An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue
https://newrepublic.com/article/180570/trump-rural-white-resentment-honest-assessment
An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue
https://newrepublic.com/article/180570/trump-rural-white-resentment-honest-assessment
29 comments
Why do we always have to coddle the backwoods hicks who constantly hold this country back? These people tried to overthrow our government and I’m supposed to care about their feelings?
“I hate the gubment, where’s my disability, heating oil assistance and food stamps!”
Cutting to the chase: Trump *still* will not do anything for struggling whites.
He already proved that during his first term as president.
If you aren’t rich, he could not care any less about you.
People who vote for him anyway are suckers.
It’s just not that complicated, guys. They are both afraid of change and resentful of the benefits of change they refuse to participate in passing them by. They’re largely racist, xenophobic, and insular, and due to the fact that they are exclusively surrounded by people just like them, that’s a normal and comfortable way to be. They stake a large part of their identity on being independent and self sufficient, yet continually demand subsidies and special treatment and wellfare while continuing to vote in people who very much want to take all of that away.
What you have in rural areas is the sticky residue of America. All the good ones get out, and the ones who are left make more people just like them.
There’s your honest assessment.
> 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 worse than that. Republicans refusing to pass the ACA Medicaid expansion is the reason a lot of those rural hospitals are closing. Republicans shielding big pharma companies is the reason rural communities got pumped full of opiods.
Republicans are actively hurting rural voters, but rural voters keep voting Republican because they care more about culture war bullshit than they do about their own communities.
This article is extremely well written. One part stands out:
>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 about time that we bluntly message to rural communities that nothing about GOP policy is in line with the true struggles in their communities.
And I agree with the sentiment throughout this piece — scholarly work in this area needs to stop treating this population with kiddie gloves, because a dangerous storm is brewing if we leave their resentment unaddressed.
I’ve driven through many rural areas and small towns in the South. I can understand why there’s anger, but it can hardly be blamed on Hollywood or libruls. They let their own towns rot to pieces.
I grew up in rural Missouri in the 70s and 80s and I remember the stubborn pride of country people. They prided themselves on ignorance and mistrust of city people. Reminds me of that Hank Williams Jr. song “Country Boy Can Survive” or something along those lines. They resent educated people. I took my east coast wife back to Missouri once and my cousin’s husband said to her “I bet you think we’re all a bunch of dumb rednecks, don’t ya?” It was like, well… those are your words. Republicans weaponized this against them via AM radio and Fox and they have fallen in line to vote against themselves for the last forty years.
I lived for over a decade in a decaying small rural farming town. The people there actively shoot themselves in the foot and complain about the results. I don’t know what to say, but they’re anti-education, anti-change, and things have been going downhill since the 1950s. At some point you have to decide they like complaining more than helping themselves and just walk.
The good ol days aren’t coming back. There’s no way we’re going back to an agrarian or mining society and populations will move back to small towns that focus on only those things.
Liberals also did not make Rural Whites give Republicans credit for everything that they can clearly see Democrats did for them, and blame Democrats for damage that Republicans clearly did to them. It’s not misunderstanding, it’s deliberate willful ignorance and hatred.
Isn’t being afraid the conservatives whole shtick?
COVID misinformation was decimating to the low information rural whites. And related conspiracy theories, they believe everything progressive is intended to harm rural whites. You can’t break the FOX stanglehold without breaking FOX.
“We don’t want to get better. We want you to get worse.”
There you go. That’s what those people are.
The most damning part about White Rural America’s unwavering support for Trump is that, in his 4 years in office, he did not do a damn thing to materially help them. Oh, but he did make it seem more acceptable to be a raging, self-serving bigot. So perhaps rural america did get what they wanted after all.
The media has been writing think pieces on this for almost a decade now.
I’m from a tiny town in Illinois. They are undereducated and brainwashed.
It’s not just rural white resentment – the nastiest (are arguably least justified) resentment is largely based in predominantly white suburbs.
It’s not truly rural white resentment. Because if it were, Vermont and Western Massachusetts would be really red.
Rather, it’s lower class white resentment. Staten Island and Huntington Beach are not exactly rural yet they are full of trumpanzees.
Honestly it’s one of the most fascinating looks into a “politically self-inflicted wound” you can find.
Republicans exist to help the ultra-wealthy and utterly destroy any protections for everyday Americans. Environmental regulations? Fuck that noise. Social safety nets? Burn them to ashes.
It’s not JUST that their entire platform exists to solely benefit the rich. You also have to factor in the knowledge that they are doing so in a way that can cause the most harm to the other 90%.
And before any trolls hop in: Yes, Democrats are also largely bought and paid for by those exact same ultra-rich sociopaths. Many of them ARE those rich sociopaths. The biggest difference, however, is that they at least ATTEMPT to pay lip service to helping the middle and lower class. They even sometimes actually pass legislation that directly helps them too. Name a SINGLE thing republicans have done in DECADES that directly helped the working-class. Go for it. And the Trump-era tax cuts are sadly not an example (the VAST majority of those went to the ultra-wealthy and any paltry tax breaks everyone else got already expired while the top earners’ didn’t.)
It isn’t even a contest. And yet these rural white communities are, by and large, solid red countrysides. Their resentment is delusion and their pain is self-inflicted.
Rural whites? Get an education that would help you live a more comfortable life. Please read a few books that could open your minds to greater possibilities. Protect our democracy
Honest assessment?
Rush Limbaugh
Fox News
GOP talking points
White Privilege
Ignorance
Blend it all together over 30 years and you get MAGA..or, Rural White Resentment
This article makes me think about the red state I used to live in, and their low placement in national rankings of any meaningful quality of life measurement (poverty, infant mortality, health outcomes). I think about my old neighbors’ hatred of “government”. And then how they vote a single party in. With rare exception. For the last hundred or so years. And somehow still manage to blame the party they *didn’t* vote in.
So, you’re gonna write a whole article, talking about “rural” Americans (and you’re gonna as far to say this word has different meanings) and you’re not gonna say it? Poor white people. There it is. Poor white people. White people who are poor. Saying it is taboo in our country. But we need to start saying it and acknowledging it.
Grew up rural in the 80’s but wanted to do sciency stuff, so had to leave. My school was awesome at the time despite its small size and I managed it. Don’t worry, the local GOP fixed that right up the moment they had the chance. Lower taxes you see and fuck the other parents’ kids because we’re rugged individualists and if we don’t need an education nobody else does neither. Nobody’s escaped town without joining the military the past couple decades per the stories I get.
Came back 30 years later and found that some of the houses still had paint jobs that I had given them at age 18. These rural types are so lazy they can’t pick up a paintbrush for a weekend in 30 effing years to keep the house they are actively living in from rotting into the ground around them? Such pride!
And the stories they tell…they are so backwards at this point they can’t even connect the dots about the poor decisions they’ve made even as the spew out the words — in one moment crying about the local hospital closing and naming too many people dying during the 45 minute drive to the regional hospital while not even ten minutes later they’re also proudly reliving how they ran that strange turban wearing new doctor and his oddball family right the hell out of town. Too bad they haven’t found a replacement yet, but they stopped trying after a couple years because it’s just too hard. But to compensate hey they got a big new almost megachurch on the edge of town for the funerals so it’s all good.
In another moment these guys are remembering how many stores we used to have, now all gone, and families we both knew that moved away when they couldn’t make a go of it anymore. Of course they don’t remember the older generation warned them this is exactly what would happen when the new Walmart moved in a couple towns over. They got some cheap plastic shit for a few pennies less really while letting some family in another state suck their money into billionaire bank accounts while turning the main street into a ghost town where half the buildings got bulldozed because a dozen empty buildings is more tolerable than two or three dozen. It’s like they forgot ALL the lessons of the great depression and how you keep your money circulating in your own community. Then again, I guess I was the only one who used to hang around for the old farts telling stories about those tough times.
But I make it sound like they got no good stories. They have loads! All kinds of stories about shootin’ and huntin’ and fishin’ too! Nothing about creating stuff of course, nothing about reading a book for fun either. Shit I remember being somewhere around 10 or 12 and having an old (still with an accent immigrant) farmer quizzing me about Dickens to see if we learned it in schools. He had a full room library that I still have not matched. He’s dead now of course, his family lost the farm and I don’t know where they ended up. He was one educated guy but clearly I am lying because the current conventional wisdom holds that all farmers must be simple men raised on country music and beer.
In all of this hand-wringing about how I am supposed to understand where they are coming from I have some hand writing for them — If Rural America doesn’t have pride in itself, if they no longer have the fortitude to make their lot in life better through hard work and determination, why exactly should I have sympathy for them?
They sure are going to be surprised when they finally realize it’s been rich white people fucking them over this whole time.
Some may even reject reality, rather than deal with this revelation.
>Soon after, Jacobs and his co-author write, “On a range of race-related questions, responses from rural residents veer from those of other Americans—and even from other Republicans—in significant ways.” **As you might have guessed, “veer from” is the euphemism they deploy to say that rural whites express more racist attitudes.** “And yet,” they go on, “for many rural residents, attitudes about races are intimately linked to perceptions of hard work, self-reliance, a disdain for government handouts, and the dangers of elites.” What they’re arguing, then, is that it’s not that many rural whites (to reiterate, not all, but many) are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
Sounds racist to me. Let’s not pretend that these rural Republicans aren’t down low KKK members.
As a white, male, middle aged communist who lives in a very rural county that glows red, who has actually read Waldman’s book, the sentiments expressed in this article are spot-on. I am generally sympathetic toward the plight of the butt hurt victims of late stage capitalism, but my neighbors need to take responsibility for letting themselves be misled and use their self reliance to purge themselves of the obviously exploitative information streams that turn them into tools of the entities they claim to loathe.
My parents live out in East Texas. The whole area is enraged that the local energy company is shutting down a coal plant and building a solar farm.
You can drive through the area and see signs in yards of people who are actively trying to stop the building of the solar plant, and literally everyone believes the coal plant is closing due to some unknown Obama regulation.
Nobody takes any time to investigate that the plant closed becaues coal is unprofitable compared to other energy investments the energy company could make… like the solar farm.
You can show people this, like even the publicly known corporate documentation, and they will just ignore it. And they do that with everything.
These people live in completely different worlds.
I live in a rural area. A girl was bitchin about not finding a job since Biden. I told her about my DIL, who just got hired at 31/ hour plus benefits. She said she’s not driving 20 minutes for a job.
They are trying to bring a manufacturing facility into area. You can find signs 20 miles out in rural area saying you’re not bringing those jobs here.
I have found them to be lazy with a life’s goal of making 150K a yr mowing each other’s lawn.
They don’t want to take care of schools and communities. Boss Hogg would feel at home wallowing in this area.
The weekends and holidays are filled with guns going off all day with an occasional blast of Tannanite.
Prices in stores are much higher than cities with a limited selection.
They are not all bad, but I haven’t got a neighbor I trust. There are always homes being broken into.
Rural areas have little health care due to politics. Kids are always sick from school. Now you may think I’m Nuts but you can pull up to a 4 way stop and watch how cars don’t move because they don’t trust each other. Deplorable