When politicians want to show they’re authentic, sincere, and trustworthy, they often reach for a little rural cred, whether they come by it honestly or not. Sen. Josh Hawley, son of a banker and a graduate of prep school and then Stanford and Yale Law, looks into the camera and says, “We’ve got two perfect little boys. Just ask their muhmuh.” Mike Pence steps out of a pickup truck and pretends to fill it up with gas to show his concern over the cost of living; the ad for his 2024 presidential run does not show him driving the truck back to his ten-thousand-square-foot mansion in a tony Indianapolis suburb. George W. Bush, who grew up summering at his family’s Kennebunkport estate, buys a “ranch” so he can clear brush for the cameras. This kind of signaling is not just about saying to rural constituents, “I’m just like you,” though it is that. It’s also about a web of values, traits, and beliefs that rurality represents. And while anger at what they have long perceived as condescension and disdain from coastal elites is close to the heart of the rural ethos, it’s also true that in politics today, almost no group of Americans is catered to and lionized the way rural people are.
There are plenty of differences between the communities you’ll encounter if you visit West Virginia coal country, the Nebraska Plains, or California’s Central Valley. But there is also an identifiable set of ideas one can find thick on the ground in all those places, a philosophy and identity that run through rural America. These ideas have profound political consequences, shaping how rural people understand politics and how politicians appeal to rural people.
You don’t have to be from a rural area to be familiar with the rural ethos as we’ve been taught to understand it. Rural people are supposedly independent, self-reliant, hardworking, competent, and capable—especially when it comes to the practicalities of everyday life. They’re patriotic and devout, committed to family and community, and ready to lend a hand. The idea that rural people (or, more specifically, rural Whites) are the realest, best Americans is essential to the outsize power granted to the places where they live.
It’s not always spoken aloud, but sometimes it is—as when Sarah Palin said on the campaign trail in 2008, “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”[2] Both Democrats and Republicans are prone to reassuring rural people that the places they come from are not just admirable and worthy of preservation but the truest America, where virtues like hard work and honesty practically bubble up from the soil. If you’re looking for the heart of America, you’re supposed to pass by the cities and the suburbs and head to where food is grown and you might not be able to see your neighbor’s house from yours.[3]
Every candidate who can claim a small-town heritage will tout their “small-town values” as just what is needed in the state capital or Washington. When North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a billionaire software magnate, launched his presidential campaign with a video proclaiming his “small-town values,” one of us (Paul) wrote a column for The Washington Post suggesting that the things one learns growing up in a city—dealing with many different kinds of people, handling constant change—might be even more valuable to the presidency than what one learns in a small town. Burgum made the column the focus of a fundraising email, which was titled “They Hate Rural America.” If you don’t laud small towns as the source of the greatest wisdom and virtue, you’re the enemy.
In much of the world, rural life has long been portrayed in almost Edenic terms, as a nearly lost idyll of beauty, honesty, and virtuous simplicity, a contrast with the harshness of modern urban existence.[4] Even if the real picture is more complicated and less perfectly idyllic, there’s plenty of truth in those ideas about what rural life and rural people are like. Rural life has become an image, even a brand, one that exerts a powerful cultural pull. That brand is steeped in nostalgia, evoking an imagined time in the past when things were simpler and better, less tainted by modern life and its complexities.
The story of modernization, in America as everywhere else, is in no small part the story of people steadily leaving the farm and heading to cities. In the nation’s early years, cities were tiny compared not only to what they are now but also to other world cities of the day. At the time of the first census, in 1790, when London’s population neared 1 million, Boston contained 18,320 people, Philadelphia had 28,522, and New York was bursting at its seams with 33,131. Most Americans were farmers; it would not be until over a century later that the rural population would be in the minority.
Even those who didn’t farm were embedded in the agricultural economy, but that steadily changed as well. When World War II ended, half the people living in rural America were farmers,[5] but their numbers dwindled rapidly as advances in technology required fewer people to farm, the agricultural economy was consolidated with the growth of massive agribusiness corporations, and the rest of the country grew faster. By 2019, only 7 percent of rural Americans were farmers.[6]
Nevertheless, the farm and the kind of person it creates are essential not just to the rural ethos but also to a contemporary vision of integrity and authenticity, one you can see all around you once you start to look. That myth is both pervasive and enduring, and it assigns exclusively to rural White citizens a special status: They are not only “real Americans” but are possessed of traits and abilities on which the rest of us are supposed to look with envious admiration. That status is vividly expressed in the vehicle we associate with rural America, no matter who’s driving it: the pickup truck.
“A man will ask a lot of his truck,” says the unmistakable rough-hewn voice of Sam Elliott in an ad for Ram pickups.[7] “Can it tow that? Haul this? Make it all the way over the top of that? Well, isn’t it nice to know that the answer will always be Hell yes.”
There may be no consumer good more invested with identity than the vehicles we buy, and no more potent symbol of what “rural” is supposed to represent—both for rural Americans themselves and for the rest of us—than the pickup truck. If you drive through many rural areas, you’ll find that pickup trucks dramatically outnumber cars on the road, and it’s not because everyone needs them. In fact, most of them probably don’t. What they’ve purchased is a luxury good—there are models of the Ford F-150 that start at around $85,000—that communicates some very important ideas about rural life and manhood. Like so many aspects of rural culture, the pickup is a symbol in communication with the past, and it helps us understand where that culture intersects with politics.
The pickup as we know it dates to 1917, when Henry Ford, reportedly having seen how farmers were putting their Model Ts to work hauling on their farms, produced the Model TT, a stronger platform made for more rugged work than motoring into town. Priced at $600 (an affordable $15,750 in today’s dollars), it was the world’s first production pickup truck.[8]
At the time, 30 percent of Americans lived on farms.[9] A hundred years later, in 2017, when that number had dwindled to around 1 percent, the three bestselling vehicles in the country were the Ford F-Series pickup, the Chevrolet Silverado pickup, and the Ram pickup. They were also the three bestselling vehicles in 2018, 2019, and every year since.
The majority of the men who buy pickups—and they are overwhelmingly men—does not need them to cart hay to the back forty. In fact, the remarkable thing about pickup sales is that they rose steadily as the number of people who needed the vehicle for work declined. As that evolution occurred, what the pickup represented changed dramatically. We chatted about pickups with a seventy-one-year-old man in Fredericksburg, Texas, who told us that when he was a kid, he hated having his father drop him off at school in his pickup, because it meant his dad was just a blue-collar worker, not someone of high status. Today, Fredericksburg is a thriving tourist town full of shops and restaurants, and its streets are filled with gleaming Rams and Silverados, not a speck of dirt on them.
Pickups symbolize a particular kind of masculinity rooted in the work rural people are supposed to do, and you can see it in ads like the ones Sam Elliott narrates, full of shots of trucks hauling and towing. The trucks communicate physical strength, ruggedness, capability, competence, and an indifference to people who might get in your way. And while there has been some media discussion about the increasingly absurd size of many pickups, it has mostly been about how they’ve gotten taller and more imposing, which makes it impossible to see what’s in front of you if you’re in the driver’s seat. But what these discussions of size overlook is what has happened to the truck’s back: The bed of the truck, the part used for work, has gotten shorter. Why? Because more room is needed for a large, comfortable backseat, which is what you’ll want if you’ve spent a hundred thousand dollars on a truck. The bench seats are long gone, and the trucks are filled with infotainment systems and every other modern vehicular amenity you could want. While you can still buy a pickup with an eight-foot bed—which is what you need to haul full sheets of plywood—the demand for those models is dwarfed by that for the ones with either 5.5- or 6.5-foot beds; the latter is now referred to as “standard.”
That’s because most people who buy trucks aren’t using them for the tasks for which the vehicles were originally designed. According to a 2019 report on the automotive website The Drive, industry data shows that the vast majority of pickup owners rarely if ever uses their trucks for towing or going off-road. Market research has shown that owners cite the desire to “present a tough image” and “have their car act as [an] extension of their personality” as reasons to own a pickup[10]—which the truck will do even if you never use it to haul anything more than your groceries home or your kids to soccer practice.
In the popular imagination (and much of popular culture), rural manhood is associated with physicality and strength, both in the work that rural men do and even in their preferred modes of recreation (hunting, fishing, four-wheeling). Unlike urban office workers, rural men spend their days both in nature and exercising their mastery over it, even if today that’s true of some rural men more than others. So, these trucks have symbolic power both for rural people themselves and for people elsewhere who are capturing a bit of that rural conception of manhood by buying one. The burgeoning popularity of pickups coincided with the continued decline in the proportion of men whose work required physical strength, and if daily life offers limited opportunities to demonstrate one’s manhood according to a traditional conception, driving a pickup can be a visible display of masculinity.
We spoke about this with Mark Metzler Sawin, a historian who—as far as we could tell—is one of the only scholars to have given serious thought to the meaning of pickup trucks. Conservative men in particular, he told us, have grown increasingly distressed as they watched the denigration of “everything that their grandpa did and was praised for,” such as upholding traditional ideas and policing the borders of gender roles. “That’s what they were supposed to do, and now they’re doing exactly the same thing that their grandpa did, and now they’re painted as the villain” by at least some in popular culture and social media, “and they’re pissed.” Every economic setback, strange new cultural trend, or renegotiation of traditional roles is a challenge to men’s sense of manhood. This can be true for men in a variety of settings, but it’s particularly true for rural men.
If you want to really understand the pickup’s symbolism, you have to look at how it’s marketed. For years, the automakers sold pickups by evoking their rural roots and power to do work; the typical ad might have told you what the truck could haul and how much it could tow, with images of strong men doing strong men’s work. And while some of that work might have been on construction sites, the ads inevitably included scenes on farms.
And some ads were about just farms, at least on the surface. In one famous ad aired on the Super Bowl broadcast of 2013, Ram trucks are presented with a 1978 oration from conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey, called “So God Made a Farmer,” in which Harvey extols farmers for their combination of capability and compassion, their hard work and family values. A scratchy recording of him delivering the piece in his powerful voice plays over a series of rural images (and a few shots of Ram trucks); the ad’s tagline is “To the farmer in all of us.” In other words, you are almost certainly not a farmer, and you may not even live in a rural area, but you have some ember of the American farmer and all his virtues glowing within you, which you can keep alight by buying a pickup.
More recent truck marketing has worked to build an emotional bridge between the rural and everyone else, using rural imagery to evoke masculine virtues that you can capture no matter who you are, where you reside, or what you do for a living. One fascinating 2019 commercial features a diverse cast of people singing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” most of them in urban settings, most notably a young Black woman singing it as she rides a subway.
That woman has no need for a pickup. With the ad’s multicultural cast, the main target may be urban and suburban liberals who feel the urge to buy a truck but who need to be convinced that it can be integrated with their existing worldview. It’s a kind of double bank shot, from the rural imagery of the song; to the racially diverse group of people singing it; to the liberals, many of them White, who could provide a vast new market for the vehicles.
For a time, Sawin told us, pickup manufacturers focused on rural customers who “were moving from occupations that did need a truck to occupations that don’t need a truck, but maintaining the truck let you maintain feeling masculine.” But “they saturated that market within ten years or so, and they still needed to sell more trucks. So they really start to turn to targeting the suburban White man.”[11]
The target of the marketing isn’t always the people who are shown onscreen, at least not all of them. You don’t have to feel alienated when shots of people driving to the grocery store are intermixed in these ads with shots of other people hauling hay; the point is that even in your suburban life, you can capture a bit of that rural masculine spirit.
Consider one more Super Bowl ad, this one for Chevy. It begins with the words “Can a truck make you more handsome? More dependable? More rugged?” It then shows focus group participants presented with twin pictures of the same man photoshopped standing in front of a small sedan and a giant pickup. When asked about him, the group describes the version standing in front of the truck as more handsome, capable, sexy, and cool, protecting his children and helping a friend in need. The potential buyers are a group of youngish-to-middle-aged men, one of whom says that the man in front of the sedan is merely “existing,” while the man with the truck is “living.” The end of this bit of meta-marketing is the tagline “You know you want a truck.”
The raw physicality of the pickup truck—its size, the power in its engine, the ridiculous amount of gas it requires—lies at the heart of its attraction, particularly for men who are uncertain about their place in a changing world. Many of those men are also targeted by right-wing political opportunists claiming that they face a “crisis of manhood,” one in which the fact that most jobs no longer require a great deal of upper-body strength has left them wondering how long they’ll stay atop society’s hierarchy. It’s why a politician like Josh Hawley writes a book called Manhood in which he purports to tell the reader how to be a man, and why former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a doughy boarding school grad, buys a house in rural Maine, creates a streaming show taped in a wood-paneled studio that looks more like a tree house, and advises men to skip college, get a blue-collar job, and restore their testosterone levels by tanning their testicles.[12]
The story of pickup trucks and their spectacular popularity demonstrates how even today, rural iconography and ideas about what “rural” means continue to have a powerful place in our culture. At their heart is a contradiction: As much as rural people are convinced (not always without reason) that they are looked down upon, the lionization of them and rural culture is an equally powerful force. And alongside the idea of rural people as uniquely virtuous is the contention that they are uniquely beleaguered and attacked by cultural, political, and economic forces emanating from cities and the coasts.
“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” These are the arresting first words of a 2022 campaign ad aired by J. D. Vance in his bid to be the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio. Vance became famous for his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, which unsparingly chronicles the struggles of his dysfunctional working-class White rural family. In it, he is especially candid about the sufferings of his mother, Bev, who hopscotched from one abusive partner to the next on her eventual path to opioid addiction.
But by 2022, Vance had reinvented himself as a Trump-loving culture warrior, stabbing away at the resentments of downscale voters and blaming their troubles on liberals. “The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth,” he went on. “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”[13]
Gone was the tough love of his book; the man who had written “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness”[14] was nowhere to be found. Now Vance was acting as though he were seething with bitterness at distant elites who were not just looking down their noses at small-town folk but literally trying to murder them. In one interview with a popular far-right conspiracy theorist, Vance accused President Biden of intentionally flooding rural America with fentanyl to kill conservative voters. “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” he said. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”[15] Rep. Tim Ryan, Vance’s Democratic opponent, tried to portray Vance as a dishonest climber who had abandoned Ohio to pursue a Silicon Valley fortune, but it didn’t work. With Donald Trump’s endorsement in hand, Vance won the election by six points.
As he revised his own history, Vance cast off the critiques he had made of his own people. After mentioning illegal drugs coming across “Joe Biden’s open border,” Vance says in the ad, “This issue is personal: I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.” But in his book, Vance says his mother was addicted to prescription narcotics, which don’t come over the border.[16] As most of the country now knows, it was domestic drugmakers and distributors who were guilty of addicting millions of people like Vance’s mother. The Connecticut-based drug company Purdue Pharma, owned by the billionaire Sackler family, targeted sales of its OxyContin pain pills to poor, rural White citizens who worked in physically demanding, injury-prone occupations like mining. Perhaps better than most, Vance understands this history, because he worked for a law firm whose lobbying arm was paid to defend Purdue Pharma.[17] That’s right: Indirectly, Vance profited from the miseries wrought upon rural Americans by the now-bankrupt and discredited drugmaker.[18] Commenting on Vance’s transformation, Sen. Mitt Romney told his biographer, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”[19]
In those few words that begin his ad—“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?”—Vance encapsulated so much about how the culture war operates. Race is inescapable, not just in liberal accusations of racism but also in conservatives’ insistence that liberals are constantly accusing them of racism, always unfairly. This idea rests inside the larger belief that people in small towns and rural areas are forever demeaned and degraded by snooty liberals seeking to destroy the way of life enjoyed by real Americans.
What distinguishes the culture war from the ordinary contest for political power is the centrality of identity. The culture war is not a competition (let alone a negotiation) between ideas or ideologies, but an existential battle between clearly demarcated groups of people whose worldviews are utterly incompatible. In rural America, the culture war vibrates with a particular intensity, as elite Republicans know well—and they use it to keep their voters in a state of constant agitation. They use it to divert attention from the places where their agenda is unpopular even among their own supporters. They use it to make sure that those supporters won’t even consider voting for a Democrat ever again.
The more the culture war becomes the focus of GOP politics, the higher the stakes seem—and the more the rural voters who are the linchpin of Republican power come to see democracy itself as a threat. Their inability to affect what comes out of Hollywood or New York makes them only more eager to use their political power to make sure the liberals they despise can’t win elections, no matter what the majority of voters thinks.
The term culture war was popularized by sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, but the actual American culture war has existed throughout our nation’s history, not to mention that of many other countries. Sometimes it has been a conflict between religions (the Kulturkampf between Protestants and Catholics in late-nineteenth-century Germany), while at others, it has manifested as a struggle between religiosity and secularism. Different issues may define it at any time—racial integration, the teaching of evolution, access to abortion, equality for women, LGBTQ+ rights—but it’s always about drawing lines of identity that define who is us and who is them.
And in the current American conservative version, it’s also about victimization, both present and future. Conservatives are told over and over that they are encircled by hostile forces bent on subverting their way of life and destroying everything they value. Unfortunately, victim-based anger is ripe for exploitation by conservative Republican politicians. As Thomas Frank argued two decades ago in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, those politicians push victimization themes during the election cycle and then, after they win, promptly turn their attention to what matters most to their rich and corporate benefactors: cutting taxes, deregulating business, and allowing companies to consolidate and monopolize their respective industries.[20]
The policy outcomes are often barely noticed, and politicians don’t have to work too hard to convince rural constituents that identity matters and that they should look with suspicion on those who live in different, unfamiliar places. Rural people understand perfectly well the long arc of economic and social history and how the center of American life has moved from the farm to the city to the suburbs. They feel the disdain—or, nearly as bad, the disregard—that cosmopolitan urban liberals have for them; according to one 2018 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of rural residents said people who live in other kinds of communities don’t understand their problems.[21]
Whatever non-rural people may or may not understand about rural life, however, they feel a strong attraction to it. In a 2020 Gallup poll, 48 percent of Americans said they’d like to live in a small town or rural area, despite the fact that a far smaller number actually does. The 31 percent who specifically said they’d prefer to live in a rural area was almost three times as many as the 11 percent who cited a big city as their preferred home. Not surprisingly, the responses varied by party: Only 16 percent of Democrats said they wanted to live in a rural area, compared with 47 percent of Republicans.[22] Similarly, the Pew Research Center found in 2021 that 35 percent of Americans said they’d like to live in a rural area, compared with 21 percent who expressed a preference for the city. (The suburbs were more popular than both.) And rural residents were the least likely to say they’d like to live elsewhere: Only 25 percent expressed a desire to move to a different community, compared with 43 percent of urban residents, even though, as we discussed previously, so many of them do in fact advise young people to leave.[23]
What’s most interesting about these results, however, is the fact that they contradict the actual choices people have made. They are in direct contrast to what economists call “revealed preferences”—not what people say they want but what their behavior reveals. It suggests that there are millions of people who have an attraction to rural life, just not a strong enough one to pick up and actually go there.
Of course, not everyone has the ability to move even if their desire to do so is sincere; we can be held where we are by family ties or economics, even if we’d rather go elsewhere. But it may also be the case that many people who live in the suburbs and cities are attracted to an idyllic view of rural life, one they associate with something akin to retirement. It’s one thing to picture yourself sitting on a porch drinking sweet tea while watching the sun set over rolling hills and quite another to have to drive an hour to get to the supermarket or the nearest hospital in an emergency, realities about which it’s doubtful suburbanites and people in cities who express a yearning for rural life are thinking. This disconnect may help explain why the many utopian experiments Americans have undertaken have usually planted themselves in the country, not only because land could be acquired cheaply but also because the projects usually included some kind of agrarian ideal, an ideological belief that the small community would achieve its perfection at least in part through a recaptured connection to the land. That connection is something we all had once but most of us no longer do.
The ideas Americans hold in their heads about rural America are complex and not always coherent; alongside the idealization of the rural are the stereotypes of rural residents as uneducated, uncultured people with boring lives and limited views of the world. Just think of all the insulting terms we have to refer to rural folk: hayseed, bumpkin, yokel, hick, rube, hillbilly, redneck. The insult White trash might sound contemporary, but it first became common in the 1850s.[24] The contempt between rural and urban people may have always been mutual, but the economic and cultural power enjoyed by urbanites meant that those on the rural side would wind up feeling insulted and resentful.
There are good reasons for this asymmetry. It’s possible for urbanites to all but forget that rural people exist, whereas even if rural people construct and maintain their own culture, they live within a broader culture created largely in cities. The movies they see, the TV they watch, the music they listen to, the sports they follow—all or at least most of it comes from cities. What’s different today is that the subset of that broader culture cultivating that anti-urban hostility is stronger than ever, feeding a resentment that is simultaneously organic and sincere on the one hand and encouraged from above on the other. In an ironic twist, even the effort to maintain rural resentment comes largely from cities. Nashville, the heart of country music that supplies endless encomia to the superiority of rural life, is a blue enclave in a sea of red. (Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 in the city by a two-to-one margin.) Fox News is headquartered in New York, from where it pumps out a steady stream of horror stories about urban decay and condescending liberal “elites” who want nothing more than to destroy all the things rural people value.
The message is clear: Those liberals are coming for you and your family. Though you are the truest Americans, they hate you and everything you stand for. They call you a racist and a redneck. They want to force their perverted ideas about sex and family on you. And the best way to fight back is to vote Republican—and forget about those democratic principles you learned in school. This is a war, and there’s no time to play fair.
The belief that rural Americans are losing the culture war over the long term only intensifies the feeling of victimization, making them an ever-more-attractive target for culture war appeals. And they are losing, without question. Despite the occasional victory—the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the passage of state laws preventing children from being taught too much about racism—the big picture is that every day, the United States grows more secular and racially diverse. Liberal values on gender equality and parenting may not be universally accepted, but they are now the norm; if you loudly proclaim that women should stay in the home or that children need to have their behavior regulated with the periodic application of physical violence (i.e., corporal punishment), you won’t be alone, but in many quarters, you will be challenged, even scorned.
And while there is still an enormous amount of homophobia that the right encourages and capitalizes on, America’s views about sexuality have grown more liberal with astonishing speed. Those over fifty may not have had a single out gay classmate in high school, but now their kids probably have peers who are gay or nonbinary, and maybe even one or two who are trans. And though they may be able to participate in the furious political backlash against trans kids that Republicans have engineered if they’re so inclined, they probably know that over the long term, this is a battle they’ll lose just like they lost the others.
The culture war may be present in every corner of America, but it has a particular shape in rural places, where it isn’t just about those broad social trends against which people react but rather a long tradition of hostility toward cities and the people who inhabit them. Rural folks have long been disrespected by the typical media portrayal of people like them; for every Andy Griffith Show portraying small-town life as friendly and caring, there were many more portrayals of rural people as ignorant bumpkins, or movies like Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which presented rural areas as places of terror. Those narratives have never disappeared, especially on reality TV, with regular programs encouraging viewers to gawk at the backwardness of rural people and their ways. Rural residents are rightly offended by these depictions.[25]
Nevertheless, Hollywood also paints rural America in more dignified colors, even in the ways rural people see themselves and their communities. In one familiar plotline, an arrogant city slicker finds himself in the country, only to discover that the rural people he initially dismissed are possessed of extraordinary common sense, folk wisdom, and practical competence, while the city dweller can barely tie his own shoes.[26] In the immensely popular Hunger Games books and films, the good people of the countryside are starved and oppressed by the government on behalf of a decadent and immoral city-dwelling elite. The extremely popular Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies, of which there seem to be hundreds churned out every year, often feature a young woman from the city who finds herself stuck in a small town through some accident of fortune, whereupon she learns the value of a simpler life and often dumps her no-good boyfriend back in the city in favor of the hunky small-town man she meets early in the movie.[27]
Even so, many more cultural offerings are found in cities—including nearly all the cop shows, lawyer shows, and doctor shows that dominate television—which can make rural people feel as though the culture usually overlooks them. Then they are told by conservative media that whatever their identity—as a conservative, as a White person, as a man, as a Christian—the liberals who allegedly run the country hate them for that identity and will hound them merely for being who they are. As scholar Anthony Nadler noted after conducting extensive conversations with conservatives, “Some talked about personal experiences of feeling slighted or castigated by liberals—especially on social media. But even more frequently, and often more passionately, they told me about stories demonstrating liberals’ disdain for conservatives that they had encountered through conservative news.”[28]
This perception isn’t just about a general us-versus-them conflict. Shame is a key component: fending it off, arguing against it, and being angry at liberals and urbanites for allegedly wanting conservatives and rural people to feel it. As Nadler concluded, for many conservatives, political life is “a constant battle against liberals and leftists driven by a goal of shaming and humiliating conservatives and their communities.”
So, in media spaces like Fox News and conservative talk radio, the same kinds of grievances rural people have nurtured for generations—about being looked down upon, dismissed, and shamed for who they are—are extrapolated to the wider conflict between right and left. More than anyone, Rush Limbaugh mastered this narrative when he emerged in the 1980s, and every outpost of conservative media today follows his template in some way, whether it is national outlets such as Fox News or the smallest, most local radio station. Even if you live in a rural area where there isn’t a liberal for miles around, the story about liberals trying to shame conservatives resonates, because you already know that those liberals have nothing but contempt for people like you.
It may seem strange to think that a person in rural Nebraska or Oklahoma could be instructed by a pundit from Washington, D.C., on a TV network owned by an Australian media magnate, on how to understand their own identity. But all of us are influenced by what we see in the media, and we integrate it with our own experiences to form a picture of the world and of our place in it. And conservative media are particularly focused on identity, both in fortifying connections between different kinds of conservatives through their mutual victimization by the left and in constructing walls so that their audience won’t consider any liberal as someone with whom they could share anything at all.
It isn’t just the conservative media; these kinds of messages are reinforced even by mainstream outlets that the right considers liberal. For all the insistence that rural life is mocked and maligned, the belief that small towns and rural areas are “authentic” is shared by the residents of those places and, ironically, elite journalists. Political reporters are forever explaining how out-of-touch Democrats can’t possibly relate to the good folks of the heartland, who can supposedly see right through their phony personas and insincere appeals.
In their conception of authenticity, journalists have internalized the criticisms the right makes of them. Overwhelmingly middle or upper class, amply educated, and residents of coastal cities like Washington and New York, journalists characterize the authentic as rural (not urban), downscale (not upscale), and Midwestern or Southern (not Northeastern).
What the media really value, however, is not actual authenticity but the deftest performance of authenticity. One of their favorite rituals involves the brutal takedown of a presidential candidate who eats some regional delicacy in an improper way. When John Kerry didn’t order his cheesesteak the way that a regular South Philly guy would (he asked for Swiss cheese, the most elitist of all cheeses!), or when Kirsten Gillibrand briefly took a fork and a knife to her fried chicken in South Carolina, the judgment from campaign reporters was swift and harsh: Look how inauthentic they are. In the inverse case, a rural person struggling to understand the ways of the city—parallel parking, say, or ordering at a hip downtown restaurant—might be presented as unsophisticated, but no one would call them a phony.
In its repetition (especially at campaign time), this double standard reinforces the disturbing conclusions about rural White power we have been exploring. If a small-town, blue-collar man is the most authentic American, then the fact that his vote counts for more than that of a Black urban lawyer or a Latino suburban government worker won’t arouse the outrage and demand for change that it might were he not so valorized.
The sense that alien and morally degraded liberal cultural ideas are encroaching has produced a backlash on the right, one that is newly aggressive and willing to use government power to restore what people perceive they have lost. In many rural areas, this has meant conservatives trying to seize control of a place where people believe their values have been particularly undermined: the local library.
It’s been said that liberals have cultural power but wish they had political power, while conservatives have political power but wish they had cultural power. At libraries all over the country, conservatives are using their political power to attempt a takeover of this one area of the culture. One such battle began with I Need a New Butt! The 2012 book by Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnaird is recommended for children ages six to ten, and if you’ve ever had such a child, you know they find this kind of humor absolutely hilarious; it’s why the Captain Underpants books have sold more than eighty million copies. But when some folks in the Hill Country town of Llano (known as “the deer capital of Texas” for the area’s hunting opportunities, and where a statue of a Confederate soldier stands in the middle of town) found out in the summer of 2021 that I Need a New Butt! and other titles like it were in their local library, they mobilized.
A woman named Bonnie Wallace sent an email to a local official in Llano with the heading “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.” She attached a spreadsheet with a list of sixty books she objected to, many with LGBTQ+ themes and some—like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me—that concerned racism. Books were moved, one librarian was fired and another quit, a lawsuit was filed by liberals opposed to censorship, and a brief round of national news coverage ensued.[29]
When we visited Llano nearly a year later, many people told us that the fight had made relations in town uncomfortably political. The conservatives, however, were eager to explain that they were the moderate ones; they just wanted to have books in the library be age appropriate. And they were very conscious of how the other side perceived them. “ ‘Oh, they’re trying to ban books, and it’s a bunch of Christians.’ That’s what people said here in town, making fun of us,” one woman who had spoken at town meetings about the books told us.[30] They didn’t want the books banned, she said, just moved to where little kids couldn’t see them. She described parents being shocked at what their kids were reading in school libraries, and said, “Well, send your kids to a government training facility, enjoy.” She homeschools her own children.
The controversy in Llano dragged on for months. When the judge in the lawsuit ordered in April 2023 that a group of books that had been taken off the shelves be put back, the county commission met to consider closing down the libraries entirely until the lawsuit was concluded. During the time for citizens’ comments, Bonnie Wallace and two of her allies took their turns to read sex scenes from young adult novels. “I am for closing the library until we get this filth off the shelves,” one concluded.[31]
Llano’s was just one of many such controversies around the country. Recent years have seen a growing number of efforts to ban books from schools and municipal libraries; PEN America reported that in the 2021/22 school year, there were attempts to ban books in 138 school districts in thirty-two states.[32] The American Library Association tracked 1,269 efforts to ban books in libraries in 2022.[33]
Many of these efforts occurred in rural areas, where libraries have become a target of controversy over books with LGBTQ+ themes or discussions of racism. Just a few examples: In Craighead County, Arkansas, residents voted to cut their tax contribution to the library in half in the 2022 election after a controversy involving LGBTQ+ displays.[34] In Maury County, Tennessee, the library director resigned after being “targeted and bullied as part of a right-wing pressure campaign” over a Pride Month display.[35] In Boundary County, Idaho, the head librarian resigned amid threats and harassment over LGBTQ+ books, especially Gender Queer: A Memoir, a book the library didn’t even own.[36] In rural Jamestown, Michigan, the librarians were accused of being “groomers,” i.e., people trying to prepare children for sexual abuse, before voters chose to defund their only library.[37]
These controversies aren’t exactly new, but they’re growing more frequent and more intense, driven by national right-wing groups such as Moms for Liberty and saturated with the latest incendiary rhetoric. Listen to local conservatives talk about books they find objectionable, and it won’t be long before they say the books are meant for “grooming.”
“There are some major scary things going on in rural America,” said Kathy Zappitello,[38] executive director of the Conneaut Public Library in rural Ashtabula County, Ohio. It’s a place Barack Obama won handily in both 2008 and 2012, but that then swung hard to Donald Trump, who beat Hillary Clinton in Ashtabula by nineteen points and then beat Joe Biden there by twenty-three. Zappitello has a unique perspective: Not only did she serve as president of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, but she also ran for state representative in 2022, jumping into the race late, after the Democratic nominee was gerrymandered out of her district and Democrats scrambled to find a candidate.
Zappitello was motivated to run because the incumbent, Sarah Fowler Arthur—who proudly notes that she is the first homeschool graduate to serve on the state board of education—had sponsored a bill aimed at banishing “divisive concepts” from Ohio classrooms, which Zappitello and many others considered a book-banning bill. “It’s the beginning of the end for Ohio libraries if that bill gets passed,” Zappitello told us.
Asked why so many of these library controversies are happening in rural areas, Zappitello said, “This stuff is ugly and not very fun to talk about. And I’m talking about my friends and neighbors.” While she said she was well aware of controversies affecting rural libraries around the country, they hadn’t come to her library in any significant way—until she ran for office. But in running against Arthur and her bill, Zappitello told us, “and by talking about that in my community, and then losing, I inadvertently beat the bushes” and soon found far-right activists investigating libraries and schools in her area to look for objectionable material.
In her twenty years as a librarian, she said, the library had changed in people’s minds from a place to find information to a locus of ominous social developments, a place that, to many, is part of the outside forces threatening the rural way of life. Zappitello’s experience running for office was a shock, and not in a good way. The Democratic Party in her area was all but absent. “There’s no help. There’s no coordinated effort. All I got was ‘Where’s your people, Kathy, we need you to go knock on doors.’ It’s like, where are your people, Democratic Party? I need you to go knock on doors.” She wound up losing by over twenty points.
Zappitello did meet liberals on the campaign trail—but many of them weren’t open about how they actually felt. “I had so many people that whispered to me and held my hand real quick and tight and said, ‘Oh my god, thank you,’ and whispered and kept walking.” She choked up as she described going to meetings that were pleasant enough “until you talk to the woman who is asking you for help and doesn’t know what to do, who’s in a horrible situation and saw that there’s a political meet-and-greet and decided to come and seek help because her son had just committed suicide, and [she] didn’t know where else to go. And now she’s standing in front of me, and I have her name, and I have her phone number, for what? How am I ever going to help her? What am I going to tell these neighbors in Geauga County, the county below Ashtabula, who came up to me in a parking lot and said, ‘Kathy, I can’t take one of your signs, because I’m so afraid of my neighbors. I can’t even talk to anybody, but you have my one vote, and I promise you that.’ ”
Zappitello isn’t sure if she’ll continue to be involved in politics, or even what the future holds for her as a librarian in her town. “I tried,” she told us with a resigned laugh. “Put that on my tombstone. ‘I tried.’ ”
Not every committed librarian in rural areas will be intimidated, be fired, or find themselves so discouraged that they leave town, though some already have. Nor are these controversies limited to rural areas. But this is clearly a way rural conservatives have found to fight back against a wider culture they see as opposed to them and their beliefs. And they seem eager to keep that fight going.
Book bans and fights over local curricula are not limited to rural communities. But rural citizens may feel unusual pressure to bend to state and national standards they find overwhelming, even oppressive. In that sense, these seemingly small-time, localized fights are symptomatic of resistance emanating from rural communities against what they perceive as predations against not merely home rule but also their self-professed traditional values.
Conservative media may not have created the culture war grievances like those driving book-banning efforts out of whole cloth, but they are the engine that drives such efforts forward, elevating certain issues at certain times and telling people what they should be angry about: immigration one day, critical race theory the next, trans kids playing sports the day after that—all contextualized within a broader cultural conflict. Those messages from conservative media are poured into an informational ecosystem in which rural people have fewer and fewer options for news that exists outside the liberal-conservative conflict. In 2008, 71,000 people were employed in newspaper newsrooms across the country—reporters, editors, photographers, and so on. By 2020, that number had plunged to under 31,000.[39] Between 2005 and 2022, 2,500 American newspapers went out of business, a fourth of all the papers in the country.[40] These closures have happened for multiple reasons, including the disappearance of vital classified ad revenue, as those ads migrated to places like Craigslist and Facebook, and the predations of media conglomerates that buy up local newspapers, strip out the local reporting, and often consolidate the papers into weak collections of wire stories.
The decline of local news is a particular problem in rural areas, where newspapers were already vulnerable and thinly staffed. As a result, many rural areas turned into local news deserts over this period. As Nancy Gibbs of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center points out, some of the places with the most disproportionate political power are without any local newspapers. She gives one striking example: “With all that added clout for shaping the composition of Congress and, less directly, the Supreme Court and the White House, the voters in about half of South Dakota’s 66 counties have only a single weekly newspaper. Seven counties have no newspaper at all.”[41]
The disappearance of local reporting isn’t just unfortunate, it’s a crisis for democracy itself. When no one is reporting on city hall or the county council, corruption flourishes. Voter turnout often declines, as does people’s understanding of politics and government.[42] Citizens have no idea what their leaders are doing or whether they are actually representing their constituents.
This void leaves people in these areas unaware of what’s happening close to home, but they can tune in to national news, where they see a politics that is confrontational and polarized. And for a great many of them, national news means conservative news, especially Fox and talk radio. That’s not to mention the multitude of local conservative radio stations spread across rural America that echo the same ideas in between their locally focused content. Many people in rural areas have the radio on for hours every day—in farmers’ tractor cabs, in their cars if they’re driving long distances, in the places where they work. A team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin counted eighty-one conservative talk stations delivering hundreds of hours of right-wing talk around the state every day.[43]
The relative lack of competing news sources in rural areas makes radio even more powerful. It takes the news of the day, as well as a steady stream of liberal outrages, and contextualizes them within a few key themes that are hammered home again and again: Democrats hate you, liberal elites are immoral and dishonest, and we are engaged in an apocalyptic struggle against those who want to destroy us and our way of life, which if the liberals succeed will leave America a depraved and desiccated husk of what it once was.
Those who consume conservative media are also given a constant reinforcement of political boundaries. They learn all about the sins of the left, but they’re also instructed in the common cause of conservatives from different places who might have different interests. And few unifying forces are more powerful than the idea that all “real” and “regular” Americans, whether they’re from the suburbs or the country or even the city, are scorned and targeted by powerful elitist liberals. In this telling, those liberal elitists have personal contempt for the real Americans precisely because of their virtues, such as patriotism and piety.
Because they have lots of airtime to fill, radio hosts can unpack and explain events to contextualize them for their audience. As scholar Scott Ellison notes, the hosts often do “deep readings” of news items from mainstream media, to “work through the text, often line-by-line, and re-interpret it so as to…situate the news piece within the grand narratives of contemporary American conservatism.”[44] They explain not only what listeners should believe but also how they should go about understanding the news—which makes talk radio a daily instruction in what to think, what to think about, and how to think.
This work is done every day by the hundreds of mini-Limbaughs spread around the country on conservative talk radio, many of whom are popular in rural areas. They take policy disputes and turn them into irreconcilable identity issues, so, whether the topic of the day is immigration or healthcare or inflation, it’s an opportunity to draw a line separating us from them. When pundits claim that the resentment of small-town Republicans is driven not by increasing diversity or the propaganda efforts of the conservative elite but by their own circumstances and the excesses of “political correctness,” we would respond that no two of those factors are mutually exclusive. White, rural, religious Americans are reacting to their very real decline as a proportion of the U.S. population and to the attendant risk to their status, but they’re also reacting to what they’re told in the media every day.
Cable news and the internet work together to show people who are afraid of change just how much change is occurring, which reinforces their sense of fear and resentment. We may grasp the fact that increasing demographic diversity is often understood by rural Whites as a threat to their way of life, but increasing cultural diversity may be just as important. It can be hard to remember just how narrow our perception of the outside world was before the internet and, in particular, social media gave us a view of so many different kinds of people and ideas. If there were aspects to the cultural life of a big city that a rural person found unnerving, it didn’t matter much, given that they had little opportunity to learn about those aspects, and even when they did, they seemed like something far away that couldn’t possibly come to their community. But now, everything is right in everyone’s face, and it’s not hard to move from shock to repulsion to fear and anger, especially when there are media figures on trusted outlets like Fox News telling you that fear and anger are precisely what you should feel. And of course, social media is an unceasing engine of outrage and disgust, amplifying every conflict and elevating trivial incidents into national awareness.
It’s no accident that many of the most prominent and admired Republicans in Congress are little more than Fox News personalities with side gigs as legislators. Few of them have ever written a law of any significance, not only because they aren’t particularly interested in the work of governing but also because governing undermines their larger project of delegitimizing government. Among them is a bevy of elite, Ivy-educated lawyers like the senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley, who are more likely to indulge in moral panic and cringe-worthy “My pronouns are ‘Kiss my ass’!” performative politics than to offer a thoughtful policy critique.
So, the politicians and the media figures cooperate to create a permanent backlash politics in which rage at social change is their primary political tool. Politics has no goal more important than lashing out at your enemies and making dramatic gestures like removing books from libraries or firing gay teachers, gestures that won’t do anything to reverse the actual societal changes people find so threatening, but that will make those people feel a little more powerful, at least for a moment.
The trouble is that this feeling of empowerment is fleeting, and change continues—which is where the real danger of the culture war may emerge. When people realize that they’ll continue to get older, that America will continue to get more diverse, that “traditional” values on sexuality will continue to evolve, and that the people they hate will not disappear, what will happen? There is no easy way to predict, but authoritarian and radical right-wing movements have always found many of their adherents among those who felt they once had power and status and were losing it.
“Try to see America through their eyes,” read a November 2022 Associated Press report about people in rural Wisconsin who are increasingly convinced that dark conspiracies are bent on destroying everything they believe in and are gathering weapons in case a civil war comes.[45] This instruction—you, reader, must make an effort to understand the perspective not just of people in rural areas but of the most politically radical and the most disconnected from reality among them—is one that news consumers have been given for years. We’re encouraged to sympathize with even extremely dangerous people who are literally stockpiling weapons, but only if they come from the places where the “essential minority” resides. There are no articles about radical Black nationalists preparing for civil war that begin, “Try to see America through their eyes.” But rural Whites are given greater moral latitude. Their excesses may not quite be excused, but we’re called upon to understand these people—the implication being that whatever dangers they may present, it’s only because the rest of us haven’t given them the consideration they deserve.
The increasing geographic polarization between the parties has become a regular topic for national news outlets, yet stories about Republicans’ inability to win in cities are far rarer than stories about Democratic struggles among rural voters. There’s an implicit judgment at work, one that says that Democrats’ failure to win over rural voters is a kind of moral failing, one that can only be bred of insensitivity or contempt. Republicans’ struggles in cities, however, are seldom examined and less often judged; it’s just how things are.
This double standard is reinforced by the fact that journalists are always ready to amplify those few cases in which a Democrat says something dismissive about rural areas and the people who live there. But try to imagine a Democratic state legislator saying that the rural areas where 20 percent of his state’s population lives are a “hellhole” and sponsoring a bill calling for those areas to be spun off into their own state so the rest of the state can be rid of them. Now imagine the Democratic Party making that legislator their nominee for governor.
That’s what happened in 2022 in Illinois, but with the parties reversed: Republicans nominated state senator Darren Bailey, who had repeatedly called Chicago a “hellhole” and who introduced a resolution to make it its own state. During the campaign, he temporarily moved to a luxury high-rise in the city, telling reporters he wanted to “immerse myself in the culture.” What did he find? “Chicago is living The Purge, when criminals ravage at will, and the cops stand down,” he said, referring to the horror movie franchise in which all crimes become legal one night a year.[46] Somehow Bailey managed to avoid being killed during his time there, but the people of Chicago were skeptical that he had any sympathy for their problems; he got just 16 percent of the vote in the city and was easily beaten in the state overall, losing to incumbent Democrat J. B. Pritzker by twelve points.
Bailey’s view of big cities is shared by many conservatives, even some who live in those cities but who see political advantage in encouraging people to fear them. And few people have fed conservative contempt, and myths, about cities more than native New Yorker Donald Trump. “We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous,” Trump said in a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, at a time when crime was the lowest it had been in decades. “You walk down the street, you get shot.”[47] This was a regular theme of Trump’s over the course of his presidency; he would paint a picture that seemed frozen in the 1970s New York of Charles Bronson’s movie Death Wish, in which vicious gangs roving grimy streets terrorized a (White) middle class.
Denigrating cities and the people who live in them doesn’t come just from Trump. The supposed depravity and danger of American cities is hammered home again and again on conservative media, frequently with the implication that the more Black people a city contains, the more dangerous that city must be. (Breitbart, the popular right-wing news site formerly run by Trump adviser Steve Bannon, for a time had a “Black crime” tag so all its stories about Black people committing crimes could be located in one place.) Republicans across the country were convinced by Fox News that during the protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, entire American cities literally burned to the ground, that if you went to Portland or Seattle today, it would be little more than a pile of rubble.
The drumbeat on conservative media then seeps into mainstream media—a dynamic that has always been an essential part of the strategy under which those conservative media outlets were created. In the 2022 midterm elections, for instance, Fox News pounded day after day on the supposed crime wave in “Democrat cities”; in the week before the election, they aired 193 separate segments about crime (the weekly number plunged to 71 once the election took place).[48] Mainstream news outlets ran plenty of similar stories, which may have featured slightly less inflammatory rhetoric but still reinforced the idea that cities run by Democrats were engulfed in crime. “Democrats are embracing the police, but can that distract from crime in their cities?” asked one NPR story at the time.[49]
Crime continues to be portrayed as an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. When crime rates spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, it led to a wave of media coverage that, in both mainstream and conservative media, focused on cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, both supposed to be bastions of liberal values and nightmares of crime. What wasn’t a topic of extended discussion in the media was the fact that at the same time, there was a dramatic crime increase in rural areas, where violent crimes rose 25 percent in 2020.[50]
This narrative of the dangerous (blue) city and the safe (red) rural area has been a staple of conservative rhetoric for so long that it encourages Republican politicians to ignore or dismiss the violence suffered by their own constituents, as Oklahoma’s governor Kevin Stitt proved during his 2022 re-election bid. In a remarkable moment during a televised debate, Stitt literally scoffed when his opponent, Democratic nominee Joy Hofmeister, pointed out that the Sooner State’s violent crime rate is higher than New York’s or California’s. Stitt peered out at the in-person audience, laughed, and said with a huge grin, as if he couldn’t believe his opponent was so dumb, “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California? That’s what she just said!” But Hofmeister was right: According to the CDC, the homicide rate in Oklahoma at the time was 9 per 100,000 people, while in California it was 6.1, and in New York it was 4.7. And Oklahoma’s violent crime rate has been higher than either New York or California for two decades.[51]
Stitt found the mere suggestion that his White, rural, conservative heartland state—Trump carried every single Oklahoma county in 2016 and 2020—could possibly suffer a higher crime rate than two racially diverse, coastal, urban states preposterous. When the audience chuckled along with him, Stitt seemed convinced he was right. Or maybe he knew the truth about crime rates but took comfort in a more useful truth about truth itself: It no longer matters. His supporters no doubt found the idea that Oklahoma could be more dangerous than New York or California simply too absurd to believe. A month later, Stitt cruised to re-election by thirteen points.
Egged on by conservative media, Republican politicians around the country reinforce these myths about which parts of America are safe and which are unsafe. As U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, a Republican from Arizona, said in 2022, “We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence. It’s gangs. It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly. And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”[52]
This dark vision of the supposed miseries of urban life comes up again and again. In 2022, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas warned on Fox News that Democrats who want to address climate change “want to make us all poor. They want to make you live in downtown areas, and high-rise buildings, and walk to work, or take the subway.”[53] People pay huge amounts of money for the ability to walk to work in a downtown area full of accessible public transportation, entertainment, and restaurants, which is why rent and the prices for goods in so many cities have been driven so high. But Cotton sought to convince rural Americans that urban life is some kind of dystopian hell of endless suffering to which liberals want to condemn rural people.
Contrast those statements with Barack Obama’s memorable 2008 comment about people in small towns clinging to guns and religion. His then-opponent Hillary Clinton attacked him for it, the news media eagerly turned it into a big story, and for years afterward, Republicans held it up as proof of the contempt with which Obama and, by extension, all liberals regard regular White Americans.
But what really matters about that incident is how right Obama was. In fact, he offered an insightful analysis of how the events of recent decades had altered the nature of political identity among Whites in rural areas and small towns. Here’s what he actually said:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then 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.[54]
What Obama was describing was essentially the culture war displacing material arguments as the main focus of politics. He indicted both Republican and Democratic administrations for not helping these communities through the process of deindustrialization that was fed by trade agreements made in the 1990s and for making promises of economic revitalization that never came to pass. He argued that the response of those communities was essentially to give up hope that either party could help them economically and to focus their political attentions on issues such as guns, religion, and immigration.
Though there are policy choices involving these issues, Obama wasn’t talking about debates on whether we should have universal background checks or increase the number of agricultural guest workers we allow into the United States. Guns, religion, and immigration, as he posited them, are storehouses of identity, solidifying political attachments to the Republican Party that are extremely difficult for Democrats to uncouple.
This episode amplifies something scholars have been talking about for some time: the “post-materialist values” theory associated with political scientist Ronald Inglehart. Beginning in the 1970s,[55] Inglehart argued that as Western societies became more prosperous, their politics became more focused on noneconomic issues such as individual rights (e.g., the feminist and later gay rights movements) and environmentalism. Arguments over economics didn’t disappear, but the relative prosperity experienced by post–World War II generations enabled them to shift their concerns toward social issues.
Obama was arguing that economics had departed the political purview of people in small towns not because those people were prospering, but because they had given up on either party’s being able to solve their material problems. If both Democrats and Republicans seemed to be supporting the same neoliberal economics that left rural people poorer and with fewer opportunities, they might as well vote for whomever they agreed with on guns or same-sex marriage.
Of course, Obama himself—just like any partisan—would argue that in fact there is plenty that separates the two parties on economics and that his party would do more for the people in small towns. We happen to agree with him on this, but it doesn’t mean that the conclusion of those who put economics aside is necessarily foolish.
Rural people are not necessarily being hoodwinked into voting Republican. Post-materialist issues are meaningful and have practical consequences in people’s lives. Still, the resignation Obama was describing is an enormous gift to Republicans, who, even as they win elections, remain the targets of well-earned suspicion from poor and working-class voters around the country (not just in rural areas) over whether they have those voters’ economic interests at heart. If Republicans don’t need to convince those voters that conservative economics works for them, but can merely say that Democrats are indifferent to their plight, the GOP’s work is almost complete.
The reaction to Obama’s comments about what people in small towns and rural areas think about when they think about politics has become familiar. A Democratic politician says something that can be interpreted as insulting to rural people. Umbrage is loudly expressed. Reporters leap to remind everyone that Democrats look down on rural people and must change their ways. And the idea that the most essential Americans are scorned by the urban liberal elite is reinforced anew.
This story and the resentments it produces are nothing new. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan thundered in his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention, “I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” The fact that cities depend on the resources mined or grown or gathered in rural areas only increases the perception that in addition to their other sins, city dwellers are insufficiently appreciative of what rural people give to them.
Despite the diversity both within particular rural communities and among them, if you were asked what “rural culture” means in America today, you’d have a pretty clear picture in your head. Some of it would have to do with admirable values and the pleasingly pastoral lifestyle, but it would also involve a series of habits and signifiers displayed with a kind of defiance, even some that long ago passed into cliché. One can even argue that rural areas around the country have lost their distinctiveness, merging together into an entity with a single cultural terroir, one with southern intonations no matter how far from the Mason-Dixon Line you might be. One can find Confederate flags flying in rural areas in every corner of the country, all the way to the Canadian border.[56]
This process of cultural homogenization was undoubtedly fed by cable TV or, more broadly, the spread of a nationalized and multiplied media with many more sources of information and entertainment than our parents and grandparents had access to. Fifty years ago, everyone might have seen the same movies and network television shows, but today we see everything everywhere at once, which, among other things, shows us both the people we hate and the people with whom we share something. So, two people watching TV or scrolling through social media in rural Montana and rural Mississippi can see themselves in each other’s uncertain circumstances and find a kind of kinship.
This communal effect could be the seed of a genuine rural political movement, but as of yet, it hasn’t been, and this is one of the central tragedies of rural American politics: Rural people across the country may feel a sense of connection with one another, and they share some of the same antipathies, but they haven’t been offered meaningful paths to political engagement beyond giving their votes to the same candidates they’ve been supporting for years. What they’re left with is a profound sense of precarity and loss, and all the resentment that comes with them, which can be easily turned into rage by cynical politicians and media figures looking to profit from their material and emotional distress. And while rural Whites may not have the firmest partisan loyalties, the kind that will make someone vote for literally anyone on their party’s ticket, they do have a stack of ideas, beliefs, and relationships that push them away from Democrats and toward Republicans. Every now and then, an extraordinary event like the 2008 economic crisis—which was so traumatic that voters were eager to vote for change in almost any form it would have been offered—can come along and topple this stack, but that’s what it takes: a cataclysm of circumstance. What won’t do it? A well-thought-out rural development plan on a Democrat’s campaign website, or a smartly written speech, or a powerful TV ad.
Plenty of Democratic candidates come from rural areas, speak rural people’s language, and understand rural people’s concerns. They tell voters how they were raised on farms and live in small towns, and they’re informed and earnest about the challenges of rural life. Both in who they are and in how they campaign, they’re doing exactly what their party’s critics, from the right and among journalists, have told them innumerable times they must do to appeal to rural voters. And most of the time, they still lose.
Like their Republican counterparts, they sing the praises of places that are small and rural, assuring voters that their communities are where the life lessons are true, the people are good, and character is forged. Many in both parties will leave out the part about how, in order to achieve their ambitions, they left. In order to demonstrate their authenticity, they’ll claim to be small-town boys, no matter where life took them, and will put a little extra drawl in their accent. But the Republicans in particular know that when they really need those votes, the best way to get them is to amp up the culture war, telling voters that the next election—indeed, the fate of the country—is all about us and them.
There will be no final battle in the culture war: Should we come to a consensus on one controversy, another will quickly emerge, and the war will continue forever. But rural Americans know that when they enter those battles, they come with a status that will always be given special consideration by the political world. They may sometimes lose, but when they do, that loss will become one more grievance other Americans will be called to respect.
Rural Whites have thus become the recipients of a benefit that echoes what W.E.B. Du Bois identified nearly a century ago as “a sort of public and psychological wage” offered to White laborers by virtue of their race during the period of Reconstruction, even if they were poor. “The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness,” Du Bois wrote. “Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”[57] Today, rural White Americans receive a special kind of deference, not necessarily from the legal system but from the political and cultural systems, one enjoyed by no one else.