White rural rage risks American democracy

Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses.

But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating for those on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines whole communities.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, they argue. Indeed, U.S. farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural workforce fell by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. The decline of smalltown manufacturing is a more complex story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metro 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, while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to city folks.

In the crudest sense, smalltown America is supposed to be filled with hardworking people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime working-age men outside metro areas are substantially less likely than their metro counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because jobs just aren’t there.

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is what happens when work disappears.

The result is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigration, wokeness and the deep state.

At this point you’re probably expecting a solution to this ugly situation. Schaller and Waldman do offer suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, I have no good ideas on how to fight it.