On the Midwest in politics, by A.O. Scott, in the New York Times

A. O. Scott wrote in today's New York Times under the headline, "Will the Real Midwest Please Stand Up?:  The vice-presidential debate, pitting Senator JD Vance of Ohio against Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, shines the spotlight on a complicated region."  Here's a quote that speaks to the implicit whiteness of "Midwest."  

Like “working class,” “Midwestern” too often assumes a default setting of whiteness, and papers over profound political divisions. The region has been a fertile breeding ground for leaders of every factional stripe. Robert M. La Follette, the tribune of early-20th-century progressivism, represented Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, as did the anti-communist crusader Joseph McCarthy a generation later. In the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Ohio alone, known as “the cradle of presidents,” sent seven of its sons to the White House, all of them Republicans.

* * * 

The Midwest is a curious region, often treated less as a distinct geographical or demographic zone than as a symbol, a synonym for the country as a whole. ... in the cultural imagination “Midwest” is code for the average, ordinary, normal, real America.

Working-class wages v. the pressures of globalization.

David Brooks wrote yesterday in a New York Times column headlined, "The Cure for What Ails Our Democracy."  I'm featuring a short excerpt here that differentiates between Trump the person and Trumpian populism, saying the latter is in a legitimate struggle with liberalism "over how to balance legitimate concerns."  Another issue he highlights:  the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization. 

Sure, there are some occasions when the struggle really is good versus evil: World War II, the civil rights movement, the Civil War. As Lincoln argued, if slavery is not wrong then nothing is wrong. But these occasions are rarer than we might think.

I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.

The struggle against Trump the man is a good-versus-bad struggle between democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance legitimate concerns.

On working-class white voters in the 2022 midterms

The rural and working-class white voter demographics have garnered considerable attention since the November 9 election.  I'll highlight just a few recent essays and tweets in this post, with a focus on the rural.  

First, there is Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect writing under the headline, "The Rural Turnaround," which begins with some data:   

For decades, Democrats have been losing rural America by ever-worsening margins. If they could perform even 5 percent better in rural counties, the political landscape would be transformed. In the 2022 midterm, Democrats did increase their share of the rural vote in several states, and it’s worth exploring where and why.

After going over the "appalling" recent history, Kuttner gets to what I believe is the most interesting part of the piece: 

My doctoral student at Brandeis, Rachel Steele, has just completed a dissertation on Democrats and rural voters, which will be published as a book. With her permission, I’ll quote a couple of her important insights.

The most important is that Democrats have been losing the white working class, but place acts as an intensifier. If white working-class voters feel abandoned by the economy and disdained by liberal political elites, that is doubly true for working-class rural voters. Their communities as well as their livelihoods have been squandered, and they have had little evidence that Democrats cared. “Place itself has become political,” Steele writes. (emphasis mine)

As late as 2008, according to Steele’s tabulations, 139 rural white working-class counties voted Democratic. By 2016, that fell to six. In 2016, rural white working-class counties favored Trump by a margin of over 51 points. Much of the loss came in the Upper Midwest—Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota—where national elections and control of Congress are determined.

Steele’s extensive interviews with rural working-class voters also reveal a bitter paradox for Democrats. As good jobs have disappeared, people in communities that once took pride in their self-sufficiency express a broad sense that the work ethic has deteriorated along with the job loss. Instead of crediting Democrats for safety-net programs that save people from destitution, many rural working-class voters, who see their neighbors and their children on the dole, blame Democrats for eroding the work ethic.

IN 2022, THE BEST OF THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES resolved to reverse this syndrome. Just showing up turns out to be hugely important, as a sign of respect and commitment.

John Fetterman’s successful slogan and strategy was “Every County, Every Vote.” Fetterman improved upon Biden’s 2020 rural support by 2.4 percent. According to tabulations by the Daily Yonder, this swing, combined with higher rural turnout for Fetterman, resulted in a net rural gain over Biden of more than 110,000 votes.

The column also talks details of Michigan, Wisconsin and Kansas.  Kuttner cites to his own September piece about the role of rural organizers, a topic I've also taken up on this blog and in my own writing about the Democrats' lackluster effort to win back the rural vote.  

Among the most creative approaches I’ve seen to recruit activists and voters on the ground, especially in rural areas, is a group called Movement Labs, founded in 2017. Movement Labs provides data, technology, and strategy to help grassroots voter mobilization, especially in red and purple states and rural counties that Democrats tend to write off. One of their marquee projects is called Rural Power Lab.

* * *  

Another key insight is that affinity for the Democratic Party may be depressed in many rural areas, but it is far from extinct, and can be rebuilt.

The Nation also published a piece this week on the rural vote.  It's titled "Democrats Must Do Better in Rural America."  Here's an excerpt from the piece by Anthony Flaccavento, Erica Etelson and Cody Lonning:  

Rural races are different from urban and suburban races; running competitively in them requires a different approach in both style and substance. Two-thirds of rural voters hold Democrats in low esteem and are profoundly antagonized by liberal elites who scorn the “rubes of flyover country.” Though Democrats’ rural deficit runs deep, it’s important to remember that as recently as 2008, Barack Obama garnered 43 percent of rural votes. And this cycle, John Fetterman’s consistent presence in rural places produced a two-and-a-half-point improvement over the 2020 presidential race—enough for him to win statewide in Pennsylvania.

“Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?” describes more than a dozen strategies used by rural candidates and office holders, four of which we highlight here.

First, candidates must have local credibility. Whether through generational ties to the area or long-standing community involvement and problem solving, Democrats fare better when they have local roots and are fluent in the concerns and values of the people living there.

Second, candidates put local concerns and issues first, rather than trying to mobilize people around their own—or their party’s—policy agenda. ...[I]t means respecting voters enough to put their priorities at the center of the campaign. In so doing, candidates sometimes find meaningful ways to tackle state and national issues by drawing upon local experience, as when a candidate in rural Appalachia stood up for local businesses by fighting the outrageous subsidies used to recruit big box competitors.

Third, candidates and campaigns seek people where they are, rather than strictly following the advice to “go where the votes are.” Canvassing and phone-banking strategies typically focus on people who vote regularly and lean Democrat. By contrast, many of our study’s successful candidates reached out to people usually overlooked by campaigns.

Fourth, successful candidates listen more and talk less.

Another major piece, this one focusing on John Fetterman, appeared in the Washington Post's Plumline.  Here's the heart of Greg Sargent's column:

Fetterman’s victory might be uniquely instructive. He defeated a candidate, Mehmet Oz, who was conventionally stronger than those other Democrats’ opponents. 

* * *  

How this happened is illustrated by the [American Communities Project] data. Fetterman significantly reduced his opponent’s margins of victory — relative to Biden’s 2020 performance against Trump — in three types of counties where Trump has done extraordinarily well.

In the ACP’s taxonomy, those three county types are known as the Middle Suburbs, Working Class Country, and Rural Middle America.

The Middle Suburbs.  These types of suburban counties are Whiter and more working class than your typical inner-ring suburb, which tends to be more diverse, cosmopolitan and professional.

We often think of the suburbs as anti-Trump, but his large margins in Middle Suburbs across the country were key to his 2016 victory.

* * *

In Pennsylvania’s Middle Suburbs, Fetterman limited Oz’s margin of victory to 11 points, significantly down from the 15-point margin Trump racked up in 2020, according to ACP data provided to me.

* * * 

Working Class Country.  These counties are even Whiter than Middle Suburbs and tend to be rural and sparsely populated. They often have low college education rates.

In Pennsylvania’s Working Class Country counties, Fetterman shaved Oz’s margin of victory to 27 points, down from Trump’s 2020 margin of 36 points. Such counties include ones along the state’s northern border or in the southwest corner of the state, abutting West Virginia.

Rural Middle America.  These counties are also rural, but also tend to include a lot of small towns and smaller metro areas. They are somewhat less agriculture-dependent than Working Class Country.

In Pennsylvania’s Rural Middle America counties, Fetterman limited Oz’s gains to 31 points, down from Trump’s 37-point margin in 2020. As Chinni noted, nearly three dozen of these counties are spread throughout Pennsylvania’s vast heartland. 

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, long-time Speaker of the House, has indicated she will no longer seek to be part of the Democratic leadership.  This led to a few Tweets by Matt Barron, a political consultant whose Twitter handle is "Mr. Rural."  You can see these below.  The first is about the likely new house leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and Pete Aguilar of California.  

Matt Barron writes:  "So the new House Democratic Leadership will be from NY (45th most-rural state), MA (47th most-rural state) and CA (49th most-rural state).  Democrats really have become the party of the coasts."

The second Barron tweet is about Pelosi's failures:  "Great news.  This is the woman that disbanded the House Democratic Rural Working Group in 2011 and would not enable the creation of a Rural Desk at the DCCC.  Take Hoyer and Clyburn with ya."

 

Meanwhile, the 134 PAC in West Texas has been tweeting about future strategy for rural organizers, here and here:

The first says, "We aren't asking for resources from the central party as they have never provided any.  Our work is to raise the resources ourselves to do what the party does not or cannot do."

The second says:  "The priority for rural Democrats should be to forget about statewide and national elections and focus solely on building up our local organizations and communities."

Lastly, I'll just note that Adam Frisch (D), who ran against Lauren Boebert (R, incumbent) in mostly rural and exurban CO-03 (western and southern parts of the state), has conceded the race to Boebert.  He did so even though he lost by just about 500 votes and was entitled to a recount.  Indeed, NPR is reporting that the recount will go ahead regardless of Frish's concession--and that Frisch has already re-filed to run against Boebert again in 2024.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Analysis of Fetterman's win in Pennsylvania: the working class and rural vibes

This is from Trip Gabriel's story in the New York Times on Sunday, which was headlined "Democrats See a Blueprint in Fetterman’s Victory in Pennsylvania."  The subhead was "John Fetterman flipped a key Senate seat in part by attracting white working-class votes, including in the reddest parts of his state."  

“It was enormously beneficial,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said of Mr. Fetterman’s red-county incursion. “It’s really what Democrats have to try to do. I know we’ve had a debate in our party—you work to get your urban and suburban base out and hope for the best.” But Mr. Fetterman showed that a Democratic win in a battleground state could also run through rural Republican regions, Mr. Casey said.

Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.

In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.

Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.

Gabriel quoted Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania:  

Pennsylvania elections are about margins, and he cut into the margins Republicans had across the counties that they usually control.  He got a lot of looks from voters who aren’t very open to looking at Democrats right now.

The story continues: 

In almost no county did Mr. Fetterman improve on Mr. Biden’s margin more than in Armstrong County, in the northern exurbs of Pittsburgh, where more than 97 percent of residents are white and fewer than one in five adults has a four-year college degree.

“I expected him to win, but I didn’t think he’d do that well,” said Robert Beuth, 72, a retired factory worker in the county who voted for Mr. Fetterman, speaking of the statewide result. “I think the biggest drawback for a lot of people about Oz is that he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for election. To me that’s not right.” He added that he hoped Mr. Fetterman and other Democrats in Congress would “come up with some ideas” to help “poor people working two or three jobs just to get by.”

To be sure, Dr. Oz carried deep-red Armstrong County, whose biggest employers include Walmart and a coal mining company, with 71 percent of the vote. But Mr. Fetterman’s 29 percent share was 5.4 points higher than Mr. Biden’s support two years ago.

I've written a lot about Fetterman in the last six months, and my most recent post is here.  My August Politico piece about his rural efforts is here, and my Daily Yonder piece on the same theme is here.  

Postscript:  This is from a NYT piece titled, "How Democrats Can Create a Fetterman 2.0" by Michael Sokolove, who also wrote about Fetterman just after he won the primary.  Here's the bit most salient to Fetterman's rural strategy:

Rural voters in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in America, have been increasingly beyond the reach of Democrats. So why bother when you can just mine the deep trove of Democratic votes in the cities and close-in suburbs?

But Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor and an unconventional politician in almost every way, did not waver. And the results showed that he had substantially cut into the huge margins that Donald Trump ran up in Pennsylvania’s deep-red communities in defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and again four years later in losing the state, just barely, to Joe Biden.

* * * 

One lesson from Mr. Fetterman is that he showed up, repeatedly, in places that Democrats rarely visited. He began during his run for Senate in 2016, when he lost in the primary. After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, a job with few official duties, he traveled the state constantly.

The essay then quotes Jeff Eggleston, chair of the state's Democratic Rural Caucus: 

He has physically spent more time in rural Pennsylvania than any candidate I’ve ever seen,He got to know people. He spent time in our backyards. He made real, meaningful relationships, so people were willing to make a huge sacrifice in order to get him over the finish line.

And here's the bit most salient to his Working Class vibe:

Mr. Fetterman’s style and appearance are the first things that set him apart. Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia consultant who has run more than a dozen statewide races, including those of the two-term governor Ed Rendell, said that “you can’t discount the look” — his signature outfit is a Carhartt hoodie and cargo shorts. Mr. Oxman noted: “It’s an entry. He can talk to blue-collar people in a way that other Democrats have been failing at.”

Finally, Ezra Klein talked a lot about Fetterman on his podcast last week, including how Fetterman literally embodied a working class vibe.  (Same sort of stuff I wrote in my two essays above in Politico and the Daily Yonder).  There was a particularly memorable line about Fetterman not only being at the bar, but being in the bar fight.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

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.  

Pennsylvania Senate candidate Fetterman publishes op ed on inflation's impact on working families

Fetterman tweet dated June 17, 2022
A voter got this photo of him shopping at Costco, 
the discount warehouse store

John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate, published this a few days ago in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat under the headline, "Domestic solutions: High prices not a random problem."  Here's an excerpt, which is striking in its specificity and furthers his "everyman" image: 

Across Pennsylvania, people are getting squeezed. We’re paying more at the grocery store, more at the pump and more almost everywhere.

My opponent, millionaire celebrity Mehmet Oz, doesn’t feel a change in price when he’s filling up his gas tank – if he even pumps his own gas at all (they don’t let you do that in Oz’s native New Jersey). He doesn’t have to worry about his gas or grocery bill, and doesn’t even notice if it’s more than it used to be.

When I fill up my Dodge RAM, it’s costing a hell of a lot more than it did a year ago.

When Gisele and I go shopping for groceries at Giant Eagle, almost everything we buy costs more.

All of our families are dealing with this. In May, the Consumer Price Index saw the largest jump in consumer prices in 41 years, with inflation at 8.6% compared to the previous year. Inflation is hitting families across the commonwealth.

But what’s happening isn’t just random. It’s plain wrong.

Just last week, gas prices hit a record high of $5.07 per gallon in Pennsylvania, an outrageously high price that is impacting families across Pennsylvania.

But the truth is, if it wasn’t for the greed of oil companies, prices likely wouldn’t be this high.

In fact, the last time a barrel of crude oil cost as much as it does now was in July 2014, but at that point, a gallon of gas only cost about $3.54. Oil companies don’t need to be charging this much for gas – they’re just doing it to make excess profits.

Johnstown, in western Pennsylvania, has a population of about 20,000 and is in Cambria County and part of the Johnstown-Somerset metro.  Perhaps Fetterman sought to place this in a small-town newspaper to further and illustrate his campaign slogan, "every county.  every vote."  Or maybe this is the only paper that would run it. (I note that his wife, Gisele, got her op-ed advocating the availability of contraception in the Pittsburgh paper).   Either way, I'm happy to see a candidate taking his message about inflation straight to the people in a local newspaper. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

On issues of race/ethnicity and rurality in the California Redistricting Process

The Sacramento Bee reports today on the latest from California's independent re-districting commission, specifically about a newly drawn U.S. Congressional district that stretches from just south of San Francisco, down through part of Silicon Valley, along parts of the central coast, and inland to the rural reaches of San Luis Obispo County.  Here's an excerpt from Gillian Brassil's story focusing what's wrong with a district like this one, a Democrat-heavy area that would likely be held by incumbent Rep. Jimmy Panetta of Carmel Valley, in Monterey County.  

Paul Mitchell, a redistricting expert, said that the size and shape of the district aren’t what pose a problem, rather the distribution of wealth, endorsements and political structure that would make it difficult for a representative from San Luis Obispo County to run against someone from Silicon Valley. 

He drew an analogy: If a sliver of downtown Sacramento were connected to disparate rural areas, candidates from outside the state’s capital would stand little chance against someone who has the financial and political support of people in the metropolitan hub.

“Somebody from Yolo County isn’t going to beat somebody from Sacramento in a congressional race. That’s the problem, I think, with this new ‘ribbon of shame’ that they’re talking about,” Mitchell said. “It’s not the size that I think is problematic. It’s the fact that it has a finger going into Atherton and Menlo Park and the Apple headquarters.” 

“Ribbon of shame” was former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nickname for a 2000s-era congressional district that stretched from Oxnard to the bottom of Monterey County. Maps sliced it out the last time California underwent redistricting in 2010. The phrase resurfaced among analysts to describe the San Luis Obispo to South San Francisco stretch.

My prior post on this topic is here.   

Postscript:  The final maps, published a few days before Christmas, are here.  A Wall Street Journal editorial on the topic doesn't mention rural issues, but it criticizing California's "racial gerrymandering" as reflected in the final redistricting is here.  An excerpt follows:  

The map-makers apparently tried to achieve something like proportional representation by race, drawing 18 majority-Hispanic districts and 18 majority white districts, according to the Princeton data. That roughly tracks both groups’ total share of the adult population. One district is majority Asian and the rest have no majority group.

This outcome is being touted as a victory by ethnic activists, but it means that voters are being assigned electoral districts based in part on race or ethnicity. The idea is that voters of a particular race should be grouped together to increase their collective voting power. 

* * * 

But it has the effect of amplifying identity politics, including white identity politics. When jurisdictions are carved along ethnic lines, politicians in both parties have less need to build multiethnic coalitions.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

White trash in Percival Everett's new novel, The Trees

The novel, The Trees, out next week, was featured on National Public Radio this morning, and author Percival Everett's discussion with NPR host Scott Simon intrigued me because it implicated both rurality and, more prominently, race and whiteness.  Here's an excerpt from the interview: 

Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big-city heat from Hattiesburg. They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and they're in the small town of Money to investigate the murder of two men in the back room of the same shotgun-style house - one, a white man who's disfigured in a way so gruesome we can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please; the other, a Black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue.

Simon observes near the end of the interview:

SIMON: I've got to ask you. I enjoyed the book a lot. So many of the white Southerners in this book are not just bigots. They're obese. They're dumb. They smell, as you write, memorably, of one, of excrement - and you don't say excrement - Aqua Velva and pimento cheese, which is an awfully clever phrase. And with no apologies made for white bigots, are you stereotyping white Southerners?

EVERETT: Welcome to club. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

EVERETT: I am, in fact. How does it feel? That's my question. Yes, I'm not fair in this novel. It's not a novel about fairness. In fact, after I wrote the first page, my admission to my wife was, well, I'm not being fair, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

This left me wanting to know more, and then I found this by Christian Lorentzen on Book Forum.  I'll just excerpt a short quote here from the commentary titled "Hillbilly Effigy": 

Not much present in The Trees are white liberals or leftists. The novel isn’t about them (us), unless perhaps it’s meant to flatter them with a vision of their redneck white-trash cousins getting a comeuppance at the hands of cunning and ruthless Black assassins (spoiler: the Black corpse is not the real killer, nor is it a ghost) and their Asian counterparts, avenging their own victims of lynching. Everett has had his go at white liberals elsewhere, most notably in Erasure, his satire of the publishing industry and the Quality Lit Biz. The Trees is looser and more freewheeling than that novel, Everett’s masterpiece.

Prior to that is this, also touching on class and whiteness:

Most of the white characters in this novel are guilty: even if they are merely the descendants of the perpetrators of lynchings, they are unrepentant racists (or “know-nothing, pre–Civil War, inbred peckerwoods,” as one character puts it), frequent users of the N-word (with the hard r), stealers of livestock, or members of a pathetically diminished Ku Klux Klan. The racists are present all the way up the chain of American power.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

On "Hillbilly Elegy," the film, and cultural and geographical divides in the United States

I published this today in The Conversation, about the new Ron Howard/Netflix film, "Hillbilly Elegy," based on J.D. Vance's book by the same name.  Here's an excerpt:

I admit to delight when I read professional critics trashing the film, which is based on J.D. Vance’s widely praised memoir detailing his dramatic class migration from a midsize city in Ohio to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School. I was expecting the worst based on my dislike of the book, and these reviews confirmed my expectations.

But once I saw the film, I felt it had been harshly judged by the chattering classes – the folks who write the reviews and seek to create meaning for the rest of us. In fact, the film is an earnest depiction of the most dramatic parts of the book: a lower-middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction. 

Everyday viewers seem to find the film enjoyable enough – it has solid audience reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

So why the big gap between the critical response and audience reaction? Could it be yet another sign of the country’s steadily growing class divide?

I want to be clear that I didn't see the film depicting rural in any sustained or meaningful way.  Middletown, Ohio, Vance's home town is not rural by any measure.  Indeed, it's not even technically Appalachian.  But about the first 10 minutes of the film take place in Jackson, Kentucky, the Vance Family's ancestral home.  That's Vance's real claim to "hillbilliness," and I don't dispute that a certain hillbilly culture followed his family into the Rust Belt.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

A role for the Black Lives Matter movement when police kill white people?

To draw attention to bad things happening to white people is decidedly out of fashion these days.  To do so risks communicating an "All Lives Matter" message, and that is ill advised in most progressive circles in this period when Black Lives Matter has been revived--appropriately, in my opinion--in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis Police in late May.    

So I was surprised to see Jack Healy's front-page story yesterday for the New York Times dateline Sedalia, Missouri, population 21,287.  The headline in the print edition that landed in my driveway is "In Rural Towns, Similar Chants to Find Justice."  The online headline is a little different, "A Family Cries 'Justice for Hannah.'  Will a Rural Town Listen?"  And here's the subhead, which highlights the rural context: 

People in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, but victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard.

Neither headline nor the subhead mentions race, however, which I'd argue is a fairly critical piece of the story--even more central to my mind than the rural angle.  This paragraph, about the young Sedalia woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy appears deep in Healy's story:  

Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

To me, its placement feels a bit like burying the lede.  

The lede the editors went with, which doesn't mention race, follows: 

Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.

“Say her name! Hannah!”

“Prosecute the police!”

Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.

Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.

Hannah Fizer's mother, Amy, commented (in a statement that echoes one of my own mother's favorite expressions):   

It’s like pulling teeth.

Amy Fizer also explains that she and Hannah's father have not been been interviewed or kept abreast of the investigation into Hannah's death--and that the Pettis County Sheriff, Kevin Bond, has not revealed to them the name of the deputy who killed their daughter after stopping her on the way to her night shift at an area convenience store.  The deputy claimed that he "met with verbal resistance" from Hannah Fizer and that he suspected she had a gun.  Subsequent investigation revealed no gun.  

This is the sort of story I've not been expecting to see in national media for the reason I led with in this post:  this story draws our attention to the phenomenon of law enforcement--including white law enforcement, even in (or is the point especially in?) rural areas--killing white people. 

And so the story raises the question:  Where are white victims of police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement?  Should we acknowledge them in the context of that movement?  Or would acknowledging those deaths be tantamount to saying the forbidden "All Lives Matter"?  What are the political, social and cultural implications of not acknowledging them?  An earlier event that took up this conundrum, this one from 2015 in South Carolina, is here.  

We saw a partial response to these questions, I guess, a few weeks ago when Donald Trump answered a journalist's question about Black Americans being killed by police by saying that "more white people" are killed by cops than black people.  Here are some Tweets by  journalists that I captured just after his  comment:  

And here are two of my Tweets about the matter then:

The New York Times responded to Trump's comment with this story by Jeremy Peters:  

Mr. Trump added to his long record of racially inflammatory comments during an interview with CBS News, in which he brushed off a question about Black people killed by police officers, saying that white people are killed in greater numbers.

Mr. Trump reacted angrily when asked about the issue, which has led to nationwide protests calling for major law enforcement changes.

“Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” the interviewer, Catherine Herridge of CBS News, asked the president.

“What a terrible question to ask,” Mr. Trump responded. “So are white people. More white people, by the way.”

Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.

Of course, what Trump said is technically true.  So were the clarifications by the media.  I call this the "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" problem.  Multiple accurate assertions can be made based on available empirical data.  The media choose to highlight one or the other.  In doing so, they drive wedges between folks who have a lot in common:  both people of color and low-income, low-status whites (who are arguably also people of color) are vulnerable to police misconduct.  Indeed, people of color and low-income whites are vulnerable to lots of bad stuff.  

I'd like to see these vulnerable folks banding together across racial lines and not to be put into a contest--or conflict--with each other.  Wouldn't we be better off, at least occasionally, to do what Healy and the New York Times have perhaps done/kinda' sorta/implicitly laid the groundwork for?   Cross-racial coalition building, that is.  It brings me back to a question I've been mulling for a long time, in this context and others:  Wouldn't all parties who have a beef about policing--parties of all colors/races/ethnicities--be better off joining forces rather than strictly competing to say who has it worse?  wouldn't we be better off not engaging in what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the oppression Olympics"?  

It seems these days that lots of folks, including many non-whites, are skeptical that anything law enforcement do that is "wrong," "inappropriate," even in violation of the constitution, is attributable to anything other than racism or grounded in racial difference.  But don't the data from this Healy story belie that assumption?  Even the data Trump implicitly invoked in his ham-handed comments a few weeks ago?

On a somewhat different note, this story out of central Missouri reminds me of the movie "Winter's Bone," set in southwest Missouri, and the scene where the county sheriff pulls over Teardrop.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, then see the movie. Some prior posts about that movie are here and here.  

I'm also thinking about the movie "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," set in a fictitious Missouri town.  That movie features plenty of racism by local police, but also law enforcement failures in relation to the investigation of a local teenager's death, that of a young woman who was raped before she was murdered.

The Healy report wisely addresses two other issues that loom large in rural contexts:  the higher rate of gun ownership and the lower rate of availability of mental health services.  Regarding the former, the story cites David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says

the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.

More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.

And then there is the issue of body cameras, technology and resources.  I published this in 2014, and it was controversial in the U.S. but has been cited widely in Australia and New Zealand.  One of my points about rural socio-spatiality is that if you are going to police vast rural areas effectively, you're going to need technology and resources.  In this case, the Sheriff claims not to have had enough of both to do something else:  hold law enforcement accountable by downloading, sorting and storing body cam footage.  

It is tragically ironic that this story out of Sedalia was published on the same day that another victim of crime in a Missouri small town committed suicide.  Daisy Coleman killed herself yesterday, as Amanda Arnold reports in The Cut:  

Daisy Coleman, the survivor at the center of the 2012 Maryville, Missouri, rape case and whose story was later featured in the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, died by suicide on Tuesday evening. She was 23 years old.

* * * 

Coleman became the subject of national attention in 2012, when she, then 14 years old, attended a party where she blacked out from drinking and was allegedly raped by 17-year-old Matthew Barnett, a senior football player who had familial ties to a former Republican state representative. Before dawn the next morning, Melinda [Daisy's mother] found Daisy, who was wearing just a T-shirt and sweatpants in below-freezing weather, passed out on their doorstep. A hospital exam later confirmed Coleman had been raped, which led to Barnett’s arrest. He ultimately faced few repercussions, however: He received two years’ probation but was never convicted. Meanwhile, Coleman endured relentless victim blaming, and her entire family was harassed. People were “calling me a bitch, a whore, and a slut every single day,” she wrote in Seventeen. One Fox News guest suggested Coleman had “expected” to get raped. Melinda claimed she was fired from her job at a local veterinary clinic over the scandal.

The ruthless bullying took a grave toll on Coleman, and in 2014, she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt; it was not her first. After recovering, she went on to advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

Maryville, population 11,972, is in far northwest Missouri, on the Iowa state line. Interestingly, both of these cases attracted the "intervention"--official or not--of professionals from Kansas City, the regional center. In the case of Audrie and Daisy, a Jackson County prosecutor was brought in to investigate local law enforcement and prosecutorial handling of the case. In the Sedalia matter, a Kansas City police officer who lives in Sedalia is challenging Pettis County Sheriff Bond in the upcoming election. 

And that takes me back to some Facebook comments by Sheriff Bond about the Sedalia protests.

Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community?  Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?

The use of "social justice" is interesting there, since the right uses it as a pejorative term for the left:  The sheriff also suggested that outside agitators are sowing "social chaos."  Even Hannah Fizer's father invokes similar concerns, as Healy summarizes:

But [Mr. Fizer] counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

Reminds me of similar concerns articulated by my mom about her community in nearby northwest Arkansas.  I wrote this about the "outside agitator" trope, and here's another piece about so-called "antifa busses," which are a hoax.

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. 

Sports, social class, and race (Part 1 of 3)

This is part one of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part focuses on providing a framework to understanding the intersection of sports with social class and race.

In the movie Billy Elliot, a young, working class boy from County Durham in North East England finds that his talent is in the girls-only ballet class, much to the consternation of his hyper-masculine, coal-miner father. Billy's father much prefers boxing, which is more popular in their community and a traditionally masculine sport.

When Billy arrives in London to audition for the Royal Ballet, he is unsure how to communicate with his peers from elite backgrounds, and he ends up punching another dancer in frustration after his audition. The judges are horrified by Billy's act of violence and seem troubled that he could bring the violent mores of working-class County Durham to vaunted halls of the Royal Ballet.  

The thematic contrast between boxing and ballet that underpins Billy Elliot goes beyond a simple contrast between combat and artistry, but also makes clear that sports can reflect the preferences and mores of the social classes in Britain. But why is it that sports are classed? 

Bordieu’s Theory on Cultural Capital and Sports

French sociologist Pierre Bordieu helps explain the classing of certain sports through his theory of cultural capital. His theory posits that the consumption of goods helps reinforce social class because individual consumption tends to reflect the values and virtues of the consumer’s social class.

In the sports context, Bordieu theorizes that the aims of upper class sports tend to exemplify upper class virtues likes artistic quality, health maintenance, and individualism; while lower-class sports exemplify lower-class virtues such as competitiveness, violence, strength, and collective discipline. He uses the example of body building versus gymnastics to show this distinction. While body building produces a large, physical form that outwardly reflects the working-class virtue of a strong body, gymnastics is essentially body hygiene and maintenance, which reflects the upper class virtue of a healthy body.

Bordieu also gives significant weight to the perceived social profits of certain sports. The upper classes derive social profit from certain sports because those sports acquire distributional significance. This means that certain sports acquire significance among the social classes because of how their participation is distributed among the classes. For example, golf is available almost exclusively to the upper classes because it requires a large amount of leisure time and significant economic expenditure. With such a limited subset of individuals who can afford to participate, these sports become a technique of sociability, where the upper classes derive social value from mingling among themselves in a privileged space and differentiating themselves from the lower classes.

On the other hand, the lower classes derive significantly different social profits from their sports. For example, most team sports run counter to the strong individualism reflected in upper class sports like tennis and golf, because athletes derive social profit from collective discipline, sacrifice, and working towards a common objective. Combat sports like boxing or wrestling are truly working class because the violence inherent in their execution are anathema to the virtue of respectability in the upper class. Importantly, with the increased commercialization of sports, the social profits for the working class may turn into an economic profit for a talented few, as playing sports professionally can also be a way out of poverty.

In America, the enjoyment of sports is a classed affair. Social class is reflected in consumption preferences of fans, as inferred by advertising preferences, also reflects the classing of sports in America as well. While much attention is paid to which $7,000 to $650,000 wristwatch a golfer wears when they win stops on the PGA tour, the focus in NASCAR is on which cheap, working class beer will adorn the winning car, Miller High Life or Busch. Though class and elitism is less baked in than in Britain perhaps, consumption of American sports often has distributional significance, and remains a strong indicator of social class.

American Sports and Race

Another dimension outside of class that affects the consumption of American sports is race. In the past, consumption of certain sports was almost entirely restricted by race. For example, Major League Baseball was a literal white-man’s-game until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1945. The same was true of other major sports leagues as well. For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) - where today 74 percent of players are Black - did not integrate until 1950.

No explicit color barrier exists in American sports today, but there remain some very large racial disparities in sports fandom. For example, a full 92 percent of National Hockey League (NHL) fans are white, which is second only to NASCAR which boasts 94 percent white fans. Compare these figures to the demographics of fans of the National Basketball Association, where only 40 percent of fans are white and 45 percent are Black.

The fandom of these sports leagues also reflects participation in the highest-levels of the sport. For example, 80 percent of players in the NHL are white, and only 32 out of 800 active players are Black. This year will also be the first time that a Black driver will compete in NASCAR’s full Cup Series Schedule in 45 years. Meanwhile in the NBA, 80 percent of players are non-white.

However, while the NHL and NASCAR are obviously predominantly white sports they don’t always connote wealth. While the NHL has the highest share of fans who make more than $100,000 a year at 33 percent, the solidly middle class NASCAR has only half that at 14 percent. It seems that despite the reputation of hockey as a violent sport suitable for working-class toughs, perhaps a fairer characterization is that of the major American sports leagues, only NASCAR is a truly white working-class sport.

These statistics on race and American sports beg the question: if we are willing to accept that sports are a reflection of social class as Bordieu suggests, are sports also a reflection of race? Is being a fan of the NHL or NASCAR an expression of whiteness, as much as golf is an expression of being upper class?

Based on the extremely homogenized racial distribution of fans of American sports, I would say yes. When being a fan or participating in certain sports remains such a uniformly white experience, it’s hard to ignore the possibility that these sports have acquired what Bordieu would call distributional significance, but in the racial context as well. Participation in these sports helps reinforce distinctions between class and race by showing that someone is white, working class, or possibly both.