The philosophical underpinnings of “rural bashing”: How progressive appeals to Marxism perpetuate the otherizing of America’s heartland

There are two antipodal tropes that may come to mind when one thinks about rural America: backwards communities of white trash, redneck, racist hillbillies, or close-knit communities that thrive on religious values and rich interpersonal relations. Obviously, neither form of these broad generalizations (the negative “white trash” nor the positive “close-knit”) accurately depicts the diversity within rural communities in America. But what happens if the values underpinning the ostensibly “positive” side of this framework are no longer deemed positive in the perspective of the urban masses? It seems, in that case, that rural people simply become a “basket of deplorables”.

A 2002 study on the perceptions of rural America found that rural Americans are often associated with a strong sense of family, hard work, commitment to community, strong religious beliefs, self-sufficiency, and loyalty to their country. In 2002, many, if not all, of these phrases connoted a positive image for most Americans. This no longer seems to be the case, especially for progressive elites who are increasingly adopting new and constantly changing sets of values at least partially influenced by “wokeness” and ultimately rooted in Marxist thought. This begs the question: does wokeness foster rural bashing even if not explicitly?

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The concept of family has traditionally been a hallmark of the American dream. However, aspects of the progressive movement have sought to change this. For example, the feminist thinker Sophie Lewis recently published a book titled Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. She invokes the philosophies of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Charles Fourier, and Alexandra Kollontai to argue that the family unit is fundamentally classist and oppressive. She thus argues that it ought to be abolished. This perspective is shared by the founders of the popular social justice movement Black Lives Matters who, as self-proclaimed trained Marxists, are committed to “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure…”.

Even feminism, which has received widespread support in its various fashions amongst most liberals and even many conservatives, has become enmeshed with a Marxist take on the family unit. This is articulated in a 2020 Vice article titled “We Can’t Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family.”

Strong religious identity is another association with rural Americans that has become a suspect trait in the eyes of the urban masses who have become increasingly secular, especially those with college degrees and high incomes. As evidence of this, one need not look further than titles like The God Delusion and “Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?” 

Further, many rural people, most of whom are religious, recognize that their values are “very different” than those who live in cities. These values shape rural people’s political positions on social and economic issues, which in turn accentuates the rural-urban political divide.

More importantly, religious values shape the overall worldview of religious people. Religion is often more than mere faith; it is a way of life. Under this framework of religion as a way of life, we can better comprehend why rural people could be seen as hard working, committed to community, self-sufficient, loyal to their country, and committed to a strong sense of family. These are traits rooted in the Christian tradition.

For example, a Christian worldview recognizes the dignity of honest labor, the dignity of hard work. Acedia, one of the seven deadly sins, can be interpreted as spiritual sloth. But sloth also pertains to general laziness, a characteristic that is so demised by working-class rural folks that it warrants the designation of one as “white trash.”

This has been flipped upside down in the progressive worldview that is inspired by Marxist philosophy. To Marx, a worker qua his work, “does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” (Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), 74.)

We can see the influence of this perspective on the minds of young liberal workers (often corporate) who engage in and justify practices such as “quiet quitting,” where employees mentally disengage from their work, doing just the bare minimum in order to collect a paycheck. In other words, what is there to cherish of commitment to “hard work” in a society that is becoming a “post-work world”.

So, what remains when “family” no longer means family (and is essentially devalued), hard work is despised as a ploy by capitalist elites to exploit the labor of the proletariat masses, religion is nothing but the folly of senseless peasants, and loyalty to one’s country is substituted with calls to completely dismantle most, if not all, institutions regardless of their efficacy or stability (and without a serious plan for rebuilding)? Only one caricature remains: the backwards redneck racist hillbillies of rural America who are allegedly too stupid to even vote in accordance with their own interests. 

As I pointed to elsewhere, arriving at this conclusion is a sign of our own intellectual laziness. 

In order to bridge the gap, progressives ought to make a serious effort to at least understand and respect (though not necessarily celebrate or agree with) the values of rural people. To fail to do this is to ignore their lived reality, which is precisely the opposite of what progressive theories (i.e., Critical Race Theory) are supposed to do. Mary Matsuda, a prominent scholar of Critical Race Theory famously argued that CRT must utilize the various intellectual traditions of people as a "new epistemological source for critical scholars." For Black rural communities in the South where the vast majority of residents are deeply religious Christians, this would seem to entail that the intellectual tradition of the Black Church (i.e., Protestant Christianity) must be utilized as an epistemological source for addressing the concerns of these communities. 

In other words, the religious worldview of rural Americans is essential to their identity; to ignore it is to ignore their lived realities and, instead, to resort to cheap caricatures.