This is ridiculous. Even Napoleon didn’t go this far.
But then, consider this by Jonathan Martin, one of the foremost purveyors of Village 2.0 conventional wisdom in which he reveals that up until now, just everybody has assumed that Trump has a lock on the White House. It has long appeared to me that the beltway press has felt that way and it’s nice to know that my perceptions weren’t wrong. But I honestly did know about the rest of this:
It has been close to an open secret in the diplomatic corps that America’s allies and adversaries are anticipating a Trump restoration. Discussing who will fill his second-term Cabinet and White House isn’t just the stuff of parlor games in embassies and overseas capitals — it has taken on a what-will-we-do urgency since Trump sealed the GOP nomination last month.
It is one thing for Hungarian President Viktor Orban, the contrarian and would-be authoritarian troll of the continent, to descend on Mar-a-Lago for an ersatz state visit. But the degree to which other countries are preparing for a Trump victory was illustrated by a far more unlikely visitor this week to the former president’s exile in Xanadu: British Foreign Minister David Cameron.
The British government hastened to say how common it was for top officials to meet with American opposition figures. But when he was prime minister in 2012, Cameron didn’t dispatch his foreign minister to Boston, let alone Lake Winnipesaukee, to visit Mitt Romney. The British received Romney at 10 Downing Street, their turf, when he happened to be in town for the beginning of the Summer Olympics.
In fact, as I was reminded this week, it was about this time in 2012 that Cameron came to the White House for a pomp-filled visit and state dinner. The then-prime minister compared the then-incumbent up for reelection, Barack Obama, to Theodore Roosevelt and all but endorsed his reelection, praising Obama for having “pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world.” (Yes, students of diplomatic sport history, that was the same trip where Obama brought Cameron to the NCAA basketball tournament play-in game in Dayton, which was surely difficult to translate into the Queen’s English.)
In fairness to Cameron, who may be gone with the rest of the Tories by the time Trump would be sworn in again, he did have a more urgent task in Palm Beach: softening the former president’s Ukraine opposition ahead of a House vote on aid to Kyiv this month.
Yet Cameron, more than any country’s foreign minister, knows the message he sent by showing up at Trump’s gilded door.
And, of course, Trump knows the message being sent. An official from another Western country, not Britain, told me Trump’s circle is advising a number of embassies to dispatch ambassadors and ministers to Mar-a-Lago to, well, rekindle relationships.
A high-ranking Biden official said it was not surprising but rather “unsettling” that Cameron would go to Mar-a-Lago. “They’re scared of how destructive he is and they’re seeing if he can temper him,” this official told me, with a measure of sympathy, because the British know Trump is bent on vengeance.
Yet right as major countries have embarked on mollifying Trump over six months before the election, there were reminders that his polling advantage in key states may not last. The fashionable assumption among Trump’s elite critics — perhaps the way of demonstrating this time one is not out of touch — that he’s a lock looks increasingly misguided or at least premature.
Foreign allies are assured that if Biden wins anyway, he and the Democrats won’t jeopardize the world or or American interests out of pique and vengeance as Trump would so they know they have little to lose by currying favor with Trump at this point. And the fact that Cameron was trying to get Trump to change his mind on Ukraine aide is also true (but he wasn’t successful. ) Still, it’s a very bad look.
They shouldn’t bother. Trump is very susceptible to flattery but he hates Europe and his alliance with Putin is written in stone at this point. If he wins, Ukraine is dead in the water and so, very possibly, is Europe. If they are looking at contingencies in case Biden loses in November there’s no point in looking to Trump for support.
We finally got the latest all-important NY Times poll which shows that Biden has gained 4 points in the last 6 weeks or so and is now virtually tied with Trump. This follows most of the other polling over the past few weeks showing that Biden’s numbers have moved up. The article accompanying is predictably dour, suggesting that everyone hates him anyway and that underneath it all Trump is really much more popular (which is untrue) but that’s how the NY Times polling rolls these days. The fact is that Biden is steadily turning the ship around and Democrats are coming back on board. If the race were held today it would be a a nail biter and it very likely will be the same in November because half the country is in a cult-like trance and believes that Donald Trump is either Jesus Christ or a business genius who will make them all rich and the rest of us are terrified that this fascist cult leader will edge out another win. I don’t know if there’s any way to change that.
Mr Hopium Simon Rosenberg puts it in perspective for you in a way that will make you breathe just a little bit easier:
More data now showing a changing election, one getting much better for Joe Biden and the Democrats. A new NYT poll has Biden going from down 5 to down 1, 46-45 – a 4 point gain! This encouraging movement is consistent with many other polls we’ve seen in recent weeks. The election today is close and competitive. Trump no longer leads, and things are moving in our direction.
The analysis of the poll is also consistent with the argument I’ve been making about what was likely to happen this spring – once the general began, and the Biden campaign turned on, some of our wandering coalition would begin to come home and Biden’s numbers would go up. Here’s a few excerpts from the NYT analysis of its poll:
the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president…..Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago…..
In the last month, Mr. Biden’s support among white voters remained flat, but it has inched upward among Black and Latino voters…….Mr. Biden was faring better than he had been a month ago in suburbs and among women……
The last few weeks have brought us lots of encouraging polling. Trump’s leads outside the margin of error have disappeared. Almost every poll national poll taken in recent weeks has the race within margin of error – meaning it’s close and competitive. 21 polls taken since late February have Biden ahead. Many polls have found meaningful movement towards Biden (he’s gained 4 points here, 6 points in Harris X for example). We’ve started seeing better numbers in the battleground states too, as there are now polls with Biden ahead in MI, PA, WI. We had 2 very encouraging polls in NC this week showing Biden within margin of error (tied). One Quinnipiac had Josh Stein up 52-44.
I particularly enjoyed this, however:
I went on CNN last night to discuss Biden’s improving poll numbers and what has become a very bad April for Donald Trump. Do watch if you have a minute, and yes I finally got a haircut:
As I discuss in the clip I think this has been a disastrous stretch for Trump and the Republicans. The new AZ and FL Supreme Court decisions stripping the rights and freedoms from millions of women in America has sent a powerful reminder to all Americans of the ongoing threat MAGA poses to all of us.
The damage to MAGA was compounded by Trump’s idiotic attempts to minimize the fallout. In a big reveal on Monday he announced he was for leaving reproductive health decisions not to women and their doctors but to politicians in the states. And whatever he thought he was doing, by taking this position, he endorsed and green-lighted the most extreme abortion laws in the country, in places like Florida, Idaho and Texas. He made it clear that total abortion bans with no exceptions and penalties for “trafficking women” were good with him. And if those are okay with him in any state, it means it would be okay with him nationally. Whatever the moronic Trump thought he was doing on Monday, he actually confirmed that he is the most powerful and dangerous abortion extremist in modern American history. He and his party will now have to defend these extremist bans which poll at about 20% across the US, a devastating political place to be on an issue which really matters to voters.
I think Trump’s confirmation of his extremism, and his Monty Python-esque handling of it, is going to cost him and his party in the polls in the coming weeks. It’s already fired up Democrats and will result in us raising more money and getting more volunteer time from our supporters. And on Monday his horrific April continues as his criminal trial stemming from his having sex with a porn star while married to Melania begins. I for one am looking forward to Christian Republicans like Mike Johnson defending the right of Trump to have sex with porn stars while married and illegally covering it all up – hey, no biggie. We all do it!
Trump’s very bad April is about to get a whole lot worse.
“Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take womens’ rights and freddoms,” Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters in Arizona on Friday.
Arizona is challenging other swing states for the designation of “Ground Zero” in the 2024 presidential race. The Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the territory’s 1864 abortion ban this week drew Vice President Kamala Harris to the state on Friday. She brought the heat and she named names. Well, just one (CNN):
Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday placed the blame squarely on Donald Trump as she went on the offensive over abortion rights in Arizona and across the country.
In the wake of an Arizona Supreme Court ruling this week banning abortions in almost all cases, Harris headed to Arizona to mobilize voters who see November’s election as a referendum on women’s rights, one of the Biden campaign’s key issues in the upcoming election. The vice president has become a go-to voice for the campaign on abortion rights and quickly announced a trip to Tucson after Tuesday’s ruling.
The decision, which revived a 160-year-old law barring all abortions except in cases when “it is necessary to save” a pregnant woman’s life, “demonstrated once and for all that overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy” to restrict abortion access in the United States, Harris said. The ruling, she said, marked an “inflection point” in the fight over abortion rights.
“And we all must understand who all is to blame,” she said. “Former President Donald Trump did this.”
Vice President Harris: Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take women's rights and freedoms. It’s part of a full-on attack state by state on reproductive freedom. We all must understand who is to blame. Donald Trump did this pic.twitter.com/gQiqJdKD9L
Vice President Harris: Trump wants us to believe he will not sign a national ban. Enough with the gaslighting. We all know if Trump gets the chance he will sign a national abortion ban. How do we know? Just look at the facts. Trump endorsed a national abortion ban as president pic.twitter.com/3NcXTnMlBp
Vice President Harris: Don’t forget, Donald Trump said women should be punished for seeking an abortion. He hand-picked three members of the Supreme Court because he intended for them to overturn Roe, and they did. And now one in three women of reproductive age in our country… pic.twitter.com/Gb0wURZcfU
Vice President Harris: This is 2024, not the 1800s. We’re not going back. Joe Biden and I trust women to know what is in their best interest. And women trust us to fight to protect their freedoms pic.twitter.com/IICAYv2DyQ
An MSNBC guest on Friday argued that Harris is undervalued as a campaigner and asset to the Biden campaign (if not dismissed). That’s been my assessment. Your guess as to why is as good as mine. And mine is pretty good.
Another GOP non-solution to a non-problem from frightened men who can’t govern except by making it harder for U.S. citizens to choose their leaders. TFG Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an “election integrity” bill at their Mar-a-Lago meeting on Friday. Their bill would make voting by non-citizens illegaler than it is already.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a bluff that has no chance to get past the U.S. Senate if Republicans even introduce it. Trump and Johnson got the publicity. They stoked the MAGA base’s xenophobia. They fed the voter fraud conspiracy theory. These guardians of the republic further undermined confidence in government of the people in which they themselves no longer believe. It’s a win-win-win-win.
How will they make the illegal illegaler? We don’t know, not having seen the bill (if it exists). People already must swear on penalty of a fine of “not more than $10,000″ or imprisonment of “not more than five years, or both” that they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote (to be verified by boards of elections). If they slip through somehow, it’s still a felony if they vote in a federal election.
Now, having required photo IDs to vote in state after state, will Republicans require citizens to produce at their polling stations their long-form birth certificates, Social Security cards, or passports at the polls? And which Americans might have the most trouble obtaining those and getting over this new barrier to casting a ballot?
CLAIM: Social Security Administration data shows the number of voters registering without a photo ID is skyrocketing in three key swing states, evidence that migrants who entered the country illegally are registering to vote in Arizona, Texas and Pennsylvania.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Election officials in all three states said the information being shared is incorrect. In fact, recent voter registrations in those states are well below the numbers being cited online. The posts are misrepresenting data from the SSA’s Help America Vote Verification system, which tracks requests by states to verify the identity of individuals who registered to vote using the last four digits of their social security number. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections and noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, as states have processes to prevent it.
THE FACTS: With three months remaining in the presidential primary season, social media users are misrepresenting government data to suggest that the country is seeing a surge in voter registrations by migrants who came to the U.S. illegally.
Statler, an Indian flying fox, was born at a zoo in 1987. Since then, he’s moved from facility to facility. For many years, he was kept in a small space and used for “education.” When he arrived at Bat World Sanctuary in 2018, his caretakers made sure he’d have a happy and peaceful retirement. To help save more bats like Statler, you can support Bat World Sanctuary here: http://thedo.do/batworld, and check them out on Facebook: http://thedo.do/batworldsanctuary.
Rosebud, a beautiful yellow bat, is visiting us from BW MidCities. She came into care back in Feb during a cold snap. Rosebud was found to be suffering from frostbite, as well as pregnant. She will stay with us and have her pups in luxury, all while being fed her fill of worms pic.twitter.com/jPLqRO1nnW
I’ve heard of kitchen table issues but this is ridiculous
I have to assume that Republicans think these are the issues people really care about and are demanding the GOP House of Representatives deal with immediately. It’s that important…
I wrote yesterday about the Steve Bannon plot to activate young environmentalists against Biden over the huge increase in American oil production during his administration (even as they lie to the MAGA cultists, telling them that Biden has shut off the spigot and Trump will come in an drill, baby, drill.) They figure they can get the young vote to turn on the Democrats and vote 3rd Party, whether it’s RFK or Jill Stein.
The US set aside 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope to serve as an emergency oil supply a century ago. Now, President Joe Biden is moving to block oil and gas development across roughly half of it.
The initiative, set to be finalized within days, marks one of the most sweeping efforts yet by Biden to limit oil and gas exploration on federal lands. It comes as he seeks to boost land conservation and fight climate change — and is campaigning for a second term on promises to do more of it.
The changes wouldn’t affect ConocoPhillips’s controversial 600-million-barrel Willow oil project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. But oil industry leaders say the plan is more expansive than initially anticipated and threatens to make it nearly impossible to build another megaproject in the region.
That’s spooking oil companies with holdings in the National Petroleum Reserve, which — along with the rest of Alaska’s North Slope — was viewed as a major growth engine for the industry before the shale boom. Interest has surged again in recent years, fed by mammoth discoveries. Tapping the region’s reservoirs could yield decades of production.
There is no reason to tap that reserve. If an emergency comes up down the road then it will be there. But that land should be protected and we should do everything we can to make sure it is.
I don’t know if Biden will get anything but grief for this but he should be given credit. Instead, I’m sure the headlines will all be that it’s more bad news for him because well .. what isn’t?
Trump bizarrely suggests his social media director, Dan Scavino, who has access to Trump’s Truth Social account, could end Trump’s political career by posting how he “doesn’t like” his voters or posting “something horrible” and “very sexually oriented.” pic.twitter.com/YjUdYqNV6q
It’s been reported that he doesn’t like his voters. Of course he doesn’t, he’s a rich guy who really only values important, powerful, rich people. He can’t stand his voters. They are marks to him, just like the rubes who bought his Trump University courses.
He posts “something horrible” every day so I don’t know what he might be talking about but if he’s thinking of something else that Scavino might know about that’s “very sexually oriented” —
There has been something of a brouhaha this past week over a new book by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage. Evidently some political science scholars in the field felt that it was unfair to the rural voters by characterizing them as feeling rage instead of righteous anger. We urban types are mean as always and need to be more understanding of some people’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny and fetishistic Trump worship because well … they’re unhappy.
When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.
Pillorying Donald Trump is fine. Thundering against the MAGA movement is acceptable. Deep-dive analyses of the votes and voices of “downscale” whites? Sure. But if you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.
And so we have, in an article in Politico by Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist who co-authored his own book, The Rural Voter, that was released a few months before ours; and another in The Atlantic by Tyler Harper, an environmental studies professor who has made it a personal crusade to attack us and our book. These pieces illustrate some of the very pathologies so common in the way scholars and pundits alike treat rural whites.
In recent years, research from political scientists showing some disturbing patterns of opinion among rural voters, especially rural whites, has begun to accumulate. But there is a clear discomfort with the implications of that research, even among some of these researchers. For instance, consider this quote: “Clearly, though, even when we account for composition effects related to race [i.e., the fact that rural America is whiter than the rest of the country], we see that racial resentment is higher in rural than in urban America.” That appears not in our book. It’s found on page 296 of Jacobs’s The Rural Voter.
Soon after, Jacobs and his co-author write, “On a range of race-related questions, responses from rural residents veer from those of other Americans—and even from other Republicans—in significant ways.” As you might have guessed, “veer from” is the euphemism they deploy to say that rural whites express more racist attitudes. “And yet,” they go on, “for many rural residents, attitudes about races are intimately linked to perceptions of hard work, self-reliance, a disdain for government handouts, and the dangers of elites.” What they’re arguing, then, is that it’s not that many rural whites (to reiterate, not all, but many) are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
Right. They’re just a little bit resentful of all those lazy … ahem ... welfare queens who are living on the government teat. It has nothing to do with their color, nothing at all. If anything it’s racist to suggest it does.
Given the important place hard work holds in the rural ethos, we find that result to be troubling, and we believe it deserves further discussion. In fact, as Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, the most oft-cited book about rural politics of recent years, told us when we interviewed her, if she were to write her book over again, “I would have written more about how racism is present even when people aren’t talking about it.”
Here is another quote, from a journal article that appeared after our book was finished: “We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence [i.e., against fellow citizens] than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals—namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment—are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state.” The lead author of this piece is Kal Munis, another of our vocal critics. To our knowledge, nowhere outside this journal article has Munis mentioned this finding about rural support for violence against the state. With Donald Trump making clear once again that he will not accept an election he does not win, a position that led to a rather notable incident of violence against the state that took place on January 6, 2021, this seems highly relevant.
We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.
We wonder what would happen if rural politics scholars took to the online pages of places like Politico and The Atlantic to describe their more troubling findings. Actually, we don’t have to wonder: Their inboxes would be filled with the hateful and threatening emails we are receiving.
When it comes to rural resentments, again and again these scholars insist that if rural whites are mad, it’s only because they have good reason to be. We are hardly unaware of the sufferings of rural America, many of which are born from late-stage capitalism. In fact, we dedicate the second chapter of our book to the causes and consequences of declining economic opportunities, outmigration of ambitious young people, hospital and pharmacy closures, and other very serious problems that pervade rural American communities, white and nonwhite alike. In our reporting, we heard many moving stories about the challenges rural communities face.
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
And yet, the response to our book has been not just angry but personal at times. Harper delivered a torrent of abuse at us on social media, calling us “idiots” and “intellectual lightweights who wrote a dumb screed.” He also called us “soft-handed elites” and claimed that our book says that “white rural people are evil scum,” which of course it does not; that was one of many distortions of what we wrote that he sent out to his followers before penning his Atlantic article.
You are just not allowed, ever, to criticize Real Americans — and you know who I’m talking about. There will be hell to pay and not just from those people but from members of the left as well who immediately launch into paroxysms of self-righteous defensiveness on behalf of the poor downtrodden whiners.
The unwillingness to define and confront what’s going on in the nascent fascist movement in this country is downright shameful:
Most importantly, our critics refuse to seriously grapple with rural whites’ place in Trump’s movement as it grows increasingly authoritarian. In rising to the defense of their subjects, the scholars discount or ignore the disturbing beliefs many (though not all) rural whites hold and work hard to justify and validate their resentments. Not unlike how journalists trooped to “the heartland” after the 2016 election to give a respectful hearing to every Trump voter they could find, scholars of rural politics bend over backward to avoid saying anything that might reflect poorly on rural whites—even when it means downplaying their own research.
Rather than explore Trump’s rural white support, they offer facile explanations for it, preferring instead to blame liberals for rural resentments whose roots date back decades. They insist that Democrats must do more to cater to rural whites, while giving Republicans compliments for their political skill (“Republicans are the political party that has figured out how to speak to that rural identity effectively,” writes Jacobs). And they don’t acknowledge one of our core arguments: Republicans are winning rural votes but doing almost nothing to improve rural Americans’ lives.
[…]
What’s really going on here? Our critics claim they’re critiquing our methodology, but their real objection is to our message. We anticipated this defense of rural whites and their virtues, knowing that they are routinely described as more “real” than other citizens and therefore deserving of greater deference. In fact, Jacobs reports in The Rural Voter that 80 percent of rural citizens say they’re more likely to encounter the “real” America in rural spaces; so pervasive is this insult to other Americans that even 66 percent of suburban and urban dwellers say the same thing. To his credit, Jacobs agrees with us that no group of Americans is more “real” than any other. If only the conservative politicians and media figures who work so hard to stoke rural resentment concurred.
Our critics also say we “misrepresent” their work. We do not; we’re guilty only of assembling in one place a composite picture of rural white politics that shows worrying strains of opinion. Our critics want to believe—and worse, want others to believe—that sentiments in the places Trump enjoys his most overwhelming following have nothing to do with his racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and valorization of violence, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. The more charitable view is that our critics failed to pull back the lens to notice that larger picture; the less charitable view is that they’ve seen it but prefer to obscure it from public view.
And guess what? There are plenty of people of color who live in rural American and for some crazy reason that these critics are unable to explain, they don’t have the same attitudes. I wonder why?
Those nonwhite rural Americans are almost invisible in the national media, as well as in the work of many scholars. Because we thought their stories are important, we traveled to rural communities with large nonwhite populations, including in the Albemarle region of North Carolina and Arizona’s “Copper Corridor.” The experience of people in those places—who are mostly ignored and enjoy little of the deference and political power their white counterparts do—only highlights the privileging of the white rural experience.
We would ask rural scholars to confront this question: How is it that rural minorities, who by most measures face even greater challenges in health care access and economic opportunity than their white counterparts, do not express weakened commitments to our democracy, or the anti-urban, xenophobic, conspiracist, and violence-justifying attitudes so many rural whites do? The Rural Voter dedicates just five of the book’s 414 pages to examining rural minorities, and it spends most of that limited space comparing the attitudes of rural minorities with urban minorities, thereby avoiding any deep consideration of how rural whites and nonwhites differ in their views or their experiences.
Those who have risen to defend the honor of rural whites insist that they have good reason to feel resentful; Jacobs even elevates resentment to a kind of virtue (“Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience,” he writes). But if the rural experience justifies resentment, should not rural minorities be equally if not more resentful than rural whites? Why aren’t they threatening their local elected officials, or marinating in conspiracy theories, or supporting demagogues eager to tear down American democracy? Too few scholars of rural politics confront these questions.
They go on to recount some of the more hysterical claims in these critical articles. It might as well be the early 2000s without any reevaluation of that stale old trope, “economic anxiety.”
Since our book came out, we’ve had many conversations with rural Americans—journalists, activists, and ordinary people—who have told us that it accurately reflects what they see in their communities. Christopher Gibbs is a case in point. A Maplewood, Ohio, farmer who raises corn, soybeans, and alfalfa hay and supervises an 85-head cow/calf operation, Gibbs is the board president of Rural Voices USA. A former Shelby County Republican Party chair who, remarkably, is now the county’s Democratic Party chair, Gibbs interviewed us for his podcast. He doesn’t agree with everything we write, but he told us that he “lives this book every day” in his rural county. He concluded our interview by saying our book may not provide an easy foldout “road map” to revive rural America, but “it’s chock full of clues” for those interested in “helping rural folks get what they deserve in policy.”
As we confront a presidential election in which one of the candidates is counting on white rural support to return him to the Oval Office so he can begin dismantling our democratic system, we can’t turn away and say everything in rural politics is fine.
Personally, I think those who rush to the defense of these folks are the ones talking down to them. They’re all adults. They have agency and they know what they’re doing. Coddling those who are eagerly rushing headlong into fascism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
There are many rural whites who do not share these views but they are a minority. Donald Trump massively dominates among this cohort and they are his most ardent followers. We know what that means. I’ve ordered the book and will probably have more to say about it once I read it. This is an important subject and I trust these two people, whose work I’ve followed for years, more than any of those others to get it right. They understand the stakes.
