We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
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What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
As someone that was born and raised, and still lives in a super majority pro Trump part of the rural South, boy is this article true. I can’t begin to explain the rabid love so many have for Trump and the republican party.
I was eating with some family at a restaurant and got to listen to them railing about the public schools grooming kids and letting them read porn. Even pointing out that they literally know the local teachers and go to church with them. Asking who is supposed to be doing what they are claiming gets absolutely nowhere.
As a rural white (I’m one of the good ones i swear): we are ignored, it’s an objective reality that the better parts of the country neither attempt to understand rural America or the problems it faces. No blame here tho, i spend most of my time trying to ignore this shithole too. Some places in America are nearly third world levels of bad, even when the was an economic reason for these places to exist they were terrible and the people are awful in so many ways. There is no ‘but’ here if anyone was expecting one, no saving grace, no happy ending.
The only way i see this working out well is if it starts in the cities, though. Organize our cities better and force reasonable housing costs, then relocate most of rural America to someplace better now that it’s not insanely expensive for basic survival there. Sure an actual farming town might not be and to be relocated, but shitty coal town #4642 shouldn’t have ever existed in the first place and rail stop #556 has been dying for over 100 years. It’ll be good for future generations to not be in places like that.
As a rural white (I’m one of the good ones i swear): we are ignored, it’s an objective reality that the better parts of the country neither attempt to understand rural America or the problems it faces.
as someone who hates city living, and suburbia, isn’t the entire point of living rurally to be left alone? I suppose it depends on how you classify it though. Seems rather ironic to me, to live rurally, and then bitch about rural living being hard.
No one chooses to be born out here, but yes that is part of the attitude people foster, which is part of the problem.
yeah, i suppose given the cost of moving to a more urban place, that it would be rather restrictive wouldn’t it?
Having grown up in suburbia all my life, and disliking it. Rural america seems like a nice escape. Guess that’s just the one sided nature of my experience though.
If we weren’t talking America I’d tell you rural is better in every single way when compared to suburban, suburban living is a hellscape that has no right to exist imo. It’s just that rural in America means you are actually disconnected from society at large. You aren’t outliers surrounding and supporting a large city, not a tight knit community, but a single person or family living far away from anything or anyone with delusions of true independence. It fosters incredibly anti social attitudes, where anything that is different is bad.
The only replacement for the society they are missing out on for most people out here is whatever hick church they go to. And that feeds into many of the awful aspects of life out here.
And no one ignores the plight of rural folk as much as Republicans. Indeed they want to make it worse to gin up more discomfort. I’m from deep rural Alabama. To say my family votes against their own interests is a given, for the two choices, but they vote for the most extreme antithesis to their best interest every time because frankly, they’re committed to the “invisible war against “”“other””“”.
I agree they should escape, but I also am not going to extend them some bullshit about how they’re “forgotten” or “ignored”. They know exactly what they’re doing. They are making their choices.
tldr; its racism all the way down but no one wants to call them on it. big surprise. no mention of the foxnews propaganda machine that instills/reinforces these ‘views’'.
I don’t know there seems be a shit ton of Toxic Masculinity too.
“all the way down” is missing the heart of it. The article is describing people with real issues, who have really been let down and really need better from their government.
That this has been channelled into racism is awful and sad for everyone, for all the victims of misinformation.
A huge portion of the country has been let down by the government. You don’t have to be rural for that. Lack of healthcare, education, and support are nationwide. Not everyone decided to be racist because of it.
You do realize that all of those issues you listed are a direct result of Republican policy, correct?
Republican policy and Democrat “failures”. How many times do the Democrats get to fumble the ball or side with corporations over workers before this becomes a widely accepted fact? This isn’t intended to give the Republicans a free pass, but just to call out that the Democrats are either too stupid or simply not interested in solving the problem.
Biden bad
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
This right here is so on the nose it’s not even funny. Republican political strategy in rural America is 100% distraction politics. Using every nonsense “moral” issue they can come up with to distract from the fact that they are completely incapable of governing anything effectively for the benefit of the people.
As someone living for decades in rural Mississippi, Rural conservatives are willing to hurt themselves if it means hurting others. They fight against raises for themselves so the “lazy” people dont get what they dont deserve. They fight against healthcare subsidies for the poor, subsidies that they themselves would qualify for, because they want revenge on “welfare queens”. They are horrid people that go to church every sunday to hear teachings against all of the shit they do.
I grew up in rural Missouri. Same thing here just as you described. My town had 300 people in it, but the town close by had around 8,000. Last I heard the hospital there was on the brink of collapse because nobody there can afford to pay after visiting. So most people won’t visit at all and die prematurely. Everyone is panicking because if the hospital closes the nearest one will be 1.5hrs away. A situation entirely preventable with subsidized health care. The hospital would get what they needed that way.
I’ve always had the perspective that they are making the poor of their states into the new slave class, with the belief that they will be above the cut-off line somehow and be better off. Do you see the same from the inside?
I grew up rural south, and I can see how that mindset will avail them right until the day their home is taken and they’re the underclass they’ve worked so hard to oppress.
No, i dont think they plan ahead like that. I think their train of thought just stops at wanting revenge on the people they feel get undeserved rewards. Its a lot of at least mildly abusive childhoods here, and just accepting that as how things should be. Ive heard sooooo many times kids arent being beaten enough here. And without a drop of self awareness that theyre not exactly a positive example of the outcomes of that abuse. And none of them really have aspirations, or saying theyre waiting for their day to come. Generally its pretty cynical outlooks, like everything is already doomed, theyre just waitin on goin to heaven.
You gotta be mentally defective to vote r.
…white? White!? Those almost red/pink skins look less white than my neighbors in my latin american city!
Bunch of clowns…
don’t worry, i’ll be moving to rural america to do my part. And if they don’t like me there, they’ll just have to kill me.
There are tens of thousands of towns that have no reason to exist anymore. The railroads don’t stop there anymore, coal isn’t in demand, or the factory where everyone used to work closed long ago. It’s a death spiral. Nobody who lives there can admit they need to cut bait and start over elsewhere. They cling to the past and the delusion that the world will go back to the way it used to be.
Biden already did the best thing that could be done for these people which is funding a massive expansion of rural internet. If corporations continue to be pushed into allowing remote work, these rural towns would see the new economic infusion they need to survive.
If corporations continue to be pushed into allowing remote work, these rural towns would see the new economic infusion they need to survive.
Biden forced federal workers back to the office. I don’t know why people keep trying to pretend we have friends in the capitol. We don’t.
I would say work from home is incompatible with government security and privacy requirements in most situations.
Endless excuses for Biden and his pro-corporate bullshit.
Endless complaints regardless of reality. Biden could personally cure cancer and you people would complain he didn’t cure AIDS too.
We’ll never know though because if Biden had the choice between curing cancer and protecting corporate profits he’d choose the corporate profits.
Don’t let the fact that Biden wants to raise corporate taxes, put a surcharge on stock buybacks, fight corporate tax evasion, and is the most pro-union president in generations interrupt your blind hate…
Yes Biden, like most trash procorporate Democrats regularly want to do things they have no ability to deliver. And flat out refuse to entertain alternatives they can.
put a surcharge on stock buybacks
Buybacks were illegal in the past. Make them illegal again. Do it today.
Digital nomads moving into these places and driving up the cost of living are a big complaint in rural areas. They’ve been complaining about the influx of Californians in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana for the last few decades now, but it has really accelerated since the pandemic.
But if there’s no industry and no-one moves there, how does the town survive?
They commute to other places to work. They also don’t typically make enough money to actually move and be closer to better jobs.
You’re missing my point. If there’s no industry, and they don’t allow anyone to move in, then the town will slowly die. They basically don’t want anything to change while at the same time they demand everything get better. It just doesn’t work that way.
Cars destroyed rural America. Take a Youtuber like Hoovie’s Garage, he buys a large farm in the middle of nowhere to store cars, drives regularly a 100miles a day. You can’t have compact European style towns, in such a reality. The factory closed, people drive 60 to a 100 miles a day, that means that the town is flattened and gone. Add to that oil disease in places like Kansas, Texas and W. Virginia; the government doesn’t need to have sound businesses as a tax base to fund itself, just oil money.
Cars have nearly nothing to do with this. It started with the industrialization of farming.
Farm towns existed at normal intervals because it took a much larger labor pool to manage them. 200 acres was a lot to manage about 100 years ago. By the 1970’s 400 acres was a normal sized family farm in the US.
Modern machinery can cover nearly 200 acres in a day. There is no reason to have thousands of people per small town anymore. It takes a tiny fraction of that manpower to achieve the same output.
1910 machinery starts to transform farming, killing small subsistence farms.
1920 factories in large towns start draw labor of off small subsistence farms
1930 cheap cars make it easier to travel great distances, small towns start to decline
1930-50s telephones, refrigerators, radios and TVs allow people to live even greater distances apart
1970s new pesticides allow for an even greater mega-farms, and fewer family farmers
1980s Free trade kills off most industrial jobs in small towns
1990s collapse of USSR means rush of cheap engineering labor, depreciates well paying technical jobs
2000s reinvestment into oil fracking and other oil extraction methods causes dutch-disease (taxes come from oil, so little interest in industry)
2010s spike in cheap synthetic drugs rolls through rural America
1970s new pesticides allow for an even greater mega-farms, and fewer family farmers
About the time where biomass started to decline.
Perfect analysis by Cracked of all places: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
I think Chomsky nailed it as far back as the nineties, at least. I cannot find the exact quote, but he was commenting on the “Angry White Male” thing and said that of course a great many people had the right to be angry about their situation, but that of course they’d be pointed at the wrong things/people either as deflection or as the (false) cause.
When people say that the cons manifested donnie vs. donnie somehow coming along and changing the cons, they are not wrong. It’s no coincidence that donnie is glued to grievance outlets like Faux and just repeats their bilge. When these angry people have been eating up Faux nonsense and a candidate comes along that just repeats everything on those grievance outlets, and gives them a permission structure to start saying some of the worst thoughts they have out loud, it’s all too obvious who they are going to vote for.
Naturally, that candidate will be doing absolutely nothing for them beyond their feels and will most likely just enact policies to make their situation even worse.
This misses an important point. Cities like Chicago and Miami compete globally, against places like Berlin and Sao Paulo. Smaller regional centers, like Oklahoma city, and Des Moines are ruled by their own elite and are not concerned by international affairs.
The wealthy in smaller regional centers don’t have the ear of the Federal government, but they do employ most people in the local area, so locals are tied to their success. Locals also rely on them for donations to local hospitals, charities, and sporting clubs.
The wealthy in smaller regional centers don’t have the ear of the Federal government
If anything, they actually have an oversized voice in the federal government due to the Senate.
It’s true that the cultural left didn’t suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals. When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.
It’s so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man’s party by anyone since the 1890s
they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals.
This didn’t happen.
When the Democrats abandoned the working class
This didn’t happen.
