Right-wing rural resentment is NOT "rage" — but liberal suckerdom still is

So says a collegiate researcher from a rural site — Colby College in Maine. And, Nicholas Jacobs name-checks people like Amanda Marcotte for misusing his data.

Marcotte is herself a piece of work, a Hillbot who's as deplorable in some ways as any of the people Hillary Clinton called deplorables, but I digress.

Jacobs says that what the likes of her and other librul pundits, and the DNC equivalent of Nat-Sec Nutsacks, get wrong is thinking in terms of policies, not politics.

I think that's true to a degree. That said, I've heard this number played before. I'll get to that at the end of this piece, after giving Jacobs a fair and thorough shake about the observations in his article, which are plentiful.

Let's get started.

Jacobs then offers a few observations:

1. Resentment is in play, but that's not rage and is more rational
2. Racism does exist but is not a primary driver of the resentment
3. This is a politics of place
4. There's no one single reason driving it.

All good backgrounding.

Here, about one-third in, may be the nutgraf:

So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics. And Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.

Big old BOOM there. Followed by this one.

So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics. And Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them. That would be a massive mistake, one that does truly threaten democracy. Democrats have an opportunity to do better in rural America. We need them to do better

And, that sets aside the hypocrisy of third-party-hating Democrats clutching their pearls over "democracy."

Personal observation? There's plenty of wingnuttery where I live, but people are, by and large, secure enough in their place that I have yet to see a house as Trumpiana-festooned as the one in one picture in the story.

Next, Jacobs calls out the authors of White Rural Rage for detailed wrongs. First is the fallacy of composition, and when you've engaged, in depth, in a classical informal logic fallacy, you have a problem, that I know.

As far as white Christian nationalism and their claims? Tim Dunn's Midland isn't rural, I can tell you that off the top of my head. Maybe the book's authors think all of "flyover country" is automatically rural?

Finally, as far as trying to get Dems to address politics, not policies, Jacobs pivots back to the issue of it being resentment, not rage. He notes that rural voters may often vote against their self-interest, but cites their politics of place, plus saying a sense of agency is involved. This:

Instead of a politics that seeks to understand and represent these contradictions, the left wants to simplify ruralness into something it’s not.

Is another good pick-up.

COVID exemplies this. California has huge metropolitan areas, but also, depending on exactly how rural is defined, plenty of ruraldom, too. Setting aside the hypocrisy of churches that were not in rural area on COVID attendance, I think rural areas wanted some flexibility on COVID policies.

That said, I do think Jacobs hits a foul ball fairly near the end, and it's not about Democrats but about Republicans. And, about those rural voters

This:

A fter portraying white rural America as an obstacle to democracy (and the Democratic Party), Schaller and Waldman call for a “ real rural movement” to “use the power they have, and start demanding something more concrete.” 

What they miss is that a real rural movement is already here. It is the rural movement towards the Republican Party that has been building since the 1980s.

Is a lazy follow-up to what Nicholas had said up to this point. 

First, even if the book's authors use sketchy poll data, Nicholas admits they're not 100 percent wrong on seeing how resentment plays out.

Second, and related, yes, resentment itself may be rational, but how it plays out is not always so.

Third, like the old Oldsmobile commercial, "This is not your mother's GOP." And, in specifics surrounding Trumpianism, the play-out of the resentment DOES seem more irrational, as well as more visible. It's a defiant middle finger, or a desire to "own the libs," that IMO might continue even if Democrats did a better job of uniting policies and politics to the degree possible.

Third, part two, is that national and statewide level Republican leaders don't really have much more in the way of answers than Democrats do, but are perfectly content to stoke the politics of resentment.

Fourth, it ignores the possibility that a fair amount of ruraldom knows what Dems say about being "takers" and don't care.

He does correct himself after that, trying to envision a politics that does address rural resentment. More bullet points:

1. Note the rural-urban geographic divide
2. Stop making it about racism, including both noting that racism still exists in urban areas and noting that rural nonwhites hold race-based tropes, too
3. Note that these rural nonwhites agree with rural whites on the geographic divide and the sense of place.

All good points. And not just for the coasts. Many urban Texas Dems could stand to accept this. 

At the same time, this appears to have a tinge of the "listening tour" to it, which Hillary Clinton touted but never did and Arlie Russell Hochschild did, but it was a one-way street. See my review below for more. That said, in the linked blog post, I mention Paul Waldman (whose book Jacobs is critiquing and even attacking) calling this a mug's game. I at least partially agree.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books where I'd like to have a two-part, split review.

I'd give Hochschild 5 stars for the listening side and 3 stars for the analytical side.

Since I can't, it's 4 stars, and let's discuss what she misses, or takes a pass on.

First, although she hints at the cognitive dissonance of the people she interviewed, she never spells it out. In fact, she never even uses the phrase. The closest she comes to that is using Gen. Russell Honore as a kind of a foil on environmental issues.

And, no, this is not a political science book. Nonetheless, sociology, like other social/soft sciences, can indeed engage in analysis and interpretation.

Second is the hypocrisy issue. Not so much toward the government when it's big biz doing the polluting, and the feds at least are trying to address it, even when Jindal's totally cutting state-level enforcement in Louisiana.

But, the hypocrisy of the highly religious voting to re-elect David Vitter to the Senate, when his sexual promiscuity was splashed all over non-Faux type news and surely got at least a few mentions there.

I mean, Hochschild just whiffs here. Unlike environmental issues, she doesn't even try to raise this issue in a roundabout way. And, Vitter's just a sample; just as she knows the pollution issue and red states, she knows the higher divorce rates, and related sexuality issues, along with high out-of-marriage birth rates for southern whites as well as blacks.

For those living in coastal enclaves, and wanting a sympathetic insight, perhaps the book is worth more.

But, for we liberals, let alone outright lefties, in these red states? The book tells me as much about Hochschild, in a sense, as it does her subjects. That's the only reason I didn't 3-star it overall. Basically, she seems of the mindset that liberals should do these listening tours whether conservatives do or not and that will somehow change their minds. I don't know exactly how the political breakthrough hurdles need to be cleared, but just a listening tour isn't one.

Beyond that, to tout this beyond sociology and as having a light for political science is wrong. That's mainly because there's an asymmetry at work.

Basically, no conservative sociologist would do what she did. We know, because Charles Murray wrote The Bell Curve instead.

View all my reviews

First, note that Hochschild speaks about rage. That's anger, not resentment. To turn back to Jacobs, a subset of the resentful may have rage.

Second, this is Overton window territory for the professional exploiters of the politics of resentment. To trump Jacobs? That goes back to Tricky Dick.  

Of course, when you're Jacobs, and your book publishing CV includes "What Happened to the Vital Center," the game is up.  His more recent book, "The Rural Voter," from which I expect his essay is taken? Hard to say. No 4-star reviews, just ratings. The two 3-star reviews? One says it's too data-dense, the other, by a deep-fried capital-L Libertarian, says it's not footnoted enough and that it's elitist. Looking at his reviews, dude comes off as semi-nutter WITHIN Libertarian Party / libertarianism.

On the third hand, it's easy to stereotype, or to move from group generalization to individual stereotype. I have a neighbor in my apartment complex who's a trucker, and delivers a dedicated product — fracking sand. We were talking earlier, and he said he tells #MAGAts that Trump has no power to tell oil companies "pump"!