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.
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.
I dated a girl from one of those small towns. Pretty much everyone either worked at the school, the county hospital, or the Hormel factory.