I don’t ordinarily deconstruct my own work, but I’m going to make an exception in this case. Here goes:
- The post was inspired by an Ezra Klein interview with a novelist named Barbara Kingsolver, who basically tells us that white rural residents are the virtuous victims of contempt, indifference, and even malevolence from city dwellers. In her view, they are justified in supporting Trump, even if he operates against their interests in actual practice, because he shows them the respect they deserve, and hates the same people they do.
- We can easily admit that there are plenty of urbanites who view rural America as “flyover country,” but the contempt runs both ways, and is ageless. Remember Al Smith? Remember the KKK? Remember the Know-Nothings? Remember Jefferson’s views of immigrants and cities? White Protestant America’s view of itself as the only true, incorruptible America in an existential battle with evil interlopers has existed for centuries. It doesn’t taste any better now than it did then, particularly since the left really wants to help these people, who seem to prefer anger and nostalgia to federal spending programs.
- The snooty liberal establishment didn’t push opioids on rural residents; voracious capitalists did. In a similar vein, environmentalists didn’t close down the mines; the mine owners did, as a result of economic forces that were beyond the control of either group. The intellectual left consistently gets the blame for this, however.
- Trump and his supporters clearly view struggling white rural residents through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement. I don’t buy it, for several reasons. First, the plight of white rural residents has never remotely approached the condition of slavery. Second, those residents always had the ability to leave and sand down their accents if necessary; black people cannot do that. Third, and most importantly, the vast majority of black people believe in liberal democracy, in spite of everything they have suffered throughout the centuries. White rural supporters of Trump, on the other hand, believe they are entitled to rule whether they represent a majority of voters or not, and they are perfectly willing to burn it down if they are unsuccessful in fair elections.
- It is true that the “burn it down” crowd has an analogy in the handful of black protesters who have torched businesses over the years in an effort to bring attention to lingering injustice. The difference is that the protesters only burned down their own communities; white Christian reactionaries want to burn down the entire country.