Solving the Mystery of White Rural Rage

People Need a Sense of Pride

Many people think it’s racism, or sexism. They think it’s love of Hitler, or the Spanish Inquisition. 

It’s not.

It’s classism.

My Friend Edna

From 1983-2015 I had a neighbor named Edna. Edna was a home health care worker. She took a bus every day to some rich person’s house to care for their aging mother or father. She retired in her 90s.

Edna was also a very proud woman. She was proud of her work, proud of her family, and stout in her faith. She looked down on the people she worked for, because they lacked her fierce working class pride, pride in a job well done, in her care for her people, and her love for the community where she lived.

I was a white collar guy. My wife was a white collar gal. We both had college degrees.

But we didn’t understand Edna.

We should have made more of an effort. Because understanding her is the key to understanding, and overcoming, today’s white rural rage.

Pride is a powerful emotion. If you don’t have it in your work, if you don’t have it in your family, where do you go for it?

My parents’ generation went to church, to civic groups like the Masons, and many of my neighbors belonged to unions, which gave them a voice in their workplace.

Sources of Pride

Where do today’s white rural people, those who aren’t lawyers or landowners or equipment salesmen, go to for a sense of pride?

Remember that today’s rural economies are built around manufacturing and low-cost services. Agriculture is a manufacturing business, and while it’s incredibly productive, the resulting products are of modest value. The money goes to the landowner and the company managing the equipment or the business. The same is true for manufacturing. Mass production produces low cost goods, but the money flows to the top. Hospitals, nursing facilities, schools, and big box stores provide jobs, but you can’t raise a family and send a kid to college working at WalMart.

The same is true when rural people go to church. Instead of yesterday’s denominations, with preachers you knew giving small services to the neighbors, today’s rural communities are filled with evangelical “Victory” churches, manufactured buildings preaching a prosperity gospel. But the only prosperity they offer is to the pastor and his wife. Civic groups died during the Vietnam War. Unions are anathema except for the police. Police have pride and power.

Given that, the only way for most people to feel pride is to look down on others. That’s called prejudice. Prejudice tells you to look down on people who are different, starting with people like Edna. She wasn’t just black, remember, she also wasn’t college educated, and she did “women’s work.” Most of those who share Edna’s values today are immigrants, making do with what they have, raising families despite everything, and powering the current recovery.

Edna had no use for the high-falutin, and universities are filled with such people. Whether they’re students or teachers, they’re golden. The research university towns across this country are wealthier than the land around them. Consider Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Look at Lincoln, then at Omaha. Look at Fayetteville, Arkansas or Athens, Georgia. These are bright blue islands in a dark red sea. They generate enormous amounts of wealth, but it goes to the talented tenth who live or work there. The only pride schools provide comes from the football team, and if you want to know why football exists that’s why.

Struggling for Pride

The struggle of class against class is a political struggle. But it doesn’t have to be. If there’s a shared commitment to something, an external threat or a national cause, people will unite around it regardless of class.

If you want to end white rural rage, you give people a sense of pride. You pay them better, you organize them around jobs and workplaces, and you build churches tied to the community.

Here’s what you don’t do. You don’t call them racists, or sexists. You don’t insult them. Instead, you understand their need for pride and help them gain pride that’s not tied to hate.

That happens to be what Joe Biden has been talking about for over 50 years.