We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
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.
…
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 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’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.
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.
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''.
"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.
It's been channeled into racism, on purpose, by the representatives in government who are doing the "really need better from their government." to the people. They've managed to implement policies that are actively harmful to their constituents, while convincing their constituents that it's all some other group's fault.
The efforts to create a Great Society were stopped when it became apparent that the benefits of the Great Society would be shared by all. Responses to racial integration included closing school districts for years and filing public pools with cement.
The government was trying to do better, but since it wasn't hurting the wrong people, the response was to make the government worse.
You ever try begging Kentuckians to accept that they’ll need to do something, anything, other than mine coal and to let the government fund them learning how? I have. They did not like that.
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.
I spend dozens of hours a year driving through the rural South. So many towns as you describe. And I have no idea how they're alive at all.
A weird thing I've seen: Most small Alabama towns are quite charming and well kept. How does that work when there's no obvious economic driver?!
Cross the border into Mississippi and it's a different story. You could teleport me to a random highway or town and I could tell you whether I was in AL or MS.
The wealth gap is on full display everywhere. You'll see a stunning property and home, rambling across several acres, and then a couple of trailers so beat down the county would condemn them if they cared to look.
How do those small towns still work? Cars. Sit and talk to people living in those forgotten towns, and they generally have very veeeery long commutes to work, or one of the few poorly paying jobs in town. +90 minutes commute is not uncommon to get to the next closest printing press/slaughterhouse/steel mill/etc that hasn’t moved overseas or closed down.
It's weird how the radicalized right wing took umbrage to the notion of retraining with their sneering use of "learn to code". Of course, not everyone can write code (and those jobs may dwindle, too) but the notion of doing anything other than mining coal just seems to really, really, really offend a certain type of person.
The idea that someone should just "learn to code" shows a huge lack of understanding of what "learning to code" entails. It also doesn't help that they'll need to earn a living while they're learning to code, and that they'll have to move from a dying town to find a job where they can code.
They weren't offended by the idea of learning to code. They were offended by the dismissive nature of the major life change that switching careers and moving to a different state entails.
And, as someone who learned how to code, I'm offended by the dismissive nature of the technology industry as just "learn to code."
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.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who voted for Biden, that's pretty much my experience as well. The U.S. government is telling me to go fuck myself every day. I'm sick of it.
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.
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.
I'm not saying they're good people, in fact i don't think most people who live out here can be saved. Making cities livable and consolidating the population just prevents new generations of subhumans. Or at least, this particular brand of subhuman.
Edit: and i don't think you understood anything i typed out. The people are the issue being ignored.
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.
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.
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.
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
one of my favorite features of politics, is how it inherently ingrains this sort of shit into the party, such that it actually incentivizes the other side to believe this shit, because it's actually fucking real.
Yet that doesn’t give any answers. Conservatives lie, misdirect, scapegoat, and seem to act against their constituents’ interests. That’s the common view from the other side.
But why do they still get elected? Why do those constituents not see through the BS? Why does it continue to happen?
Is it all they know? Is demonization so successful? Are they that gullible? Is there something positive to conservative politicians we don’t recognize?
What's so weird about donnie in particular is that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, spent much of his life trying to be accepted by elite culture in Manhattan, was given a game show in which he played a businessman.
He's like the embodiment of every single douchebag in an 80s flick. I grew up in an extremely rural area, and most people I remember, left and right, hated donnie and his antics as a so-called businessman. I just don't get how he has transformed into someone they think represents them. Does he insult other elitists? Okay, yeah. Is he still an 80s caricature of a douchebag who flies around in his own jet and plays a lot of golf? You bet.
That essay covers it pretty well and maybe I’m in the same boat as the author. The small town I grew up in was a great place but dominated by a single large employer. When they left, they left a huge gap still not filled decades later. I left, and the few times I’ve visited have been mostly sad at what is left.
I did go to a high school reunion at some big number like 20, and it was even sadder. It was mostly people who stayed local and they hadn’t changed at all from high school. My best friend has the same hobbies so can’t talk about anything new after 20 years, and claimed he had never been more than 50 miles from where he grew up. What the ever living fuck? My brothers best friend still lives in his Mom’s basement and works on his Camaro on weekends. What else can I feel except pity?
However the large employer in our town was a tech employer so this is new, playing out in a single lifetime. For most of these small rural towns, their way of life has already died long ago, but the people either don’t understand or don’t want to understand. The article talks about farming mechanization requiring far fewer people, but there’s also the rise of large corporate farms and global trade making it much harder to succeed at a family farm. But that’s half a century or a century in the making. You can’t blame the current president, nor can some blowhard change that with BS. Your way of life is already gone and your desperation is from clinging to it, doing the same thing over and over for years. Somehow expecting something to change. I know change is hard and I wouldn’t want to, but your actions are locking your children, your town, yourself in the same cycle of desperation that will keep getting worse. It’s long past time to rip off the bandaid, to face the music. To take responsibility for your future instead of hiding from reality
As a former Republican who lives deep in MAGA territory that article resonates so hard I'm sure a nearby Geologist just looked at their seismograph in alarm.
Republicans have a huge and extensive propaganda network that feeds their constituents a steady stream of misinformation, fear, hatred, intolerance, and ignorance. Fox News primes them, Republicans parrot Fox or whatever right-wing news outlet people get their news from, and get elected because most people don't have the media literacy to see that they're being lied to.
We can't reason with them, because they live in a world that has been carefully crafted to keep them compliant. The only way to fix this is to break the GOP's propaganda machine. Until we can do that, they are lost to us.
I don't know if there's a single reason, but I would suspect a large part of it is that the alternative is giving in and conceding on pretty much everything. Sure, there's a possibility that if they suddenly started voting for Democrats, they might see some more funding sent their way, more programs to help them get by, or possibly even create jobs. It doesn't seem too likely they'll be the same old jobs that used to sustain those rural towns, though. They also won't be able to dominate the discourse of the party with a worldview built around Evangelical Christianity. That's going to mean just flat out giving up on a lot of the culture war battles they're fighting via the GOP at the moment. I don't see them getting the Democrats to walk back support for gay rights, for example. A lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric basically just has to die off, or else urban Democratic voters will not support them.
For me, the real question is why they think they should be able to hold the vast majority of the population to their decidedly minority views? I'm sympathetic to wanting to be able to live the way you and your family have for generations, but there's no bringing that back at this point, so they need to try something new.
The republicans convince their constituents that as bad as things are now, they can easily get worse, and these are people who have lived in shit so long they literally cannot envision anything better.
The real shame of all this is that we have to care what some of the worst elements of this country think. They are a minority and they live in areas that are not all that strategic when it come to the future, or economics, etc.
Their argument is always "we grow your food!". And I've never understood this argument as a valid one for so many reasons. For one, it's not like this is done as some kind of altruistic thing, any more than any other industry, lol. So you are part of agriculture, uh, so what? Secondly, most of the food that I personally eat is not grown in the flyover country they seem to indicate. Lastly, things like automation might be coming for all of that and so I don't know why I or anyone else have to be held hostage by a minority group that happens to be distributed in remote areas of our country and who may have been tenuously connected to food production at some point in the past...
Is the same thing happening in the US as in the UK. Whenever data is taken working class white men always come off worse in the stats. But all the money goes to women and minorities while also talking about how the white man is today the cause of all the problems.
It's like being at the bottom of the barrel and then also being shat on while everyone gets a helping hand but you.