Review: The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

The third and final book in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy, the Politics of Resentment joins Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in their Own Land as explorations of the Trump voter's sociology. Whereas the latter two look at Kentucky/Ohio and Louisiana, Resentment looks at Wisconsin. I read it with a very particular question: why did the Blue Wall fail?

Two big ideas stand out to me, the first is the main theme that Cramer has: rural consciousness is a valuable, important thing. People who don't live in cities are aware of that fact immensely, and they see it in a multitude of ways. 1. They see cities as being less hardworking, as they do less physical labor. 2. They see cities as being bastions of government employees. 3. They see cities as being overpaid and less deserving. 4. They (tacitly) see cities as less white. 5. They see cities as less "cohesive" or community-centered (neighbors do not know each other).

These five ways of seeing cities (and the five inverse ways of seeing themselves) interlock and feedback on one another. They bind together to create what I would call an "adjacent class"- a class of people who are every bit struggling as the poor in cities and facing the same enemies, but because of Place see themselves as moral opposites.

What you notice when you read Vance and Hochschild (and now Cramer) is that the would-be Trump voters have a split-relationship with "The State". They live in a way that they both desperately need help from the state, but at the same time are condemned and oppressed by it. Vance describes how the child protection services that ought to protect him bred fear and distrust in his family. Hoschschild describes poor chemical plant workers who, on one hand, need the government to step in and protect their environment, but by doing so would destroy some of those jobs that they hope to enjoy. Cramer describes a similar paradox: the rural people of Wisconsin need the Department of Natural Resources to protect the game and fish from overexploitation, but they themselves resist its protection and chafe under things like licensing and fees. At the same time, both the Wisconsinian and Louisianian states allow large corporations to get away scot free.

Who else deals with a state that is at once absent and oppressive? Who else deals with a state that both fails to enforce and uses too much force? The black American. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement with an easily explainable, readily apparent problem. Anybody who is compassionate, sane and statistically literate knows that there is something wrong, something dystopian that needs to be fixed.

But the problems outlined in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy are subtle. They're not microaggressions aggregating over somebody's lifetime, they're nanoaggressions aggregating over an entire town, an entire region's lifetime. Ultimately, what I think they come down to is a failure in governance:

There are well-governed, and unwell-governed, parts of the country. In the US, when I go to the suburbs or the gentrified areas of New York or DC, I am fairly close to well-governed areas. The cops are quick, the firefighters are a few moments away. The worse part of my interactions with the government is usually the DMV. The best parts of my interactions with the government are when I go to the national Disneyland that is our national parks.

The farther you get away from economic centers the less resources are that marshalled for you. When you have a history of racist oppression, black neighborhoods are first to be ignored- but so are regions that have simply always been poor, or, worse, getting poorer. The capacity of the state begins to weaken in those regions, breeding resentment. Those economic centers -the segregated suburbs- can thereby use this resentment. They can elect anti-redistributive leaders who stop the outflow of resources to the poorer regions even more and create private enclaves like those described by Naomi Klein in the Shock Doctrine. These anti-redistributive leaders thereby make the poor complicit in their own destruction.

So, why did the Blue Wall fail? The failure of Democrats within states, and the failure of national Democrats and the federal government to deter the rusting of the Rust Belt seems to be the primary reason. The rusting itself creates a feedback effect where local governments fail to govern, and then states fail to govern, and then those who /promise/ they will not govern, themselves begin to govern and increase the rate of failure. The federal government, state government, and civic society are, throughout this process, more and more of a target of resentment.

And then a city-dweller... a lawyer... an old, frail lady... ignores you completely, exactly as you expected.