An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue [View all]

https://newrepublic.com/article/180570/trump-rural-white-resentment-honest-assessment

No paywall link
https://archive.li/oXgi6

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.

When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.

Pillorying Donald Trump is fine. Thundering against the MAGA movement is acceptable. Deep-dive analyses of the votes and voices of “downscale” whites? Sure. But if you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.

And so we have, in an article in Politico by Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist who co-authored his own book, The Rural Voter, that was released a few months before ours; and another in The Atlantic by Tyler Harper, an environmental studies professor who has made it a personal crusade to attack us and our book. These pieces illustrate some of the very pathologies so common in the way scholars and pundits alike treat rural whites.

*snip*