MATT TAIBBI: MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage.”
“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”
Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.
White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading, is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America:
The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.
As Taibbi writes, it’s one of the left’s oldest tropes, and it’s reoccurred on a regular basis since the late 19th century, as American “Progressives” search for their own hoarders and wreckers as scapegoats to demonize. Fortunately, today’s Kulaks know how to culture jam: Conservatives on Twitter Send a Message to Leftists by Taking Over #WhiteRuralRage Hashtag.
I got cow kisses on my walk this morning.
I guess that's part of the whole #WhiteRuralRage thing.
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