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.
It’s not giving them a pass. But you can blame them and do nothing, or you can try and lift them up.
And you propose I do what exactly? They are dead set on ignoring reality and substituting their supremacist fantasy. Any program that is aimed at uplifting people is deemed communist and assaulted by the very people it’s aimed at helping. Any influx of people and capital that could replace all the lost industry is viewed as an invasion of “elites” or whatever enemy of the day is.
They are ruled by fear and hate of everything that outside of their safe propaganda bubble. They cannot be helped until they are willing to do a bit of introspection, and decide they are open to listening and learning. I will not feel sorry for the people who would happily destroy the world around them just because it doesn’t align with what they want it to be.
I grew up with this. I know these people. I got away from it, and I am happy to never go back.
Give us a viable path fom here to there, given that capitalism doesn’t give a shit about them and that they have been trained to hate SoCiaLisM?
Seriously, if you had a magic wand that could cause the entirety of our federal, state and local governments to want to improve the lot of poor rural Americans, what would result from that?
Because most of the things I can think of, like universal basic income, universal free (at point of access) healthcare, etc, are exactly things that conservative poor rurals have for decades been propagandized to hate as SoCiaLisM.
Myself, I grow tired of hearing that I need to better understand those folks and why they vote as they do. I’ve lived in rural areas, in my youth. It’s among the reasons that I don’t live there now.