Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a four term US senator from New York. Although a Democrat, he served as an advisor to President Nixon. He treated the Senate less as a political body than a seminar in macroeconomics at an Ivy League school where he held an endowed chair. On a regular basis he reminded his colleagues that rural areas are becoming a center of hard right MAGAness. While rural areas used to be more liberal and voted for Democrats, the political spectrum has shifted. White, older, more religious, less affluent and less highly educated voters who live in rural areas are more likely to hold socially conservative views generally championed by Republicans.
As part of this shift, rural residents deeply resent how they’re perceived and treated – or how they think they’re perceived and treated, One of the best reports on the subject is Robert Wuthnow’s 2019 book “The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America.” The challenge has been described as “rural resentment,” perhaps best exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s description of the rural states, including Louisiana and Wisconsin, as “deplorables.” According to the Washington Post, “political scientist Katherine Cramer defines rural resentment as focused on three things. First concerns redistribution, or the belief that rural areas don’t receive their fair share of government resources and benefits. Second is representation, or the perception that most politicians ignore rural residents. And third, a sense of being culturally overlooked, that rural lifestyles and cultures don’t get the same respect as those of urban and suburban communities.”
A number of studies show that rural resentment is simply based on false beliefs. A 2017 study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government found that New York contributes $48 billion more in taxes than it gets in federal funding, which is the largest “negative” balance of any state. New York’s negative balance of payments is driven primarily by federal taxes, rather than spending. Payments from New York to the federal government were $12,820 per capita, or approximately $3,401 higher than the national average.
For the most part the imbalance between urban and rural reflects demographics. The rural states tend to be older, poorer and sick, This is the way the social safety net works. According to the Census Bureau, “When looking at the populations of both rural and urban America, we find a distribution with two peaks, baby boomers in their 50s and 60s forming one, and ‘millennials’ in their late teens and twenties forming the second ,,,. While there are more people in the millennial generation in urban areas, baby boomers form the higher peak in rural areas.”
Rural areas have much older working-age populations … Generally, an older working-age population points to lower overall labor force participation (i.e., the percentage of the overall population in the civilian labor force), as workers begin to drop out of the labor force past age 50. Rural areas have lower labor force participation overall (59.2% compared with 64.2% for urban areas).
At the same time, there are patterns based on education and race, The New York Times reported that people with higher education, even in rural areas, are more likely to vote for Democrats, while the Washington Post focuses on race. The Post presumes that a rational political party will return to the center. “That’s particularly true in electoral systems requiring a majority of votes to win power, as parties realize that they need to broaden their appeal to gain support from moderates and independents. If they do not learn and adapt, if their only appeal is to the extremes, parties will remain in the electoral wilderness.” That is, unless Republicans don’t understand the true distribution of public opinion, which is always possible, any rational vote-seeking party should recognize the risks of the Trump brand and move the party back toward the conservative center-right.
Right?”
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2023
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