Krugman strikes again, this time calling out the "whiteness" of an alleged "rural rage"

Paul Krugman wrote yesterday in the New York Times under the headline, "The Mystery of White Rage."  His column seems to have been inspired by a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage:  The Threat to American Democracy.   Here's an excerpt from Krugman's column, which draws heavily from the book:  

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

* * *

So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.

Krugman closes the column: 

But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.

It's an interesting ending in light of his speculation earlier in the column that so many rural folks have lost work and the dignity associated with it.  I tend to agree with Krugman on importance of work, as I wrote here.  I'd also note that rural folks, like the working class generally, are being deprived of social esteem (term coined and concept defined by Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit) by elites like Krugman.  

One last thought:  Krugman has been writing about "rural rage" periodically for a while.  With this column, he adds the modifier "white," following a trend on the left and in the academy.   Of course, Krugman is quoting the title of the new book, and the inclusion of "white" is a political statement, with consequences among voters who don't understand this relatively recent turn to whiteness and the negativity associated with it.  

Postscript:  Here's a review of the Schaller and Waldman book by Jeffrey Bloodworth, published in The Daily Yonder.  I like these quotes in particular: 

This is what makes Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s new book, White Rural Rage so predictable—and maddening. Rather than listen and understand complicated, three-dimensional rural Americans, they stereotype. Their analysis is an amalgam of our collective ills. Unwilling to reach across the divide, Schaller and Waldman gorge themselves on the negative and nihilistic. Then they regurgitate every rural, red America stereotype imaginable.

And I like that he clips from the Kirkus Review of the book: 

A view of rural America as a font of white privilege—and of resentment that the privileges aren’t greater.