Stop Trying to Understand the White Rural Voter

Many of Hochschild’s conclusions are sound but not particularly striking. She observes both here and in Strangers in Their Own Land that many of her subjects feel that others—minorities, immigrants, etc.—are somehow “cutting in line,” and she remarks that this notion, however incorrect, is a powerful motivator of political reaction, especially in impoverished communities. As she notes, many residents of these communities do go into cities, some of them in patterns of almost seasonal vocational migration, and see the scope and scale of investment—buildings; roads; airports; restaurants—and then return to the hollowed-out, deindustrialized landscape of the post-extraction economy. Hochschild identifies a “pride paradox”: Americans do want to live with pride and with dignity and find themselves simultaneously proud of their community and its values and ashamed of its poverty and disintegration.

Yet the book has a regrettable tendency to fit people into this schema in ways that can feel both narrow and, frankly, a bit naïve. She finds many cases of the “pride paradox,” like Alex Hughes, a small entrepreneur who “yes-sure’d” his way into jobs and businesses—self-training and picking up work others wouldn’t or couldn’t do—until “by the 1990s Alex’s bootstrap ‘yes sure’ strategy no longer brought in steady work,” and he found himself divorced, underemployed, and $128,000 in hock to the IRS. Like many of the Pikeville residents Hochschild meets, Hughes purports to want nothing to do with the white nationalists. He tells her, “I am three emergencies past a deadline at a job that I worry I could lose”; he has no interest in “racial strife.” But like 80 percent of Pike County, he voted for Donald Trump, who showed scarcely less animosity toward racial minorities or immigrants than did the Nazis at the march. I couldn’t help but wonder if the paradoxes Hochschild identified were really explanations, or if they were just excuses and justifications all along.

Some of this empathy begins to feel like special pleading. I grew up in one of these communities. Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was not quite as small as Pikeville (though it may be even poorer), but it was still an old coal-and-coke town with a dying main street, whose population had declined from more than 20,000 in the ’40s and ’50s to barely 12,000 when I was in high school there in the ’90s (and continued to decline to under 10,000 today). There were, and are, plenty of good and noble people, but, as anyone in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, or anywhere like it, will also happily volunteer, there are plenty of assholes. (Abramsky’s book is more forthright on this point.) You don’t need to embrace the full thesis of a book like White Rural Rage, or even Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to see that for some people at least, the cruelty is the point, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer put it. Sophisticated racists with an understanding of journalism and, to some extent, social science are capable of invoking terms such as disinvestment and material deprivation as little more than a convenient excuse for their corrosive beliefs. We should be careful not to be too readily taken in by self-representation—a weakness, perhaps, in the ethnographic form itself.