[ My part of the world is full of people who, according to most of
my liberal friends, “vote against their own interests”. ]
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WHAT WE MUST DO: UNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMING THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE
 
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Anthony Flaccavento
November 28, 2020
The Stansbury Forum
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_ My part of the world is full of people who, according to most of my
liberal friends, “vote against their own interests”. _

2006 near Fresno, CA., Robert Gumpert

 

I live in the southwestern corner of Virginia, the Appalachian part of
the state that borders North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West
Virginia. Like all of these neighboring states, we went overwhelmingly
for Donald Trump on November 3rd, with margins in most of our counties
between 75 and 80%.  Five days after the election, comments on the
Facebook page of our primary daily newspaper ran about seven to one
that the election was fraudulent, stolen from Trump.

SO, HOW DID WE GET HERE?  HOW DID WE GET TO SUCH A STRENUOUS DIVIDE,
ONE THAT HAS MANY DIMENSIONS, BUT IS IN LARGE PART GEOGRAPHICAL?

A third or so of this region is ‘coal country’, communities whose
economies have been dependent on the coal industry for generations,
even as it declined inexorably for more than forty years.  Trump’s
pledge to bring coal back has, like most of his boasts, proved to be
an empty promise. There are fewer coal jobs now than there were in
Obama’s last year in office.

The many thousands of small farms throughout the region don’t do a
lot of exporting to China, so they’ve missed out on those federal
payments that have kept bigger farms afloat. A fair number have
embraced new enterprises or shifted to selling local food at local
markets. Still, the last four years has been a struggle for small
farmers. But then, there’s nothing unusual about that.  

Several efforts to diversify local economies – from downtown
revitalization in Bristol to an “ecological education campus” in
the tiny town of St Paul – are beginning to bear fruit.  Most of
these have been helped along by a range of investments, including
grants from the Appalachian Regional Commission. ARC is popular among
businesses and economic developers and has continued in spite of
Trump’s repeated efforts to zero out its budget.

You’re probably starting to get the picture. My part of the world is
full of people who, according to most of my liberal friends, “vote
against their own interests”. It is true that this once-Democratic
stronghold has shifted to Republicans over the past dozen plus years,
and that Trump has cemented that support to a degree we’ve never
seen before. It’s also true that a region whose people are known for
their neighborliness and readiness to pitch in for whomever needs
help, is increasingly defensive about its guns, deeply suspicious
about government and ready to believe the worst about people with
different views or politics. Which is to say, Democrats, liberals,
progressives.  Me. Us.

All of this is true, and it’s pretty damn depressing, especially
when you realize that southwest Virginia is not the exception to the
rule. This is the reality in most of rural America.  

So, how did we get here?  How did we get to such a strenuous divide,
one that has many dimensions, but is in large part geographical? How
did country people come to see themselves as so alienated from and
dissed by their fellow citizens, to feel like, as Arlie Hochschild put
it, “strangers in their own land”?

One major reason, of course, is the relentless campaign on the right
to fundamentally change our view of what it means to be an American, a
citizen, a neighbor; and more specifically, to denigrate and even
demonize liberals, progressives and Democrats. From Glen Beck to
Tucker Carlson, from Sarah Palin to Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing
politicians and pundits have been remarkably successful in building an
alternate world view in which liberals are actively working to destroy
the nation, a worldview held by nearly half the population. Trump’s
remarkably loyal base comes in part because he’s so uncompromising
in his attacks on these nefarious liberals.

Another major contributor to the urban-rural divide, and to the
enduring allegiance to Trump is of course race and racism.  Our
sordid history of state-sanctioned racial exclusion has been
interrupted by periodic efforts to reduce systemic racism. Every one
of these periods precipitated widespread backlash among white people,
both those in power and everyday folks. Clearly, we are in yet another
period of this backlash.

Race is deeply woven into the right-wing narrative of grievance and
together, these two elements have propelled and exacerbated the
urban-rural divide.

But everyone on the left already knows this. What I’m asking us to
do is to _look closely at our own role in fostering this divide_, our
own failures of policy, action and words. Having worked for almost
four decades to build stronger local economies in mostly rural areas
and having run for Congress – twice – in rural southwest Virginia,
this issue has become something of a preoccupation for me.  I’ve
come to believe that there are six underlying causes of this divide,
which I’ve described in much more detail in _The Urban-Rural
Divide:  A Guidebook for Understanding the Problem and Forging
Solutions_ [[link removed]]_.  _In
this two-part series for Stansbury Forum, I’ll briefly touch on each
of those underlying causes, and then offer what I hope is a way
forward.

One last caveat:  As you read these two pieces, I ask you to
consider the possibility that many rural people who support Trump may
simultaneously have both a greatly exaggerated sense of
grievance _AND_ real and long-standing grievances that have not been
addressed; disproportionate rage _AND__ _plenty of reasons to be
angry. White privilege _AND__ _almost none of the trappings of
privilege. 

Six underlying causes

_IT BEGINS WITH A FAILED ECONOMIC SYSTEM__, or more accurately, an
economic system that has worked pretty well for roughly 20% of the
population, but mostly failed the other 80%_. Our trickle-down
economy, obsessed with the GDP and global ‘investor confidence’
has failed plenty of people in New York and Chicago, to be sure. But
among the 20 percenters who’ve done pretty well the past four
decades, the great majority are in cities. The vast, vast majority of
country folks are among the 80 percent of people who’ve either lost
ground economically or simply tread water to stay afloat. Stagnant
wages, outsourced jobs, depressed and declining farm incomes, and the
flight of young people to cities have become the norm in many rural
places.

I know, I know, the average income of Trump voters is higher than the
national average. But that’s the _average_, a figure inflated by
the very wealthy people who commonly support Trump. In truth, the
biggest economic commonality among rural Trump supporters
is _economic insecurity_, the terrible uncertainty about what the
future holds, for themselves and for their children. Seeing your own
economic situation stagnate is bad enough. Recognizing that the future
may yet be worse lays the foundation for mistrust of those in charge,
the politicians and experts who claim to be making your life better.

Declining prosperity, household insecurity and heightened economic
inequality have proven a powerful foundation for mistrust of ‘the
system’, helping to foster_ THE SECOND UNDERLYING CAUSE OF OUR
DIVIDE, a deep and pervasive anti-elitism. _In _The Politics of
Resentment
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Katherine Cramer shares the stories of scores of rural Wisconsinites,
most of whom supported Scott Walker in large part because he
disparaged ‘elites’: Academics and intellectuals, urban liberals
in Madison and Milwaukee, government employees overseeing
environmental regulations, even public school teachers. For many of
the rural men – and it was mostly men – who spoke to Cramer, they
felt disrespected by these elites.  Speaking of how these folks saw
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cramer says “…it was not that
UW-Madison ignored their communities but that it ignored the knowledge
and the norms of the people living in their communities.”

When most liberals think of ‘elites’, they focus on Wall Street
executives, corporate CEO’s and other economic elites. For many
people in the countryside, elites are cultural snobs, intellectuals
who talk a lot but don’t say much, city folks with desk jobs
who’ve never picked up a chain saw; and they are also the
‘experts’. Cramer discovered, as have I, that many rural people
are sick and tired of these folks telling them what to say, how to
eat, shop and think, how to manage their own land, and what they need
to do to catch up to the innovators in town. It should be clear that
politically, this caricature of elites fits the modern-day Democratic
Party and most of its best-known leaders.

The _third underlying cause_ grows out of the strong anti-elite
sentiment but is a critical factor in and of itself: _a profound
distrust of government, generally, with a particular contempt for
regulations_. This regulatory aversion,
[[link removed]] as I’ve
come to call it, is not limited to rural people, but it is especially
commonplace in the countryside. It’s not surprising that people who
don’t trust the government would view government regulations with
skepticism. But there is also the widespread belief that regulations
are intrusive, cumbersome, even ridiculous.  And that they protect
the powerful, not the little guy.  

Liberals and Democrats often try to persuade rural working folks that
regulations are necessary, that they protect all of us. When we do
that, we miss the point. If you fundamentally mistrust the government
and if you view experts and academics as out-of-touch elites, you’re
very unlikely to be moved by the argument that more government
involvement in your life is a good thing.

An economy that has failed so many rural communities, a sense of being
routinely disrespected by urban and liberal elites, and deep mistrust
of government, especially regulations, these comprise the first of
three underlying causes of the urban-rural divide. In the second
segment, we’ll explore three more underlying causes, and then
discuss what we can do to change course.

…

THIS IS THE FIRST IN A TWO-PART SERIES.  THE SECOND SEGMENT WILL RUN
NEXT WEEK

 

_Anthony Flaccavento is a farmer, author and bottom up economy
consultant from Abingdon, Virginia, and the two time Democratic
Candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 9th district. _

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