A good American progressive is meant to disapprove of disparaging political stereotypes. But that hasn’t stopped them gleefully embracing the caricature of the enraged rural American. You know the tropes; they’re the last ones you can utter in respectable conversation: “white trash”, “redneck”, “hillbilly”, all them ignorant belligerents in stark raving anger ready to storm the Capitol.
Just last month, academic Thomas Schaller, co-author of the erroneous book, White Rural Rage, stoked this prejudice on MSNBC: “[Rural voters] are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country… They are the most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.” He was trending on X in no time. But his ideas aren’t exactly new: after the 2016 election, Frank Rich published an essay titled “No sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York magazine, while the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly churns out op-eds on rural rage.
As two scholars of rural politics, who have spent the past three years pouring over thousands of survey interviews with rural Americans, this caricature of the rural rabble-rouser is deeply puzzling. Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.
Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.
However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.
Such failures help to explain the deep-rooted scepticism in many rural areas towards government policy solutions. Just consider the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994. Nafta’s champions, including both Democrats and Republicans, promised that the deal would bring prosperity to small farmers, but between 1998 and 2018, one out of every 10 small US farms disappeared. Not long after the trade barriers were removed, Canadian cattle ranchers flooded the American market with beef and prices plummeted, forcing small farms out of business. Meanwhile, large-scale agribusinesses capitalised on the open borders. If government neglect drove your grandpa off his farm back then, why would you trust it now?
Yet the stereotype of the raging rural American misrepresents these complexities of the rural experience. It is why Hollywood fell for J.D. Vance’s story of Appalachian poverty, while failing to recognise that he was running a political campaign that spoke to the resilience, values and pride of rural residents. And it is why most progressives don’t have much empathy left for rural voters — despite feeling deeply for nearly every other marginalised group in American society.
In some circles, this lack of empathy stems from the fact that these so-called “deplorables” are blamed for having brought Trump to power. As Paul Waldman, the second co-author of White Rural Rage, said on his book tour: “If Donald Trump gets back to the Oval Office, it will be because — once again — rural Whites put him there.” But rural America is not responsible for Trump. If simply voting for Trump makes you “enraged”, then the residents of cities and suburbs, from which Trump derived 80% of his total votes in 2020, are downright furious. Pinning Trump’s gains on decades of rural America’s losses is just another form of confirmation bias — reinforcing existing beliefs without critical examination. Rarely do you hear mentions of figures such as Bill Clinton, who championed Nafta, or Hillary, who seemed to openly celebrate the fact that she lost the places that were economically suffering the most.
With stereotypes of rage come stereotypes of irrationality. But rural folk have good reason to partly blame Democrats, experts and college professors for their misfortunes. They know full well that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by both Democrats and Republicans did destroy rural economies. And 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. Surely, the drive for diversity and inclusion should include rural kids, too?
We’ve also noticed that city dwellers have a tendency to use stereotypes as a crutch to disguise the fact that they know very little about how different people live their lives. Both rural and urban people see the “other” as having different values. Many of these differences are overblown, but some of them are, undoubtedly, true. We see it in our own lives: as college professors who choose to live in the countryside, our colleagues playfully say we’ve “gone native”, and our neighbours think we’re squirrelly. We love both worlds and the people within them, even when they value different things. But stereotypes, generalisations, tropes and unchecked hyperbole foreclose the possibility of closing this divide.
In order to genuinely heal societal rifts and to find common ground, we have to dispel the myths of blind rage, and see instead a common desire for recognition. And yet, it appears that progressive commitments to multiculturalism and pluralism only extend to groups that vote the “right” way. It’s almost as if they haven’t learnt their lesson: as long as rural America is treated with disdain, should we really be surprised when, once again, it reluctantly turns to Trump?
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/