On rural resentment and pain, and its link to the trucker strike

I am a huge fan of Thomas Edsall, who writes regularly for the New York Times, but I missed this column earlier this month until today.  The headline is provocative, "There's a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers."  As is typical of Edsall, he marshals recent academic research on a topic.  You have to get pretty deep into this column to get to the rural part of this one, which otherwise focuses on class and regional inequality, but I'm just going to highlight below those rural bits.  The rural bits, by the way, could also be framed as regional inequality.  Edsall writes:  

I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:

In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.

The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.

“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University; Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics; and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article “Progressive Cities: Urban-Rural Polarization of Social Values and Economic Development Around the World.”

* * * 

Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”

Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:

when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”

The urban-rural conflict between postmaterialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”

I'm thinking "postmaterialistic values" sound like what Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs"--those that folks with other pressing problems (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs) in their lives solved then have the time to worry and think about. 

In an email, Luca elaborated:

There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in second demographic transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.

Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”

Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.

The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.

Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In their October 2017 paper “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”

There's so much more to Edsall's column, which I'll try to get to in another post focusing more on class than geography.  

Meanwhile, here's another New York Times column on the Ottawa trucker's strike, this one by Ross Douthat and focused on class.   

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.