I was cutting firewood on a warm March day when a fellow pulled up in his truck to ask me what I was doing there. When I explained that the owner of the property had given me permission to cut up some of the downed logs, he relaxed, got out and fired up his own chainsaw. After a while, he introduced himself. He was a big old boy in his late 30s, white, tall and stout. After I’d introduced myself in turn, he looked at me with surprise.
“Are you that fella running for Congress?” he asked. When I told him that I was, he said, “Boy, if my buddies could see you now, cutting wood, sweating hard, every one of them would vote for you!”
As we were finishing up, he told me about his teenage daughter: how smart she was, but how worried he was that she wasn’t taking school seriously enough. “I told her, you’ve got to study and go to college because I don’t want you living under the thumb of some man!” My new friend wasn’t just good with a chainsaw; he was a bit of a feminist.
In my 2018 run for Congress in Virginia’s 9th District and in nearly 40 years living in this most rural part of the state, I’ve met many people like this young man. Hard-working, often at physically demanding, sometimes dangerous jobs. Smart, thinking people who’d never been to college. Proud of how they make a living, yet keenly aware that in terms of wages, security and prestige, their work didn’t measure up to “knowledge economy” occupations: what they’d call “desk jobs.” That’s been a basic difference across class and geography for generations. Over the past decade or so, however, it’s been intensified to the point that for many working class and rural folks, it has come to form what writer Kathy Cramer has called a “politics of resentment.”
There is no question that a politics of resentment (or “grievance,” as others call it) exists. The question is, who has it affected and where does it come from?
The authors of the new book “White Rural Rage” have easy answers for us: It’s white people in rural areas, folks whose resentment has become a democracy-threatening rage. And this rage comes not as a result of long-festering economic problems but from the fact that “they are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, conspiracist…” group in the country. According to one of the authors, “If Trump wins in 2024, it will be — once again — because rural white people put him there.”
For those of us who live and work among the people Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller have called “The Threat to American Democracy,” we know the story is quite different. Some of what they contend is just flat wrong, others more of a bad misrepresentation of the facts. Mr. Waldman’s claim, for instance, that it is rural whites who bear primary responsibility for Trump’s support is defied by the fact that just over 20% of Trump voters in 2020 were rural white people, or about 16 million out of 74 million who voted for him. The other 58 million were in cities, suburbs and exurbs. And while Trump’s support is by far the strongest among whites, 41% of working-class Latinos also voted for him in the last election, while the share of Black votes for Trump increased substantially, from 8% in 2016 to 12% in 2020.
It’s true that our democracy is under threat and the potential for political violence in our nation is growing. But if the January 6 attack at the Capitol is any guide, rural people were actually under-represented on that day, constituting only about 12% of those convicted for their actions, well below the 16% – 18% of the population we comprise.
The authors’ singling out of rural whites as the most racist group is another core misrepresentation, overlooking the fact that racial resentment is all-too-high among white people regardless of geography. As Nick Jacobs and Dan Shea show in their study of more than 10,000 rural voters, racist beliefs and attitudes are only slightly higher in rural areas when you control for party and ideology.
The white rural rage narrative is part of the broader conceit among the highly educated that it is cultural issues — and the backwards views about them — that drive support for Trump, not economics or the conditions of people’s lives. As a small farmer in rural Virginia myself, this misses the point. Culture and economics are deeply intertwined for all of us, but particularly for working class and rural people. Many of our jobs are tied to our place and our communities, not only the land-based occupations of farmers, loggers, fisherman, miners and drillers, but also including the small businesses that connect people to history, traditions and the natural environment.
These place-based jobs, along with those in manufacturing, food processing, construction, trucking and others are sources of pride for those of us who do them. Coal miners are proud to have fueled the industrial revolution and much of our nation’s prosperity, just as farmers take delight in knowing that we feed our neighbors in towns and cities. While we accept the much higher levels of danger and wear and tear that comes with this work, what rankles us is the lower pay and the higher job insecurity. Most of all, it’s the sentiment too often expressed that these are yesterday’s jobs: “gloomy” work, as one Yale academic characterizes it; or jobs that don’t require much “gray matter,” as Michael Bloomberg famously said.
If we want to understand where rural and working-class anger comes from and what can be done about it, we should begin with the work that is done in these places, and how all of that has been mischaracterized in the media, misunderstood by highly-credentialed elites, and undermined by bad public policies. We must stop saying that rural America has been “left behind,” instead naming what’s really happened. We’ve been taken for granted, worn down, left for dead. Of course there are irredeemably racist and dangerous white people in rural America, as elsewhere. But they are not the norm. Most folks in the countryside, like elsewhere, are fed up with an economy that has ground them down and a politics in service to the rich. If we wish to reduce threats to our democracy and overcome what divides us, this is where we must begin.
Anthony Flaccavento is co-founder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and a former Democratic candidate for Congress. He lives in Abingdon.
