The academy has again blamed me for choices made by others. I’m an easy target; I’m an urban liberal. (Detractors throw in “elitist” but, as with much public discourse, it’s unclear what that means other than, naturally, that it’s intended as a slur. Whatever the case, I’m once more getting something wrong.)
It happened before. After Trump’s election in 2016, countless journalists preached how Democratic voters like me needed to “understand” the anger of Trump voters. First, I wasn’t aware I had that responsibility. Second, even if I did, my subsequent search of what, precisely, Trump voters were angry about consistently proved fruitless.
What one did encounter can reasonably be described as the inchoate rage of people who, each for his own personal reasons, preferred to burn down the house, an act of political nihilism that not only didn’t help him but caused harm to the rest. Fact-based explanations? Beyond childish foot-stomping, nothing.
Eight years later, here we are, again blaming liberals, this time for how rural communities see things. True, it irresponsibly overstates the case to brand rural communities as, by themselves, a “threat” to the republic. But it’s hardly inaccurate to say that, in combination with kindred spirits, they play a material role in the collective threat.
Whether it was curiosity or masochism, then, which had me wade through the article of Professor Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) I’m not sure. Probably both. It was an exasperating experience, starting with the topic’s dependence on generalizations and, worse, opinion polls whose relationship to street-level reality is tenuous.
He makes a meal of the distinction between the “resentment” (rational) of rural voters and the “rage” (irrational) of liberals who criticize them. “Rage,” now ubiquitous, has lost meaning. But his exercise is hair-splitting, not least because for resentment to be rational it still needs a factual basis. All I see is vague sentiment.
For my money, “spite” far more accurately describes the dynamic prevailing on the Right, though one hardly unique to rural voters. If a “liberal” (read non-reactionary) suggests it, it is reflexively condemned, not on its merits but because of who suggested it. How that’s rational, or not childish, is beyond me.
In passing, this highlights another aspect of what we see, namely, the one-way street. Rural voters don’t care about urban life. But more than not care, they claim (always have claimed) a monopoly on civic and moral virtue — “real” Americans — while vilifying city-dwellers. I see no equivalent demand on rurals to respect urbanites.
In substance, Professor Jacobs blames me for attitudes that rural voters — persons with full agency like all others — choose to hold. Criticism of those choices is then branded “demonization,” certain to “further marginalize … a segment of the … population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by [wait for it!] experts and elites”.
Here we get to some fine cognitive dissonance: rural people are resentful (rational, Jacobs claims) because they feel “forgotten”. But forgotten by whom? By the very people they constantly denigrate as “experts and elites”. How does that make sense, at least when speaking of adults and matters of public import?
Further, what does it mean for a group of voters to be “marginalized”? We hear it all the time. Newsflash: outvoted is not “marginalized”. (Worth mentioning: no one gives a fig about the countless times I’m on the losing end on votes. In fact, am usually told that I deserve to lose because I’m a liberal intent on ruining the country.)
The enduring mystery: what do rural people want? All Professor Jacobs has come up with is the preservation of their “rural identity”. Question 1: Who/what is stopping them? Like the rest of us, they choose the life they want, both as to where and how to live it. Am not aware that anyone threatens to take it away from them.
There is, too, the never-ending melody about the need for “respect”. Are we in high school? What does it mean for me, urbanite, to “respect” rural citizens? Clearly, am out to lunch. For decades fellow liberals and I were deluded enough to vote for policies we thought helpful to rural communities. The wrong flavor of respect, apparently.
What liberals do suggest is that economic realities will color the choice to stay rural. We can agree on the charms of scenery and small-town life, but neither is a substitute for economic activity that generates affordable modern living. To complain that that activity takes place chiefly in non-rural areas is like yelling at the clouds when it rains.
Here we get to the crux: I understand that others have values seriously different from mine. But, according to the current economic model, I’m compelled to subsidize people who are happy to take my money … and even happier to then shit on my urban-liberal-elitist values. If only a Democrat were bold enough to deconstruct that model.
As we know, “bold” and “Democrat” are antonyms. Since forever Democrats have missed the point about American voters, all of ‘em, not just rural ones: they have zero interest in public policy. They want to be entertained, preferably with a narrative that caters to their deepest feelings, impulses, and, yes, prejudices.
With respect to rural voters, we know this because, in 2016, only one candidate proposed an economic policy for rural areas. Their response? Pick the candidate who offered them nothing — literally, nothing — beyond a wagonload of spite that they avidly gobbled up. Yet, somehow, it was the liberals’ fault that they did so.
What those voters did get from their guy was fiction-driven nonsense about “Mexican rapists and criminals” invading the country. It put him on the map. Millions, rurals among them, loved it: “Finally, someone who tells it like it is!” It’s curious, then, that it’s out of bounds to qualify them (correctly) as raging xenophobes and racists.
This is what gives the ya-gotta-understand-‘em enterprise on behalf of the “marginalized” a whiff of fleeing-the-scene. Prompted by Trump, they willingly opened their bile duct for him — twice, no less. When they’re called on it, we’re told, No, they’re not unhinged like him, just “frustrated”. Like Germans with Weimar, I suppose.
Professor Jacobs says “ruralness is not reducible to rage”. Strawman? It’s also special pleading at its best to claim “rural Americans engage in politics” in “nuanced ways,” driven as they are by “sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect”. Wasn’t aware they had a monopoly on those ways and desires.
As for “nuanced ways,” what are they? Many things characterize rural voters’ champion; nuance is not one of them. Its absence is why they admire him. His spite is their spite. We see it in their buying into and fueling the culture wars, the hallmark of which is the abuse of some — irony-deprivation alert! — marginalized group.
Where liberals have indeed been monumentally wrong is with their insistence on helping people who see help as outsiders’ intrusion on their way of life, an infringement of their “belief in self-reliance,” a threat to “rural ways of living [that] will soon be forced to disappear”. Lesson to liberals: don’t help people who don’t want help.
Widespread rural poverty tells us that economic reality is the existential threat to (non-farm) rural life. How, then, is it that we have a cottage industry legitimizing the fatuous claim that it’s liberals who are the threat? Or contending, when liberals reject the claim, that they “disrespect” and “marginalize” and “demonize” rural people?
It’s said that liberals who “give in to the simplistic rage” see rural Americans as “irrational and beyond any effort to engage them”. So, it’s “liberal rage” that’s the issue? Professor Jacobs has simply flipped the equation: liberals irrational, divorced from evidence; rural voters paragons of reason. Weak tea.
He alleges Democrats “are … letting themselves off the hook,” which suggests they have a special obligation beyond presenting themselves as candidates for public office and espousing their views in the process. What is that obligation? Far as I know, even in the country’s reddest jurisdictions Democrats continue to run for office.
Am sure each rural voter, like all voters, has his rationales for the choices he makes. I suspect, though, that rural voters’ preference for Republicans has nothing to do with lack of “engagement” by Democrats. Rather, these voters choose not to buy what Democrats are offering them.
We may not know the precise and highly individualized reasons for that, but we do know it can’t be economic policy because, aside from their usual let-the-markets-decide catechism, Republicans offer none. At least none that could be considered mindful of, let alone helpful to, rural voters.
We also know — from public statements of those elected to represent rural communities — that the rejection of liberals goes to the marrow. Those voters identify with the Republican (now Trumpian) version of civic and moral values, its take on the social contract, the Constitution, and more religion in the public square.
Their choice, of course. But, in light of that choice, what would Democratic “engagement” look like? Without a coherent demand (something beyond “we’re disrespected, ignored, and called hillbillies”) as to what policies rural voters want, what proposal from Democrats would cause rural voters to choose differently next time?
Especially when liberals are portrayed in the hinterlands as tyrants (with their “wokeness,” presumably), enemies of liberty. Certainly, no one, rural voters included, should be compelled to live under tyranny. The only answer is to give rural voters what they seem to want: a change in the social contract via federalism on steroids.
My guess, though, is that, if they had to choose between true self-reliance and public money, rural voters would go with the money. Not that that would change their disparaging view of city people (code for Blacks, gays, foreigners, transgenders) as sit-on-their-ass moochers or cause them to vote for Democrats. Hypocrisy to the horizon.
The Democrats’ problem is indeed politics. Always has been. The current febrile, impulse-driven environment suggests that things are unlikely to get easier for them. Are rural voters to blame? Not entirely, but they play their part — an outsized one given our loopy Constitutional arrangement that ensures minority rule.
As do those who proselytize the concept that liberals are to blame for rural voters’ discontent, ascribing to them a special status based solely on where they live. Rural voters have agency; they alone are responsible for their choices in life and on voting day. It is claims to the contrary which disrespect and infantilize them.
