Today Paul Krugman discusses a new book by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. In particular, Krugman agrees that rural areas have hemorrhaged jobs, leaving behind a loss of purpose and dignity:
This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities.... In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.
Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.
I'm once again prompted to point out that while this is true, it's not that true. For example, here's the share of full-time workers in urban and rural areas:
It's almost identical at every age level for both men and women. In both places, about 80% of men and 65% of women have full-time jobs.
Here's the overall labor force participation rate:
Among prime-age men, the participation rate is about 88% in cities and 85% in the country. The difference is even smaller among women.
Now, pay is considerably less in rural areas: the median income for men is about $52,000 compared to $60,000 in cities. However, when you account for the far lower cost of housing in rural areas, a lot of this difference goes away.
These figures are all from 2016, but I don't imagine they've changed a lot since then. More to the point, however, there's nothing new about this. Urban men earn about 15% more than rural men, but the Fed puts the overall urban/rural wage difference in recent years at about 20-23%:
So how does this compare to 40 years ago? In 1980, according to the Census Bureau, median household income was $19,043 in cities and $15,350 in rural areas. That's a difference of.......24%.
This is a lot of charts and tables to make two simple points. First, the economic difference between urban and rural households isn't as great as people make it out to be, especially when you account for the cost of living. Second, to the extent there really is a difference, it's been around for a long time. City dwellers have always made more money than folks in the country, so this can hardly be the cause of a sudden surge of white rural rage in the Trump era.
So what's really going on? I'd guess that part of the answer is economic, but not at the individual level. Main street shops have gone away. Rural hospitals have shut down. The nearest doctor may be 50 miles away. There's no access to broadband internet.
This kind of slow lifestyle deterioration is unquestionably discouraging, but it's not really the sort of thing that produces rage. That's more likely to come from cultural issues like abortion, immigration, race, gay and trans rights, and so forth. I'm still guessing a bit here, but in the past the cultural difference between urban and rural wasn't quite so stark. Mores were relatively conservative everywhere—in public, at least—and in any case, urban debauchery was a long way away. Today it's only as far away as your TV set, and urban culture overwhelms contemporary TV, especially among cable outlets. That can feel pretty oppressive.
Economically, though, I just don't see it. Rural areas today aren't doing any worse than rural areas have always done. The city is where you once went to make your fortune, and it still is.
"These figures are all from 2016, but I don't imagine they've changed a lot since then."
Jesus Christ, Kevin, you can't use data nearly a decade old. That's like looking at pre-Trump America and assuming it's pretty much the same. That's half a generation of change to account for, and the world moves fast.
I don't even think your point is necessarily wrong but you're playing with statistics to confirm your existing beliefs.
Old data isn't optimal, but was the political landscape of rural white anger any different when the data was recent in 2016? after all that's the year trump rode the wave of white anger to the presidency.
We had the same white anger in 2012 & Barack Obama was easily re-elected.
Trump rode the wave of political media & FBI hatred of Hillary Clinton.
You should dig down and analyze a handful of zip codes over time, instead of just relying on aggregated data. Add population size and the U-6 unemployment rate to your time series, too.
Exactly. I can’t speak for the Waldman and Schaller book originally cited, but my prior is that the zip codes in Appalachia (to take one example) are driving the rage data but are offset by the zip codes in, say, southern Indiana (to take another). It wouldn’t surprise me if the latter zip codes and those like it are better off than cities with near parity on salaries but much lower costs of living. But areas of the former are in terrible economic shape.
(If my priors are right, however, it still remains to be seen if the economic depression in some areas of the country are really driving “white rural rage.”)
All of this "feeling of a loss of dignity" stuff sounds a lot like liberal academics trying to prove to the rubes that we don't really look down on them, that we are trying mightily to "feel their pain" etc. But I think the reality is much more banal: exposure to years and years of Rush Limbaugh bellowing on the radios in their shops and truck cabs, followed later by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham doing the same on the TVs in their kitchens and family rooms, followed by Newsmax and OANN on their computer screens. It's indoctrination. Urban or rural doesn't matter -- once it takes hold, mass propaganda is transformative.
When you say urban culture you mean black folk, right? Why not just say so?
A lot of rural people aren’t cool with people speaking foreign languages or restaurants serving “weird” foods or gay pride parades or all gender bathroom signs or mosques. None of that is “black folk” but all of it is “urban culture.”
This, yeah.
I’m quite certain that is not what he means at all.
I think they resent having to hunt for reruns of Green Acres and Petticoat Junction and Hee Haw on channel 386 instead of channel 4 where it used to be.
No.
I suspect, though, that a lot of the lower end of the wage spectrum in urban areas aren't middle aged whites. And I bet that in rural areas more of the lower end of the wage spectrum are middle aged white people. When I visit rural areas I'm often struck for a moment because the cashier at the grocery is a middle aged white person. Something I almost never see in Chicago, where that job is often held by a teen or someone who appears to be an immigrant.
It was always a shock for me to fly across the state to visit relatives in Spokane back in the 1980s and every porter at the airport was a middle aged white man. So this is not a new phenomenon.
" in the past the cultural difference between urban and rural wasn't quite so stark."
I remember the Great Sorting that happened in my city neighborhood in the 1980's. The conservative families moved out to the more rural areas outside town, and more liberal families moved into my neighborhood. I remember being amazed at who was moving, and how clearly delineated the differences were.
Personally, I think that people who don't like to live close to others will try to move to rural areas. The less they trust and can tolerate neighbors, the further out they will move. I have a brother-in-law who moved my sister and himself out to the desert near Durango, because he wants to be totally self-sufficient against the day that civilization ends. He's also a big conspiracy fan. Any conspiracy will do, as long as it seems like privileged knowledge. When society comes crashing down, he, and his armed and wary neighbors, will then step forth and will guide the surviving remnants of society to the true faith.
He's nuts, of course, but he's not atypical of a certain type of person.
Oh, and he doesn't work. My sister supports him. She went from a pharmacist job in Chicago to working in Home Depot in Durango. She's not politically nuts, but she gave up her good job to stay with him.
Well, maybe she's a little nuts.
I shouldn't say that my brother-in-law is nuts. Rather, I will say that he doesn't live in a world where facts matter, because he, himself, has a very hard time understanding facts. He much prefers fables. Fables can be twisted to mean anything he wants them to mean, and they can't contradict him or his beliefs.
Arguing about anything with him is a lot like wrestling with a mass of snakes. You can't get a grip on anything and you are constantly being attacked and bitten.
I'd like to see Krugman explain him by an economic theory.
Fables — I have a crackpot hypothesis that is based on the reddest, Trumpiest states being found in the former Confederacy and the Mountain West: the two areas of the US which have most mythologized their pasts (the Lost Cause, and the rugged-individual cowboy/pioneer). So now they are attracted to myths that explain why they have declined from those days of past glory — the Deep State, the Great Replacement, stolen elections, etc.
There's also the old fallen industrial belt. It used to be called "the trunk" because of the structure of the railroads, but the interstates highways destroyed the structure and jobs went south and beyond.
Ironically today's South (depending on the state) is doing much better than it did for many years after the Civil War.
“I have a brother-in-law who moved my sister and himself out to the desert near Durango, because he wants to be totally self-sufficient against the day that civilization ends. … Oh, and he doesn't work. My sister supports him.”
Nothing says “I’m going to be self sufficient in the future when the world ends” better than somebody who can’t even manage to be self sufficient today when the world isn’t ending.
Oh, snap!
My brother-in-law is nuts. He abandoned the once-suburban house he inherited as soon as he found out that the light rail line would be running nearby. I asked his wife if he was insane, because it would surely triple the value of their house. She said he was worried about who would be on the train and moved them 20 miles away, committing them to 2 hours of stop-and-go commuting every day.
I have been doing doorknocking for the local Supervisor candidate and wow, the difference between Republicans and Democrats is so real. None of the D houses had gates or fences, a few had no solicitation signs, and most I talked to were excited about the election. The Rs had the only gates with speakerphones, would hold themselves defensively, block doors while I was speaking to them.
And this is for a nonpartisan position (and my candidate got the former R Supervisor's endorsement!)
Ironically, disliking ppl should keep one IN the city since nobody pays any attention to their neighbors. The fewer ppl there are around where you live, the more those ppl are aware of every single action you do.
It strikes me that there is more going on with MAGA rage, which btw is not only rural and not even only white. As much as I like Paul Krugman, I think he has tried a little too hard to boil this down to something as simple as
"Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there."
Kevin is right to point out the holes in this theory but I don't know that he's got any better suggestion because I don't see much evidence that the cultural differences between urban and rural areas has gotten much wider either. Radio and TV have been around a long time amplifying those differences long before social media came along.
Last, this rage seems to be something of a worldwide phenomenon and certainlyshows up in Europe and elsewhere. Is this because it is so much easier for people to migrate and move around perhaps increasing more every year because of climate change and environmental degradation ?
I truly don't know but it seems like it is important that we understand it much better because it will cause chaos if left unchecked.
I dunno. Go back to 2000 on queer stuff and compare it to now. Republicans in about the same place Dems in a far different spot
For sure rural areas have hemorrhaged people. That has been going on for over 100 years. I wonder if just not having enough folks around has an effect.
yes: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/navigating-demographic-shifts-new-report-unveils-iowas-changing-urban-and-rural-populations
It used to be farmers had lots of kids to help around the farm. Some would leave the area, some would stay. Automation means they're no longer needed. Corporate farms and economy of scale kicked in--so fewer farms (and farmers and their children). Now there are fewer people to support "downtown" businesses--you know, the ones on the street with a street light. Then the Walmart opens up just off the interstate. Local schools close and kids have to be bused (if available) forever to get to school. Local hospitals? Well, there's one in the state capital.
But a packing plant did open up--mainly staffed by migrants....
From my own personal experience, having grown up at least somewhat adjacent to these types of places, I think I can say that these undercurrents were always there. But Trump gave these people a conduit, and most importantly through his statements and actions, a certain kind of cover or permission to let the worst of these impulses out.
I think of something like the Obama birth certificate thing. Typically this kind of dumb racial grousing would be going on here and there, but would be ignored by the actual people in power. Now you've got this famous guy coming along, and not only is he saying the same thing that you are, he's telling you how great and bold and authentic you are for saying it. It's like a powerful drug.
Similarly, election denialism. Everybody loves to bitch and moan when their candidate loses, but the people in charge were smart enough to accept the reality of their losses. Now the guy at the top is saying that you can just make your own reality were any number of outlandish things happened, and not only that, you're a super righteous aggreived party. He plays up the worst impulses of his audience, and then praises them for it. Again, it'd be tough to sell a drug this effective.
Without him in the picture, a lot of this stuff stays in the background, out of sight. But he brought it to the forefront.
Trump gave them permission to hate the scapegoats.
Bingo. …. Now I don’t have to write a long post cause you done did it for me. …. GOP leaders had promised for decades (at least since Reagan) to do the things that Trump actually did. Those gop leaders, as horrible as they were, kept making excuses for not being as horrible as they promised they would be. Trump came through. He is, indeed, their hero. Reagan was the prophet who promised that this would happen one day. (Not just them getting attention but actually taking power.) …. They have always been there. … (to be clear, I don’t mean all of trump’s supporters, just the scariest .)
"in the past the cultural difference between urban and rural wasn't quite so stark."
The GOP has been pumping poison into the body politic since Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt, Alex Jones, and Rupert's Fox "News". It is designed to polarize the populace with the target being the white, rural, male, high school only diploma, evangelical crowd. A more sophisticated version of Nixon's racist Southern Strategy. And people are surprised? They haven't been paying attention.
Where is the evidence of rural *RAGE*? There are few rural street protests, involving very few people. Occasional isolated acts of anger-driven violence serve only to demonstrate how rare they are.
What I see evidence of is sullen resentment; exactly what you'd expect to see in response to "slow lifestyle deterioration" with no realistic prospect of turning things around. I see no reason to amend Obama's 2008 observation that "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
“There are few rural street protests, involving very few people.”
For a protest to be effective, it needs to garner attention. You’re not going to garner much attention blocking the street in a rural hamlet with one traffic light that 99% of people just bypass on the interstate. I agree with you on the sullen resentment everywhere in rural areas, but the lack of actual protests isn’t surprising to me for the above reason. (Shooting up a school or post office or Walmart does garner attention, which might be why those do happen sometimes in rural areas.)
Rage-driven people would quickly find ways to express their fury, perhaps by blocking the interstate. The Bundies staged their sit-in, and their other protests, but the fact I remember them simply shows how unusual they are. *RAGE* would be evident in mobs occupying government offices, harassing Democratic politicians and the like, but it made the national news when some unhappy individual wanted to talk to Kyrsten Sinema in an airport. As far as I can tell, Democrats don't fear for their lives in red states.
“*RAGE* would be evident in mobs occupying government offices, harassing Democratic politicians”
Forgot about Jan 6 already I see
The traditional rural form of protest was a lynching. They'd pick some poor bastard from an out group and torture him to death. They'd hold a big town picnic to celebrate, and they'd mutilate the body and leave it hanging there. Lynchings were fueled by gossip and condoned, even encouraged, by local legal authorities.
If you read the time-use studies, people used to spend a lot more time gossiping with friends on porches, in bars and just hanging around. This was true into the 1950s. Then came television. You can credit the civil rights movement, but it was TV that made it much harder to get a lynch mob together. The community was fragmented into nuclear families.
More recently, we got the internet and social media. That made it much easier to gossip and organize. You didn't need to buy an ad or billboard. You just posted. The lynch mob got its mojo back. Thank you internet.
P.S. You'd think a big AI application would be monitoring social media for incipient lynch mob formation and quashing it. Unfortunately, this would interfere with "engagement" and hence profits. The feds could do it, but there would be political opposition to preventing murderous assault by the usual suspects. The right would push back so hard that it would only pick up Hispanic yard workers saying they had a rough day as potential rioters. The various terms of service on social media prevent any outside organization from doing the tracking, and the tech bros are tightening the clamp down on this.
Go to a school board meeting or town council meeting, and you'll see the rage!
My school board recently held a meeting dominated by attempted book banning. A local resident wanted a book removed from the high school library, and lost his case. He appealed the decision to committee and lost again. So he appealed to the school board as a whole, which held a public meeting to decide it once and for all. The tiny minority that wanted to ban the book was visibly angry from beginning to end, defensive about questions from the board members ("You mention a statement on page 136, but what about this statement one page earlier?"), glared at others who offered testimony that disagreed with the premises of the appeal, and ended up storming out of the meeting when the board voted not to extend discussion a third time (after already extending it from 30 minutes to 60, and then from 60 to 90).
FWIW, the library already allows parents to restrict their own children from reading certain books, so this appeal was solely for the purpose of restricting OTHER people's children from reading the book.
What book?
Yes, I really appreciate the report from the hinterlands but - what book? Why that one?
I've read a few of the LGBT inclusive books (usually with some not white characters also) that were banned in various places. It's interesting to see what they are complaining about, and even more interesting to see what gay kids (or any other kid wanting to read something inclusive) have available to them today. When I was in school back in the Middle Ages there was exactly nothing.
However your reference to the "tiny minority" supports my argument that this so-called "rage" is not widespread.
It's a lot of alienated zeroes who have no life or interaction with anyone who isn't also an alienated zero and who have nothing to look forward to between now and death, and who's dismodia is objectified and validated for the purpose of capturing an audience.
To keep them interested the cultivation becomes increasingly provoking over time to 'compete' with the seeming increasing provocation of everything in the world that isn't about alienated zeroes, and end up in a state of being distracted from their distraction losing the sense of fun in their alienation and start to get depressed and need to get revenge on something before it's too late.
I’m trying to square Krugman:
Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there. (The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because the jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in health care.)
with Drum:
[the percentage of urban and rural full-time workers] is “almost identical at every age level for both men and women.”
I’m missing something but can’t see what it is
If you ASK them why they are mad, they will tell you that they are sick and tired of Metropolitan America looking down on them and telling them what to do. They see metropolitan liberals as arrogant and effeminate hypocrites obsessed with promoting minority interests at their expense and who have forgotten traditional values and virtues.
Gross generalizations, of course.
All of their victims left and they have no one left to bully, so they’re pissed off. Doubly pissed off because the people they used to bully are getting rich while they aren’t.
Rurals have always thought citymen are arrogant fools with disgusting habits.
Exactly sums up Sarah Palin's campaign speeches - Real church going hard working Americans like them being looked down on by atheist Urban Elites in their posh offices etc.
(I made up some details there but that's what they were thinking if it wasn't explicitly stated.)
In addition to the other critiques, you forgot to provide any proof of this part:
"However, when you account for the far lower cost of housing in rural areas, a lot of this difference goes away."
Does it really? You didn't show your work.
He's done it before, tho.
You think rural areas are NOT cheaper than urban areas?
No, that's not my point. My point is that Kevin is saying that it doesn't matter that rural incomes are 20% lower, because *waves hands* costs are lower in rural areas so therefore it washes out.
If it's only 10% lower cost to live in a rural area but people there make 20% less, it does not wash out.
And obviously, all areas are not equal - these are national averages that Kevin is citing.
It's telling that there's this paper that is just 34 days old which says in the abstract:
"Asking the same fundamental question—if someone bought the same thing in a rural and urban area, would they pay the same price?—and using the same methodology, the results 10 years later indicate that, contrary to popular perception, there was again no consistent pattern of lower prices in rural counties and no consistent pattern of a lower rural cost of living in all of the rural areas. While prices are only one piece of the larger picture of how rural households meet their needs, in addition to price differences, the results highlight how differences in rural life create additional costs that extend beyond prices."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ruso.12475
While housing IS cheaper in rural areas, it's only one (although the largest) component of cost of living. Many things are more expensive because you're forced to either buy the one thing that's nearby or drive a long way for choice. The nearby thing may not be less expensive, either - it could be even more expensive because it's just not (as) profitable for producers to serve these areas.
And going back to housing, Kevin has liked to post in the past about qualitative adjustments to price. Rural housing tends to be older and in worse shape, with fewer amenities. If we're going to be doing quality adjusments/hedonism adjustments to price, that cost differential between urban and rural housing doesn't look as great anymore. I could pull a Kevin and say that it washes out but I won't because I don't actually know.
I live in one of those ruralish areas and have had a front-row seat to 30 years of this. I could write a ton about it but for now let me stick to just one major point that I think is central to people's experience here: these places don't feel like they have a future, and that's what makes the biggest difference between them and the urban areas (and the blue areas writ large).
It isn't just the jobs. It's the kids and grand-kids. They have to leave in order to get ahead, or even to hold their own. And until it was killed by the 2008 meltdown, the belief was near-universal that the kids needed college degrees before they could set off. So the prospect was of a very few kids in a cohort staying in town and doing okay, some of them racking up huge debt (and parents taking out second mortgages) for degrees and leaving, and a lot staying in town getting by on whatever they could find or dealing with addictions.
This is a good bit of what trump tapped into. A lot of these people actually voted for Obama, I think that much is accurate, hoping to see a general upturn coming out of the near-collapse that would reach even struggling areas like this ("not a red America and a blue America, but one America"), instead of more and more and more concentration of population and consolidation of the economy, all in urbanized regions. RZM and others are right that Limbaugh and others plowed and seeded the ground for trump, but he really tapped the id and mainlined the disdain toward, and anger at, the people who structure this economy and society.
I think (without evidence) that Biden has at least a tinge of that view and has made a big bet that pouring money into these areas will sweeten the underlying mood and foster some sense that there might be a future in these places, so people won't be so oppressed by the vision of their kids and grand-kids having to end up in Atlanta and Houston and LA, or else stay local and end up junkies. They might not all say it in so many words, but I do think it's that stark in people's minds.
The concentration and consolidation that have been feeding all this here in the US are going on in other places too. And yes, they've been going on here for a very long time one way or another. But I think something changed in the 90s-- actually the 80s-- and the few countervailing trends that had been mitigating the personally-felt effects of consolidation and concentration no longer operated. In a big way, we're now feeling the hangover of the way the Cold War ended for us.
I don't want to be disagreeable here, but this "kids had to go to move away and go to college to get ahead" has been a feature for 40 years or more. I grew up in the red part of a purple state, and almost 20% of my graduating class joined the military before age 20. At the time, most of them said they were trying to get the hell out, or learn skills, or something like that. Probably half that number ended up going to college. But in either case, the ambitious kids were leaving rural America in 1984, just like they are now, and only some of them were ever going to come back, so I don't think that's what's fueling the current anger. Hell, some of the most pissed-off people I run into are those who DID go away, often on the taxpayer buck, and then moved back as reasonably successful adults.
I was going to say something similar: the cultural center of America as seen on TV just isn't in rural America any more. You want to work in tech? At a university? Finance? Government? Medicine? Even sales requires being near people with a lot of money. None of these jobs are plentiful in small towns.
And red state America has declared war on its citizens. No ACA Medicaid expansion, so fewer hospitals and doctors in the area. Abortion bans making it unsafe to be pregnant if something goes wrong, and causing Ob/Gyns to leave. Remarkably tough Medicaid eligibility requirements.
And I think Biden should pour resources into friendly areas. Close the rural hospitals. Flood them with opiates. Kill enough of them off and with assists from covid and whatever follows the problem will solve itself.
They think we hate them? That we want to destroy them? Let's give them a taste of what they asked for.
Brain drain is why I don't live in the rural area I grew up in - and wouldn't want to raise a kid there.
Shops go away, because they prefer their long trips to walmart.
Hospitals go away because they vote against paying for them.
They don't vote for taxes, but their areas get more federal and state money than cities.
And they vote against laws which would help expand rural broadband.
I just don't understand, either. But they're angry, but then make it worse.
In small towns there used to be a piano teacher and a community theater director and a librarian and a band leader and a gal who coached the girls softball team. And small town America decided to persecute them relentlessly, so they left. And now they have a Waffle House and, if they’re lucky, a taco truck.
They like to comfort themselves that we sneer at them, but really, we’re just grateful to have escaped their relentless bullying.
👍👍👍👍👍
👍👍👍👍👍
No doubt these people are ridiculously and self-defeatingly tax-averse. However, there are a lot of reasons why rural hospitals have been closing, and at least around here it isn't about people refusing public policies that would support them. At least in the East and Midwest, hospitals have been consolidating like nobody's business over the past 20-30-40 years because of intense financial pressures. Once the small rural ones let themselves get gobbled up in order to survive, Mega-Medical Central then decides they can't meet their metrics and starts closing them down anyway.
It happens in cities too-- fewer and fewer survive, attached to bigger and bigger systems. It doesn't even matter that much whether they're notionally non-profit or for-profit, the broad path is the same.
Although voting against Medicaid expansion, and having extremely low income limits for regular Medicaid eligibility combine to cut back on the number of people who can afford to go to a hospital.
And it will get worse -- increasingly Ob/Gyns are leaving red states because they can't legally provide best practices for medical care without risking prison.
The number of states which haven't accepted ACA Medicaid is rather small now. Yet rural hospital closures are happening everywhere, even in states like New York and Michigan that are all in with the ACA.
Rural areas today aren't doing any worse than rural areas have always done. The city is where you once went to make your fortune, and it still is.
Agreed.
Yes, they are doing worse.
It used to be that you could be respected as a farmer before big-Ag took over, or at least farm-adjacent with a job at the feed or hardware store or related business that gave you a sense of belonging, of contributing, of holding up your end in a productive community. That is largely gone, and it took away the sense of a reason to be there.
That might not have been “making your fortune” but it gave self-respect to many who were never going to make a fortune (financially or otherwise).
Altoid and kkseattle above nailed important parts of this. Thanks, guys.
Proof again, if needed, that the fable that "Democrats lost the white working class because they didn't care enough about their economic welfare" is A-1, Premium Grade Bullshit. The rubes are toweringly angered because people in the cities just don't give a golly God Damn about their narcissistic demands and solecistic opinions.
Oddly, Krugman isn't following the money here. The reasons for white, rural rage are directly linked to the profits and increased power that accrue to those willing to exploit it. The Grift that has taken over the GOP is rooted in that exploitation, which is why the GOP has drifted away from conservism that supports democratic institutional norms. Right-wing extremism in the USA is a product of late-stage capitalism. You can sum it up in two words: Fox News.
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Trump isn't anything without the churches.
Yes, it's not primarily/solely economic and, more importantly, we've been here before--in the 1850s and the 1920s, to cite two examples. Basically, it's the urban/rural split (which, as best I can tell, is a common feature throughout many societies and millennia), and nativism/immigration.
And this is nothing new. Apologies for citing myself, but here's what I wrote after the 2016 election. I think it holds up pretty well. https://masscommons.wordpress.com/?s=we%27ve+been+here+before
Would hold up except that it looks like it was written on Nov 8 2020, and holds up rather less well considering what happened 2 months later.
The ironic thing is, rural America is more a victim of neoliberal capitalism than anything else -- the very thing MAGA voters claim to be defending from the hordes of criminal-embracing trans communists in places like SF and NYC. The local Sears with its good-paying jobs: gone and replaced by Dollar General. Why? An asshole with a hedge fund took it over and ran it into the ground. Local manufacturing: gone. Why? Global trade agreements shipped all the jobs to China, to the great benefit of corporate shareholders and CEOs. Farming: now a sure path to debt and penury. Why? Unfettered consolidation of seed and fertilizer suppliers, meatpacking, and grocery companies make all but the largest operations focusing on commodity crops unprofitable.
What rural America needs is a good dose of socialized regulation, but good luck telling them that.
"Farming: now a sure path to debt and penury."
* ahem * No. Farms in most of the US are heavily subsidized by federal price supports. And in large swathes of the country farmland is now even more valuable thanks to wind turbines, which means a farmer can make a decent income even without growing anything. My family has its roots in NW Iowa, and several of my relatives farm to this day. They are quite well off - well above average Americans. This is hardly surprising since they mainly grow corn, and federal subsidies for corn farming - just CORN farming - surpassed $7Bn in 2023.
Again, economics does not explain why rural people are so pissed off.
Rural America is where all the old, white Americans live. This explains why there are so many white, angry Americans there..its where they live.
We dont need a deep explanation of why flying monkey poop seems to be centered around the monkey enclosure at the zoo. Its where the monkeys are.
Re: the Mighty Wurlitzer, aka Right Wing Noise Machine:
There's a reason churches have weekly services, multiple services, services on days other than Sundays. Because it's not enough to read or be told what The Message is, you have to be frequently reminded, have it applied to concrete situations, and do this for the rest of your life to make it stick.
That's how the Noise Machine functions. But it doesn't appeal to "the better you", it massages and flatters your worst tendencies, y our selfishness, your dislike of "the other", your greed, your violence. You can dose up 24x7 via teevie, radio, phone, internet! No church can withstand the onslaught, and I wonder if they even try. How can they compete by making people feel bad about being bad, when the Faux Newz complex makes them feel GOOD about being bad?
And this is where what we're currently calling "maga" comes from. Used to be "freedumb caucus", was once "tea party", and reaching way back, "moral majority." Those with more history knowledge than me can probably trace it back to the overly-worshipped (heh) "pilgrims."
If "economics" is involved, it's just incidental. Or made up, like so much of the maga creed about "obamaphones" and "illegal immigrants coming so they can get on welfare" yada yada yada.
Despite working hard and adhering to the middle class values of diligence, self-improvement, living within one's means, many, if not most, rural folks still have a declining living standard in this land of freedom, opportunity, and free enterprise. Their subjection to the Friedman political economy precludes assigning any responsibility of accumulated wealth and class relations for the precarity of their situations, making them susceptible to the sirens of demagoguery. Migrants, social welfare programs, progressive attempts to eliminate racism and sexual discrimination remain as the culprits for why their loyalty and dutifulness to authority failed to deliver the results they considered promised.
There is an economic divide in the US, but Republicans have never been on the side of lower-income people. Economics is just not a reason for any lower-income people to vote Republican.
The cultural divide is based on race and religion, and it has been deliberately cultivated by Republican politicians for the last 50+ years. As more progress has undoubtedly been made in racial and sexual equality and as Christianity loses its dominance, there is a desperate reaction from White Christians. By cultivating this and splitting the "working" class, Republicans have tilted the economy to the right. They have constructed the right-wing media to propagandize the country - there should be no surprise that tribal feeling has intensified on the right.
Any well-designed polls show this - the questions which really separate lower-income voters are cultural, not economic. The MSM often seem to be on a mission to obscure this, accepting the right's framing in terms of "wokism" taking away people's rights. The rights that the MAGA movement and Republicans are fighting for are the right to be racist and for the Christian religion to dominate, and the rights of big business and finance to be unregulated and pay no taxes.
There is absolutely nothing new about jobs moving from the "country" to the city - it has been going on since the founding of the US as the world industrialized and as farming became more efficient.
There have been many political turning points in the US, but one that has had huge importance is the switch of the parties on racism in the second half of the 20th century. Cultivating racism has been what has given Republicans the power to impose their economic policies.
The various attempts by academics to explain white rural rage always seem to tap dance around the first adjective, the one which explains everything.
Virtually all demographic groups won by Trump have that same adjective. That one adjective is the Rosetta Stone to unlocking his entire appeal.
Yet there are all these attempts to make it seem structural, economic, cultural, or whatever, anything but that one word which is studiously avoided.
Bravo to Kevin for pointing this out:
“This kind of slow lifestyle deterioration is unquestionably discouraging, but it's not really the sort of thing that produces rage. That's more likely to come from cultural issues like abortion, immigration, race, gay and trans rights, and so forth. I'm still guessing a bit here, but in the past the cultural difference between urban and rural wasn't quite so stark.”
And we are the ones responsible for the stark and, I would add, unnecessarily brutal nature of that divergence. Rather than sending reporters out to midwestern diners to interview the mysterious Trump voter, we should take a good, hard look at ourselves.
People opposed to an influx of immigration have valid points. Don’t agree with them? Try persuasion rather than denunciation.
And in regard to race, a large majority of the country agrees with the Conservative supreme court’s decision to get rid of race-based affirmative action. What does the Left do? It passes regulations quite literally forcing all California Community college employees and faculty members to promote DEI and antiracism or lose their jobs. WE are the ones behaving like fundamentalists on racial issues.
And then Kevin mentions trans issues. Speaking for myself, I have no issue with an individual who wants to put a biological man (trans woman) on a girls sports team. I do disagree with their idea, but I’d be happy to discuss it with them. Forget it. According to them, I’m evil. Again: our side is the problem.
And yet, despite all of these fairly obvious observations, the otherwise estimable Krugman comes up with this astonishingly obtuse statement:
“The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes and rural America as the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.”
In a column trying to figure out why rural voters begrudge urban/elite/educated Liberals, Krugman proceeds to DEMONSTRATE the answer.
In that one statement, Krugman manages to imply that republicans/rural voters/blue collar workers are gullible (they believe lies), deluded (NYC is dangerous!), and paranoid (opposed to wokeness).
But it’s Krugman himself who is displaying all of these characteristics. To continue the utter charade that wokeness is not real, at this point in 2024, is beyond merely deluded or gullible. I have no words.
Part of the problem is that Krugman, while intellectually brilliant, is himself woke. And it is an inherent aspect of wokeness that its practitioners cannot question themselves. That would be like asking the pope to question Catholicism.
I recently read one of the best definitions of woke I’ve yet encountered, written by Greg Lukianoff: “A narrow, parochial, neuroticly self critical, & rigid worldview that thought it was simply revealed truth.”
And that’s mainly all you need to know to understand rural resentment.
You are assuming rural Americans are just as bigoted as you are. Which, sadly, may be true to a large degree. I grew up in Iowa but will never go back. Way too many bigots.
@Five Parrots in a Shoe:
Your response is a close match to the definition of woke already provided: "A narrow, parochial, neuroticly self critical, & rigid worldview that thought it was simply revealed truth.."
And, similar to Krugman, you are demonstrating the explanation for rural/Republican/blue collar rage: there simply isn't all that much else in life quite as infuriating or insufferable as the condescending worldview that declares all (or most) others to be bigots.
"I grew up in Iowa but will never go back. Way too many bigots."
Do the woke ever stop to think about what they are revealing about themselves, rather than those they so enthusiastically accuse, through such statements? Of course not; if they did, they wouldn't be woke.