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Overview
What is fueling rural America's outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America's small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order—the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities—underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans' anger, their culture must be explored more fully.
We hear from farmers who want government out of their business, factory workers who believe in working hard to support their families, town managers who find the federal government unresponsive to their communities' needs, and clergy who say the moral climate is being undermined. Wuthnow argues that rural America's fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washington's seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.
Moving beyond simplistic depictions of the residents of America's heartland, The Left Behind offers a clearer picture of how this important population will influence the nation's political future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691177663 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/27/2018 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Sales rank: | 688,326 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Communities
Among the many effects of "big data" and digitization, one of the most far-reaching is shaping the content of information itself. This is true of the most readily available information we have about rural America. National newspapers and the Internet offer a flood of facts, much of it in the form of statistics, graphs, charts, and interactive maps. This information paints a distinct picture of rural America. It is that part of the country composed of "rural areas," "rural counties," the "rural population," and "rural voters." This information is useful but it misses the most elemental fact about rural America — the fact that causes journalists, political analysts, and social scientists to call for a different kind of information that gets closer to the people who live in rural America. The missing piece is the fact that rural America is composed of small communities. Nearly everyone in rural America lives in or near a community. These are the communities they call "home."
Social scientists conceptualize homes as places in which we routinely interact with people we know and care about, places in which we conduct the most routine activities of our everyday lives and in which we feel or aspire to feel safe. Homes are places of familiarity, memory, ambience, and habit and for this reason are the spaces we can take for granted much of the time and in which we can be comfortable. This is what we mean when we say we feel "at home."
Homes can also be abusive. The rules governing them may be constraining, exercising "tyrannous control over mind and body," anthropologist Mary Douglas writes. Youth frequently rebel against the rules and want nothing more than to escape. But homes are the places in which we feel an obligation to uphold the rules, if the rules are working. Homes are places that require upkeep and repair. They are places in which we expect to experience love — or, at minimum, understanding and support.
Rural communities are homes in these same respects, only more so. For most inhabitants of rural communities, the town or borough in which (or near which) they live is geographically identifiable. The town limits are clearly marked. The town not only has a name but also in most instances has a school that goes by that name, and the school has athletic teams that play on behalf of the town and the teams have a mascot. The town is sufficiently self-contained that residents do a good share of their shopping there, go to the local post office, attend worship services locally, and know their way around. The population except in the least populated communities is too large for people literally to "know everyone," but it is not uncommon for them to say that it somehow feels like they do.
That is not all. Rural communities are places of moral obligation. Residents can live there and be so independent that they rarely speak to anyone else. But if they do live that way, they are treated as outsiders. To be a community member in good standing requires speaking to a neighbor, keeping one's residence maintained, and attending some of the town's community functions. These are not the ideals of a utopian order that are seldom put into practice. They are the implicit constraints of ordinary life to which people adhere enough of the time to function as community norms.
The obligations to the community include obligations to specific people within the community. The first order of responsibility is to oneself and one's family, which in turn is an obligation to the community by taking care of one's own and not being a burden on one's neighbors. The second order of responsibility is to the extensions of one's family for which the community does provide support: the schools one's children attend, the aging relative who needs medical care or assisted living, the farm that has been in the family for three generations. And tertiary responsibilities, which are more selective, typically include community organizations and community-wide projects, such as helping with the annual homecoming parade or staffing the volunteer fire company.
The point of emphasizing these obligations is not to suggest that they are always fulfilled. Often they are not. Communities struggle, just as families do. People are too busy to pitch in. Neighbors avoid one another. Families feud. The point is rather that so much of everyday life occurs within the bounded, socially and culturally identified community that the community itself takes on the characteristics of home. Just as people identify the house in which they live as home, residents of small rural towns tend to identify the community as home. They live in such and such a place, are "from" there, and have a mental image of the place, an image sufficiently clear that they can navigate it by knowing that you turn right at the Methodist church to get to the school or turn left at the stoplight to go to the co-op. They are aware of the community's shortcomings, just as they are of their family's dysfunctions. And yet the community feels like home because it is familiar.
These are the reasons it requires understanding rural communities as collectivities, as places that people call home, to grasp why they react as emotionally as they often do when they perceive their communities to be threatened. The places they live are "moral communities" that carry meanings about the quality of life that they feel is right. The moral community influences their attitudes and how they think about the self-interests of their families. But the influence of the moral community runs deeper than that. It represents their way of life.
To better grasp the various components that constitute this sense of moral community, we need to consider what people who live in small, out-of-the-way places say about their communities. Doing so will demonstrate the extent to which people identify with their communities and how the language in which they describe these places resembles how many of us might describe our homes and our neighborhoods. In addition, the descriptions illustrate how it matters that residents have roots in the community, perceive living in small places to have genuine advantages over living in cities, and associate their communities with obligations to themselves and their neighbors.
THREE EXAMPLES
The first example is a community I'll call "Fairfield," a Midwestern town of 14,000 residents, 90 percent of whom are white Anglo and the remainder of whom are Latino or mixed race. Another 13,000 people live in a half dozen smaller towns in the county and on surrounding farms. Fairfield is located on the vast plains that stretch from Texas up through Kansas and Nebraska, the Dakotas, and into western Canada.
The most noticeable feature of Fairfield is how utterly flat the terrain is. The town's grain elevators can be seen for miles in any direction. Nearly all the land surrounding it except for a ridge of low-lying hills to the north has been in crops since the 1870s, when the first white settlers plowed the prairie. Legend has it that the early settlers introduced some of the best winter wheat to the area. Today, the fields are just as likely to be growing soybeans as wheat.
The residents of Fairfield work for small businesses, in offices, or at one of several low-tech manufacturing plants, and farmers in the area grow wheat and soybeans and raise cattle. Like many small towns, the hospital and the schools are among the largest employers, but a third of Fairfield's labor force is in manufacturing, which means there are a substantial number of families who have little in common with the agricultural population, except that both worry as much about international trade as they do about domestic policies.
Compared with many small rural communities, Fairfield is a hive of activity. A century ago, the town was barely large enough to be counted as an incorporated place, but decade by decade, the population grew. An early church-related college attracted students who stayed and worked in professional jobs. Later, a junior college added to the town's white-collar ranks. Being the site of the county courthouse and also located at the intersection of two highways helped. Eighteen-wheelers now rumble through town carrying cattle and grain. On one side of town a manufacturing plant processes crude oil and natural gas, and on the other side the regional headquarters of a national home and commercial products company provides employment. An interstate highway passes a few miles beyond another side of town. Filling stations, restaurants, used-car dealers, and a Walmart have been stretching the town in that direction for the past two decades.
Fairfield is large enough and sufficiently diverse occupationally that people mostly associate with their immediate neighbors, kin, coworkers, and people they know at churches and clubs. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable community-wide esprit de corps. Most Friday evenings from late August to late November the place to be is at Fairfield's Cougar Stadium, rooting for the championship Cougar football team. The local newspaper, which now circulates online at no charge, squeezes a few stories about state and national politics into its selections but mostly highlights the town's latest athletic achievements.
A visitor passing through Fairfield might decide to keep on going in hopes that one of the cities two hours away would have more appealing amenities. The locals, though, feel the community's size is just about right — and the ones who think it's too large live in one of the smaller villages that share the same consolidated high school. The locals we talked to said there was plenty to do, and, whatever it was, they liked the fact that it took only a few minutes to get there and were sure to have been there many times before. For one woman, it was the church she'd grown up in; for another, the Family Community Club her late mother had founded; and for yet another, attending musical performances at the high school.
Karen Meeks and her husband John live on a farm a few miles west of Fairfield. She teaches first grade in a rural school district 15 miles away, does most of the housework, helps on the farm, and tends to her mother at an assisted living facility in town. Their two-story farmhouse, surrounded by trees and farm buildings, and most of the thousand-plus acres they farm were in Karen's family for three generations. John's ancestors farmed in another community as far back as anyone can remember. The Meeks go to church in Fairfield and do all their farm business there.
Ms. Meeks is the kind of rural American who puts the practicalities of living there in perspective. Living outside of town and being as busy as she is, she admits having little time to chat with the neighbors. In fact, when someone comes to visit, she often wishes they wouldn't because there's too much work to be done. The farmers she knows help each other when help is needed, but often they are too independent to ask for help. The rich and the poor in town are increasingly separated, she says. The townspeople don't want to admit that poor people are there. The population could grow, she believes, but nobody seems to want things to change. "A lot of people don't like it when people move in."
She nevertheless feels a strong affinity for Fairfield. It is her community, her home. She has lived here all her life, knows its history, and is proud that her ancestors were part of that history. She knows the fields like the back of her hand, knows where to watch when you're doing tractor work so you won't get stuck in the mud. She appreciates the natural beauty of the surrounding land, the green fields, the ripening wheat, the wildflowers in the pasture across the road. "I get a bit wispy about it," she says. And then to shift the mood, chuckles: "It keeps me grounded."
A long-term resident like Ms. Meeks sometimes envies people — her sister, for example — who have moved on and seen more of the world. The meaning Fairfield holds for her, though, is inextricably woven into her sense of who she is and why she has worth. She feels a kind of ownership about Fairfield because she knows that her family history and the town's history are joined. That history would still be hers if she lived somewhere else, but in Fairfield it is a story she can tell — has indeed told again and again — and has relatives and neighbors who have similar stories, or if they don't, still find it interesting.
The Meeks's ties to Fairfield clearly include the fact that the land they farm belongs to Karen's mother. They have considered getting out of farming several times. The work is hard and the returns are small. But her mother always put family first and Ms. Meeks feels she should do the same. She wants to be close when her mother needs her.
Others we talked to in Fairfield expressed similar sentiments about their ties to the community. The ones who lived in town spent more time with their neighbors. The ones on farms and in the surrounding villages considered Fairfield the hub of the wider community. Most of them, like the Meeks, said it took two salaries to pay the bills. That meant someone — often the wife — commuted 20 or 30 miles to a larger town for work. They had less time to visit with their neighbors and, for that matter, had more in common with the people they worked with anyway. The fabric of the community felt like home, but its edges were fraying.
A second example takes us to a town in New England I'll call Newborough. It's a fourth the size of Fairfield, which gives its residents a more intimate sense of the community. The area around Newborough was settled in the early 1700s and the town was incorporated a century later. Following an early spurt of growth, the population held steady for more than a century but has been declining in recent years after a manufacturing plant that employed four hundred people relocated. The county, of which Newborough is the county seat, has a population of approximately 30,000. That number and the population of the county's smaller villages have also been declining.
Newborough's natural beauty is its most distinctive asset. Although it suffers — as most small towns do — from too many electrical poles and overhead wires and from deteriorating shops only the locals can appreciate, the surrounding hills are balm to the spirit. The community's first settlers found it an ideal location for farming. The valley's bottomland was deep and rich, which made the soil good for wheat and corn. The hills protected the valley from the harsh New England winters. Over the years the valley's farms turned increasingly toward dairy, punctuating the landscape with tall silos and large white barns and supplying coastal cities with milk and cheese. The valley's rivers, unfortunately, also put the area at risk of floods. A few years ago, the entire valley was flooded for several weeks. Many of the farmers went out of business.
Kenneth Somers is one of the farmers who survived. Now in his fifties, he has been farming since he was a boy. He dresses the part, wearing blue jeans, plaid shirt, and a ball cap tipped back on his forehead. He and his family specialize in summer fruits and vegetables, greenhouse flowers, and baked goods. Visitors flock to the farm on weekends to sample the fresh-picked produce and fill their lungs with country air.
Mr. Somers thinks most of the people who live in the community "feel that they live in a very special place." The scenery is beautiful, he says, the history is rich with local lore, and the farms are impressive. The side roads feature two-story multi-generation farmhouses and an occasional covered bridge. The antique lampposts in town are decorated with flower baskets in the summer. The shops and gorgeous colonial houses along Main Street have been renovated to house lawyers' offices, branch banks, insurance brokers, and antique stores, all with an eye toward maintaining their New England charm. To Mr. Somers, "It very much feels like home."
It feels like home, he says, because you can walk up Main Street and have eye contact with virtually everybody you meet. You know them and that's special. Maybe it takes longer to walk to the post office because you are expected to stop and have four or five conversations along the way. But ideally you're not in too much of a hurry that you can enjoy those conversations. You can live at a slower pace. "Would I change anything? No. I like the fact that we're some distance from cities. I guess if I could change one thing, I'd want to lessen the impact the outside world has on day-to-day life here."
"I guess I need to explain what I mean by that," he adds. What he meant was that, yes, things in the valley were inevitably connected to the outside world. Travel and transportation and communication all provided the connections. And those influenced life in the valley. Still, it was what did not change that he appreciated most. "I look out the window at my farm right now, and apart from newer cars and trucks on the road, I could be looking out at 1910 or 1940 or 1970 or 1980." Something new might be growing in the field and somebody's house might look different, he acknowledged. But the mountain is still there. And those fields where I worked as a kid, they're still here too."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Left Behind"
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Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Communities 13
2 Present Dangers 44
3 Makeshift Solutions 80
4 Washington’s Broken 95
5 Moral Decline 116
6 Bigotry 141
Epilogue 159
Notes 165
Further Reading 171
Index 183
What People are Saying About This
"Wuthnow cogently confronts the question: Why are so many of the people living in small-town America filled with rage? Instead of condemning, he listens. In this highly accessible, instructive book, Wuthnow reminds readers why the so-called American Dream is closely connected to the politics of place."—Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America"Analytical and humane, this account of the dense, vexed moral communities of rural America is based on profound fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade by one of our most accomplished sociologists. Conveying the anxieties and resentments that run deep in stressed but resilient small-town America, Wuthnow's appraisal of ethical sensibilities, patterns and limits of membership, and political orientations is learned, engrossing, and timely."—Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time"Distilling an impressive body of research, this book describes the core characteristics of rural moral communities and brings important conceptualizations of rural life to audiences that may not have previously encountered them. Given the contemporary political environment, The Left Behind is a timely contribution."—Colin Jerolmack, New York University"Wuthnow draws on his trove of primary source interviews and observations in small-town America, and a wealth of other materials, to effectively describe how the social fabric and moral tenors of small towns are changing. This thoughtful and effective book serves as a corrective to the caricatures of small-town America and is an important resource for our shared future."—Courtney Bender, Columbia University