Opinion: Scholars have been asking the wrong question about what's 'wrong' with rural voters

What's wrong with American rural voters? Maybe the question is the problem, reports Emma Goldberg for The New York Times.

Kristin Lunz Trujillo

Kristin Lunz Trujillo grew up on her family's farm in rural Minnesota, and although her parents did go to college, they encouraged her to attend. During Trujillo's undergraduate years, she experienced new and somewhat confusing culture shocks. Goldberg explains, "She was dismayed when she checked out the farm club and learned that its members wanted to brew kombucha, not milk cows." During an art class, when the teacher "asked students which famous paintings they’d seen in person, Trujillo stayed quiet. She had never been to an art museum."

As Trujillo headed into graduate school, her earlier "sense of cultural alienation molded her research," Goldberg reports. As a political scientist, she has sought to understand what rural identity is and how it defines political choices. Recently, Trujillo was reading a "best-selling book that cited her research to explore those questions. But this recognition didn’t bring the thrill she might have expected."

Penguin RH photo

Trujillo was reading White Rural Rage by journalist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller. The book "is an unsparing assessment of small-town America," Goldberg explains. "Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy." Trujillo told Goldberg her thoughts on Waldman and Schaller's work, "It seemed to be more of a hit piece on rural America."

In her opinion for Newsweek, Trujillo said the book was "'a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing people unlike them,'" Goldberg reports. "This latest effort [by Waldman and Schaller] provoked a response that was swift and scathing and revealed something new: the existence of a tight-knit group of scholars who are clamoring for more empathetic political analyses of rural Americans."

Even though some academics were raised in rural America, as scholars, their identity and questions can drift away from the experience. Nick Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College and co-author of The Rural Voter, told Goldberg, "We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins.' Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”

Overall, rural Americans "see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper, Jacobs said. . . . . The resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere," Goldberg writes. "Jacobs differentiated that resentment from the idea of 'rural rage.' . . . And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide."