Manufacturing discontent
How Dems can fight back against Republican resentment politics.
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It’s become something of a cottage industry to explore how white rural animus gives much-needed support to Republican candidates in local, state, and national elections.
On the surface, this would appear to be further evidence that Democrats are doomed in November. But a closer look at the dynamics involved suggests significant weaknesses in this deeply cynical strategy, and opportunities for mobilizing a counter-politics through which President Biden and congressional Democrats can bring more rural voters into their fold.
Case in point: Paul Krugman’s recent New York Times column (“The Mystery of White Rural Rage”) identified several sources of resentment that have helped boost Republican support in rural America. In a departure from the Times’ long-established penchant of interviewing non-urban voters in Midwest roadside diners to find out what city-dwelling liberals miss about their basic beliefs, Krugman considers studies of a decades-long process of political-economic change that has stripped many communities of economic opportunity and government services.
When it comes to everything from employment in agriculture and mining, to availability of affordable, quality health care, access to healthy environments, and ownership of small family enterprises, it’s true that many rural American communities have seen a steady decline of opportunity over the last several decades. Small wonder that residents here rail against globalizing markets — and cling to values and traditions that valorize an idealized past.
So the question is, what’s the fate of public provisions in struggling communities when government itself is the target of existential attack? By his own admission, Krugman is dumbfounded as to how Democrats can reach these struggling communities and claw back gains that have accrued to Republicans.
Yet, Krugman and countless others miss something important — they locate rural America's infatuation with Republican dogma as if it were the expression of some set of natural, organic loyalties. This is a fatal move, for it neglects how Republicans, following Trump's initiative, have deliberately incited anger at national “elites,” heightened fears of foreign immigrant invasions (and “deviant” gender identities), and induced non-urban communities to become obsessed with the odious "swamp" of Washington politics.
What, exactly, is getting overlooked here? The “rural rage” discourse that’s so often wheeled out but rarely unpacked should not be seen as the simple offshoot of political and economic change. To a large degree it has been created by national media operatives and Republican agents that are skilled at exploiting latent anxieties and fears, inflaming sentiments that — truth be told — Democrats have been slow to understand.
Right-wing lobbying groups and think tanks like the Family Research Council, the Federalist Society, Moms for Liberty, and Project 2025 have been working full time with celebrity politicians like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and countless others to fan the flames of a radicalized anti-immigration, anti-LGBT, and anti-clean energy politics. The goal is fomenting fears and stoking some of the most craven reactionary sentiments in recent American history.
We will never know if Republicans really believe this stuff, or whether they feel they’re forced to fight the culture war because scarcely anything else can give them leverage and power. It should be stressed that few of the far-right politicians who make the news today have any experience with actual legislation. But whether they hold authentic beliefs or not ultimately doesn’t matter because the whole point is to act as if their feelings are sincere.
MAGA Republicans absolutely need to be taken seriously for the threat their politics poses. At the same time, there’s little chance the cult believers can be shaken from their trance. Indeed, Democrats should stop trying. The battleground when it comes to elections and legislative lobbying lies within a penumbral middle ground — those who are inclined to see how insidious the manufactured discontent is, and who may be inclined to regret how they are enlisted in its production.
The white herring of rural rage
We need to appreciate how powerful the machinery is of what political scientist William Connolly calls a “resonance machine” — a self-reinforcing radio, television, and internet echo chamber that silos political interests, mainstreams fringe ideas, stirs up fears, and transposes them as the basis for a legitimate politics. Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Daily Wire, and Truth Social are all geared to doing precisely this — providing traction for ideas that people in rural communities feel validate their anxieties, even as they do not provide a way to overcome them.
We cannot ignore the ways in which the structural impasse of congressional politics has been created by a bare majority of Republicans in the House that stonewalls a bare majority of Democrats in the Senate. The normal difficulty of getting any legislation passed has been compounded lately by ideological extremism within a GOP that can barely agree on its own House leadership — one which holds the current speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, hostage to the crudest voices of outrage from the party’s own ranks.
To be sure, Johnson has been complicit in his own subservience from the start. The resulting impasse on everything from Ukraine aid, border security legislation, national debt ceiling negotiations, and basic funding of the government has badly crippled the legislative process. The GOP is now afraid to do anything that might improve conditions for citizens lest Biden reap credit for it.
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Republicans and media conglomerates have become uniquely skilled at orchestrating this strategy. Republicans crusade by demonizing progressive policy alternatives and blaming “left fascists” — the term itself is deployed to confuse people.
But here’s the kicker: the blame for gridlock is then used to frame Democrats as un-American, as socialists or communists, as devil-worshippers bent on destroying the country. Long gone are the days when we had political opponents with different but legitimate values and priorities. The point today is to treat government itself — in effect, the people themselves — as the enemy.
We also need to understand how fragile the mythology of Trump as savior is. Like the frantic efforts of the wizard of Oz to create an illusion of power, the ginning up of resentment and the valorization of a strong leader as the only way out must continually play up the outrage and conjure deep state conspiracies to keep people on edge.
The result is a volatile cocktail: an aggrieved community, one that raises hopes for rural revenge fantasies that ultimately prove to be dead ends as policy. Thus, “rural rage” is, to a considerable extent, a concoction that exploits the country’s most vulnerable, inducing them to turn against the very institutions that could help them.
The American right-wing — aided by the superficial character of mainstream media analysis — has fashioned a fierce but perverse alliance of resentful citizens based on emotional nostalgia for a past that never existed. That leaves them only with hopes of staving off change by resistance (including violence), repression, and outright expulsion. Racialist replacement theory is part of their arsenal. They turn back the clock on gender rights, women’s rights to choose their own medical procedures, and the ability of immigrants to secure legal employment in sectors for which there’s huge need in a vast number of labor markets.
These strategies of outright reaction bind many rural and impoverished urban communities and play directly into the hands of major industries in the agricultural and extractive energy sectors by disavowing a regulatory culture and measures designed to protect labor and the environment. This is neoliberalism with a vengeance, one that produces the precise conditions of an unregulated market that further impoverishes the working and middle classes. It also plays into the hands of radical Christian evangelicals committed to a world in which (white) men, armed with their god-given right to rule, lord it over the country and the world, regardless of impact on family health, long-term economic development, education quality, or mitigation of climate change.
The short-term emotional catharsis secured in the process relies upon a politics that undercuts the well-being of the larger community. Republican states that refuse to draw upon federally-subsidized Medicare funding for expanded services to citizens to make a point of repudiating the welfare state provide an alarming example of how self-destructive this politics can be.
Democrats can counter with a discourse that carries its own emotional power — one based not on narrow interest group politics or answering every thrust and claim of the Republican crazies, but that confronts head on the fundamental threat to American democracy posed by this fabricated climate of grievance.
Tell voters what you’re for, not just what you oppose
Last month, President Biden surprised Americans — and not a few of his own supporters — with a feisty State of the Union speech that bluntly explained what’s at stake this election year.
Combining humor, irony, and compassion, he showed how lively he and his political party can be when it comes to matters of policy and state power. At the same time, by ad libbing comments about disastrous Supreme Court decisions (to the justices themselves!) and exposing Republican duplicity on matters of Ukraine, Social Security funding, and immigration reform, Biden very effectively energized his base by stressing the high stakes of the November election.
He also presented a compelling vision of American identity that invited others in, thereby denying oxygen to the dogmatic pretensions of white rage. Republican claims about Biden being feeble fell by the wayside. It was an instance of charismatic mobilization — an important step in establishing an alternative national conversation rather than letting aggrieved, gun-toting white Christian racism and misogyny rule the day.
The task for Democrats in the run-up to November 2024, then, will be to make the case on both self-interest and emotional grounds for a counter-narrative to the Republicans’ atavism. There’s nothing natural about the rage; to accept it as inevitable is to succumb to an ideological crusade that has arisen to mobilize political sentiments in a distinctly reactionary manner. That path is a dead end.
At this political juncture, it’s critical for the Democrats to expose how self-destructive GOP fear-mongering is, but also to establish new conversations that can draw people toward an altogether different politics — one steeped in decency, tolerance, respect, and economic adaptation.
That’s it for today
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Whatever it takes to hit home, even if classic self interest in this case is a candy bar.
Imagine my surprise to see my very own home County as the featured image. The struggle is real. ShenCo Dems intend to mail up towards 10,000 postcards to voters in our annual attempt to move the middle (of which there are few in this ruby red area). We have elections every year - exhausting. Our messaging issues: Abortion rights are #1. Saving democracy is #2. Climate change #3. MAGAts don't want to save democracy, nor do they care about climate change. The extremists are even resisting a 50 mile rail-to-trail, preferring NO economic development so they can blame the libs. Nevertheless, we persist.