Former President Donald Trump speaks at rally Saturday in Greensboro, N.C. (Scott Muthersbaugh for The Washington Post)
Listen
5 min
Share
Comment
Add to your saved stories
Save
Patient efforts to “understand” Donald Trump’s voters and their grievances have occupied frequent-flying journalists for almost a decade. The rules of those reporting trips, rarely violated, stipulate that the frayed vinyl booths in a thousand heartland diners in a thousand small towns are judgment-free zones.
(Random House)
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman are here with a corrective. These voters, Schaller and Waldman write in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” are complicit, and the authors are in no mood to condescend to them. Someone write a new elegy for the bilious hillbilly, because these authors went for his jugular.
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman are here with a corrective. These voters, Schaller and Waldman write in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” are complicit, and the authors are in no mood to condescend to them. Someone write a new elegy for the bilious hillbilly, because these authors went for his jugular.
It’s not that the authors discredit legitimate grievances. They dutifully document how the country — the modern world — has abandoned rural America. People who live there are demonstrably worse off than their urban and suburban cousins. Good health care, good jobs, good schools and even good WiFi are scarce; drug addiction, gun suicide and crime are plentiful (yes, Oklahoma does have a higher violent crime rate than New York or California). But what Schaller and Waldman also document, scrupulously, is how much outsize power rural White voters have but squander on “culture war trinkets.” Wyoming has two senators for not quite 600,000 people; California’s two serve around 39 million. The way our democracy is set up — not just its lopsided Senate but also its thumb-on-the-scale electoral college — rural Americans could be its biggest beneficiaries, if not its drivers. They are not. They are not even its biggest fans, in Schaller and Waldman’s telling.
Also, they vote Republican. This confounds the authors, because “there is no demographic group in America as loyal to one political party as rural Whites are to the GOP that gets less out of the deal.” By less, they mean policy prescriptions — stuff that might better their lives. What these voters do get from Republicans, the authors argue, is someone to stoke their rage — to fuel its flame from a bottomless stack of cultural kindling. Republicans long ago figured out that it is really the blue yonder that makes rural White voters see red. Exacerbate the villainy in that city-country divide and you have yourself some dependable voters.
Enter the Pied Piper of dark traits, “a walking repudiation of every value rural Americans claim to hold.” He’s a truth-challenged billionaire from Queens, true, but he’s got no truck with “shithole” countries, Mexican judges, traitorous generals, Soros-backed “animals” and radical left thugs that live like vermin. What’s not to like? Or better yet, this being a Christian nation, worship?
Tom Schaller. (Research Graphics at UMBC)
“Never before in American politics has a single syllable carried so much symbolic weight,” the authors write in a chapter they title “The Unlikely King of Rural America.” “‘TRUMP’ is thrust at liberals, chanted at high school games when the opposing team contains a lot of non-White kids, shouted in the air, and scrawled on the sidewalk, carrying boundless aggression in its percussive simplicity. It says I’m mad and We’re winning and Screw you all at the same time.”
Maybe it starts with the preferred status rural Americans have long enjoyed as the country’s “real” Americans. It’s not coastal elites who think they are better than everyone else, but heartlanders. And the funny thing is that coastal elites have always tended to agree with them. The authors quote Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”
No comments:
Post a Comment