Country bumpkin asks: What's the matter with me?
People have been telling us country bumpkins for a long time what’s wrong with us. After awhile, you begin to believe it.
“What’s the matter with Kansas?” William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette famously asked as William Jennings Bryan and the populists challenged the railroads and White’s mercantile class. White became the sage of the prairie and friend of Teddy Roosevelt by telling the rural riffraff to let the folks in Emporia, Topeka, New York and Washington determine their interests.
“What’s the matter with Kansas?” Thomas Frank asked by title of his 2004 book that pondered why these rural folks vote against their seeming self-interest.
Lately, the authors of a book called “White Rural Rage” suggest that we, especially us men, are an imminent threat to democracy. (What about Gov. Kim Reynolds, city boys?) Paul Waldman was a columnist for The Washington Post, Thomas Schaller was a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. They argue that our festering irrational rage will vault Trump back into power. Then, you have Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, musing that the rural voter is a mystery.
Trump is our fault.
… a lot with reading at:
https://www.bellevueheraldleader.com/opinion/country-bumpkin-asks-what-s-the-matter-with-me/article_eaf3fefa-ead3-11ee-beba-2b9d0abe1a88.html
https://archive.ph/FPQmA
= new reply since forum marked as read
and they are great researchers and writers. I really enjoyed what they had to say.
And I AM a rural white boy....or was brought up that way. 
