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   for the hillbilly”. For a more recent example, consider this (since-   
   deleted) tweet from Nell Scovell, a television writer who co-wrote Lean In   
   with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, in response to the tornadoes in Kentucky   
   that killed more than 70 people in December:   
      
   Sorry Kentucky. Maybe if your 2 senators hadn’t spent decades blocking   
   climate legislation to reduce climate change, you wouldn’t be suffering   
   from climate disasters. If it’s any consolation, McConnell and Rand have   
   f’ed over all of us, too.   
      
   This sentiment reared its head online after the West Virginia senator Joe   
   Manchin blocked the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act. Trading   
   in some of the most reprehensible stereotypes about Appalachia, the actor   
   Bette Midler wrote on Twitter:   
      
   What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has   
   done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like   
   his state, is horrible. He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like   
   his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.   
      
   Lazy thinking of this sort is what happens when you don’t make class   
   distinctions. The existence of the rural gentry class – and increasing   
   income inequality that coincided with economic decline in rural areas –   
   ought to make clear that not all rural Americans are voting against their   
   class interests when they side with Republicans.   
      
   The wealthy voted for Trump, and Trump rewarded them with tax cuts. But   
   rural political conservatism relates to rural economic conditions in   
   other, more complicated ways. During the Great Recession, Katherine   
   Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spent several   
   years conducting ethnographic studies on rural, often white,   
   Wisconsinites. She found a persistent sense that rural areas and the   
   people who live there are mistreated, creating a recognizable “rural   
   consciousness”. People felt not only that they had been abandoned by the   
   government, but that cities and cultural elites hoarded power and prestige   
   at the expense of rural areas.   
      
   Some of the rural discontent is unquestionably racial. The GOP appeals to   
   people who want to preserve the social and economic benefits that   
   whiteness confers, or to restore the loss of privileges brought by an   
   increasingly diverse populace. A recent analysis of 2020 voting patterns   
   by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that among non-   
   college educated white voters, “racial resentment” was one of the highest   
   predictors of conservative political views.   
      
   But all this applies to plenty of suburban Trump voters, too. To the   
   extent that a rural consciousness exists, it’s entangled with a sense of   
   having lost something while the rest of the country moves ahead. This,   
   Cramer found, creates a persistent “us v them” view of the world. In   
   Wisconsin, this rivalry manifests as anger at cities – where, it should be   
   said, most of the state’s non-white population lives – but also at white-   
   collar professionals and public employees of all kinds. These attitudes   
   can also be found in western Colorado, with the frustration directed at   
   the Denver and Boulder population centers. Western Slope economies depend   
   on tourist dollars from these metro areas, yet there’s a strong sense of   
   resentment toward the cultural and economic power concentrated on the   
   other side of the Rockies.   
      
   I encountered this sentiment in the fall of 2020, when I interviewed an   
   unaffiliated, first-time candidate for local office named Trudy Vader.   
   Vader’s family had been forced to sell their ranch during the farm crisis   
   of the 1980s. Today, what’s left of the ranch holds a mobile home, a horse   
   pen, and little else. A few wealthy families own most of the county’s   
   private ranchland. The property’s sale was one of her formative   
   experiences. Her sense of having once held and now lost something dear   
   could not be separated from other, less concrete losses: her ranching town   
   overrun with tourists during the summer, agriculture’s decline as a   
   cultural force, a hunch that people worked harder back in the day.   
      
   Vader’s default conservatism – her nostalgia for an era that might not   
   have been as great as she remembers – makes some sense in this context.   
   But she remains a landowner, a status that millions of Americans cannot   
   hope to achieve. If economic change can help create distinct rural   
   identities, those identities can also become relatively uncoupled from   
   material realities, spiraling out in unpredictable ways that may not   
   easily trace back to economic conditions.   
      
   In his book The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin summarizes the mindset of   
   conservatives like Vader:   
      
   People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but   
   conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something.   
   It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the   
   unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory   
   owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of   
   standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned   
   in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative   
   retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished   
   as that which we no longer possess.   
      
   The conservative mindset that Robin describes is widespread, but it is not   
   absolute, even on an individual level. Vader’s primary issue during the   
   race, one that she stressed throughout the campaign, was a local   
   affordable housing crisis, which she supported radical measures to   
   address. (Politics may be national, but major party categories are still   
   scrambled at the local level.)   
      
   There’s evidence that the political makeup of rural America is neither as   
   simplistic, nor as homogenous, as either major party’s treatment of it   
   would lead us to believe. The past six months have seen one of the most   
   sustained periods of labor activity in decades. More than a dozen strikes   
   and unionization efforts are happening around the country right now, many   
   of them in small towns and midsize industrial cities in rural areas. Every   
   day, reports appear of workers walking off jobs that demand too much for   
   too little pay.   
      
   For months this past fall, John Deere workers stood on picket lines in   
   towns in Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas, and came away with pay increases and   
   a strong bargaining agreement.   
      
   In late 2021, after strikes across the midwest and rust belt that lasted   
   more than two months, Kellogg workers won an agreement that removed a two-   
   tier benefit system and ensured no factory closures until 2026.   
      
   In Topeka, Kansas, last summer, several hundred Frito-Lay workers stopped   
   working, alleging low pay, long hours, and unsafe conditions.   
      
   Since April, Alabama coal miners have been striking – in November,   
   hundreds protested outside the New York City headquarters of the financial   
   giant BlackRock, the largest shareholder in the mining corporation they   
   work for.   
      
   In early November, simultaneous strikes in hospital maintenance and   
   steelwork meant that 3% of the entire town of Huntington, West Virginia,   
   had walked off the job. Last year’s strike wave was preceded in 2018 by   
   gigantic teacher strikes that began in West Virginia and spread to 10   
   other states.   
      
   And in response, the Democratic party has done nothing, as far as I can   
   tell. Whether it’s a strategic lapse or an indication of the special   
   interests Democratic politicians are beholden to is unclear. Either way,   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)