ED MORRISSEY: Bitter Harvest: The True Roots of Rural ‘Rage.’
The Protection Racket Media has spent the last few weeks running with a new narrative of panic pornography: “white rural rage.” Along with “Christian nationalism,” these media explanations of the current dysfunction in American politics start and end with Donald Trump and his alleged “threat to democracy.”
The general gist of these narratives is that Trump spent 2015-16 blowing dog whistles to bigots and transformed them through misinformation into angry conservo-populists. Trump and his cult have essentially hoodwinked voters, especially in the rural South and Midwest, by feeding them on xenophobia and anger over true progress in America. Trump and his “white rural rage-ists” will undermine the institutions of the republic — not to mention the institutions of the cultural elite.
To put it mildly, this overlooks a very long stretch of political, cultural, and economic history. The collapse of confidence in these American systems began long before Trump — decades before, in fact, and had nothing to do with race. The signs of this betrayal began in the rural and industrial Midwest not long after the launch of the Great Society and the Vietnam War warped American fiscal policy, destroyed agricultural markets, forced farmers and small bankers into retreat, and left massive destruction in our once-dominant manufacturing base.
Salena Zito has written about these issues for years, but she’s not alone. . . .
The issue driving populists on both sides of the political aisle isn’t “rage,” either inchoate or focused. It’s the betrayal of the ethos that governed rural America: Take care of the land, and the land will take care of you. Its origins go back to the massive redistribution of capital to the urban centers in the 1960s, the deficit spending that forced the US off the gold standard and triggered ruinous inflation rates for a decade, and the abandonment of American manufacturing to the enticements of deregulation and free trade — which may have produced benefits for the US overall, but laid waste to the rural and industrial heartlands.
The experts thought they knew better. The elites wanted “progress.” Is it any wonder that their failures and the damage they caused have alienated the people who paid the price of those failures — especially when the experts and elites kept failing, right through the pandemic and the changes they imposed to deal with it, which turned out to be largely unnecessary?
And prospered, and smugly congratulated themselves, right through those failures. Plus:
Just recall why the Protection Racket Media needs to gin up slanderous narratives like “Christian nationalism” and “white rural rage.” The US establishment media now entirely come from the elite institutions that created this massive destruction and betrayal and want to desperately distract from it now by pretending the anger just materialized out of Trump’s wizardry. They want to rewrite history as well as the present and sneer at tens of millions of Americans who have waited decades for someone to address their decline and despair.
Flashback: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.