The mystery of rural white rage

Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment?

People have been asking themselves this question for two centuries and the real answer has always been no.

Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always created enough new ones compensate for these lossesand there is every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But progress is not painless.

Businessmen and some economists may speak enthusiastically of the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, both economically and socially, for those on the destruction side of the equation.

This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but entire communities.

This is not a hypothetical proposition.

It’s a big part of what happened to Rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying, and baffling detail “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” (“Rural White Anger: The Threat to American Democracy”), a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldmann.

I say “devastating” because the plight of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political reaction to these situations represents a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “disconcerting” because on some level I still don’t understand the politics. .

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue.

Indeed, American farms produce more than five times more than they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural workforce has shrunk by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides.

Coal production has declined recently, but partly thanks to technologies such as mountaintop logging and coal mining as a way of life It’s disappeared largely a long time ago, and the number of miners has declined by 80% even though production was about it doubled.

The decline of manufacturing in small towns is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it is also primarily a problem technological change which favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, therefore, has enriched the United States as a whole, but has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas.

So why don’t rural workers go where there are jobs?

Some do.

But some cities have become unaffordable, partly due to restrictive zoning (something democratic states don’t understand), while many workers are also reluctant to do so. abandon their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we help these communities?

We do. Federal programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and others) are available to all Americans, but they are disproportionately funded by taxes paid by wealthy urban areas.

As a result, huge transfers of money actually occur from wealthy urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.

While these transfers mitigate to some extent the hardships facing rural America, they do not restore the situation sense of dignity which has been lost along with rural jobs.

And perhaps this loss of dignity explains both rural white anger and why that anger is so misdirected: because it’s pretty clear that this November, a majority of rural white Americans will vote again. against Joe Biden, who as president sought to create jobs at home. community e Donald Trumpa street vendor from Queens who offers little more than confirmation of your resentment.

Genesis

This feeling of loss of dignity may be compounded by the fact that some rural Americans have long viewed themselves as more hard-working, more patriotic, and perhaps even morally superior to big-city residents, an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts such as the hit song Jason Aldean “Try it in a small town.”

In the crudest sense of the word, rural and small-town America is supposed to be full of hard-working people who stick to the traditional valuesnot like those degenerate urban dwellers who depend on social assistance, but the economic and social reality does not coincide with this self-image.

Working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely to find work than their metropolitan counterparts, not because they are lazy, but because there are simply no jobs.

(The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in healthcare.)

A good number of rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide, and births to single mothers; again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder it is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago regarding urban problems, What happens when work disappears.

Draw attention to some of these realities and you will be accused of being a smug urban elitist.

I’m sure the responses to this article will be… interesting.

The result (which in some ways I still find difficult to understand) is that many rural white voters support politicians who tell them the lies they want to hear.

It helps explain why MAGA storytelling presents relatively safe cities like New York as crime-infested hellscapes, while rural America falls victim not to technology but to illegal immigration, the woke, and the deep state.

By now you are probably waiting for a solution to this unpleasant political situation. Schaller and Waldman offer some suggestions.

But the truth is, although rural white anger is probably the greatest threat to American democracy, I don’t have any good ideas about how to combat it.

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