Kurgman conflates working class whiteness and rurality (or, a return to The Geography of the Class Culture Wars)

Krugman asserts in his column, "A Racist Stuck in the Past," that Trump is stuck not in the antebellum period, Reconstruction or even Jim Crow--but in 1989, a mere 30 years ago.  It's an interesting rhetorical strategy--to talk about the relatively recent past as "the past."  Krugman's point is that Trump conflates the urban with blackness and black dysfunction, and he dates this back at least to Trump's response to the brutal 1989 beating of the so-called Central Park Jogger:  Trump called for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five, the five men arrested for the crime.  The five were later exonerated, in 2002, but Trump has never admitted he was wrong about the men.

Krugman uses those events as a jumping off point to talk about how urban black dysfunction has evolved into rural white dysfunction in a short three decades, a trend he says Trump is in denial about:

[Trump's] vision of “American carnage” is one of a nation whose principal social problem is inner-city violence, perpetrated by nonwhites. That’s a comfortable vision if you’re a racist who considers nonwhites inferior. But it’s completely wrong as a picture of America today. 

For one thing, violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was. 

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Americans. 

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

Note that Krugman's definition of rural is quite broad--seemingly any place not the inner city.  

Krugman goes on to explain how these events confirm what William Julius Wilson wrote decades ago: the problem of three or four decades ago was not "some peculiar problem with black culture."  Rather, the catalyst for the decline of African Americans was poor job opportunities and the attendant decline of the traditional family.  Krugman asks how one might test Wilson's hypothesis:   

Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

Krugman concludes:

What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t.

The colorblindness aspect of the first part of conclusion will annoy many, but I generally like Krugman's argument.  What I'm less comfortable with is his conflation of rurality with whiteness and white dysfunction.  Indeed, his column seems to me a terrific illustration of what I called, in my 2010 article, "The Geography of the Class Culture Wars," a progressive tendency to project what's wrong with America onto rural people and places, who are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) raced white.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Are rural and working class white women re-thinking their support of Trump?

Recent focus groups conducted by Stanley Greenberg (the Democratic pollster) and colleagues in Bangor Maine and perhaps some other places (on this point, the sources are not absolutely clear to me) suggest that working class white women may not be as loyal to Trump as working class white men.  In particular, working-class women are put off by Trump's crassness and bombast, while their male counterparts tend not to be.  Ronald Brownstein summarized in The Atlantic a few days ago, under the headline "Will Trump's Racist Attacks Help Him?  Ask Blue-Collar White Women": 

And a new set of focus groups in small-town and rural communities offers fresh evidence that the gender gap over Trump within this bloc is hardening.

In the Rust Belt states that tipped the 2016 election to Trump—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—few things may matter more than whether Democrats can fan doubts about Trump that have surfaced among blue-collar white women or whether the president can rebuild his margins among them with his polarizing racial and ideological attacks. 

“The white working-class men look like they are approaching the 2016 margins for Trump, but not the women,” says the veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, in a judgment supported by public polling. “Clearly the women are in a different place.” Greenberg conducted the focus groups, whose findings were released today, for the American Federation of Teachers.

The Intelligencer also ran a story on the focus groups, quoting liberally from the Brownstein story.  Here's a link to the Greenberg survey/focus group docs. 

And here is my own 2018 law review article about rural and working class white women in the era of Trump.  I speculated that most working class white women see their economic well being (if one could fairly use the word "well" to express what I'm thinking about) as so connected to the jobs of their husbands and boyfriends that they are not troubled by Trump's bad behavior, including his crass language.  In other words, to quote James Carville, "It's the economy stupid."  I sure hope I'm wrong.  Interestingly, the Brownstein story above includes the following, which suggests that people are not voting based solely on their pocketbooks--that Trump's "exclusionary racist and cultural messages" are off-putting to them:

In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released earlier this week, fully one-third of adults who said the economy is working for them personally still said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance. An equal share of these voters said they now intend to vote against him for reelection. To offset that unusual defection among the economically content, Trump must maximize his margins—and turnout—among the groups that have been most receptive to his exclusionary racist and cultural messages: older, nonurban, evangelical-Christian, and non-college-educated white voters.

And speaking of blue-collar whites, here's a feature story from today's Des Moines Register out of Clinton County, Iowa (population 49,116), whose electorate twice backed Obama only to flip for Trump in 2016.  The headline is "Democrats' Hope for White House Success Run Through this Iowa County."  The story by Brianne Pfannenstiel features the chair of the county's Democratic Party, Bill Jacobs, who takes campaign organizers for the various presidential candidates on tours of his county:

When a new campaign organizer arrives in his corner of Iowa, he meets the person in the gravel parking lot outside the party’s headquarters, they climb into his gray Toyota minivan, and they set off for a drive. 

With the radio tuned to classic rock, Jacobs drives northeast along Liberty Avenue past the looming Archer Daniels Midland Co. plant, where a constant procession of grain trucks loops through to drop off corn for processing. 

He follows the curve of the Mississippi River where the city has invested in recreation and tourism. He points out the boarded-up retail shops on Main Avenue. 

"So much of the tour I give is talking about things that used to be here," Jacobs said. "We're really looking for the next big thing." 

He drives past the recently renovated lodge at Eagle Point Park, where the unions hold their annual Labor Day picnic.  (emphasis mine) 

Note the focus on what the county previously had and the need for economic revitalization.  The feature also touches on race--of course--and is well worth a read in its entirety. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.