On realness in politics, and its links to geography

Paul Waldman writes in today's Washington Post under the headline, "I, too, am a hardscrabble American."  It's about Florida governor Ron DeSantis' effort to brand (or re-brand) himself as what is sometimes called a "real" American.  In any event, the "harsdcrabble" adjective caught my attention.  Here's an excerpt from Waldman's column:

Perhaps that’s why [DeSantis] has decided to search elsewhere for the salt-of-the-earth realness that Florida lacks. In his campaign book, he tells readers that despite a lifetime in Florida, he’s actually from Ohio, kind of:

I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.

Apparently, people in Florida do not work hard, fear God or love America — at least not the way they did in the redoubt of Rust Belt customs that was the DeSantis home.

Waldman's column takes up a silly dialogue that's been driving me crazy ever since Sarah Palin declared herself a real American who represented the Joe Six Packs (or was it Joe the Plumbers?) of Main Street, pitting herself and them against Barack Obama and Wall Street types.  I wrote about the recent iterations of who is a real American in my recent law review article on Rural Bashing (with Kaceylee Klein).  There I observe that Mary Peltola, recently elected Democratic congresswoman from Alaska, seems to get away with this sort of "real" people talk--that she's not been attacked from the Left as so many before her have--perhaps because she is a person of color.  

Edsall on Democrats' uphill battle in 2022, 2024, with attention to the white working class

The headline for Thomas Edsall's column is "Democrats are Making Life too Easy for Republicans," and an excerpt focusing on the white working class follows:  

At the moment, there is widespread pessimism among those on the left end of the political spectrum. Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote that for predictable reasons, “Democrats face an uphill battle in both 2022 and 2024.”

But, she went on, “the problems are much deeper. First, the white working class that used to vote Democratic no longer does.” Sawhill noted that when she

studied this group back in 2018, what surprised me most was their very negative attitudes toward government, their dislike of social welfare programs, their commitment to an ethic of personal responsibility and the importance of family and religion in their lives. This large group includes some people who are just plain prejudiced but a larger group that simply resents all the attention paid to race, gender, sexual preference or identity and the disrespect they think this entails for those with more traditional views and lifestyles.

Messages coming from the more progressive members of the Democratic Party, Sawhill warned, “will be exploited by Republicans to move moderate Democrats or to move no-Trump Republicans in their direction.”

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party, writing by email:

Misguided focus on unpopular social policies are driving voters away from the Democratic Party and are mobilizing Republicans. Democrats used to be the party of the working class, but today they are instead seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, crippling the police and injecting social justice into math classes.

As a result, Westwood continued,

It is no surprise that this doesn’t connect with a working family struggling to pay for surging grocery bills. By abandoning their core brand, even Democrats who oppose defunding the police are burdened by the party’s commitment to unpopular social policy.

The traditional strategy in midterm elections, Westwood wrote, is to mobilize the party base. Instead, he contended, Democrats

have decided to let the fringe brand the party’s messaging around issues that fail to obtain majority support among the base. Perhaps the most successful misinformation campaign in modern politics is being waged by the Twitter left against the base of the Democratic Party. The Twitter mob is intent on pushing social policies that have approximately zero chance of becoming law as a test of liberalism. Even if you support reducing taxes on the middle class, immigration reform and increasing the minimum wage, opposing defunding the police or the legalization of property crime makes you an unreasonable outcast.  (emphasis mine)

In other words, Westwood is blasting purity tests. 

I have highlighted the column's comment about the rural-urban dynamic in a post at Legal Ruralism.  

On escapes, literary and otherwise, from Trump country

Don't miss Timothy Egan's op-ed piece in the New York Times today, in which he brings together Hillbilly Elegy (by J.D. Vance) and Educated (by Tara Westover) as documenting how to escape from "Trump country"--namely by access to education.  The piece is titled, "A Hillbilly and a Survivalist Show the Way out of Trump Country."  Here's a short excerpt:

The two great literary bookends of President Trump’s half-term of grift and chaos have come from survivors of the most broken white communities that helped put him in office. They also show us the best way out of the basement of American despair. 

How J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Tara Westover, who wrote “Educated,” escaped physical and psychological horror is the dose of Charles Dickens that makes these two memoirs so memorable.

I admit I liked Westover's Educated better than Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, though each resonated with me in powerful ways.  As for the latter, I have written a published response, which is included in a collection of essays just out from West Virginia University Press, Appalachian Reckoning:  A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.  The book is available for pre-order now and has received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Forward Reviews, which called it "[s]tunning in its intellectual and creative riches." Publishers's Weekly also gave it a very positive review.  My chapter is called "What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in 21st Century America." 

I'll be on a panel discussing the book in March at the Appalachian Studies Association meeting in Asheville, North Carolina.  Below is a screenshot of a Tweet by one of the volume's editors, Meredith McCarroll.  I think we're all still in shock that Ron Howard has paid $45 million for one man's very skewed and partial insights into his upbringing.   

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

An appeal to liberals: we seek to be culturally attuned abroad...surely we can do that at home, too

Those who live in liberal areas on the coasts of America have doubtlessly heard of (and probably support) ideals such as celebrating diversity, practicing cultural sensitivity, and finding culturally appropriate solutions for problems. These values are generally mentioned when talking about interactions with people from different countries – “cross-cultural encounters.” Why are the same principles not applied to interactions among Americans? It’s clear that people in America live and think in very different ways. In one of my earlier posts, I discussed the “culture war” which seems to exist between the liberal coasts and the rest of America and the impact that it may have had on the 2016 Presidential election  and the 2018 midterms. Our political polarization and vilification of the other side show that “cultural sensitivity” between Americans is lacking in many cases.

I’ve spent most of my time lately at universities in California, which tend to be bastions of the liberal coastal elite, so I will primarily address those on that side of the “culture war.” The values we hold regarding diversity and cultural sensitivity can and should be applied to our fellow Americans. I dare say that those values would have the same positive effects intra-nationally that they have when we apply them internationally.

Consider the value placed on finding culturally-appropriate solutions. We’ve come to recognize that imposing the American way of solving problems on our friends abroad often backfires. At best, it’s less effective because of its blindness to culturally important factors, which are left unaddressed. At worst, it’s colonization and oppression. We recognize that locally-led efforts which are culturally informed are far better.

Similarly, culturally informed solutions can be applied to domestic problems. Rural and white working-class populations have been struggling with drug epidemics. The impacts of meth on rural and WCW people have been depicted in films such as "Winter’s Bone" and the documentary "Meth Storm", and  the opioid epidemic has also hit hard in these communities (see responses by the USDA and CDC). What would a culturally sensitive effort to address this problem look like? At least one already exists. Teen Challenge is a faith-based addiction recovery center. The Central Valley chapter, based in the Fresno area, has been around for three years and has grown rapidly in that time. It now has 170 beds.

This recovery program is attuned to Central Valley culture in at least two ways. First, it is faith-based. Coastal liberals tend to be suspicious of anything that adds religious practice to another activity, such as addiction recovery.  Yet Teen Challenge has been quite successful using this model. Moreover, an additional cultural benefit flows from this: community support. Because faith is a value for many people in the local community, Teen Challenge has strong community support. This is crucial and brings us to the second point of cultural sensitivity.  Many rural communities are marked by a lack of anonymity. Last Sunday, Teen Challenge gave a presentation at a Central Valley church that has supported their efforts. Two of the young men who spoke at the presentation had attended the local school and were known to the church congregation. Because Teen Challenge enjoys strong community support, the lack of anonymity was less of a hindrance to them entering the recovery program. In fact, community members referred them to the program and supported them along the way. The program is able to use the interconnectedness of these communities to its advantage.

Despite the fact that Central Valley Teen Challenge is locally-led and culturally attuned, I imagine that many coastal liberals would be very reluctant to support it because faith-based programs are not a part of our culture. Colleagues and friends, don’t let cultural difference lead to antagonism. Our culture has done a lot of work in building an appreciation of cultural difference and working to learn from those who are different from us. In some ways, the difference here is smaller – the people on the other side of the “culture war” are our fellow Americans, people with whom we share history and government and future. Please don’t let the fact that this culture is a domestic one prevent you from using the valuable skills of cultural understanding that you have developed in different contexts.

On rural whites, in the context of Mississippi politics

The race to fill a U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi has been drawing lots of media attention, in part because it pits a white Republican woman, Cindy Hyde-Smith, against an African-American man, Mike Espy.  The other reason the race is attracting attention is that Cindy Hyde Smith has been--depending on your perspective--either dog-whistling or flat out race-baiting, as she has made comments about, for example, wanting a front-row seat if invited to a public hanging by one of her donors.  To that, Espy, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, said the comment was "awful" and called it "tone deaf," though he did not square respond when questioned whether it was racist.  Both Walmart Corporation and Major League Baseball asked Hyde-Smith to return their campaign donations following that episode.  Hyde-Smith has also been recorded making comments about the desirability of suppressing the vote among liberal-leaning college students.  A few days ago, media outlets like USA Today began pointing out that Hyde-Smith attended high school at a "segregation academy," a private school set up to cater to wealthy whites (and even less wealthy ones) lest they be compelled to attend integrated public high schools.  Phil McCausland, reporting for NBC news, explains:

About 200,000 students moved to private schools between the 1960s and 1980s immediately after a series of Supreme Court decisions that began with that 1954 case. Two-thirds of those students came from six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, according to the Southern Education Foundation.

Personally, I blame Hyde-Smith much more for what she has said recently, as an adult, than for the decision her parents made to send her to a segregation academy.  The sins of the parents should not be visited on their children.  That said, her education in such a setting might explain her current views, and her lack of sensitization to issues regarding race and the ugly racial history of the South.   Further, a well-educated woman like Hyde-Smith should have caught up on a more accurate version of U.S. history by now.

The New York Times reported yesterday on this Mississippi race, and I thought some of the observations there were especially interesting regarding the views of "rural whites," a term that is sometimes a proxy for working-class whites.  The headline for Jonathan Martin's story is, "Across South, Democrats Who Speak Boldly Risk Alienating Rural White Voters" and here's part of the lede focusing on Espy's apparent effort not to alienate "rural white" voters:

When Mike Espy ... faced his opponent at a debate ahead of this Tuesday’s runoff election, he had to make a choice: confront Ms. Hyde-Smith over her comments about attending “a public hanging,” which evoked the state’s racist history, or take a milder approach to avoid alienating the conservative-leaning white voters who will most likely decide the election. 

He chose the latter. 

“The world knows what she said, the world knows that those comments were harmful and hurtful,” Mr. Espy said afterward, sounding not entirely convinced.

In a state where politics has long been cleaved by race, Mr. Espy was reckoning with a conundrum that Democrats face across the South — from Mississippi and Alabama, which have been hostile to the party for years, to states like Florida and Georgia that are more hospitable in cities but still challenging in many predominantly white areas. Even as they made gains in the 2018 elections in the suburbs that were once Republican pillars, Democrats are seeing their already weak standing in rural America erode even further.

Comparing Espy's situation to those of Stacy Abrams (Georgia), Andrew Gillum (Florida) and Beto O'Rourke,  Martin notes that "in rural county after rural county, this trio of next-generation Democrats performed worse than President Barack Obama did in 2012."  The Democrats also lost Senate seats and governor's race outside the South, in places like Iowa and Ohio "with more conventional candidates whose strength in cities and upper-income suburbs was not enough to overcome their deficits in less densely populated areas."

The story quotes Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist, saying something I keep hearing in the wake of the mid-term elections:  Democrats don't have to "win" the white working class--they just need to lose them by a smaller margin than they did in 2016 and 2018:

There’s a baseline percent of the white vote you have to get to win and you can’t get to it just through young and progressive excitement. The path from 48 to 50 is like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.

How do you do that?  Some suggest you have to avoid making white people uncomfortable, and when there's too much focus on race and racism, "rural" whites are put off.  (What are the salient characteristics of "rural" here?  low-education?  traditional?  static?  insular?)   Is it guilt that causes them to be put off?  or "white fragility"?  Espy's avoidance of calling out Hyde-Smith's comments as "racist" seems consistent with this need to coddle whites--not to remind them of this nation's horrific racist past.  An anecdote illustrating that can be found here, from this Washington Post story about evangelical Christians in Alabama.  One feared "the racial divide" was getting worse. 

The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”  [See related stories regarding how we teach slavery here, here and here]  

She was suspicious of what she saw as the constant agitation of blacks against whites, the taking down of Confederate memorials and the raising of others, such as the new memorial to the victims of lynching, just up the highway in Montgomery. 

“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne. 

“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?” 

“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila. 

It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives. 

“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”

This also reminds me of a topic I've been preoccupied with in recent years, especially since the election of 2016:  the divide between the chattering classes' understanding of racism (which is very broad) and the much narrower definition of racism associated with less educated folks.  I wrote about it some here.  How are we going to bridge this gap and get white people to be more comfortable with --or at least more willing--to see how they have been beneficiaries of a racist past and that they have a responsibility to denounce that history and take the nation clearly in a different direction?  Surely it's going to include better educating our students (I'm talking public primary and secondary education)  about slavery and its aftermath, something our nation has not done effectively.  Read more here and here.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

"Sparse country" at Harvard as derision of rurality and conflation with whiteness

Prof. Jeannie Suk Gersen writes in the New Yorker this week under the headline, "At Trial, Harvard's Asian Problem and a Preference for White Students from Sparse Country."  She is writing about the same landmark affirmative action case I wrote about a few days ago here.  And, as I predicted in that post would soon happen among commentators, Professor Gersen conflates rurality with whiteness.

Prof. Gersen, of Harvard Law, repeatedly uses the phrase "Sparse Country," capitalized even (perhaps for emphasis?  Is there a whiff of disdain--or more than whiff--here?) to refer to the 20 states from which Harvard makes a particular effort to recruit students.  (I want to know what 20 states constitute "sparse country" but Gersen does not list them; elsewhere the New York Times listed a few of them, including Montana and Alabama).

In his testimony, William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions, who has worked in the admissions office since before Bakke, reminisced about his Harvard roommate in the nineteen-sixties, who was “a great ambassador” for South Dakota. He also testified about the letters Harvard sends to high-school students in Sparse Country who have P.S.A.T. scores of at least 1310, encouraging them to apply. The only Sparse Country students with such scores who do not get the letter are Asians; to receive it, an Asian male must score at least 1380. An attorney for the plaintiff asked why a white boy in, say, immigrant-rich Las Vegas with a score of 1310 would get the letter, while his Asian classmate with a 1370 would not. Fitzsimmons responded with generalities about the need to recruit from a broad array of states to achieve diversity.

The quotation marks around "great ambassador" suggest to me Gersen's derision of the rural experience and the notion that kids from rural places might have anything to teach urban kids, who are no doubt the Harvard student body default. 

When asked whether Harvard “put a thumb on the scale for white students” from Sparse Country, Fitzsimmons contrasted students who “have only lived in the Sparse Country state for a year or two” with those who “have lived there for their entire lives under very different settings.” Perhaps he meant that whites are more likely to be “farm boys” or “great ambassadors,” like his South Dakotan roommate. Or perhaps he meant that Asians are more likely than whites to apply to Harvard, less likely to be accepted, and more likely to enroll if accepted, so Harvard saves itself postage costs by reducing its recruiting of Asians. But the exchange highlighted a key question of the trial: whether the Harvard admissions process treats white racial identity as an asset, relative to Asian identity (or treats Asian identity as a drawback, relative to white identity).

This explanation of Harvard's desire to attract students from "Sparse Country" suggests another meaning of the phrase--that the sparseness refers to the dearth of applicants from these places, not necessarily to the low density of the population.

As for Prof. Gersen's conflation of whiteness with rurality, it is arguably supported by Fitzsimmons' distinction between students who have not been in Sparse Country for very long and those who have been there all their lives.  That is, immigrants are moving into "Sparse Country" (as I have written about here and my colleague Michele Statz has written about here), and I would hope that Harvard would not devalue those immigrants simply because they have not lived in rural America for very long.  Indeed, those immigrants are probably valued by Harvard because they represent racial and ethnic groups generally underrepresented at Harvard--regardless of whether they are admitted to Harvard from rural or urban places.

One issue that is not explicit in Prof. Gersen's musings is the distinction between "Sparse Country" as rural and "Sparse Country" as urban.  This gets at the issue of scale:  Is the scale of the "state" helpful if we want rural voices at Harvard and similarly situated institutions?   I have often argued (in conversation, though perhaps not explicitly in my publications) that admitting the children of doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers and such from Billings or Missoula or Bozeman Montana (or, Salt Lake City or Albuquerque or even Rapid City or Sioux City) is really nothing like admitting the real "farm boy"--or, more importantly, farm girl--from one of these states.  So if Harvard sees "Sparse Country" as 20 states, it's missing out on the complexity of the dramatic variations within those states.

The best seller Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover, helps to make my point.  Tara was raised by fundamentalist Latter Day Saint parents in southern Idaho--which is NOTHING like being raised by wealthy retirees in, say, Sun Valley, or even as the daughter of physicians in Boise.  Do we really want to look at issues like diversity of lived experience at the level of the state?  Or do we need to look to a lower scale to achieve more authentic diversity?  Doesn't the phenomenally successful Educated help us to see that distinction quite clearly?

Cross-Posted to Legal Ruralism.