No, Elites. Rural Voters Aren’t a Threat to Democracy.
But increasing polarization between rural and urban America is a worrisome trend.
Ever since candidate Donald Trump swept 66 percent of the rural vote in 2016, bewildered urban and suburban Democrats have wondered aloud: “Why do they vote against their own interests?” But the question they should be asking is: “What are rural voters’ interests and what can we do to help address them?”
After all, as recently as 2008, Barack Obama won 45 percent of the rural vote. A lot of rural folks used to vote for Democrats. What drove so many into the GOP’s corner?
Colby College professors of government Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea set out to answer that question in, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. Drawing from historical data as well as their own survey of 10,000 rural voters, Jacobs and Shea provide a complex analysis of rural attitudes, culture, and voting behavior.
Emphasis on complex. Rural-urban polarization and virtual one-party Republican rule in most rural districts are what I’d call “wicked problems.” Wicked problems are persistent, deeply rooted, multi-faceted problems with no singular cause and no off-the-shelf solution. They resemble intricate knots that are extremely difficult to untangle. Climate change is a wicked problem, as are poverty and homelessness. So too, it seems, is the GOP’s hold over vast swaths of the countryside.
As someone fairly desperate to reverse Democrats’ losses in rural America, I badly wanted to hear that the problem was simple and remediable. Economic implosion? Remedy: Massive public and philanthropic investment in rural communities. Cultural marginalization? Respect rural lifeways and increase their representation in media and entertainment. Fox News radicalization? Revive local journalism.
These diagnoses and prescriptions are correct, according to Shea and Jacobs, but insufficient. They are mere strands, knotted together with a host of other causal agents, including resentment (sometimes but not usually of a racial variety), right-wing cultivation of a nationalized, conservative rural identity pitted against urban “others,” and place-based pride.
When it comes to pinning down the primary drivers of rural-urban polarization, the role of economic precarity is the most difficult to decipher. According to the authors, it’s not clear that rural America is, on the whole, significantly worse off than urban America. Suffice it to say that inequality and poverty are rampant across geographies.
But rural people feel more economic anxiety than their urban and suburban counterparts. Why?
This is where the related concepts of shared fate and place-based identity take on significance. Rural and small town communities are less class-segregated than cities and suburbs, with trailers and fancy homes in close proximity. Wealthier residents may be able to weather downturns (of which there are many, especially in factory towns devastated by the effects of NAFTA), but they’re painfully aware of their neighbors’ plight. What’s more, rural communities are united in defensiveness against those whom they perceive to be denigrating and undermining their way of life. Their collective group identity has many dimensions, but the grievance that stems from being continually disrespected by others is foundational.
Rural residents have strong feelings of attachment, pride and loyalty to their homes. When urbanites disparage their beloved communities as “flyover country” or “backward backwaters” inhabited by “stupid, racist trailer trash,” well, no big surprise, they get mad. Keenly attuned to condescension and scorn, their resentment deepens with every derogatory remark and stereotypical portrayal. And that resentment is grist for a partly true but incomplete story: Their community’s hardships are caused or made worse by urban liberals who don’t care about them, look down on them, and maybe even hate them.
The missing part of the story, of course, is that most Republican elites don’t care about them either. But at least they pretend to.
Even a thriving rural community’s economic prosperity doesn’t inoculate it against a defensive rural identity that binds people together against their detractors. The authors explain that unflattering media portrayals are “a major source of rural grievance—a simmering anger that has politicized their distinctive identity and put them in the service of exploitative politicians willing to wage war on behalf of the real America.” This incredibly important insight invokes what is perhaps liberals’ most pervasive unforced error—the very bad habit of positing themselves as morally, culturally, economically, and intellectually superior to the “deplorables.”
The rural-urban, red-blue divide has become a vicious cycle fueled by a small minority on each side: Urban liberal politicians, journalists, entertainers, and sometimes even government agencies, ridicule and decry the MAGA-deranged, unvaccinated hordes, sometimes even rejoicing when “those people” died of Covid.
Rural folks naturally defend themselves. Most of them quietly lick their wounds and vote Republican, but a minority—about ten percent by Jacob’s and Shea’s reckoning—get extremely riled up. Festooned in MAGA swag, they say and do inflammatory things that get them profiled on cherry-picked TV shows, which then provokes another round of sweeping denunciations of the nativists who are ruining the perfectly multicultural and science-abiding democracy that the righteous progressive elites worship.
And around and around it goes—in an ugly and unnecessary round of mutual contempt and hatred.
Country folk have a long memory for insult, but they don’t need one; the jabs keep coming. For example, newspaper coverage of rural America, the authors show, is scant and skewed toward negative stories such as Trump’s election, Covid, and January 6 (despite rural residents’ underrepresentation among the insurrectionists). As the authors note:
If a community of people continually shake their heads at how they are portrayed, if they feel they are constantly reduced to a caricature, it would make sense that resentment would build—and that a shared fate ethos would gain steam.
Hell hath no fury like a voter scorned.
In politics, perception is reality. If rural people feel disdained, then it behooves those courting their vote to telegraph empathy and respect instead.
The latest categorical condemnation of rural America comes in the form of a book entitled, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. This misleading and supremely unhelpful book enjoyed a mercifully brief moment in the limelight before savvier reviewers, rural progressive leaders, and scholars, including Shea and Jacobs, demolished its factual and analytical foundation.
If there’s an existential threat to democracy, it’s not white rural voters, it’s rural-urban and red-blue polarization. It’s a small minority on each side inciting fear and loathing of some subset of the other. The “Antifa” bogeyman is to the right what “raging white rubes” represent to the left—an intentionally overblown caricature of the other team’s most objectionable characters. Meanwhile, the divide deepens, alienation festers into hatred, and undemocratic measures become rationalized as the necessary means of taming such dangerous elements.
If there’s a loose strand in the wicked knot presented by Jacobs and Shea, it’s that rural voters’ opinions on most issues are only a little, if that, to the right of mainstream public opinion. This presents an opening for local Democratic parties and candidates running in overwhelmingly Republican districts:
Show up with a respectful attitude;
Listen to rural voters’ concerns and grievances;
Build trusting relationships across lines of difference by working together on civic improvement projects (such as the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative’s “Community Works” program); and
Present “place-specific,” bottom-up solutions that most American voters would find palatable.
What are some of these smart solutions? Clean energy projects on abandoned coalfields; materials reuse corridors; free trade school; and investment in local food processing facilities so that small producers can compete against Big Ag. There’s no shortage of good ideas, just a political divide that keeps them from getting the attention they deserve.
Erica Etelson is the Communications Director for the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and co-writes the “Rethinking Rural” column for The Nation. She is the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide.
This is a decent piece, but as a conservative I can't help but chuckle. Respectfully, it seems that every day more and more liberals are waking up to the fact that being disdainful assholes to half of the country isn't good politics. Every word of this article could have been written in 2015 about the prior 10 years. It is why I voted for Trump in 2016...not that I supported him so much as I despised what the left thought of me and folks like me. I foresaw the dangers that lie ahead for anyone on the wrong side of their ire should they retain power. The last 8 years have proven me right.
I believe we are in the early phase of a true political re-alignment that began when the left abandoned their class-based strategy for one based on identitarian politics....demographics as destiny. This worked pretty well when the strategy focused on minorities and immigrants. Leveraging their complete control over the media, journalism, academia, and entertainment, the left effectively painted the other side, all 80M+ of us, as hateful bigots (bible clutching, gun toting, deplorables) while promising goodies to their constituents every four years and then do nothing meaningful for them when it came time to govern. The strategy jumped the shark with 1) their unquestioning support for the government technocrats during Covid and their glee at punishing the dissent of 'wrong thinking' Americans (many of them rural) and 2) their support for the insanity that is gender theory to the point where they cast anyone who questions the medical castration of children as...once again...hateful, bigoted, racist. Oh and toss in an insane open borders immigration policy for good measure...wash, rinse, and repeat on the 'hate has no home here' nonsense.
Oh, yeah, and the unprecedented prosecution of your political enemies isn't a great look if you're claiming the mantle of 'protectors of democracy'. There is so much hypocrisy it's difficult to keep it all straight.
The problem liberals now have is that, in a post-covid world, people are questioning everything. That tends to happen when authoritarians criminalize dissent. They have been exposed as the political animals they are. This article, again respectfully, is a testament to that. Why does it require a looming election 5 months out that polls suggest your are losing for you to snap to the conclusion that the way you've treated your fellow Americans, rural and conservative alike, is wrong? The answer seems not to be that you have a new-founded curiosity for the needs of those you've overlooked; let alone have you any remorse for how you've treated them. Rather, it seems to be like it always is with liberals...bad polling data.
Liberals are hoping they can shift on dime and convince people they are, once again, the party of the people...of the working class and down-trodden. I just don't think it works this time. That said, a good start would be to expel from your ranks those blowhards with megaphones who find glee in dismissing, condemning, and calling for the re-education of those who support the opposing party candidate. That's truly scary rhetoric, though Mao would be impressed.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying it's pretty simple...be good human beings. That's always good politics.
Dems seeking to help rural voters, would aid their endeavor, if they would stop talking about them, as if they were zoo animals. Rural areas, like cities, are a mixture of wealthy, poor and middle class residents. The grizzled farmer in the beat up pick up, may own a farm worth millions of dollars, but he will never mention that fact. The one thing that separates him, from urban millionaires, is the empathy he feels for those around him, with less financial resources.
Dems have spent the last 3 years informing voters the economy is fabulous, they are just too stupid to realize how good they have it, compliments of DC. It would be comical, if it were not so nauseating. Since Biden entered the WH, the cost of American life has risen $1000 a month. That is an indisputable fact. Rural voters do not want government handouts, they want the prices they had pre Biden.
Moreover, little enrages rural voters more than student loan forgiveness and $7500 handouts to people earning $225K a year, buying an $80K EV. Rural people believe in helping those in need. The SV Billionaire Bank bailout, paying the student loans of married 26 year old lawyers and doctors earning $250K together, on their way to 1/2 million dollar paychecks in middle age, hardly qualifies.
Finally, rural voters know how food is produced and shipped. Ditto for construction materials, timber, oil and the rest of life's necessities. They view EVs like Sports Cars, toys for boys. They drive vast distances to work and their kid's school. They are always in a hurry, because there is always more work to be done. Many require real trucks for work, and large SUVs for carpools. The notion of a half an hour charge, for a small performance car, as opposed to 5 minute gas tank refill, strikes most as insane. If Dems would stop shoving EVs down their throats, and allow for organic development, it would not hurt.