In a long lament in The Guardian, Nick Bowlin examines why Democrats can’t seem to win in rural America. He writes:
After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, these compounding rural crises became something of a preoccupation for national media and mainstream liberals. Rural America suddenly seemed to them a distant shore, home to strange customs, backward people, and jokes that weren’t funny. National reporters dropped in to diners and filed dispatches from Trump rallies. Pundits wrote countless columns with titles like “Why rural America voted for Trump”, “Penthouse populist: why the rural poor love Donald Trump”, and “Explaining the urban-rural political divide”.
Democratic politicians such as Tester and the former Missouri senator Claire McCaskill criticized the party for abandoning moderates and recommended that it run candidates who could relate to rural voters – there’s a throughline between these suggestions and the cowboy hats.
Trump’s success in rural areas and among non-college-educated whites spawned a market for books that sought to explain non-coastal areas. The condescending infatuation with JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was the most obvious example, but more sophisticated works – including Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia – also became prominent.
Four years later, though Trump didn’t win, he took an even greater share of the rural vote. In 2020, he won roughly 90% of rural counties. Whatever lessons Democratic strategists have absorbed do not seem to be working.
There’s a certain sort of liberal who looks at all this and writes off rural areas as deserving of whatever policies the GOP inflicts on them. As a New York magazine headline blared after the 2016 election, “No sympathy for the hillbilly”. For a more recent example, consider this (since-deleted) tweet from Nell Scovell, a television writer who co-wrote Lean In with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, in response to the tornadoes in Kentucky that killed more than 70 people in December:
Sorry Kentucky. Maybe if your 2 senators hadn’t spent decades blocking climate legislation to reduce climate change, you wouldn’t be suffering from climate disasters. If it’s any consolation, McConnell and Rand have f’ed over all of us, too.
This sentiment reared its head online after the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin blocked the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act. Trading in some of the most reprehensible stereotypes about Appalachia, the actor Bette Midler wrote on Twitter:
What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible. He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.
Lazy thinking of this sort is what happens when you don’t make class distinctions. The existence of the rural gentry class – and increasing income inequality that coincided with economic decline in rural areas – ought to make clear that not all rural Americans are voting against their class interests when they side with Republicans.
The real problem, as most of you know, is not “lazy thinking,” or the rural “gentry class,” but Democrat politicians’ own proven record of treating constituents more like a piggy bank than as the people whom they should serve. With the radicals in Washington running the party, Democrats have no chance at convincing rural Americans that they aren’t coming for their religious rights, guns, money, and freedom.
Action Line: Do your local politicians care about you? The easy way to tell is by looking at how they treat you. Do they maximize your freedom while minimizing their impact on your livelihood? If not, if instead, they treat you more like a piggy bank and someone they have power over, it’s time to look for a better America. Start your search with my Super States. If you need regular guidance on the best places in America, click here to sign up for my free Survive & Thrive letter. I’ll help you find a better America, today.
