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.

More from The Rural Voter (Jacobs and Shea), this time from Politico Nightly

Politico Nightly recently featured a short interview with Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea, authors of The Rural Voter (2023). I've earlier blogged about the book here (well, in truth I picked up the Daily Yonder's review of the book).  Here's an excerpt from the interview with Politico: 

Question:  Donald Trump won large majorities among rural voters in 2016 and 2020. What explains a Manhattan billionaire’s strong appeal in rural America?

Jacobs: You have to get beyond Trump’s persona. You have to look beyond this idea that Trump is a typical Manhattanite. I think that’s where people try to carve out this disconnection: How could this billionaire living in his Manhattan skyscraper identify with these people? But the truth of the matter is he never pretended to be a rural person. He didn’t go around making a whole to-do about being born in Scranton like Joe Biden or chumming up with coal miners like Hillary Clinton. It made him not authentically rural, but authentic as a non-typical politician. And when he would speak about rural issues, like taking pride in mining coal, it was more empathy than anything. … A politician or a leader like Trump doesn’t necessarily have to pretend to be rural to play into rural identity politics. Just like progressives on the left don’t have to be a certain demographic to speak the language of identity politics.

* * * 

Question:  What are some of the implications of your research for the 2024 presidential election?

Shea: I hope Democrats appreciate the size of the rural voting bloc. This is a group of voters that is more important for the Republican Party than either Black voters or young voters are for the Democratic coalition. This is a big important group, and if the Democrats can’t chip away and make some inroads, it is not good on a national level and it’s going to be very bad at the state-level. … One of the reasons it may be hard for Democrats to go into rural areas is that they’ve come to believe these are bastions of crazy Trumpers. … But what we show in this book is that there are genuine concerns that pre-date Donald Trump by decades. Take the anxiety that all Americans feel about the future, double it, and extend it back extra decades. That’s the story of rural America.

I have read nearly the entire book at this point and am very much a fan of the work these scholars have done.  I expect to be writing more about the book during this election cycle.  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLV): Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening

Here's an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's 2023 book Democracy Awakening:  Notes on the State of America, about rural and urban power in relation to the founding of the United States and the structures the "founding fathers" put in place:  

States ratified the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791, and the framework for the United States of America was in place. The principles behind it were democratic—that every citizen should have an equal say in the government and that every citizen would be equal before the law—although its practice was almost exclusively limited to white men.

It was a “great experiment,” as first president George Washington called it shortly after he took the oath of office, but it had a crucial flaw: the Framers did not foresee the rise of political parties. They figured that, having thrown off monarchy, Americans would all agree on their form of government. To the degree that they disagreed, Framer James Madison argued in the famous essay “Federalist No. 10,” they would break into small factions and so cancel each other out, much—as the presence of many religious sects in the country ensured that none gained the upper hand over the others.

But partisanship appeared almost immediately. Southern leaders opposed Washington’s policies, conceived by Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, that strengthened the hand of northern businessmen in the national government. Virginians like Madison and Thomas Jefferson maintained that their opposition to such national power made them the true defenders of the Constitution.

Partisanship turned out to be an important innovation. It engaged ordinary voters and provided oversight of lawmakers, but it also weakened the nation’s framework, hampering representation and many of the checks the Framers had built into the system

The first thing to go was fair representation. By 1796, political leaders had divided into two camps, and Jefferson saw that he would have won the presidency if only Virginia's electors had all voted as a bloc in the Electoral College rather than splitting their votes between him and John Adams of Massachusetts. Jefferson urged Virginia to adopt a winner-takes-all system that would give all of the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate got a simple majority. It was a stunning change and one that appalled Madison, who wanted to amend the Constitution to prevent it. He died before he could get such an amendment ratified, and other states quickly followed Virginia, manipulating the new system to give their own top candidates a leg up. Today, only Maine and Nebraska still split their electoral votes, with the result that candidates campaign almost exclusively in states with large electoral vote counts.

The Framers also did not foresee—although this, perhaps, they should have—that eventually, politicians desperate to keep their party in power would add new, sparsely populated states to the Union, as the Republican Party did when it brought six new states into the country between 1889 and 1890. They were quite open that their goal was to make sure they controlled the Senate in order to stop legislation they didn’t like, even if the American people wanted it.

The Framers also did not foresee the growth of vast cities, possible thanks to modern industry—including steel—and transportation. They could never have imagined the astounding size differences that would develop in the modern era between states like California, which according to the 2020 census has almost forty million people, and Wyoming, which has fewer than six hundred thousand.

Living in small, largely rural states, the Framers put a lower limit but no upper limit on representation. When the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans for the first time, the House in 1921 capped its numbers at 438 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, whom lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today, the average congressional district is 761,169 individuals, which both makes representation less effective and reduces the power of states with more people.

The government that the Framers designed, hammered out by fifty-five young white men sweltering in Philadelphia in summer 1878 to permit individuals to have an equal say in their government without succumbing to tyranny, was an astonishing feat, but it was not perfect.

Fortunately, the Framers recognized that their work would need adjustment. They wrote into the Constitution that future generations could amend it.

(pp. 185-186; emphasis mine).

Humboldt County, California judge under fire for ethics violations as election looms

The headline from The Press Democrat (of Sonoma County, California but covering the north coast up through Humboldt), is "Humboldt County Judge Greg Kreis accused of sexual harassment, drunken bullying, throwing curveball into his reelection bid." Here's an excerpt from the deeply reported story by Andrew Graham and Marisa Endicott: 

The commission that oversees California’s judiciary has served presiding Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Gregory Kreis a 35-page notice charging him with 19 ethical violations including drunken bullying of attorneys, lewd behavior toward women, poor courtroom behavior, cronyism and abuse of power.

The allegations outlined by the commission on Feb. 2 stretch back years and have thrown his reelection campaign into turmoil just weeks before the March 5 election.

In one case, in May 2019, he is accused of using an antisemitic slur against a deputy public defender, insulting his manliness and then pushing him fully clothed off a pontoon boat into Lake Shasta.

A 2015 allegation from before he became a judge states that he took two attorneys with him to buy cocaine, then used the drug in the car as he drove back from the purchase.

Another accusation alleges he sneaked into a sleeping woman’s bedroom, exposed his genitals and tried to wake her.

Here are more posts about Humboldt County, which is metropolitan, but sparsely populated.  I'm just thinking about the presumably helpful role of this state commission in providing oversight of a sensitive matter like this one.  It seems far preferable to local oversight--and, to my mind, is even preferable to letting the voters decide in a couple of weeks. 

Billing indigent defendants for provision of constitutionally provided legal counsel

Lauren Gill and Weihua Li reported last week for the Marshall Project under the headline, "If You Can’t Afford an Attorney, One Will Be Appointed. And You May Get a Huge Bill."  The subheading is "In Iowa, people too poor to pay for a lawyer are on the hook for big fees they can’t afford. So-called “free” lawyers aren’t free."  Here is an excerpt that highlights problems in states other than Iowa:  

This summer, the American Bar Association released guidelines recommending that poor people shouldn't have to pay for a lawyer in criminal cases. But in Dothan, Alabama, for example, people charged with Class C and D felonies, which commonly include low-level drug charges, must pay a flat fee of $2,000. In rural Anderson County, in East Texas, people are charged $750 to plead out to a third-degree felony. If they choose to go to trial, they must pay $750 a day for legal counsel.

And here are some excerpts about the Iowa system--highlighting differences between rural and urban places, or what sociologists and geographers call spatial inequality. 

Iowa legislators recognize they have a constitutional obligation to cover indigent defense, which is paid for by budget appropriations, said state Rep. Brian Lohse, a Republican who chairs the Justice System Appropriations Subcommittee. But the fees are meant to deter repeat offenders, he said. “I think the purpose of that is simply to kind of hold them accountable a little bit,” he said of defendants. “So they just don't see it as a kind of gift.”

David Carroll, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, an organization focused on indigent defense, disagreed. “The right to counsel is both a foundational American value and a 14th Amendment obligation of states owed to each and every defendant — it is not a ‘gift.’”

* * *

Out of Iowa’s 99 counties, just 13 have public defenders, who receive a state salary. Their offices are located in the state’s most populated cities. Iowa requires clients of public defenders to repay the costs of their defense, but these lawyers say that they often do not charge for all the time they work on a case. Public defenders had much higher caseloads than lawyers in rural counties.

Residents of the 86 more rural counties mostly rely on private lawyers who contract with the state to perform indigent defense work. Judges can also appoint other lawyers in certain circumstances. Iowans who accept contract lawyers are on the hook for the full amount of their services unless they can convince a judge to reduce the bill by filing a lengthy document within 30 days of sentencing. Current rates for contract lawyers are $73-$83 an hour, depending on the seriousness of the charge; paralegal time costs $25 an hour.

People who live in counties without a public defender are more likely to be assessed higher attorney’s fees, data shows. For example, in the decade between 2012 and 2022, Iowa charged an average of $391 per case. People in counties with a public defender’s office were billed an average of $312; those in rural areas were billed an average of $506.

Black Hawk County Judge Melissa Anderson-Seeber, a former public defender, said that she does not usually assess court debt against people who are incarcerated. When someone is free and working, she said, “I may not make them pay the full amount.” For people who are not employed, she makes them perform community service to pay back their court debt.

Another judge in the same county, Joel Dalrymple, has a different approach. A former prosecutor, he said he tends to consider whether people can make payments under a payment plan rather than one lump sum.

The billing indigent defendants for the cost of their defense is an issue I first became aware of more than a decade ago, when I was writing this about provision of this constitutionally guaranteed service in Arizona.  In short, it's not a new issue.  Since then, I've seen some coverage of the issue elsewhere, but without the attention to rural difference that is featured here. 

Biden's investments in rural America

Farah Stockman wrote in the New York Times blog yesterday about the Biden administration's investment in rural America.  

Frustration in rural America, which has long felt left behind in federal attention and dollars, has been a major driver of right-wing populism. To counter that, the Biden administration has bet literally billions on the idea that federal investments can turn those places around. The infrastructure act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act all contained special incentives aimed at improving the economic prospects of rural towns and small cities across the country.

It’s too early to tell whether it worked.

Stockman then notes a recently published Brookings Institution Report seeking to assess just that--whether these investments are working.  In particular, it tracks "$525 billion in private investment in advance technologies like clean energy and semiconductors" and "found that a significant portion has gone into economically depressed places that hadn't seen those types of investments before."  Here's a bullet point form the Bookings Institution Report: 

So far, economically distressed counties are receiving a larger-than-proportional share of that investment surge relative to their current share of the economy. With comparatively low prime-age employment rates and median household incomes, these counties account for about 8% of national GDP but have received 16% of announced strategic sector investments since 2021.

The NYT blog post focuses on Haywood County, Tennessee and Matagorda County, Texas, which are seeing the benefit of these investments.  

Supplementing rural justice systems to level the playing field

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published this editorial a year ago, but I just came across it and found it worthy of note.  The headline is "Rural counties need AG expertise."  It's about the bind that nonmetro counties are in when it comes to handling big prosecutions because they typically have fewer resources.  Here are some excerpts that focus on the challenges specifically identified as rural: 

After four years of requests, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison finally will get a badly needed and ongoing legislative infusion of funds to bolster the criminal prosecution division of his office. The expertise and staffing power he will add are crucial, especially to outstate county attorneys who already have too few resources when confronted with complex or high-profile cases.

The piece quotes Ellison, who had just received more than $4 million in funding to hire seven new attorneys plus support staff: 

There are incredibly complex human trafficking cases in rural counties that cross all kinds of jurisdictional lines, same with financial exploitation and other cases. We have had to rebuild the criminal division from the ground up, but with this funding, I can say, 'We're back.'

The editorial continues:

The benefits that can yield were clear earlier this month, when the Attorney General's Office came in at the request of Cook County and obtained a conviction in the gruesome murder of Ricky Balsimo. After Balsimo was killed in St. Paul, his body was dismembered in Superior, Wis., then transported to Grand Portage, Minn., where Robert T. West obtained a boat to dump the remains into Lake Superior.

Cook County has a population of 5,600, is on the Canadian border, and is the state's easternmost reaching county.  

Cook County Attorney Molly Hicken told an editorial writer that her office had not had to take a murder case to trial in 22 years, let alone one of such sweeping complexity. "My office has two attorneys," Hicken said, "including me."

Hicken said a murder trial "takes immense resources. This specific one had 2,500 pages of discovery, days' worth of recordings. It would have been total nightmare." Ellison's office, she said, was able to supply a prosecutor with 22 years of experience in homicide cases. "He knows the issues that can come up," Hicken said. "He works with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He has relationships with forensic scientists. We simply don't have that expertise and resources."

Hicken said she is far from alone in this predicament. Of the state's 87 counties, she said, "24 have two or fewer attorneys in their county office. Fourteen more have just three." County attorneys also have many responsibilities beyond court cases, she said, including providing counsel to local officials, reviewing contracts, negotiating cases and even writing ordinances.

"We need access to equal justice in rural Minnesota," Hicken said. "That includes access to justice for crime victims. Victims here deserve the same type of skilled prosecution for their cases that they would get in Hennepin County."

This seems like a sensible way for a state to support its rural counties, whether the issue is prosecution or indigent defense.  

Literary Ruralism (XLIV): Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections and Saving America

In his 2019 book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, Professor Ian Haney Lopez explores the best messaging to achieve cross-racial coalition building to support progressive causes.  Here's the beginning of Chapter 9:  The Race-Class Approach:

The Right’s core narrative urges voters to fear and resent people of color, to distrust government, and to trust the marketplace. The Left can respond by urging people to join together across racial lines, to distrust greedy elites sowing division, and to demand that government work for everyone. This is, to repeat, a core narrative, not a recommendation regarding precise language. This is the foundational scaffolding the Left can use to build a multiracial movement for racial and economic justice. The first box puts the core narrative into visual form. The next puts flesh on the bones, offering three versions of the race-class message. How did the race-class messages perform compared to dog whistle racial fear? We tested nine versions of the race-class message. Persuadables found all nine race-class messages more convincing than the dog whistle racial fear message. It’s an impressive result for a first run. Recall that familiar messages typically do better simply because they’re familiar. Those in the middle hear racial fear messages every day, and yet even when first exposed to the race-class messages, this group found all of them more convincing.

And here's the part that specifically references rural folks and their receptivity to the so-called race-class narrative: 

While much more research remains to be done and the race-class messages will certainly evolve, we’re confident the early positive results were not a fluke. Other groups subsequently tested versions of the race-class message and also report strong findings. Rural Organizing, a progressive group focused on rebuilding rural America, surveyed their constituents in 2018. Unsurprisingly, they found rural-specific messages to be very popular. For instance, this message garnered approval from 94 percent of respondents: “The rural and small-town way of life is worth fighting for.” Now compare how the novel race-class arguments did. Rural Organizing also tested this message: “In small towns and rural communities we believe in looking out for each other, whether we’re white, Black or brown, tenth generation or newcomer.” Almost nine out of ten, 89 percent, agreed. And this message: “Instead of delivering for working people, politicians hand kickbacks to their donors who send jobs overseas. Then they turn around and blame new immigrants or people of color, to divide and distract us from the real source of our problems.” Three-quarters of all respondents, 76 percent, agreed.3

In the summer of 2018, Latino Decisions polled more than 2,000 registered voters in the 61 most competitive House districts. They tested this statement: “Today, certain politicians and their greedy lobbyists hurt everyone by handing kickbacks to the rich, defunding our schools, and threatening our seniors with cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Then they turn around and point the finger for our hard times at poor families, Black people, and new immigrants. We need to join together with people from all walks of life to fight for our future.”4 More than 85 percent of respondents agreed.

These high levels of agreement are heartening, especially coming from rural areas and competitive districts where one might expect a more lukewarm reception.

We’ve also seen the race-class approach picked up in campaigns and by politicians across the country.

Extraordinary story of French farmer behind recent blockade in Southern France

Catherine Porter reported for the New York Times last week under the headline, "The Farmers' Protests Have Become a Wildfire.  He was the Spark."  The "he" is Jerome Bayle, and this story is largely about the 42-year-old former professional rugby player who has been running his family's farm since his father died by suicide in 2015, at age 61.  

The story's lede is catchy, for sure, and presents a real contrast between rural and urban: 

Jérôme Bayle had spent seven nights on a major French highway, leading a group of aggrieved farmers in protest, when the prime minister arrived, dressed in his Parisian blue suit and tie, to thank them for “making France proud” and announced he would meet their demands.

Before camera flashes and outstretched microphones, Mr. Bayle told Prime Minister Gabriel Attal that he had seen the standoff as a match between two teams — the revolting farmers, led by Mr. Bayle, and the government, led by Mr. Attal.

“I don’t like losing,” said Mr. Bayle, dressed decidedly more casually, with a baseball hat on his head, turned backward. The thick crowd around him chuckled. It was clear his team had won.

Then there is this bit, which provides a wider-angle perspective: 

More broadly, not just in France but all around Europe, farmers are complaining about rising costs from inflation and the war in Ukraine. Those burdens have been exacerbated as the governments look to save money by shaving farm subsidies, even as the European Union heaps more regulations on farmers to meet climate and other environmental goals.

You can hear Porter's further commentary on Bayle and his victory on the NYTimes audio of this story. 

Regarding the wider European angle, here's news yesterday of a Spanish farmer blockade. 

Rural(ish) straight white guy becomes California senate's speaker pro tem

Mackenzie Mays brings us this feature of Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) in yesterday's Los Angeles Times.  Here's the lede: 

On a foggy January morning in his hometown nestled in Northern California wine country, state Sen. Mike McGuire was at an elementary school doing a dance called the “wheelbarrow” and explaining insurance policy to children who were more eager to talk about their 4-H pigs.

The Sonoma County Democrat then rushed off, driving past rolling green hills and dewy vineyards, to have coffee with firefighters who are banking on him to help a region that has been repeatedly devastated by wildfires and often feels overlooked by state leaders.

At the Healdsburg Fire Department, a staffer struggled to get McGuire out the door in time so that he could make it to a Chamber of Commerce event three hours north in Eureka. There, he would partake in a hobby perfectly suited to his sense of urgency and penchant for squeezing as much as he can into the time he has: auctioneering.

* * * 

[I]n some ways, McGuire’s appointment comes as a surprise. He represents a rural district in a powerful position long held by senators from major cities. He is a straight white man helping lead a state that is predominantly Latino amid calls for more diversity in Democratic politics.

A prior post about McGuire is here.  Some other posts mentioning him and his vast coastal district are here. 

Here is an excerpt from CalMatters coverage of McGuire's ascension to speaker pro tem; it focuses on the rural-urban angle--and how long it's been since someone from the north coast has led the Senate:

But the optics of McGuire’s ascension are notable: It’s the first time since 1866 that a lawmaker from the north coast leads the Senate, the Associated Press reported. Alongside his Assembly counterpart, Speaker Robert Rivas of Hollister, both legislative leaders now hail from more rural, agricultural areas of California — a shift in the epicenter of power. McGuire succeeds Toni Atkins of San Diego, while Rivas replaced Anthony Rendon of Los Angeles County last summer.

I find myself skeptical that the balance of power between rural and urban will shift because of the presence of McGuire and Rivas, but we shall see.

The Sonoma Press-Democrat coverage includes a photo of McGuire hugging Pat Sabo, the chair of the Sonoma County Democratic Party--who was also his 8th grade math teacher.  Like the coverage I heard on Capital Public Radio, it mentions McGuire's grandmother, on whose prune farm he worked growing up.  McGuire was raised by his single mother and his grandmother, and he credits them for his work ethic. 

Racism in rural Vermont: 1890s

Vermont Public published a great story a couple of weeks ago regarding the 1890 disappearance of a Black preacher, John Harrison, in Norwich, Vermont and the failure to charge the man who confessed to his murder. It also details a place name with racist origins that may have derived from his presence in the community. You can read (or listen) to the story here. It serves a nice follow up to my previous piece on racism in North Carolina during the same period and a good reminder that racism wasn't the exclusive province of the South. 

This piece touches on a few interesting artifacts of history:

1. The outmigration of people from rural New England in the 19th century. I've touched on this in previous writings but this article does a great job of illustrating the opportunities created by the holes that are left when people leave. In this story, Mr. Harrison ends up in Norwich to serve as a preacher, a job which had become less coveted because of the declining population. It is unfortunate that racial prejudice prevented him from fully taking advantage of the opportunity. 
2. The racism that people of color faced outside of the rural South. The heart of the Abolitionist movement was in New England, but that doesn't mean that Black people were welcome in those communities. People wanted them to be free, but free elsewhere. 
3. The erasure of records, which is a national problem for people of color and historically lower-income people. 

As a student at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, I spent four years living across the Connecticut River from Norwich. The Upper Valley (as the area is known locally) is a beautiful community with an interesting history. I'm happy to see my former Sociology of Law professor, Deborah King, quoted in this piece and I am excited to see her research into Dartmouth's role in the transatlantic slave trade.