America are not specific to rural areas. Importantly, and often overlooked by the rage peddlers, is the flip side of those numbers — that more than 60 percent of both sets of voters, a strong majority of Americans, both rural and urban, do not hold those attitudes.
This shoddy analysis and faux expertise does real damage. It is clear that the overwhelming portrayal of rural America as angry and irrational feeds into and amplifies the divisions between rural and urban Americans, overshadowing the shared challenges and aspirations that cut across these geographic lines.
So, on the one hand, this is a fair criticism. In a vacuum, it makes no sense to say rural American rage is a danger to democracy when we find exactly the same proportion of folks living in urban and suburban areas saying the same thing. On the other hand, we have rather considerable evidence, with the Capitol Riots as the most obvious example, of MAGA types engaging in actual politically-motivated violence.
Here’s some of what the research, properly understood, does tell us about rural America.
Rural communities, much like disadvantaged neighborhoods in urban areas, are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions, a challenge compounded by the closure of local hospitals and a shortage of health care providers. Rural economies often struggle with limited employment opportunities and infrastructure deficits, issues that should resonate with many post-industrial urban areas facing similar challenges. Additionally, educational disparities persist across the U.S., with rural schools facing funding shortfalls and teacher shortages that parallel urban struggles to provide equitable educational opportunities.
And it is this divide I find particularly troubling — that so many rural and urban areas suffer from similar ailments but remain politically divided. It is not one solved by the new rage peddlers.
I don’t think Waldman and Schaller claim they’re solving a problem, merely pointing one out. Still, to the extent they’re misrepresenting the problem, they’re pointing us in the wrong direction for solutions.
I can anticipate the frustrated Democratic response: “We tried to give them what they want, and they continue to vote against their interests.” Waldman said as much in 2022: “One thing you absolutely cannot say is that Democrats don’t try to help rural America. In fact, they probably work harder at it than Republicans do.”
I agree, to a point. Rural voters do not give Democrats credit for much good. And rural voters may indeed support policies and politicians that seem, from an outside perspective, to undermine their own economic interests.
However, that is exactly what a focus on resentment helps us to understand. This is not rage against the people trying to help. Nor is it an excuse. Resentment, instead, asks us to consider how rural voters’ choices are frequently rooted in values and place-based identities that place a strong emphasis on self-reliance, local control and a profound sense of injustice regarding the lack of recognition for rural contributions to society.
There is no “mystery” to it. Rural Americans often prioritize their way of life over immediate economic gains that are often promised (and not always delivered) by policy solutions. My research suggests that their perceived resistance to certain policies, and especially a political party that advocates for a multitude of governmental correctives, is a complex reaction stemming from years of economic transition, dislocation and yes, harm from policies they were told would help.
Again, my amateur understanding of the problem is roughly the same as Jacobs’ expert analysis. While I’m decidedly not like these people in so many ways—as evidenced by having moved far away to find better professional opportunities—I’ve been around enough of them to understand their deep sense of place, interspersed with family ties, cultural values, and the like.
Those values are absolutely under assault and have been for a very long time. But I don’t see how Democrats—who hold different values—can fix that problem. Sure, avoiding blunt talk about “deplorables” and “clinging to God and guns” would be helpful at the margins. But, if the core values of the party are about diversity, equity, and inclusion then they are diametrically opposed to rural values, which are inherently about, well, clinging to a vision of America rooted in an increasingly distant past.
Pushing for full equality for LGBTQ folks can certainly be done in a way that doesn’t insult traditionally-minded folks. Calling them bigots and homophobes is simply going to make them defensive. But, at the end of the day, pushing for full equality for LGBTQ folks inherently clashes with the deeply-held values of rural America. There’s just no way around that.
Sure, “Hollywood didn’t kill the family farm and send jobs overseas. … College professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids in rural communities,” as Schaller and Waldman write. But rural people do know that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by Democrats and Republicans did destroy many rural economies. Rural people do know that liberal elites stood by as rural students became one of the least likely groups to attend college, and one of the most likely to drop out. So they benefit from Obamacare and vote against it; can rural people contain multitudes, too?
But liberal elites have been the ones pushing the “everybody needs to go to college” mantra since, what, 1945? The problem, aside from going to college generally requiring leaving the rural areas and being increasingly expensive, is that higher education is increasingly at odds with rural values. It’s always been the case that education pushes toward modernization and away from traditional thinking. But, as rural and urban/suburban values diverge, that pressure is exacerbated.
Taken as a whole, rural voters are not merely reacting against change — be it demographic or economic. They are actively seeking to preserve a sense of agency over their future and a continuity of their community’s values and social structures. Some might call this conservatism, but I think it is the same thing motivating fears of gentrification in urban areas, or the desire to “keep Portland weird.” Place matters for a whole bunch of people — but especially for rural folks.
Sure. But all of these efforts tend to fail. People with money will be able to buy up older downtown buildings and renovate them, pushing up property values and pushing out those who can’t afford the taxes. As places like Portland and Austin become more desirable, folks with money will move there from around the country and they will homogenize. Rural areas are likely more resistant to change but, as noted earlier, that tends to result in a brain drain wherein those with the most talent move to where they can actually get ahead.
There’s a great lyric in Blackberry Smoke’s “One Horse Town”
In the tiny town where I come from
You grew up doing what your daddy does
And you don’t ask questions you do it just because
You don’t climb too high or dream too much
With a whole lot of work and a little bit of luck
You can wind up right back where your daddy was
Those who want more have to saddle up their pony and leave.
Consider the fact, as I discuss in my book, that rural Americans are the most likely to say that if given the chance, they would never want to leave their community, while at the same time they are the most likely to say that children growing up in their specific community will have to leave in order to live productive lives. Could any single policy solve that dilemma?
Nope.
Instead of a politics that seeks to understand and represent these contradictions, the left wants to simplify ruralness into something it’s not. In the immediate aftermath of 2016, blaming rural people was a way to make sense of the surprise of Trump’s election.
But this, of course, goes both ways. When Republicans lose, they blame California. Indeed, they do it even when they win. In 2016, they responded to people pointing out that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by some 3 million votes by saying, “Yeah, but that’s just because of California,” as if residents of our most populous state don’t count.
There is a general tendency among the readers of the New York Times and viewers of MSNBC to think about politics in purely transactional terms: We give you these benefits, you give us your votes. And rural voters, as Waldman is right to note, aren’t living up to that supposed bargain.
But this flies in the face of what research on resentment actually tells us. For many rural residents, the solutions they seek may not always come neatly packaged as government policies, white papers or policy briefs pumped out of a campaign war room. I’ve found that resentments exist because self-reliance and local problem-solving is intrinsic to rural identity, and self-reliance is something by nature resistant to government policies emanating from Washington, D.C.
While I, again, sympathize with this assessment of the situation the fact of the matter is that these people actually aren’t self-reliant. By definition, being self-reliant means not needing to be propped up by support from the taxpayer.
What rural communities may desire are empowering strategies that allow them to shape their own future — support that bolsters local leadership, encourages community-driven initiatives and provides the tools and resources necessary for them to address their specific challenges in a manner consistent with their values. That isn’t rage, nor is it a threat to democracy.
Sure. But nobody is claiming that these desires (however they might be met) are a threat to democracy. They’re worried that the attitude that those who don’t share their values aren’t real Americans and that their votes therefore shouldn’t count is a threat to democracy. And, again, there’s a hell of a lot of evidence for that position.
Shockingly, there’s still a whooooole lot more to the feature. But I think you get the idea.
While Jacobs is persuasive that “White Rural Rage” is a misdiagnosis of the problem, I’m more than a wee bit skeptical that the Democratic Party can somehow effectively respond to the grievances of rural America without abandoning the core values of their own base. The gap between the two is a canyon, not a fissure.
UPDATE: Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper has a related piece in The Atlantic titled “An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America.”
White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning Joe, the book inspired an approving column from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The book has become a New York Times best seller.
It has also kindled an academic controversy. In the weeks since its publication, a trio of reviews by political scientists have accused Schaller and Waldman of committing what amounts to academic malpractice, alleging that the authors used shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations about white rural Americans. I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.
White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans.
Ouch.
UPDATE II: See also my December 2009 post “Ressentiment Creep,” a reaction to a coinage by Julian Sanchez. The phenomenon in question is decidedly not new.
*Which, incidentally, is grossly unfair to Schaller. While he’s probably best known for his time as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun (2007-2016), he earned his PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina in 1997 and has been a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1998. His major scholarship is on partisanship and is certainly pro-Democrat.
It’s the typical result of self-pity and has been going on for decades. One hundred years ago Thomas Beer wrote “The Mauve Decade”, which discussed the cultural environment of the 1890s. In one of the chapters he analyzed the effect on the 1890s culture of the ever-existing trope of the innocent rural inhabitant vs. the wicked city.
I watched a friend of mine slide down into continuous life problems after three years of indulging in self-pity after a failed marriage. All that was going wrong with him was the fault of someone else. Which meant he ended up time and time again failing every single chance he was given. I had to finally go no contact because of his financial requests. How many times do you rescue someone before you decide it’s not just bad luck but their own self-sabotage?
Take the original cultural idea of innocent rural inhabitant vs. wicked city, add to it the social media and news organizations willing to push stories encouraging a mindset of self- pity, and no wonder the more toxic mindsets are taking hold.
And it is this divide I find particularly troubling — that so many rural and urban areas suffer from similar ailments but remain politically divided. It is not one solved by the new rage peddlers.
I don’t think many people who live in public housing in a city would be fired up and angry about policies designed to help both rural and urban poverty. Whereas the appeal of right-wing politicians to rural America is based upon fears that money is being given away to undeserving minorities in cities.
This is just a fact. We can’t debate it. Stroking one’s chin and blaming reactions (good or bad) to the fact is just hackery. Politically, rural America has been entangled with racism and nationalism forever. Its defenders are not defending it as a place. They’re defending the right to be entangled forever with racism and nationalism.
If someone leaves their abusive spouse, that spouse may very well end up feeling “disrespected” or “denigrated”. That doesn’t obligate their victim to remain in the relationship to shore up their abuser’s fragile ego.
From a comparative Point of View, there is an emergence in Europe of vaguely similar reaction in the rural / semi-rural segment, not only our classic French farmers but Dutch and German, historically rather less inclined to teh French farmer behaviours…. as notably a strong reaction to EU driven green/enviromental regulation.
While of course each country or zone is specific there seems to be some commonalities in drivers – reaction from economic change that disfavours the rural economy relatively so far, from regulation that the speed of change and apparent over abstraction (as in what appears quite theoretically straight-forward in office-theory is less so in application notably for smaller actors) is daunting to rural actors.
The phenomena in its broadest terms from economic change is certainly not only American.
What seems most interesting to me is the difference in European political responses to this from America – where you dismiss any potential to compromise, to tailor and adjust…. As one says in French, a veritable dialogue of the deaf.
@Grumpy realist: That’s is certaily path to winning votes in key geographies…. or simply pre-losing them rather.
It is funny how the Lefties here are quite willing via the lens of Identarian politics to rather not apply the same logic to the politically-ideologically in favour ethnic-gender groups, but rather immediately willing to adopt what one might call very conservative views relative to the ethno-gender groups in identarian-politics that are in disfavour.
Rather more pratically, winning votes to prevent Trump return in terms of specific geographies.
It would be an interesting test to see the mix of where January 6 defendants lived in urban, suburban, or rural locations.
The resentment of rural populations isn’t unique to the US, it was the fuel of France’s, Yellow Vest movement and the current farmer protests in France and throughout Europe. The economic causes are something that Dems can and are addressing, but they can’t make everything peachy. Any economic development for rural areas that government wet nurses is going happen in the larger regional centers, because that is where there is the population to support the development, both as customers and employees, not in the small towns and ag regions that will see development. And if tossing the party’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is a requirement to attract rural votes, then that won’t happen.
I read the entire politico piece yesterday. All of it. And it’s freaking long.
My take: Bullshit! It’s just another peice normalizing and excusing racism and homophobia. Everything else stems from those too issues. Sure, they couch it in many different terms, but it all comes down to religion, racism, and homophobia. They’re pissed black, brown, and other non-white people won’t stay in their place. They’re pissed their kids leave them for the big city. They’re pissed that the local sherrif can’t just lynch those “others” who don’t belong.
Rare that a piece that long can piss me off so much, but having spent so much of my last 15 years in rural Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Georgia, and Florida, I speak from lived experience.
The piece is just one long excuse for shitty behavior by many in rural areas. Full stop.
The Republican party has been actively against any Democratic states for a long time. Many in congress parrot the “these people are undeserving” when speaking about cities. There is simply no parallel when talking about Democratic politicians, I don’t see any major Democratic politicians talking about the undeserving people in rural areas.
Really interesting piece.
I think we’re seeing IQ sorting. We tell people they must go to college to succeed, but a large percentage of people do not have the wattage to get through college. (One of my kids is an example.) The idea that we could just educate everyone into the middle class was always ridiculous. Draw an IQ bell curve – the people on the left side are not likely to graduate from college. But just because a person is on the left side of the bell curve doesn’t mean they can’t see where this is leading for them. They are seen as second class citizens, and they are well aware of that reality.
Also related to IQ is religion. Higher IQ tends to mean less Jesus. Evangelical Christianity in particular is meant to expand, to grow. It is triumphalist. But that religious optimism is simply untenable in the face of declining church attendance and declining belief. In the 1960’s Congress tried to exempt atheists as a class from employment discrimination protection. And now atheists (my people) are loud, proud and triumphalist.
There is also the situation with men, which I’ve written about many times. Men have lost what they once had – a unique and valued place in society. Many men adapt, and shift their identities from group (male) to something more individual and specific. Many other men either can’t or won’t adapt. Men tend to be hierarchical creatures, they need to know where they fit in. The men who can adapt tend to be, what? Smarter, better educated. Again, it’s IQ, intelligence.
But women have their own issues, and it’s not about the patriarchy. We have systematically devalued women’s own unique and valued place as mothers. For a long time the model has been: career first, motherhood second, or never. Women who choose to focus on having and raising children, and don’t go out to compete in the working world, are treated as lesser, even as embarrassments.
The trans phenomenon has of course exacerbated both male and female worries among – again, the less clever, the less adaptable. To be a man or a woman is now seen as a choice. Maleness or femaleness is reduced to a decision, some hormones and a surgery.
I shouldn’t have to say, but will before the usuals launch another tedious heretic hunt, that I am an atheist, I am one of those fluid and adaptable males, I’m rootless and placeless, and a strong supporter of women’s rights and gay and trans rights. But I am also aware of what that looks like to your typical rural, tradition-bound, place-defined person. They aren’t wrong to resent people like me. They aren’t wrong to suspect that my world view is antithetical to theirs. They are right that I condescend to them, pity them, even despise them.
The question is, can anything be done about all this? I don’t think so. We’re down to brute political power now, us vs. them. We can pass all the programs we like to subsidize rural folks, but that won’t change how we see them, or they see us. There’s something more than resentment happening here, there’s fear. We fear them, they fear us. And both sides are right.
Perhaps they feel marginalized because they ARE the margin. Yes, they can swing a close election. As can Blacks, Hispanics, youth, retirees, left handers, or any other identifiable minority.
I noticed some time ago that the Picante hot sauce people had restarted using the “New York City?!” ads they’d dropped after 9-11. James’ home state and Dr. T’s current state of Alabama gets little love from anyone, Birmingham as much as elsewhere, Detroit is largely regarded as a wasteland, the popular perception is that people are leaving CA in droves. Nobody gets a lot of respect. The rural subjects of these books just seem more sensitive to it. (Full disclosure, I was raised through grade school in a town of 3,000 people in ND.)
However, I wonder if this isn’t barking up the entirely wrong tree. Is the split urban/rural or educated/not, with not correlated to rural? And if educated/not, is it as usually represented some cultural thing, or only that the educated have better bull shit detectors?
I think the values mismatch you mention is really interesting. The liberal worldview of diversity and pluralism can happily include rural traditionalism and small town life — but only as one of many sub-cultures hopefully co-existing. There’s zero interest on the left to do to Christian fundamentalists what they are trying to do to trans people.
But the reverse isn’t true.
@Steven L. Taylor:
This may address your question tangentially:
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/01/03/jan-6-rioters-white-older
“Rioters flooded in from such places as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and Chicago…”
@Tim D.:
That is what it comes down to. I have yet to hear of an evangelical being forced to have an abortion (except perhaps by an abusive partner) or to gay marry.
@Tim D.:
That is just not true from their perspective
They love guns. We hate guns and push laws to regulate or limit them. They believe schools have a legitimate place in teaching religion; we think schools should teach science, and since we control the education establishment, we win. They believe in traditional sex roles, we laugh at them. They like pick-up trucks and we tell them they have to go electric. They want a burger, we tell them they’re destroying the planet. They believe in military service, we mouth platitudes but stay well away from uniforms.
It’s not that we are intentionally trying to destroy their world, but we are in fact, destroying their world, dismantling it piece by piece, and it only adds insult to injury that we are doing it without even intending to. We are crushingly contemptuous of them and they know it. Do they return that contempt? Yes, but they can’t compete in contempt when we have the jobs, the money, the educations, the opportunities going forward, the control over books, TV and movies. They may be dumb but they know we are winning the culture war.
It’s not a question of blaming us, the world has evolved and we evolved along with it. But it’s wrong to pretend that they are just imagining our condescension and indifference. We can pretend we’re not maintaining a class system, but I used to wait tables and clean homes, and I’m not a college graduate, and I know from personal experience how people in less-than-elite occupations, wit less than a bachelor’s of something, are treated in this country.
@Michael Reynolds: Maybe it’s just me but I don’t feel crushing contempt for conservative Christians. I have friends and family in that category. I really only feel contempt for politicians who have for decades told me I’m not a “real American.”
I’ll give you the gun issue, but some of your other examples perfectly illustrate the point I was trying to make about pluralism. And I agree with you about education and class… but that’s not exclusive to conservative Christians. LGBTQ+ people wait tables too.
Go ahead, say the word, rednecks. But that it also the culture that Southern Blacks took to the urban North 80 years ago and what now defines the ‘hood gang culture. See Thomas Sowell’s ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’. And he shows the roots are from Northern England/Scotland.
That is what all the fear has and is still about, rednecks. Interestingly, the Ukraine war has shown what rednecks can do when needed. The innovation to fight and invent new ways of warfare comes from the rural/farmer folk of Ukraine. Instead, the Ukrainians are sinking warship with autonomous jet skis and swarm FPV drones.
It’s not “resentment”, it’s “ressentiment“.
Sadly, these days so many colleges have campus policies to inhibit students developing discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions or establishment of principles. Quite the contrary, students are pushed to become angry and chant slogans without thought to “fit in”.
Back in the ’80s, the trades were full up with the men thrown out of the factories the “urban elite” moved offshore. They were a good bet for Gen X or even Millennials. But now we’ve an overabundance of white college, college credentialed and a deep shortage of blue collar workers as the men of the 1970s are now in their 70s. The next ten to twenty years is going to be useful skills with your hands over useless college credentials. And the “educated strata” have spent so much time and effort inculcating that to learn to do something useful with tools is beneath the college graduate.
Rebuilding the industrial plant, away from the cities as urban land is too expensive, is already getting going. And while fewer, those factories will need people who know how to use tools, not slogans. It may be the best results are coming from starting to teach middle schoolers how to use tools and do useful things, but in 5 years those middle schoolers will skip college for the vo-tech or OJT.
Relax, people are marrying later, so the colleges can pick up a skilled tradesman as a student at 28 instead of an ignorant frat boy at 18.
@JKB: “Sadly, these days so many colleges have campus policies to inhibit students developing discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions or establishment of principles.”
Really? Name one. One policy to inhibit developing discipline of intellect or regulation of emotions or establishment of principles.
And no, telling the students you can’t call someone a racial slur doesn’t do any of that.
@Tim D.:
Make a list of high status jobs. Every one of them requires a college degree, most in fact require advanced degrees. Do you really believe that lawyers and doctors and professors don’t look down their noses at truck drivers, farmers, pet groomers and maids? Please. You think the other side don’t see the class division and how closely it tracks education and city/suburban life?
Do you really believe that the, ‘I don’t like city slickers’ attitude of a guy working at a chicken processing plant is the equivalent of an investment banker who’d hang himself if he had to live in Shitheel, Arkansas?
For all of our talk about acceptance and tolerance and empathy we are remarkably un-self aware. We are the elite, the winners. The defensive contempt expressed by the losers does not compare to the casual contempt of the winners. I’m sure the homeless guy I pass on my morning dog walk tells himself I’m a POS and he’s the better man, but neither he nor I, nor anyone else, believe it.
@CSK:
The unifying property of the rural, suburban and urban areas involved was above average rate of increase in the non-white population, above average decreasing in the proportion of white population.
(Perhaps this equates to above average rate of cultural change, above average contact with foreign cultures).
@JKB:
And yet Trump Republicans are trying to sell them out to Putin’s genocidal warmongering.
Several thoughts on this:
First is that rural people are not all the same. I grew up in Colorado, and we have different rural flavors in just this one state. Much of southern Colorado is majority Hispanic for example. Many mountain areas are very diverse, with tourist towns right next to ranches. Much different from the plains on the eastern side of the state.
The western US generally has a much different rural character and makeup (and a higher percentage of Hispanics and Native Americans in particular) than other rural areas such as the upper and lower plains, which is different than the midwest and especially the south. To me, the South is really the outlier. Some of James’ comments really bring this home to me. When I think of rural people, I mostly think of people in the west and the plains because that is my primary experience. I think James and Steven have a lot of experience in the Deep South which has a completely different rural culture than anywhere else in America. So, James’ mention of violence and “honor culture” I think applies there, but that cultural aspect does not in other areas that I’ve seen. For example, wife’s family roots are Scandinavian farmers in the upper-midwest. Going to the reunions in Iowa is like an episode of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. There is no violent honor culture there.
Secondly, I want to ask—where is the rage? 16% of the population is ~53 million people—about the same number as the entire country of Columbia or South Korea.
I go back again to my soapbox about behavior and actions in revealing preferences vs what people may claim. Maybe it’s out there, but I don’t see many if any, acts of rage in or coming from rural communities. Considering how much the liberal and progressive media is primed to want to believe this, I would think they would eagerly report on anything that bubbled to the surface. So where is it? We don’t even have European levels of rage, where rural communities with some regularity take their tractors, block roads, go into cities, dump manure, and cause mayhem to protest government policies. None of that here! Not very rage-like.
So it seems this whole thesis fails at the most fundamental level.
Third:
This just shows an ignorance of the actual interests of many rural voters and also fails to account for the fact that rural voters’ interests are diverse in terms of policy. It cherry-picks a few things Democrats have done that they think rural voters should like and then ignores all the things Democrats have done that rural voters think have harmed their interests.
Want examples? Again, I know the West the best, so I can’t speak for other areas. But a pretty big deal in the western states is pretty consistent Democratic hostility to rural industries here, especially extractive industries (lumber, mining, energy, etc.), and increasingly farming and ranching. The response of “just make a tourism-based economy instead,” “learn to code,” and “get educated and move to the city, you racist fuck” that I’ve heard in the comments here and elsewhere do, unsurprisingly, breed resentment. No one likes it when government policy – especially policy made by Executive fiat – destroys your business or job. There are lots of other examples. Take electric cars. They are great for many urban areas and some suburban commuters, but they suck for most rural areas out west where drive distances are long, and the economics of charging infrastructure do not exist. Many Democrats don’t seem to understand this or care when promoting mandates and timelines that they want to apply to everyone. Not all Democrats, of course. Our governor here in Colorado, Polis, understands the regional issues of our state and does, I think, make a good-faith effort to balance the competing interests.
But at the end of the day, this “debate” between the city and country folk is as old as there have been cities.
Still, I’m not sure what the point is in trying to paint people who live in rural areas as monsters and otherizing them. It’s just dumb IMO, as stupid as the RW analog that harps constantly about how bad cities are, at least the Democratic ones. Tribalism is a helluva drug.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s hard to graduate from an engineering curriculum lacking awareness of having a marketable ability that many people are incapable of.
When I worked in Malaysia, one requirement to get the assignment was possessing a Professional Engineer registration. (Back then, 1980’s, most engineers never bothered to get registered like they do now, and the required examination was pretty tough). The Malaysian government wanted that evidence that expats actually knew their stuff.
@JKB:
You’re delusional. Even in countries that value trade educations and hands-on jobs more highly than we do, it’s still the educated who form the elite. Germany’s current PM, Scholz? A lawyer. Angela Merkel, chemist. Before her, another lawyer. Before him, a PhD in history.
Things are the way they are because change happens, societal evolution happens. Rural populations never came back, not because of liberal perfidy, but because of John Deere. Stay-at-home moms are never coming back, not because of feminists but because children, which were an economic plus, became economic negatives. Time only moves in one direction. Whenever governments have tried to reverse the flow of progress, the results have been famine and failed states.
Do you really believe that lawyers and doctors and professors don’t look down their noses at truck drivers, farmers, pet groomers and maids?
Mostly, they look down on them in a nice, condescending manner which treats them as if they were barely visible. And why not? Being superficially nice is considered blameless and worthy of sainthood if it’s a white person talking to a black person, and if the black person talks about how this behavior is a function of privilege they’re told to chill out or worse.
People seem to worship social darwinism in this country. The losers and winners alike. We treat it as if it’s a natural fact of existence when in fact it’s a load-bearing fabrication for our entire social edifice. But show me a person who tries to work at undoing this, and I’ll show you a leftist or an anarchist, and certainly not somebody who wants to go back to a world where women were put in the house to do women’s work.
Boo hoo, everybody’s a victim these days. People who vote for the “party of personal responsibility” and rugged individualism should be held to their own standard, methinks.
Rural America is largely subsidized by urban and suburban tax dollars — and that’s before the special treatment and subsidies given to
black urban welfare queenssalt of the earth real American farmers and miners. But let’s all feel sorry for rural America as a majority (thankfully and notably, not all) of its votes to go preventing everyone else from getting the same largesse.It’s nice to see more of urban and suburban Americans join the minority of exurban Americans ourselves in rejecting ‘bootstraps for thee, not for me’ hypocrisy, and the special pleading of scolds who excuse it.
By contrast, European farmers are rightly calling attention to the economic and cultural importance of agrarian communities. Unlike American conservatives, their efforts are often about addition, not subtraction. Rural Europe would not vote to get rid of their nations’ free college, guaranteed housing, and universal healthcare all while being the net takers of taxation + demanding super special subsidizes for themselves + crying ‘we feel demonized by the inevitability of technological growth and social change waaaaa.’
@Modulo Myself:
I’m not sure about this. Much of what we’re talking about is a result of capitalism and its handmaiden consumerism, which prize competition and productivity both load-bearing (I like that) elements of modern societies. But was capitalism a choice? Or was it an inevitable evolution? If we want to consume – and sure seem to – the system with the best record of allowing increased consumption, is capitalism.
It’s a bit like war. One can be against war, but if the neighboring country quite likes war, guess who wins that argument. One can be against productivity as the capitalist be-all, end-all, but it is very hard to keep up, to literally feed your people, if you aren’t willing to compete in productivity. Look at the list of countries straining every nerve to become more competitive, and more consumerist. It’s the whole world. Is everyone, everywhere making the same choices? Or is everyone, everywhere succumbing to something unavoidable, like gravity?
If you out-produce me, you will have more money and more power, and more ability to shape a world amenable to you, more ability to impose your preferences on me.
As someone who grew up in a small town, then the country in the Midwest, and now live in the suburbs in the South, I have to say that a large number of people are rural in their heart even though they have had to move to the suburbs. So that 16% is somewhat misleading.
@Michael Reynolds: I dunno man this all seems pretty melodramatic to me. I think most people are genuinely trying to be good people and do their best.
I don’t have contempt for the Christian chicken processor. If he wants to organize a union to fight back against the billionaires and corporations, I say hell yeah, how do I help. I do see the right wing culture war stuff as a deliberate wedge to divide working people and prevent a broader class-based coalition from forming.
I think the claim of rage is way overstated and doesnt do much except further cement rural peoples’ opinions. First, I think rural should probably include small towns. Next, I think it’s true that Democrats dont always cater to the true concerns of rural voters. However, the stuff that rural people claim that hurt them the most have largely been driven by GOP policy or just modernization. Take energy. Rural people blame Dems for coal going away but that’s just a modernization effect. Third. Rural people have always resented city people. Their disdain for city people has, IMO, generally exceeded any city people feel towards them.
Next, rural people have just as much poverty as cities and benefit from govt support just as much or more than urban areas. Their ideal may be something different but that’s not reality. Next, a lot of what is called politics of place is really religion. Religion in rural areas is dominated by more fundamentalist groups. They want to encode their religious beliefs into law. Next, they are angry because their kids leave to go get better jobs elsewhere but they take no responsibility for that happening. Instead they look for others to blame. They listen to the politicians who promise to bring the jobs that arent really ever going to come back.
That said, I think it’s mostly that the world is changing and it’s not in ways that rural people like. They want the world to go back to some idealized version of the past but it’s not going to happen. So what they do is vote for people who give them empty promises and promote resentment and, yes, anger towards people they want to blame.
Steve
@Lounsbury: what I’m saying is that self-pity is one hellova drug and we’ve got quite a lot of history and media willing to shovel it towards anyone wanting to pick it up, whether on the left or on the right.
I suspect that most of those loudly yelling about how disrespectful “the elite” are to “ rural people” are suburbanite males living in their parents’ basements. Real farmers don’t have time for such nonsense.
This seems like splitting hairs to me. There’s a book and a competing book both trying to explain the inexplicable:
A twice-impeached, four-time criminal indictee and racist who’s been found liable for fraud and sexual abuse, a leader who when POTUS actively undermined a nation’s response to a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and who orchestrated a months-long coup attempt that culminated in a violent attack on the Capitol, has a 50/50 chance of being the next President.
There’s got to be a reason for that, right? Right?
A bunch of points here:
First, note how Jacobs quotes Waldman, who admittedly does not qualify “interests” as economic. But this is a missed opportunity! Because Jacobs could simply note that Waldman is ignoring that if one views legal abortion as a moral abomination, it is rational, even laudable, to sacrifice one’s economic interests in service to a moral cause. This would highlight Waldman’s implicit appeal to the stereotypical rural simpleton.
But I suspect that he realizes that it cuts against his argument of the misunderstood rural voter. For, if the rural voter prioritizes anti-abortion or bearing arms as fundamentally normative questions, and must come before economic self-interest, they don’t get to then bitch and moan that they have been left behind economically. But that would require he extends to urban Democrats the same excuse-making he affords rural voters.
Moreover, the rural voters made their choices, and refusing to criticize the other effects of those choices is infantlizing rather than understanding.
Second, this “place-based identities” claim is sort of nuts. I’m quite positive that many rural voters complain about the Democratic Party’s embrace of ‘identity politics.’
Similarly, he groups suburban and urban voters as if they are a monolith, when they certainly are not. And he doesn’t even mention exurban voters who are arguably distinct as well. This does not strike me as sound practice. Nor does it acknowledge this approach introduces tension to his claims that Democrats treat rural voters as a homogeneous group.
Third, resentment and rage may indeed be distinct, but that does not mean they are decoupled. If simmering resentment is not cooled, it festers, and rage emerges. Criticism of ‘outrage culture’ on the Left is a repeated theme pushed by conservative news outlets, whereas displays of outrage by reactionaries is described as patriotic or evidence of real grievance.
Fourth, Jacobs ignores issues that plague sentiment and issue polling no matter the sample size nor rigor of the statistical methods applied.
-Sentiments based on perception often do not align with reality. This is true of economic perceptions such as inflation, but also questions like protection of democratic processes. This serves to place imaginary conspiracies about rigged elections on the same reasonable ground as real problems of representation.
-The sentiments expressed, even if they do align with reality, often are not the driving force behind choices made at the voting booth.
It’s also rational to use a candidate’s party as a heuristic given the breadth and complexity of issues in the modern world, but this conclusion of rationality relies on the answers to other questions. Was party identity chosen rationally? (Probably not.) Do views of issues withstand shifts in ideological doctrine among candidates? (Maybe, but I doubt it does in the main.)
Finally, the piece doesn’t once reference the fact that rural voters have national electoral power disproportionate to their population. And that by extension, because that impacts the outcome of the Presidential race and control of the Senate, rural voters have a disproportionate voice in the composition of the judiciary. Nor does it acknowledge that in some places, the same advantage appears at the State level due to gerrymandering. Might that be a legitimate reason for resentment toward rural traditions by urban voters?
Jacobs exhibits a pattern of handwaving counter-arguments in order to criticize Democrats so that he does not have to interrogate his own thesis. For example, he blames Democrats for failing to fix the healthcare system, but the rural voters use their disproportionate electoral say in federal elections to elect people who fight against those policies, and then elect state officials who refuse the resources offered through whaetever watered-down version of reform Democrats can enact.
But wait, I thought rural voters are all about self-reliance? Why are they then complaining that they don’t get enough help from the government? And if they are all about local control, why don’t they vote for state and/or local representatives who will take care of their economic needs? And since when do truly self-reliant people seek approval from those who allegedly despise them?
Jacobs is correct that Democrats and Republicans alike have enacted legislation that has hollowed out the economies of rural areas. But the two parties hardly share equal blame. And who is the first in line among Democrats to criticize the neoliberals among their co-partisans? The Progressives–the preferred cartoon avatar for the Democratic party.
Jacobs ignores history. ‘Tradition,’ ‘local control,’ and ‘self-reliance’ have most often been used to erase bigotry, most often racial animus, as a driving force behind policy preferences. ‘Heritage, not hate’ bears a striking resemblance to “concerns about the social burden of immigration is not always an expression of hate.” Merely asking people questions does not necessarily illuminate their true beliefs, reinforcing my criticism toward his interpretation of polling–it cannot support the weight of his conclusions.
No matter how valid some of Jacobs’ criticisms of the use of his research or Democratic strategies, it is buried under a bunch of arguments on a foundation of false equivalence, e.g. concern for democracy vs. “end of America,” and the “profound injustice” of supposed dismissal of rural contributions to society as worthy of consideration alongside the continued marginalization of groups at the hands of those he coddles.
Not to mention that rural folk have long held contempt for those in sub/urban areas. Indeed, a large component of country identity is derision for the city and its inhabitants, often expressed via outright hostility throughout American history.
Jacobs isn’t trying to foster understanding–he is engaging in secular apologetics for the religiously intolerant.
@EddieInCA:
I generally agree with your take. I’m tired of the largely fabricated yet enduring meme/talking point: ‘they (so-called coastal elites) look down on us here in flyover country.’
Well, I’m one of those so-called ‘coastal elites,’ I’m a San Francisco/Silicon Valley Bay Area liberal, and most of my friends, colleagues and associates are well-educated professionals with careers in just about every field you can imagine – legal, finance, medicine, engineering, space sciences, etc – and not once have I heard any friend, associate or colleague mock or patronize those raging-and-resentful people in ‘flyover’ or rural America. The fact is, most of us were too busy working 50-60 hour weeks, starting families and raising children, all in one of the the most expensive places to live in this country.
Yet the myth endures … the feeling that people like me sit around, and while drinking white wine or a Bud Light LGBTQ beer and eating my Peruvian-Vietnamese takeout – we spend hours mocking white working people in Rural America.
But these days it’s all about the culture wars, which is why conservatives are telling working White people that the ‘real problems’ in America are whatever they deign to label as ‘woke,’ diversity, homosexuality, transexuality, vaccinations, abortions, birth control and contraception, and drag queen story hour. We’re told that we need to understand these people, that the problem is of our making. Well I’m calling bullshit on that notion.
Neither Democrats or Republicans are offering any real plans to revitalize America’s small sized cities or the rural areas around them. Neither.
Republicans offer scapegoats. Democrats offer nothing. It’s not surprising that the people in these areas prefer scapegoats to nothing. It’s not surprising that the people being left behind would be resentful of those who get ahead, and even be resentful of their values.
We need an industrial policy, with the government putting its thumb on the scales to help cities like Newburgh, NY or Centralia, WA — small forgotten cities — become modest economic centers to support their regions (and maybe some in red states too) . This could also relieve some of the pressure on cities like Seattle, which are growing faster than they can accommodate new people, and end up with big homeless populations.
I’m a professor, and gay, and live and teach in a small metro surrounded by a lot of rural counties, and I really, really am not seeing myself in a lot of these assumptions about how I must be and who my neighbors must be and how we must regard each other.
Many of my favorite students over the years have been the Ag and the Construction Management students. They’re more likely to be farm/ranch kids than most and they’re more likely to be returning back home afterwards. They’re overall both smart and disciplined.
Also wanted to add that I lived in rural Western Mass for a decade and have lots of relatives in rural Maine and New Hampshire, and I wanted to echo what some others have said about the rural West. Rural New England is 100% a very different type of rural than the Southern version James and Steven have experienced, and is different than what I’ve experienced living in rural environments inside the interior of the Texas Triangle.
JJ: your criticism is well directed and I do think the difference between rage and resentment is merely a semantic shell game. I might want add one example to exemplify the divide- the whole anti-vaxxer movement. How many rural republicans needlessly died of Covid to own the libs. Very sad really.
@Gustopher:
Both parties send substantial subsides to rural America. Democratic tax dollars keep rural America afloat. Democrats are sending to rural America billions in infrastructure, semiconductor, broadband, construction, and manufacturing spending — projects so vital and visible the Republicans who vote against them still want credit.
The unfortunate reality is most (not all) of the voters in ecurban Georgia where I was reared seem to care more about imposing Medieval white nationalist religiosity than they do about economic revitilization.
Yes, Biden and Democrats greenlighting $20 billion for rural health systems, $20 billion for advanced agriculture projects, $11 billion for rural electrification, and $13 billion for rural energy projects greenlighted will help. But it will a) still take a backseat to culture wars and b) not reverse the decline. Why?
Because central planning cannot make the best and brightest of American youth and immigrants eschew urban and suburban America for communities where they are made unsafe by xenophobia, forced birth, book banning, hatred, and hostility towards multiculturalism and integration.
I would love to take my advanced degrees and go live in the old family homestead in Millen, GA or Garden City, GA outside of Savannah. My now-retired parents flirted with moving back. But for now I’m staying put in L.A. and they in suburban Atlanta. Our family seat is near Ahmaud Arbery Country. No amount of economic investment can make sundown towns attractive to America’s increasingly-diverse, upwardly-mobile youth.
@al Ameda: ” the feeling that people like me sit around, and while drinking white wine or a Bud Light LGBTQ beer and eating my Peruvian-Vietnamese takeout – we spend hours mocking white working people in Rural America.”
Made me think of one of my favorite lines from Manhattan, in which Woody Allen’s character, discussing two very pompous acquaintances, says “They probably sit around on the floor with wine and cheese and mispronounce allegorical and didacticism.”
I’ve been writing about this, off-and-on, for the last decade as a matter of empathy. Not that you agree with someone necessarily but that you at least listen to their concerns, even if their concerns are irrational (which many political concerns are). There has evolved on the Left a tendency to dismiss people who disagree with them as bigots. Indeed, most debates seem to be a stampede to see who can invoke the bigot card first. So reasonable concerns about the border are dismissed as racism. Moral qualms about abortion are dismissed as sexism. People hear the media and the political class constantly dismiss them as bigots and … surprise! … they don’t respond to that by voting Democrat.
(The empathy problem is two-way but is more concerning given what’s going on with Trump voters.)
I know saying that 74 million people voted for Donald Trump because they’re racists is comforting ot those of a lefty persuasion. But it neither reflects reality nor makes inroads into those populations. And if the tactics aren’t changed, we will end up, once again, with Democrats wondering how on Earth they lost when “everyone” agrees with them.
@Hal_10000:
No, reasonable concerns about the border lead to a bipartisan border defense act that would have passed except that Donald Trump told people to kill it. People with reasonable concerns about the border should be really mad at Trump about that. And yet, somehow they aren’t…
Similarly, “moral qualms about abortion” describes essentially 100% of Americans. I do not know anyone, of any political persuasion, who does not sympathize with moral qualms. Criminalizing women’s healthcare and forcing rape victims to bear their rapists’ children is not accurately described as “moral qualms about abortion”.
I genuinely agree with you that there is some fraction of the 74 million Trump voters who are not actually awful human beings, and who could be reached with some facts and some sympathy. But let’s not pretend that it’s most of them, or that liberal contempt is why they vote for Trump.
@Hal_10000:
I agree with you, but only so much. Not that I’m a big fan of Cato in general, but…
https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-why-theyre-wrong
There are a few word choices in that piece that are–uh, I take issue with them. But it addresses the most common anti-immigration arguments from a non-Left perspective. But that’s the point–so many of the anti-immigration arguments are demonstrated to be either outright false or comically exaggerated that it’s hard to hear them without thinking there is some other motivation.
Putting myself in the shoes of someone who harbors legitimate concerns about border security or immigration, I would be more frustrated with the race-bating (original usage) than I would be with whatever the Left thinks about my motives.
Isn’t Lefty suspicion of the motivation behind certain arguments fair given how RW people adjusted their vocabulary in the way they discuss race?
To use a current example, not all anti-vaxxers are created equal. I am more likely find an elderly Black person’s suspicions of vaccination mandates reasonable, if misguided, than I am some coal roller with a Let’s go Brandon sticker or a Goop Liberal.
@Hal_10000:
There is a tendency on among moderates to launder hateful treatment of gays, blacks, and other minorities as mere ‘disagreement.’
I’ve been dismissed as a n***r and a f***t all my life, yet I don’t use that as an excuse to throw ethics, decency, and morals to the wind, and go vote to harm myself and others. The whole “a libersl hurt my wittle feewings on Facebook so now I have no choice but to vote for fascism and religious extremism” bit is weak tea — especially with the anti-snowflake alpha male real masculinity sector of the electorate.
No, the media and Democrats are not responsible for Republican voters’ lack of principles. They are accountable for their choices.
The nonsense I faced being bussed across DeKalb County, GA as a child to help integrate schools that were still lagging in the late 90s was not due to legitimate concerns about the border. Not from the same types of folks who will now vote for the candidate who killed the bipartisan border bill. Enough with the blame-shifting excuses from the party of personal responsibility.
@Michael Reynolds:
Unfortunately I feel this applies to guns and violence generally. If one political faction wishes to use violence in place of democracy, then we’re all going to have to use it. Or hope that there are still enough law-abiding honorable people in uniform to protect us from them.
My mother grew up on a farm outside a town in southern Kansas that is so small, you probably haven’t even heard of the Indian nation it’s named after, much less the town. The major business in town is the Co-Op, and the three restaurants alternate which days they’ll be closed so that the town has at least one restaurant open each day. The biggest annual cultural event in this town is a Ground Hog Dinner on Ground Hog Day (it’s just pork sausage).
Meanwhile the price of the hard red winter wheat he grew all his life went from $2.50/bushel in 1950 to about $4/bushel in 1990. Somehow farmers were supposed to take the loss each year – most of the ones who survived branched out into cattle, and the USDA who was willing to pay him for each acre of scrub land he owned that he didn’t farm.
Her father, who ran the farm after his father because his older brother got out first and got a professional career established, explained to me as he was dying back in 1998, “there is going to be a race war in this country and the blacks up in Wichita were going to try to take over and we needed to be diligent and prepared to fight.”
I took over managing his farm when he died and saw first-hand what a terrible investment it was. For the privilege of working day and night to bring in revenue from all corners – including hunting leases to rich Texans and oil-drilling rights in case the oil companies ever wanted to come drill on his wheat land. All up there was about a 3% return on the value of the land, in a good year. And that’s assuming the weather held out and they could harvest the wheat between rainstorms in the spring. That’s a lower return than savings accounts were offering at the time.
Selling the wheat was a job itself. You have to balance the storage fees at the Co-Op against the rising price of wheat as you moved further and further from harvest time. Everyone harvests at the same time, so the price plummets in the spring. Essentially you are in competition with your fellow farmers and there was always somebody willing to take a loss because the kids needed to eat this month. At first I paid the storage fees for a few months trying to play the market, but eventually I just sold it when we delivered it to the Co-Op because it was too much work trying to outsmart every wheat farmer in America – and they cared more than I did.
After 4-5 years of running his farm, we just sold it all to the man who had been growing wheat on it for the previous 25 years as a renter. He died a couple of years ago, likely from Covid-19, because education is so poor in that area of Kansas that they are suckers for the anti-vaxxers and Q-Anon people who manipulate them for the lolls.
Rural America is a mess – it’s no wonder the young people get out as soon as they are able to.
I, too, am outraged by the diversity, equity, and inclusion represented by the US electoral college.
It’s fun to see that rural white people are in favor of DEI when they’re the beneficiary. We can all be sure they’ll immediately be voting to remove their outsized influence on national politics!
Of course, the rural whites also showed us how to do KKKancel Kulture.
I’ve been continuously shocked to watch poor people take as a element of faith the concept that Trump’s policies help them in any way. The only thing Trump’s ever done to promote labor is to end Roe v Wade.
Here’s some bullet points:
* I think we are seeing sorting, but I don’t think IQ has much to do with it. Adaptability, on the other hand, willingness to change and adapt to modern times has a lot to do with it.
* Y’all know how I decline to trash rural people as a class. That might be because I’m the only one here who has actually lived that life.
* There are very different groups being called “Democrats” in the OP and works quoted. There are politicians and policymakers – the ones who have got the policy right. And there are folks like most of us here on this forum, who are understandably unhappy with MAGA and who vent our unhappiness with (sometimes) slurs on many of the supporters. We’re all politicians now.
It’s amazing to me the number of people who just flat-out hate and/or detest rural people. I’m not going to try to talk you out of your sweeping bigotry, but perhaps I can get you to think a bit more strategically and tactically.
I’ve already made the obvious point that not all rural areas and people are the same. Extending that, a non-trivial number of rural people vote for Democrats. In 2020, about 35% of all rural voters voted Democratic. If you are going to paint with a broad, disparaging brush, you are also smearing those people.
Let’s look at the swing states from the 2020 election via the NYT and what percentage voted for Biden:
Arizona – 43%
Nevada – 40%
Wisconsin – 36%
Michigan – 34%
Pennsylvania – 30%
Georgia – 30%
Those who want Trump to lose and claim Trump is an existential threat should probably not be going out of their way to call those Democratic-aligned and the marginal/gettable/swing voters losers, whiners, and leeches who don’t have any legitimate concerns. Call me crazy, but that’s not a very good persuasion strategy.
The article covers a lot of ground, so I’ll just meander through a couple of my after thoughts touching on the livelier rage/resentment topics. One notion is that city slicker smarty pants folks are always telling rural folks how to live. For example, the city dwellers are great at promulgating rules to make the rural denizens save the environment, when its city folks using the vast majority of all the finished goods and resources. Second, there is nothing wrong with pushing higher education! Great humans throughout history, like Washington, Einstein, and Plato, have all extolled the virtues of higher education. However, higher educational attainment should be seen through the lens of what’s relative to the individual. To that point, a highly trained tradesman will also naturally have a higher level of education attainment as they successfully navigate through a greater understanding of their valuable work. On guns, a pox on both the Democrat and Republican political houses. The answer to this situation does not come in the form of a ban on guns or an unholy desire to make guns a totem to American virtue. Instead, the answer is found in the operative term of the Second Amendment, “a well regulated militia.” Now is the time to add responsibility into the mix and have the militia, which is all of us able bodied and sane minded adults, fall under our Constitutional obligations of responsibility. Under the Constitution, Congress is responsible for enacting laws governing the militia and the states are responsible for establishing the leadership of their respective militias. Congress and the states have failed miserably in meeting their Constitutional responsibilities in this area. Finally, “In God We Trust” is not the same as trusting dictatorial minded religious zealots, as their understanding of God is as seemingly limited as their imaginations and wholly corrupt in their lust to lord over the rest of us.
@Andy:
I want to make clear that I do not detest rural people at all. But I also recognize that I don’t have the same concerns as Eddie, DK, or Beth. I am not at risk. But I find their reaction understandable. It can be a difficult balance.
I mostly grew up in SW Georgia. I saw a lot of racism. I saw a lot of decency. Sometimes there was an overlap within individuals and groups. So that informs my views and approach.
I default to siding with the marginalized. That includes rural communities. But I cannot ignore history or the prevalence of bigotry in many of those areas, particularly in the South. Southern hospitality is real, but for too many it’s also selective.
@Chris: I understand that everybody falls for their own grandiloquence but what specific environmental rules you feel are oppressing our fellow agrarian brethren?
@Raoul: Well the term “grandiloquence” seems to be a nickel priced word looking to make a dime sized impression. Meanwhile, the best source for an answer to your question is to simply ask a farmer. Otherwise, one might start by listening to what Sen. John Tester says about those environmental initiatives that adversely impact farmers, as well as what farmers are advocating for that will help the environment.
@Kurtz:
I’m not denying anyone’s experience in SW Georgia or the South, but certainly, everyone here should understand that SW Georgia or the South generally is not representative or emblematic of all ~50 million people who live in rural America.
Individuals are certainly entitled to their views and their personal experiences, as I am to mine growing up in the West.
My point here is that painting with a broad brush is bad. ~1/3 of rural voters are Democrats! What purpose is served by insulting those who have voted for your side in the past?
Secondly, of the swing states in play, only one is a southern state. Treating the rural voters of Arizona, Michigan, etc., as if they are Southern states and all that entails with the broad brush is not a good strategy IMO.
@Chris: Thanks for responding. I went to the ontheissues.com page on Tester environmental views. To be honest, not much there. My view is that people (of all stripes) just like to whine on whatever. That’s why I asked for specifics. I worked on some farm issues in the past, specifically pesticide control, and believe me not, the removal of certain herbicides/pesticides needs to clear a high barrier. When I listen to rural radio I hear many complaints of generalities nary of specifics. Anyways, most rules that are passed are not applicable to the family farms (<10) and many are passed to protect the workers.
@Andy:
Absolutely. I toyed with adding the following: that before I moved to Georgia, I lived for a short time in Wisconsin. Small city surrounded by rural area. I wasn’t there long and I was young, but observant enough to notice similarities and differences between rural culture in both places.
I have no illusions about the differences between regions. I’ve spoken with and spent time with a lot of people over the years. I mainly replied to make sure anyone still following this thread understood that I didn’t intend to denigrate the entire rural population or imply that there were no differences between regions.
Wrt ~1/3% Dems. Intuitively, it seems that the minority party in non-swing states likely experience some level of lower turnout. I think the literature is split with some showing large effects, others smaller. But I haven’t done a deep dive. But I think there is a decent chance that your percentage is low.
@Andy:
I’m not amazed, primarily because I don’t see that.
You’re probably conflating a ‘flat-out hate and/or detest for rural people’ with a hate for those voters whoe gave us Donald Trump, some of whom are rural voters.
@Andy:
Any voter that is actually gettable for Democrats is not going to excise their principles and turn their backs on decency, liberty, and equality because a random, powerless stranger online called Trump voters whiny.
Having long been a target of actual “flat-out hate” replete with actual slurs, nobody had to persuade me to stand up for what’s right. There’s no mass cohort of swing voters who would be voting Democratic but for being called whiny online. Like, please. That’s an attractive attempt to shift blame and pretend Trump voters are aggrieved victims, but no.
@DK:
Sure, but the problem is the sort of attitude that you and others have isn’t confined here. The reason this thread exists is because of the White Rural Rage book this post is about, which become popular in certain circles and has gotten a lot of attention and coverage in the wider media. And it’s not like your attitude is novel – the sort of broad-brush derision is very common and has been for some time and is considered acceptable discourse in progressive circles.
Well, you can believe what you like, but as I said, it’s not just online; it’s part of progressive messaging everywhere, including the major media. And it’s you who is dodging here, from the effects of the words, ideas, and messages that you openly support and condone. The excuse that it’s all ok because no one will see it because you’re only a random powerless stranger is particularly lame.
@Andy:
1. There are no “progressive major media”. Cite?
2. As he said, “There’s no mass cohort of swing voters who would be voting Democratic but for being called whiny online.” If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it.
I mostly agree. But practical politics has little to do with what’s fair. I think there’s a lot of room to peel off Trump’s supporters.
@DrDaveT:
It’s very weird to me that people are so insistent about digging in their heels defending the bigoted notion that it’s acceptable to insult people based on the geography of where they live. And this defense is particularly lame – it’s ok to be bigoted this way because of the unproven assertion there are no swing voters who will care, and this bigoted message isn’t getting out into the mainstream media (progressive or otherwise)anyway, so it’s no big deal. What a winning series of arguments that is to justify being a bigot.
@Andy:
That is so far from what I actually wrote that I have to wonder how you could have possibly misread it that badly. I will not speculate, but I invite you to try again.