I traveled to Texas to see the eclipse, and most of my travel was on US Highway 287. Between Denver and Amarillo, there’s not a hell of a lot to see. Google Maps calls US 287 the “Heartland Expressway” in Colorado, but if this is the heart of our land, we need to cut down on the cheeseburgers and get to the gym a little more often. Though I’ve spent plenty of time in rural America, the level of decay in small rural towns seemed worse this time. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living in metro Denver for the last few months. Denver definitely has its problems, but it is a bustling, booming place, with lots of new construction. Not so in eastern Colorado, and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.
The pictures I’ve embedded were taken in Eads and Hugo, Colorado and Paducah, Texas, but there are a lot of other towns with the same decaying buildings on the side of the road. It’s not all bad: there are signs for fundraisers, and monuments like the Eads town sign, that show the community making an effort. There are also a lot of Trump signs, “Impeach the Democrats” signs, and other associated signals that these areas are about as red as you can get in the West.
I’ve been following with interest the “debate” between the authors of White Rural Rage, Paul Waldman and Tom Schiller, and political scientists like Nicholas Jacobs. John linked to Waldman and Schaller’s piece addressing their critics, and here’s Jacobs’ piece in Politico. Jacobs, who wrote The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America thinks that “rage” isn’t the right word — rather, we should say “resentment”. I’ve always thought that resentment was rage after it had curdled, soured and burrowed itself deep into someone’s head, but Jacobs makes big noise about the distinction. He also picks through polling research to present a picture of rural America (by which he clearly means white rural America) as a place that’s not quite as racist as you’d think.
Jacobs can certainly read polls, but he has very little insight about how the views reflected in those polls came to be. The words “Fox News” are nowhere to be found in his piece. Having seen the evidence of radicalization firsthand in my rural relatives, talking about heartfelt views of heartlanders without talking about the diet of right-wing propaganda that they regularly ingest is missing the story. Or, as Waldman and Schaller put it:
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.
Also, cut me a break with the patronizing views of rural folk as the simple-hearted (and simple-minded) moral backbone of America. Maybe, overall, people treat each other a little better than average in a small town, but people in those towns know each other, and humans are far more likely to be good to people they know than to strangers. I find it condescending and wrong to treat rural folk as somehow better then everyone else. But there’s enormous pressure to do so — here are Waldman and Schaller again:
We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.
Rural America gets all the breaks in our political system. They get more representation, more federal money and more positive attention than urban dwellers. Yet their towns are in decay, their health is terrible, and they are under the sway of a bunch of big-city liars who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. If we’re going to understand rural voters, we need to start with the bare facts, not some fantasy.
Corrections: It’s “Schaller” not “Schiller” and the last picture was taken in Hugo, Colorado.
This Is What Serious People Look Like When They Are Doing Their Jobs
Baud
They’d be better off voting for Democrats, but the one thing we can’t give them is special social status.
Albatrossity
Amen, brother. I live in the heart of it too, and see/hear it every day. It boggles my mind to try to figure out how folks who live in this part of the country ever fell for a con man who shits on a golden toilet and lived in a NYC penthouse. All he wants is their money, and all they want is his approval to hate the folks they already hated.
japa21
And if you said this to them directly, they would call you a liar, or worse.
Sister Golden Bear
Seems apropos: Warren Zevon “Play It All Night Long.”
HumboldtBlue
I read this piece last night and it’s an excellent analysis. I thought “shouts and whispers” was right on the mark, hell, the entire piece is brilliant.
Anonymous At Work
I’ve always preferred “ressentiment” as a more refined version of the “resentment” of rural whites. That and this comic about The Salt of the Earth.
“Cities are big melting pots, so we’ll drive out those different to be small and forgotten.”
It creates a cognitive dissonance that would be hilarious if there wasn’t cost in lives. The trucker complaining about them darn immigrants while ordering huevos rancheros, for example.
Anonymous At Work
@Baud: The one thing Democrats WILL NOT, as opposed to ‘cannot’, give them is license to spit upon others.
TooTallTom
And sometimes, the lack of engagement in the real world is the root cause. (This is my family, living in a rural area). Why do they love TFG? “Cause he sent me a check.” Full stop.
piratedan
and this pattern will likely not stop until either Murdoch is dead and the rest of the family has a moral epiphany or someone makes news be actual news, not some bad faith twisting of events that is one part a passing resemblance to facts and nine parts misdirection and ninety parts a fucking lie.
p.a.
“Big town’s got its losers, small town’s got its vices…”
P. Westerberg
For quite a while now I’ve read occasional interviews with small town politicians & residents with the theme “our immigrant citizens saved this town from becoming a ghost town.” Not a widespread enough thing I guess. Or bigotry blinds people from this fact.
Ryan
I-80 is the Heartland Expressway. You can get some quality cheeseburgers in Omaha.
Ryan
“Rural America gets all the breaks in our political system. They get more representation, more federal money and more positive attention than urban dwellers. Yet their towns are in decay, their health is terrible, and they are under the sway of a bunch of big-city liars who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. If we’re going to understand rural voters, we need to start with the bare facts, not some fantasy.”
They ought to pull themselves by their own bootstraps!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
We went down US-285, then came back TX-163 then US-385. Lots of very depressing, tiny, virtually empty towns in rurl NM and TX. I’ve been thru Eads more times than I care to remember.
As I’ve expressed here, 22+ years of living in a rurl town in central Misery, I knew people that if we were in Ukraine in 1942, they would have gladly turned in Jews to the Germans so this small-town, rurl “good folk” is bullshit.
HumboldtBlue
Lawrence O’Donnell had a few minutes to talk to people about just how fucking weird Trump’s face paint is.
Mike in NC
We’ve known that author Nick Jacobs for years and his parents live in our community. I’d venture that his study of rural white folks is a bit naive. Driving around small town central Virginia when Obama was first running, the racism we noticed was so thick you could almost cut it with a knife. Then there were the many visits to rural diners to talk to Fat Bastard’s supporters that we’ve read about. It usually boiled down to, “Trump hates [n-word] and so do we!”.
Barbara
I read both articles and the comment I made previously about Jacobs is on par with what Waldman pointed out — his research is overwhelmingly about white people, and he equates “rural” with “rural white” the way many pundits equate “working class” with “white working class.” Yes, rural people are more likely to be white, I do understand that, but the difference in views between rural whites versus their non-Caucasian counterparts makes Jacobs’ speculation about the benign racial attitudes of rural whites to be especially weak sauce.
If your choices are to die of thirst or share water with everyone else and you would rather die of thirst, then I will still try to make sure everyone gets water including you, but I sure as heck don’t have to care about your survival more than you do.
That’s kind of where I am at on the whole rural politics issue.
Frankensteinbeck
Crucial to understanding this is to know that conservatives went looking for someone to tell them the lies they want to hear, which in turn makes them more extreme in a vicious cycle. When most of Fox thought they shouldn’t touch the Dominions conspiracy theory, why did they lean heavily into it? Because if they didn’t, their viewers would abandon them for someone who did.
Similarly, nobody shoved Trump on Republican voters. Republican voters heard him call Mexicans rapists and they demanded him, telling the Republican establishment to fuck off.
There are other weird bits of resentment. Like, ‘coal miners’ in Appalachia, almost none of whom are actually coal miners. They are royally pissed that the ‘coal miner’ identity is dying because coal mining is dying, and they don’t want economic help, they want someone to promise they’ll be ‘coal miners’ forever. I don’t think this one ties into race anywhere, but it’s certainly the same identity politics.
Baud
@Barbara:
Ain’t nothing new. (Warning: n-word)
Re-construction, or “a white man’s government” | Library of Congress (loc.gov)
Lurker
In the city, someone might walk down the street and stab you in the chest.
In the country, they know it’s much more polite to stab you in the back.
Doug R
As someone who watched the early boomers snag all the good jobs before us, I had resentment. I think pretty much everybody this day has resentment.
It’s these right wing politicians who carefully nurture resentment and turn it into rage on their rage farms.
MattF
@Baud: Did not know that Currier & Ives were libtards.
Jackie
@HumboldtBlue: He must have Kari Lake mirrors – plus there’s been mentions over the years that he’s too vain to wear the glasses he obviously needs. Melania obviously tells him very sincerely, “you look very handsome, dauhling!”
p.a.
@Frankensteinbeck: I remember during or after the ’16 election, given the coverage (🤬), someone online quipped, “who the fuck knew so many people wanted to work in factories or coal mines?”
MattF
@HumboldtBlue: It’s remarkable. This is how he wants to appear.
Jeffro
We don’t have to concern ourselves with Rural America if we push to get rid of the EC at every opportunity.
Nelle
@Doug R: Hmmm, am I early or middle boomer (born in 1951)? The recession of 81/82 had me without any work for over a year and I didn’t qualify for unemployment. We ate a lot of lentils.
Making generational statements ( even within a generation) is simplistic and misleading.
persistentillusion
@Ryan: Also a quality Reuben sandwich.
Bill Arnold
@HumboldtBlue:
If Trump can’t look at himself in the mirror, he can always use the makeup-mode camera on his smartphone.
This is the well-known workaround for vain entities in the vampire class.
bbleh
@Frankensteinbeck: yup. “My daddy worked in the mines all his life and that was a good job …” blah blah blah. Uh-huh, and the reason employment in the industry has contracted over 90% since that time? Mechanization? Profit? Contraction in demand? “Wellll, my daddy …”
I think some of it is fear of the unknown &/or the different. If not coal mining then what? And it extends to many things, eg immigrants in the community. And yes, a feeling that they’re just gonna get abandoned (like the mining companies have done to them, although somehow that connection doesn’t get made a lot of the time). And they DO see the decay, and the way young people leave and don’t come back.
It’s a vicious cycle. But it breeds some pretty nasty attitudes. I don’t wanna hear about those small-town virtues, something something church-going folk something. Mean as cat dirt, some of ’em.
schrodingers_cat
Hasn’t this topic been written about and debated to death? Political analysts are like cows chewing this regurgitated cud. How about an analyis of rural voters, white and otherwise who haven’t given in to this politics of resentment.
Tom Levenson
Inevitable.
A Ghost to Most
Once you brainwash em with religion, they will believe, and do, anything. That’s just as true in WNY as in Texass.
Albatrossity
“The worst part about being lied to is knowing you weren’t worth the truth”
Jean-Paul Sartre
bbleh
@schrodingers_cat: [sighs, scratches “schrodingers_cat” off list of NYTimes columnist candidates]
TheronWare
The Electoral College must go.
Barbara
@bbleh: My granddaddy worked in mines when it was NOT a good job. It became a good job because the United Mine Workers fought long and hard to make it so. Even the UMW can’t fight mechanization, the disappearance of underground mines, and so on.
UncleEbeneezer
@Barbara: Exactly. And the People of Color who are moving over to the GOP…guess what they usually have in common with their White counterparts? Spoiler: they think we’ve already done enough (or too much!) for Black People. I guarantee that is true for rural PoC who lean Republican too.
raven
@Frankensteinbeck: Steve Earle Mountain
Jay C
@Barbara:
A good point: I read through Jacobs’ piece, and among the other inanities I noted (besides his near-apoplectic PO at the conflation of “rage” and “resentment”: though AFAICT, the definitions work out to be pretty much the same in the political context) was his insistence on trying to qualify “rural working class” as NOT equating to “white rural working class”. And failing, IMO: he did note that the rural population was “only” about 80% white; though in political and/or socioeconomic terms, it might as well be 100%…
raven
@Barbara: Mine too. My old man spent the war on a Tin Can in the Pacific and went down with his FIL once. Never again he said.
NotMax
Obligatory.
;)
Barbara
@Jay C: Waldman’s point was that Jacobs spent no more than five pages in his book specifically discussing the views of non-white rural people.
Regarding rage versus resentment, here too, Waldman is fairly perceptive, his view is that Jacobs dislikes the fact that rage carries a connotation of violence, whereas resentment does not.
Ksmiami
@Baud: Well I am to the point where I think blue areas should have the right to cut these people off.
Dan B
@Barbara: My grandfather owned a coal mine, a wholesale produce business, a 600 acre ranch, studied Greek and Latin, and raised kids who graduated from Oberlin, MIT, and Harvard. His kids all ended up in cities.
Barbara
@Dan B: My grandfather would not let my dad or his brother work in a mine except as a summer job, and even then, he encouraged them to find a different kind of job.
Sister Golden Bear
Years ago I visited Vicksburg, MS and was astounded by frozen-in-time decay, along with a number other MS “zombie towns” I drove through.
California has more than its share of ghost towns, due to our boom and bust economic history, but the reason there’s ghost town is that when the mines played out, people moved on, instead of staying put and insisting the mines would reopen some day. They may not necessarily been happy about it, but they recognized that it’s part of the cycle of life.
theturtlemoves
As someone who’s never lived in a town with over 15k people, I really love hearing about these East Coast academics studying rural folk like it is some fucking anthropological expedition and acting like they really GET the common clay of the New West. And then accusing others of being elitist when they point out some of those folks might be a hint racist and addicted to right wing media. Jackasses.
bbleh
@Barbara: oh don’t start me about the routine mine disasters, especially the ones in which the official numbers killed were far lower than reality because, eg, there were kids in the mines helping their dads and they just didn’t count, you see.
A lot of it is mythologizing, often by people who’ve never seen even modern mining except from a distance, selecting the good points (mining jobs WERE comparatively very good in terms of pay and security for a long while) and letting the bad points (eg crippling physical ailments) disappear in the mist. See also, eg, cowboys who defended their honor and freedom with their trusty side-arms (which had to be surrendered at the sheriff’s office before entering town).
ETA: Don Blankenship, he of the countless safety violations and the Big Branch Mine disaster, is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate. I sincerely just cannot even …
jefft452
@Anonymous At Work:
“but the one thing we can’t give them is special social status.”
“The one thing Democrats WILL NOT, as opposed to ‘cannot’, give them is license to spit upon others.”
And that is why going after the white rural vote is a fool’s errand
Offer to help make their lives better and they will spit in your face (see “Obamacare” debate)
The only thing they want is to hurt our own and our friends
Bupalos
Got back just in time for eclipse totality here in NEO from a “last spring break” trip with the fam to Grand Canyon then down to Padre Island National Seashore then New Orleans and back, all driving, camping, and cheap hotels. It was amazing to see some of our national gems and natural beauty. But I haven’t done a long drive trip in a long time, and I have to say I felt a kind of social decay or decoupling that I really wasn’t prepared for. I feel less confident making electoral predictions. To some extent an insane thing like Trump emerging here feels like it makes more sense to me than it did before. It felt like lives of dysfunction and desperation were everywhere and maybe a sense of “there’s nothing left to lose.”
Also I think Texas would just quite literally collapse without spanish speaking immigrants. I can understand how immigration really dominates politics in that part of the west, it’s just hard to believe the form it takes. They’re sawing away at the branch they’re standing on.
UncleEbeneezer
Black People, Immigrants, LGBTQ (especially Transgender) People, Jews, Muslims etc., generally want nothing to do with rural areas for good reason. And it ain’t the Economic Anxiety and it ain’t real complicated. These are areas where any racial, religious or sexual minority knows that the majority of their neighbors hate their identity and consider them inferior, threatening or in the case of white, cisgender women: made only for wifing, birthing and nothing more. All the Jobs Programs and Economic Development/Investment in the world can’t get around that any time soon.
waspuppet
@HumboldtBlue: About time. I’ve been saying that the way Trump CHOOSES to look is in “We need to have a serious and difficult conversation with Dad” territory for years.
As for Jacobs, the giveaway phrase (there’s always one) is
The identity. Not the material realities, or the details, of rural life. The identity. We all know what that means; some of us are paid a lot of money to pretend not to.
Ksmiami
@jefft452: yep fuck em. We will be better off without them
Bupalos
@Ksmiami: Cut “them” off how? What does that look like in your head?
Origuy
I spent last week driving around southern Ohio and Indiana mostly on rural roads. I saw maybe a half dozen Trump flags, fewer, I think, than I would have a few years ago. They weren’t on the houses with large barns and fields nearby. I think they were on houses where people worked for the businesses that served the farmers lived. Things looked fairly prosperous in places like Wilmington, Ohio and Richmond, Indiana.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Golden Bear: I’m in an Eastern Sierra/Route 395 FB group for camping & weather updates and pretty pics. And the mostly-white members never stop gushing about Bodie. It kinda creeps me out as I suspect there is a lot of nostalgia for the Wild West, good old days, Libertarian Fantasy bullshit in their obsession with times before SSM, Civil Rights, Women’s Suffrage or even Emancipation.
Citizen Alan
@Jeffro: sigh. this again.
The EC isn’t going anywhere because it would require a constitutional amendment and way too many states would see their influence over presidential elections evaporate if the EC went away.
The proper solution is to increase the size of the House so that there is a proper allocation of EC votes to large states. That is doable without a constitutional amendment. Its just politically impossible.
UncleEbeneezer
@waspuppet: I’ve spent enough time in extremely rural places like Sanger, TX and Grantsville, WV to know damn well what the “rural identity” voters want to hear. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that part out. Republicans are just willing to say them and Democrats are not (for good reason.)
Sister Golden Bear
@UncleEbeneezer: Can’t speak for the other groups that you mentioned, but actually about a fifth of queer people live in rural areas. There’s a documentary about that, although I don’t remember the name. IIRC, things like family ties, love of the land, etc. is what motivated them to stay there. Plus, even if it was well-known they were queer, as long as they weren’t explicitly public about it, they were reasonably tolerated.
Personally, I couldn’t do it, but takes all kinds.
lee
287 is right in my backyard and I’ve traveled it almost my entire life.
There are towns along that highway that I’ve seen go from small and thriving to boarded up and dead.
They are also some of the most consistently red voters in Texas. They are about to be completely fucked and I don’t feel sorry for them at all.
Our Gov is pushing hard for vouchers because his billionaire backers want some of that public school money. Those small rural schools will be devastated if vouchers pass. The state reps from those areas stayed strong in our last legislative session (regular sessions are only every 2 years on odd number years) and voted against vouchers. Well the GOP primary was about a month ago and a lot of those reps lost to candidates backed by the aforementioned billionaires. Now those little towns have a choice. Either vote for a Democrat or watch their schools get fucked.
I’m betting they will continue to vote straight Republican and within a decade Friday Night Lights will be a thing of the past. I won’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
Another Scott
@bbleh:
ding!
Without mining, what else have they got? They look around and see little or nothing else for miles and miles….
Change is hard. When you’re a one-horse town, it’s really, really hard.
Hillary tried to help. Biden is trying to help. All we can do is keep trying, because groups of angry people are bad for all of us. Even if grandpa is stuck in his ways, that doesn’t mean that his kids and grandkids and people he interacts with are to the same degree.
If it were easy, it would have been done already.
Cheers,
Scott.
Josie
@lee:
You are exactly correct. I live in Texas, and I was amazed to see what happened in the primary to the representatives who had bravely stood up against Abbott to protect their rural schools. The stupid voters rewarded them by kicking them out of office. What were they thinking?
satby
Not at all my experience. I had friends and they apparently liked me, but the insulting attitudes about “city” people never let up. Neither did the idea city people weren’t the “good” kind of people that my rural neighbors were. What I’ve read from Waldman and Schaller, they’ve diagnosed *white* rural folks pretty accurately.
Starfish
@bbleh: The fear of being abandoned is not unjustified.
Their medical access grows worse every day as rural hospitals are closed for not being profitable enough.
Wapiti
@Barbara: My granddad was a Kansas farm boy recruited to be a scab in the Colorado mines (pre-WWI, maybe). The family tale is that he was back home in Kansas three days later, saying, “I could see why those Colorado boys were striking.”
Starfish
@Sister Golden Bear:
I grew up with a lot of rural queer people, and a number of them are still rural queer people.
geg6
@Barbara:
That’s what my dad did with my brothers, only in a steel mill. They gave families a tour once when I was in junior high. Sure convinced me that higher education was the better path. Of course, my dad would have had a fit if any of us girls had decided to work in the mill. I was doubly convinced when a friend of mine, working a summer in the mill, lost a finger. And I never forgot my dad being off for months when I was about 8 or 9 because while doing his job as inspector in the seamless tube mill, a pile of pipes shifted and took him with them. He had his right ankle broken and his left leg was broken in two places, one a compound fracture. Why people around here still long for those days, I’ll never understand. My parents wanted us all to do better than they had and it worked.
bbleh
@Starfish: true, although some rural hospitals close not due to lack of profitability but to lack of government funding — some county hospitals, as the medical care facilities of last resort, are supported heavily, even primarily, by government funding — because ah don’t want mah hard-earned tax dollers goin’a some buncha moochers. Cutting off their noses to spite their faces, as they say.
Gvg
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:Some of the money that is counted as “going toward rural areas” is more universal not specific and by that I mean it’s for all of us. Maintaining roads to connect everywhere benefits everyone but urban more than rural even though many of the roads go through the rural areas and are used by them and benefit them. The fact that the areas are poor and run down show we are benefiting by the whole economy more than they do. Roads get products and sales from source to consumer. That means big cities, both manufacturing and consuming need those roads. The farmers are just a small part of our economy these days. Everyone needs food, but there are also a million other things we need. The post office and telephone systems are a part of that universal cost too. Every mile of highway costs more than most of us understand. That’s a bunch of the money we “send” to the rural areas. They get some of the jobs, but they don’t benefit directly as much as we do. It is a good use of our money though and helps the whole country.
The problem is that not everyone can pack up and leave AND it’s not that easy to MAKE a place prosperous. Attracting industry doesn’t seem to work that well. I guess because everyone else has the same idea.
lowtechcyclist
@Tom Levenson:
Totally OT: Just wanted drop it in here that I’m about halfway through your Vulcan book, and am enjoying it muchly.
CliosFanBoy
@Nelle: Early. Late Boomers start about 1956-57. Basically, did you (or male peers your age) have to register for the draft to go fight in Vietnam?
Frank Wilhoit
@piratedan: It didn’t start with Murdoch and indeed he is a timid little piker compared to his predecessors.
CliosFanBoy
This is the line my wife and I always repeat to each other when we head into bright red rural areas of Virginia. “We are pilgrims in an unholy land.” youtube.com/watch?v=x1YoAbTwHCU
CliosFanBoy
@Gvg:
I’ve driven on some really nice new broad highways in rural Virginia where I was the only car on the road. But if urban Virginia gets more roads, by gum the rural counties get it as well, even if there’s no one to drive on them.
CliosFanBoy
My Dad was an engineer for GM (Frigidaire in Moraine, Ohio, SALLL-LUTE!), and when I graduated high school, he got me a job on the assembly line. Fourth generation of my family to do so. I think he wanted to let me know what was in store for me if I didn’t do well in college. He may have over-done the lesson as I ended up a fulltime college student for the next ten years. :)
jefft452
@Another Scott:
“Hillary tried to help. Biden is trying to help. All we can do is keep trying, because groups of angry people are bad for all of us.”
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day
Let him stave to death and you never have to listen to him whine for the rest of your life
Martin
So in the telling of any story, what the author says and what the audience hears, don’t actually match. The words match, but the images don’t. What the author is trying to communicate is an image or a concept in their head, and what the audience receives is a different image and concept. They might be close, but they’re never the same. It’s why dogwhistles work – the intended audience for the dogwhistle gets an image or concept which is pretty close to what was intended, but the unintended audience for the dogwhistle gets something completely different, which is the point.
Everyone is interpreting this through a financial economic lens, which isn’t invalid, but it’s not the only lens we use. If that lens was all that mattered, we wouldn’t buy people gifts, we wouldn’t do charity, and so on. There are other economies – emotional, independence, dignity, environmental, etc. Some people care about more than others, and which all of us care about from time to time more than financial.
I regret to inform you that this comment was made 15 years ago:
This is an old idea. The lies are old lies. In 15 years they’ve either not caught on, or they don’t care, or they hear something we don’t hear that is more valuable to them through the lens they use.
I remember 40 years ago going to college and finding myself in Cole’s neck of the woods, a kid from NYC, and interacting with family of friends of mine in rural WV in places that looked WAY worse than the photos above. Homes barely standing. I didn’t understand why they didn’t want things to change – I mean, they did, but not in the ways that I would have changed them, but in certain other ways. I learned a lot of about the Amish, another community that is voluntarily and purposely out of phase with the rest of the national culture and economy. My NYC eyes saw backward people, but I came to learn that they saw themselves as independent people. Grid goes down – doesn’t affect them. Shortages of this or that? Probably doesn’t affect them. Something break, they know how to fix it themselves. They understand the trade-offs and they are find with their choices. They also have complaints that could be solved by making different choices, but these are few binaries in this world. You reject both option A and B and ask for C, which nobody is yet offering.
I think the GOP is getting a lot of what they want. They want an emotional outlet, and they’re getting that. Trump gives them people to be pissed at and license to express that anger as loudly and crudely and illegally as they want. We’re the pillow that they scream into:
Fascists take your rights away but in exchange, you can murder your gay neighbor without repercussion. Surely that has a certain value to the right kind of person. That’s a trade a lot of people will make. You can’t take them off of that path by saying ‘these people are lying to you’ or ‘these people are going to make your town poorer’. They know that. They may not see any outcome that doesn’t result in that. Let’s be honest here, Biden can’t save the town either. He can try, but they’ve seen that before. Oh, we’ll bring Walmart in – and every small business goes under. We’ll incentivize this company – and they turn out to be a scam, or lie about how many workers, or refuse to hire anyone from town because none of them have a masters degree, or whatever. So how do they make lemonade out of a dying town? Well, this guy will let me scream at immigrants and that guy won’t. I mean, it’s something… Nobody is convincing Apple to move any part of their business to Paducah Texas. You can raise cattle, grow cotton, drill oil – that’s the economy and that ain’t changing.
I think you need to find something for these people to aspire to. That’s hard. We offer up climate change in terms of things we need to undo, not things we need to do. Can you put a turbine in Paducah and have the residents keep the money? Can you do that with solar? They’re poor – they can’t capitalize that – so how do you make that happen that doesn’t just exploit them by a different party? Democrats don’t offer any answer there either. So a lot of these people aren’t aspirational at all. That changes how politics is done – a LOT.
SW
Rural America has been in decline for decades. What is insidious about this is who they are constantly told to blame for this. There was a similar dynamic in the 1920’s. The depression started in rural America prior to 1929. But there was no right wing media to speak of then. Populist at times but not the pseudo conservative bullshit that saturates communication channels today. From the depression it was the big bad federal government in the form of The New Deal that saved their asses. They knew it and rewarded it with political loyalty for a generation. Until that generation died off and where replaced by a generation willing to embrace the paranoid self serving vision of of those who have spent their lives in opposition to the principles of The New Deal.
Martin
They don’t, but the rules are VERY clear, and everyone knows the rules.
Again, growing up in NYC, the rules were pretty limited. You are surrounded by people from damn near every culture on earth. Every day is a holiday for someone. Food on one block isn’t cooked like food on the next block. You become very fluid to the cultural rules. There are some shared rules, but they’re pretty simple and often forgiven if you get them wrong.
But in a small town, the rules are much more clear. There are ways you’re allowed to not conform and ways that you must conform. I went from NYC to a town of 3,000. I remember going to the barber in town and there were like 4 haircuts I could get – they didn’t know how to do any others. The honest to god general store in town still had a hitching post out front for the Amish to use. I remember our university diversity exercise – I was a student rep – and they’re asking how to get more students of color and I had to point out this town was 100% white with 3 acceptable protestant denominations. Was there even a catholic in town? Why the fuck would a POC even want to come here? They know what white protestant culture looks like. It’s called TV.
So yeah, you get treated really well if you conform. Holy shit if you don’t… I don’t think there was anything in NYC to conform to. Tipping maybe? How to order a coffee or hail a cab. Not holding up a train. Those would get someone telling you to fuck off. Decent chance you’d never see them again as well.
Soprano2
@HumboldtBlue: I read it today, and as a person who lives in ruby red Missouri I agree that it’s brilliant. I grew up in one of those towns. They get to the heart of the problem. Amanda Marcotte is another person who understands them.
It’s not just them, though. Today I listened to Bill Maher say that Democrats should ditch “identity politics” because the way to address racism is to ignore it.🙄🙄🙄 His mostly white audience applauded because they want to quit thinking about race too.
Soprano2
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Aabsolutely, I’ve always thought it was stupid and condescending that we can’t criticize rural people’s views at all.
Kent
I’m probably late to this thread. But these are my people. I have an enormous extended family of white rural folks with limited educations. Scattered across Oregon, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania mostly. Most are also Mennonite or some other flavor of evangelical.
Rage isn’t really the right word. Resentment maybe, but that doesn’t quite capture it either. Maybe alienation. It is the sense that the country is changing under them and they don’t understand it anymore All the Thai food, rainbow flags, and so forth.
Mostly the story of rural America is productivity gains. Every rural extraction industry: Farming, fishing, logging, mining, ranching. Every bit of it has undergone enormous productivity gains in the past 50 years. One logger can cut down what took 50 loggers to harvest several generations ago. One farmer can farm 10x the acreage as farmers generations ago. It took 50 coal miners in Kentucky to mine what one machine can do in a mountain top removal operation in Wyoming. And a factory trawler in the Bering Sea can catch in one day what it took small boats a year to catch in the 1950s.
So vast numbers of rural people have essentially been made obsolete. Not just miners. Not just farmers. All of them. It is just the hard reality of economics. With the loss or rural small town journalism they also live in a right wing echo chamber of FOX news. There isn’t anything else out there frankly. And so they hear that it is immigrants to blame for their plight. Or welfare programs in the cities. Or transgender kids. Or BLM, CRT, DEI, etc. etc.
There frankly is no answer. Because there is economic logic to cities. There always has been dating all the way back to the Bronze Age fertile crescent. Cities make economic sense and rural areas simply cannot compete for new economy jobs. Back 100 or 150 years ago when rural areas played out, people just moved on. The west is littered with ghost towns. Today that is just impossible politically. And so here we are, trying to prop up rural economies that have no rational reason to exist anymore.
Soprano2
@bbleh: It’s about “manly” jobs. They don’t consider jobs where you use a computer manly enough for them. They mourn the loss of men’s jobs, it’s why they’re so mad coal mining jobs are going away.
Martin
@Soprano2: I don’t think that you can’t criticize, I just argue that it won’t accomplish anything and distracts from things that might.
A lot of people are more motivated to be right than to make things better. We should aspire to be the latter.
Kent
It’s not that. Computer jobs don’t exist in rural areas anyway. From a sheer economic rationality point of view, the only jobs that make sense to do in rural areas are ones that HAVE to be done in rural areas. Namely resource extraction, agriculture, and to some extent natural resource management and certain kinds of tourism. And then the government jobs (teaching, local government, etc.) That is pretty much it. Everything else is more economically efficient to do in larger metro areas.
Rural folks are not stupid. They know if the resource jobs disappear they won’t be replaced by anything meaningful, ever.
Paul in KY
@Lurker: True friends stab you in the front. Heard it in a song…
Paul in KY
@Dan B: They were fortunate to have those resources to use for their betterment. I hope they acknowledge that.
wjca
Not entirely clear why it is politically impossible now.
Kent
Because rural areas have political power now that they never had in the 19th Century. Due to gerrymandering, the Senate, the electoral college, and so forth.
Go back and study the Populist movement, William Jennings Bryan and so forth. Rural folks were seriously disenfranchised back then compared to today.
Martin
@wjca: Because abandoning a community really should be a act of last resort. We’re going to have to make these decisions for communities affected by climate change, making that decision for economic reasons is much harder.
But the other problem is that the US is really bad in terms of worker mobility. Between a consumerist culture which weighs each of us down with a huge amount of stuff and an over focus on home ownership which is simply very transactionally expensive to unwind means that throwing your stuff in your Oldsmobile Model 37 with granny in the back and heading off across the country just isn’t realistic. It’s why the Chinese manufacturing economy was able to grow so rapidly because getting 20 million people to move from the weeds to Shenzhen in 30 years is pretty easy when they don’t have much weighing them down. The rural Chinese standard of living isn’t something we should aspire to, but a little more of that worker mobility wouldn’t be a terrible thing. Things like universal health care can help that along. So could non-market rate housing.
But it’s also part of a dynamic we do see in the US – young people, before they’ve reached this state pack up for college and then for careers wherever. They do migrate from economically weak to economically strong areas. A lot of communities see this as a cause of their problems, when really it’s a measure. The kids see what the parents often refuse to.
Martin
I kind of disagree with this, though. Some of these economies (oil extraction, coal, etc.) we have adequate substitutes for, but others (agriculture) we don’t. But as you note, productivity gains means that you can sustain that agricultural effort – particularly for row crops where 1 person and a combine can manage 1000 acres without much trouble – meaning that the economy the land can carry is both maxed out, and via a population too small to sustain a secondary economy – restaurants and services and the like. So the town dies.
There’s scant few industries left that are location dependent that can carry a substantial economy. CA ag is marginal – much more labor intensive – usually 1-2 workers per acre instead of 1 per hundred or more acres. Eventually productivity gains will come for them as well but where the carrying capacity of a row crop community is usually hundreds of people, in CA it’s easily thousands and that secondary economy holds on. But we need to find ways to sustain our agricultural communities – we absolutely cannot do without them.
LiminalOwl
@Baud: Wow. And things haven’t changed.
DFH
@Albatrossity:
Rural here, too.
When things seem bad, I remind myself that even though I live out in the country, Illinois is a blessedly blue state. Hat tip to Chicago.
I’m downstate, west central, very rural and blue collar. Farming dominates, of course. You’ll see signs “100% American, 0% Socialist” in front of farms happily accepting govt subsidies for grain. Pandemic aid, too.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kent: Thing is, if they have FoxNews they probably have MSNBC. Not to mention a whole World Wide Web of sites where they can get perspectives that aren’t Fox/OAN/Tucker Carlson etc. They CHOOSE to make FoxNews their only news source because it tells them the things they want to hear/believe. I think the problem is much less about Fox News than it is about the fact that the vast majority of their community wants everyone to believe Fox News bullshit and there is strong social pressure for everyone to get in line. If local news papers were still around they would still have to strive for an impossible view from nowhere and avoid any/all appearance of a liberal outlook in order to survive. I grew up in a suburb before Fox News had really arrived and at a time when local papers were still common. But my parents still only got the local papers to see our names in them from high school sports and for obituaries etc., but would completely reject anything they wrote that didn’t fit their conservative views. They were all “liberal bias” unless they were the WSJ, Boston Herald etc. So I’m not sure that a return of local newspapers would really do much. The problem is that a lot of people stay in (or move to) rural areas because they want to live in an ethnically homogenous community where “traditional” views are the norm and everyone is expected to adhere to them. And minorities are fine so long as they keep their Freedom/Equality/Liberation sentiments to themselves. I’m not sure that even magically erasing the RightWing Noise Machine would make a huge difference. This dynamic in Rural America long predated television.
nickdag
@mistermix I didn’t realize you were in Colorado. I live about 10 min from 287 near Boulder.
With @tamarar in Longmont, and I know there are others in the region, we should plan something this summer.