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.
The real shame of all this is that we have to care what some of the worst elements of this country think. They are a minority and they live in areas that are not all that strategic when it come to the future, or economics, etc.
Their argument is always “we grow your food!”. And I’ve never understood this argument as a valid one for so many reasons. For one, it’s not like this is done as some kind of altruistic thing, any more than any other industry, lol. So you are part of agriculture, uh, so what? Secondly, most of the food that I personally eat is not grown in the flyover country they seem to indicate. Lastly, things like automation might be coming for all of that and so I don’t know why I or anyone else have to be held hostage by a minority group that happens to be distributed in remote areas of our country and who may have been tenuously connected to food production at some point in the past…