The outrage over White Rural Rage

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 12, 2024

Early in my first year at the Big U, a new friend from Chicago’s south side asked me what he thought was an innocent question. “You’re from southern Illinois,” began Vince, “so why don’t you talk like a hillbilly?”

Like a what? I asked.

“You know,” he explained, “why don’t you talk with a drawl and say ‘ain’t’ a lot?”

When I told him no one I knew in southern Illinois spoke like that, Vince, a budding engineer, was unable to square his circle. For years thereafter he introduced me as “a farm boy from southern Illinois but not a hillbilly!”

Vince’s unchanging understanding served his unchanging ignorance. Hillbilly, to him, was anything or anyone–including me–somehow connected to the word “southern.”

He wasn’t alone. Canadian rocker Neil Young made a similar leap in his 1970 anthem “Southern Man.” In his 2012 autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, however, Young apologized for the mistake. 

Others have made the jump and remain comfortable in their view of “southern” and “rural.” J.D. Vance, a one-time venture capitalist and now U.S. senator from Ohio, won instant acclaim with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, set in Appalachia. The New York Times called it “one of the six best books to understand Trump’s win” later that year.

Others–me included–read it and thought it was more Vince-like than Vance-like: hollow, shallow, and more commercial than cerebral. Vance’s fellow Appalachian, economist William Easterly, called Elegy a “sloppy analysis of collections of people–coastal elites, flyover America, Muslims, immigrants, people without college degrees…”

I wouldn’t have been so kind.

Now comes another presidential election year, another election featuring Donald Trump, and another book to explain why me and my extended, white rural family are so enraged at our position in life that we are not just “a” but “the” biggest threat to our nation’s survival.

Like most books about rural, white folk these days, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, is also a New York Times bestseller. 

But dozens of critics, many whose research the book’s co-authors, Paul Waldman and Thomas S. Schaller cite, are less thrilled. Several, like Nicholas F. Jacobs in his April 4 takedown of the book for Politico, have made clear that the book’s use of their scholarly work has been “misinterpreted and misunderstood.”

Jacobs, a political scientist at Maine’s Colby College, continues: “What the authors get wrong about rural America is exactly what many Democrats have been getting wrong for decades… (T)hat rural political identity has morphed into resentment–a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and the party that seeks to empower them, Democrats.”

But resentment, Jacobs rightly points out, is not rage. “Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience….” Rage, however, “implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion.”

That’s true for most rural voters that I know: they are rational, resentful, and Republican because they see the institutions at the center of their lives–churches, schools, families, and communities–rapidly changing with only one political party, the GOP, consistently acknowledging the changes.

To them, it’s about politics, not policy; practicality, not philosophy; empathy, not antipathy.

And, sure, many GOP politicians have made an art of telling rural Americans exactly what they want to hear. Unlike so many Democratic politicians, however, at least they show up to ask.

Former Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill often told the story of how after his initial election to Congress in 1952 he asked his mother if she had voted for him. Yes, she replied, but it was close.

Close? asked the wounded son. Why?  “Because,” she said, “you never asked me.”

“I learned that night,” O’Neill explained, “that all politics are local.”

Any rural American can tell you the same thing. Just come by and ask.