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Hollowed out Heartland, USA: How capital sacrificed communities and paved the way for authoritarian populism [1]

['Associated Press', 'Commonwealth Of Massachusetts']

Date: 2021-02-01

“The United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban,” political analyst David Graham proclaimed in a 2017 article in The Atlantic (Graham, 2017). Viewing the map of 2016 presidential election results, it is hard to avoid a similar conclusion. Donald Trump carried over 2600 largely rural counties and Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, less than 500 mostly urban ones (Associated Press, 2016).

The “two countries” thesis echoes scholars of uneven development going back decades, from Michael Lipton’s (1977) study of “urban bias” to Cynthia Duncan's Worlds Apart (1999) and — more recently — Katherine Cramer's The Politics of Resentment (2016). The rural-urban divide received more attention after November 2016, but too often “rural” became a synecdoche for “Trump voters,” “working-class” or “white,” misrepresentations that comedian Samantha Bee demolished in hilarious video interviews with small-town minority voters (Bee, 2018). In fact, Trump voters had a higher median income than Clinton voters, reflecting backing among affluent whites without university degrees, many of them business owners in the suburban counties where Trump received nearly half his votes (Balz, 2017; Carnes and Lupu, 2017; Edsall, 2019). These suburban voters, especially women, began to abandon Trump's base in the 2018 midterm elections (Greenberg, 2018; Kohler, 2019). But it nonetheless remains true, as Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017) wryly observed, that in 2016 “Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker” and — it could be added, since he received a majority of white women's votes — from Susie the Waitress to Susie the CEO.

The argument of the paper is simple:

(1) People and communities benefit when they can appropriate the wealth they produce and when their institutions provide frameworks for meaningful lives.

(2) Since at least the 1980s, capital systematically undermined this capacity and these institutions in rural, non-metro and inner city zones in multiple, interlocking ways and shifted the wealth upward in class terms and outward in geographical terms, while simultaneously undermining community social supports. 1 These zones “sacrificed” to capital are spreading from historically impoverished areas of Appalachia, the Deep South, and Native reservations to much of the rest of the rural and small town United States. Some lie within the most globally linked, economically dynamic metropolitan centers, such as New York and Los Angeles. Others are newly created banking and news “deserts” and places where the “retail apocalypse” and deindustrialization have hit hard.

(3) Scholars, journalists and pundits have underestimated the severity, cruelty and interrelatedness of the factors contributing to these shifts and their impacts, especially but not only in rural areas, and the degree to which different negative forces mutually constitute each other. 2

(4) Many Trump voters were affluent suburbanites motivated not directly by economic distress but by racism, loathing for government regulation, and hope for tax cuts. Another important sector, however, consisted of downwardly mobile inhabitants of zones where capital destroyed the institutions that earlier allowed people to appropriate the wealth they produced and where social provisioning and the social safety net — always tenuous and significantly dependent on better-off workers' bargain with private employers — are increasingly in tatters.

(5) The “economic” and “racial resentment” explanations for the rise of Trump, and of authoritarian populism more broadly, cannot be neatly separated. Much of the U.S. population suffers severe economic stress, which in turn generates physical and emotional stress, and this is closely associated with fear and hatred of outgroups and susceptibility to authoritarian appeals.

The focus of this essay is on largely white areas receptive to authoritarian populist appeals, but it is important to remember that there are major sacrifice zones — urban and rural — populated by Native American, African American, Latinx, and immigrant people. Because racism, authoritarian populism and economic distress are often inextricably bound up with each other, urban majority-minority sacrifice zones and the people in them figure in authoritarian populist rhetoric, along with the frequently derided “coastal elites,” as key elements in “rural resentment” of cities and city people.

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[1] Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0743016719305157

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