Who Cares About the Plight of Rural America?

Policy failures and misdirection

I’ve been binging “Resident Alien” on Netflix. Originally shown on the SyFy channel, it stars Alan Tudyk (of “Firefly” fame) as an alien who crash-lands in a Colorado mountain town and takes the personality of the town doctor. Most residents of the town don’t know he’s really an alien. It’s funny and touching and is a testament to the community values of a small town. People in the community have been there for most of their lives and believe in its values.¹ While the over-eager mayor of the town worries about the competition with another neighboring community, there isn’t a lot of space given to the normal issues that confront small-town America (which would clearly take away from the show’s charm).

In the early 1990s, I lived in Sterling, a small town in Kansas (population < 2,000). Granted, it was a college town which protected it from some of the economic challenges of its neighboring communities. Three times every day — at seven, noon and five — the siren sounded from the water tower to let farmers know it was time to head out or come in for lunch and dinner.

Sterling, like a lot of rural communities, was financially precarious. It had little of the conveniences that many of us take for granted. The grocery closed at 7:00, the nearest fast-food restaurant was eight miles away, there was one stoplight, one pizza place, and the Walmart was 23 miles away. The main street shops were hard to maintain. It was both socially and politically conservative.

A little more than a decade after I left Sterling, Thomas Frank wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”. Recognizing that Kansas was the home of the Grange movement that advocated for rural needs, his title question asked why things changed. Why had Kansans embraced the culture war fights offered up by Republican politicians instead of addressing their substantive material issues?² In retrospect, he was unkind to the people who lived there and offered up the coastal “we know better” views rightly critiqued today.

This background is what made me eager to read Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s new book, White Rural Rage³ that came out last week. Schaller is a political scientist at University of Maryland Baltimore County. Waldman was until recently (they let him go) one of my favorite op-ed writers at the Washington Post.⁴

Here’s a relevant section from the prologue to the book laying out its thesis.

The devastating force of late-stage capitalism has inflicted enormous damage on rural Americans. But we are more concerned with how the political system responded and, specifically, why so few rural Americans have noticed that they've been exploited and lied to by the conservative politicians they elect. Their own leaders deploy a sophisticated propaganda system meant to ensure that every problem rural America faces will be blamed on faraway forces and people who have little if any actual influence on rural Americans' lives. It's the best way to stoke the voters' seething —that and telling them the solution to their problems will always be to elect more conservative Republicans, who will continue to pend more effort in ratcheting up rural anger than in addressing the problems confronting rural communities. (5)

They address the litany of issues that have ravaged rural America in recent decades. Yes, there were jobs that moved overseas. But there was also the growth of corporate farming, the shuttering of local businesses, the closure of hospitals, the explosion of Dollar General stores, and the limited home equity destroyed in the Great Recession.

They also document the disproportionate political advantage present in rural America as a result of the Senate configuration, the Electoral College, and gerrymandering. Yet this comparative political advantage hasn’t been reflected in solutions to the issues listed above.

Part of that gap echoes the argument made by Frank years ago. So much of the focus of modern politicking is to stoke anger at the coastal elites, Hollywood, and big cities. It’s easier to be concerned about a trans person promoting Bud Light or to demagogue about library books or worry about caravans than to seriously address the lives of people who live in rural communities.

In the final chapter, the authors recount a conversation they had with Representative Chip Roy of Texas. They asked if he had an agenda to meet the needs of his rural constituents. Confused, Roy spoke of hot button issues like illegal immigration and complaints about inflation and described his opposition to the farm bill. I’m reminded of a phrase in Martin Luther King’s Dream speech regarding voting:

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

When rural America feels like nobody cares about their issues (and yet treats them as taken-for-granted), they are in the same position. What difference does voting make if the people you vote for don’t address your issues?

In laying our their argument, Schaller and Waldman focus on four interrelated issues that set the stage for rural discontent: white despair, outsized political power, the veneration of white rural residents as “real Americans”,⁵ and media triggering through talk radio and cable news.⁶

The four factors we identified in this book as the foundation of America's rural problem provide a political strategy for those who benefit from the status quo. The deep challenges affecting rural Americans — in economic opportunity, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and more — keep so many of them dissatisfied and disgruntled. Their elevated status as the essential minority provides a means to pander to them even as the distance between what they get and what they feel they deserve widens. Their outsize electoral power enables Republicans to retain control of government, often to such a degree that the party is all but exempted from electoral competition. And they are represented at all levels by politicians who use these structural, material, and cultural conditions to manipulate rural Americans in ways that translate into little or no improvement in their lives-and often make those lives worse.

For those politicians, the threats we have identified coming from rural White America — racism and xenophobia, conspiracism, anti-democratic beliefs, and the justification of violence — are not threats at all. They're either not a problem to worry about or, even worse, tools that can be used to maintain their anger in whatever direction the politicians find most advantageous. (229)

I like the solution they offer. They suggest that rural America needs the elements of a social movement with a political agenda put forth to politicians to take seriously. They could demand that their politicians (like representative Roy) actually develop legislative solutions that would address their issues of economic transformation, health care access, small business development, and the like.⁷ In all likelihood, they would remain Republicans but their representatives would feel compelled to do something about their situation. On rare occasions, a Democratic candidate might even be able to provide solutions they would find attractive which would improve our small-d democracy over where it is now.⁸

1. One of the ongoing bits involves how a group of 59 miners who escaped a mine collapse went back in to rescue the one left behind (somewhat biblical!). But then there was another collapse that killed them all.

2. I highly recommend Brian Alexander’s books that address the challenges of rural life. His Glass House addressed the problems in Lancaster, Ohio after a series of leveraged buy-outs devastated the Anchor Hocking plant there. His The Hospital addresses the struggles of a small county hospital in Bryan, Ohio.

3. In an interview last week, Schaller said that “rage” was the publisher’s idea. They actually talk of resentment in the book.

4. His SubStack is here:

5. I’ve written before about Sarah Palin’s exploitation of this idea in 2008.

6. They rightly ask why it is that when Democrats say insensitive things about rural America (“clinging to guns and religion”) it creates an uproar but nobody thinks twice when Republicans denounce cities as “burned out husks riddled with crime”.

7. There is an obvious parallel here for urban Blacks to demand that Democrats deal with concrete issues confronting cities.

8. I’m sharing this post with my congressperson since our district is about half rural.