Salena Zito responds to Krugman's "rural rage" assertion

Salena Zito is the latest journalist to respond to NYT columnist Paul Krugman's recent "rural rage" column. Writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Zito introduces us to Dr. MeeCee Baker, a Democrat in Juniata County, population 23,509. 

Ms. Baker struggles with intellectuals who refuse to give up their uninformed and prejudiced stereotypes of rural Americans as enraged radicals who either spend their days plotting the next January 6th or fuming over a list of grievances against institutions or the current president.

After all, this former Rendell administration official and progressive Democratic strategist is a rural American, too. “I would love to invite him to come and spend a day or two with me and perhaps go to church with me,” she offered with characteristic generosity.

* * *

Since the moment rural America helped deliver former president Donald Trump to the White House, many in the national news media have viewed rural America — in particular in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan — through the lens of their own angst and personal biases. But they invariably do so from a distance.

Steve Crawford, the former Deputy Secretary of Agriculture under the late Gov. Bob Casey, Sr., and Mr. Rendell’s last chief of staff, said it wasn’t all that long ago that voters in rural counties here placed Democrats in elected office up and down the ballot: “We had Democrats representing Lebanon County, Franklin County, Adams County, Cumberland, Indiana, Crawford, Elk and on and on,” he said.

Mr. Crawford, a Columbia County native, said the use of the word rage in the Krugman piece was “really overstated, and it stokes a preconceived notion that that’s the leading emotion that rural Pennsylvanians or rural America is feeling. I frankly think that there’s more angst and anxiety, perhaps, than there is rage. I understand that they have feelings of uncertainty, and . . . it’s not unusual for people to be worried about change that they don’t understand. But ‘rage’ — that’s just inviting it.”

The entire column is well worth a read.