Where white majority is fading, election deniers thrive

The New York Times reported last week from several places that are not necessarily rural, but which may be exurban, and where politicians who are election deniers are thriving.  The Times reporters Michael Keller and David Fitzpatrick see a correlation between this phenomenon and a fading white majority.  

The first place featured is Fort Bend County, Texas, which is part of the greater Houston metro area.  Another region featured is far southwestern Virginia, the more rural Buchanan and Wise counties, with populations of 20,000 and 36,000 respectively.  

Here's the gist of the story:    

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

* * * 

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

* * *  

Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results.

* * *  

Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s [district] in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed.

Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause.

From Marie March, a restaurant owner in Christiansburg, Virginia, had this to say about local support for Trump's dispute of the election results: 

You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up.  We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.

March attended the January 6 rally and won a seat in the Virginia state legislature last year.   The story continues:  

[March] said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted.

“You could call it an echo chamber of our beliefs,” she added, “but that’s a pretty big landmass to be an echo chamber.”

 Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On upward mobility, the "American Dream"--and China?

The New York Times today reveals a fact that will shock many:  One has a greater prospect of upward mobility in China than in the United States.  This finding (which I'll not scrutinize here in terms of methodology; I'm hardly qualified to do so) flies in the face our cultural assumptions--not only about capitalism v. socialism/communism, but also more strictly about the United States v. China. Here's the gist of the article:

There are two 18-year-olds, one in China, the other in the United States, both poor and short on prospects. You have to pick the one with the better chance at upward mobility. 

Which would you choose? 

Not long ago, the answer might have seemed simple. The “American Dream,” after all, had long promised a pathway to a better life for anyone who worked hard. 

But the answer today is startling: China has risen so quickly that your chances of improving your station in life there vastly exceed those in the United States.

Journalists Javier C. Hernandez and Quoctrung Bui report on the reasons for this surprising conclusion, attributing China's primacy to "an economic expansion without precedent in modern history": 

Eight hundred million people have risen out of poverty. That’s two and a half times the population of the United States.

* * * 

Not only are incomes drastically rising within families, but sons are outearning their fathers. That means expectations are rising, too, especially among China’s growing middle class. 

Life expectancy has also soared.

That brings me to a topic I have explored on these pages (and on Legal Ruralism) in prior posts, such as here, here, here, here, here and here, which is deaths of despair and the the role of optimism--or in the case of the United States pessimism--and mobility (is it upward or is it downward?)  in relation to health and wellbeing.  See more here, including references to the work of Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University, who has theorized white despair in relation to, well, (among other characteristics) whiteness and the current lack of optimism among the white working class, who no longer expect to move up, but instead see themselves slipping backwards.