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By Grant Avis
I’ve gotten mad the last few weeks. I saw clips from two authors detailing their new book White Rural Rage. I read Paul Krugman in the New York Times expanding on their thesis. I heard Joe Gerth had tweeted that rural Kentuckians were racist for wanting a cancer center in Bullitt County. And it all made me real mad.
White Rural Rage, written by apparent experts Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, is advertised as “a searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens,” meaning rural Americans. The crux of the authors’ argument is that rural Americans don’t believe in democratic values. Rather, they are an authoritarian, violent, and ignorant collection of brutes attempting to destroy democracy - and good, educated, urban liberals need to fight back.
The esteemed economist Paul Krugman agrees. In fact, Krugman has argued for years that rural America is a leech on urban America, sucking farm subsidies, social security, medicare, and other welfare benefits out of the pocketbooks of the industrious metropolitans. I think Dr. Krugman should talk to my grandpa, who will likely tell him that without farming, Dr. Krugman and urban America would be “hungry, naked, and sober.” Papaw’s maxim may be cheesy, but it’s true.
The defenders against so-called “rural rage” have a strange victim complex, espousing, and possibly sincerely believing, that rural areas have an outsized influence in this country. Krugman makes the argument that the nation’s current welfare structure unfairly subsidizes rural areas and agricultural operations, displaying well the rot in modern liberal thought. Schaller and Waldman make the argument that rural areas are too strong in the political process, thus empowering authoritarian figures like Donald Trump.
In terms of the economic argument, Dr. Krugman seems to posses literal understanding of how our nation’s rural lands provide so easily and conveniently for him. The reality is that the lifestyle of modern Americans, particularly those in cities, is founded on destruction. The lights that illuminate our city’s skylines are often powered by the ontologically exploitative mining industry. In Eastern Kentucky, mountains are decapitated, trees uprooted, and men die young to fuel our lifestyles. In Western Kentucky, fields and woods were once rich with wildlife next to livestock. Every farm, and there were many, had a pond, which supported thousands of thriving ecosystems. Now the ponds are filled in, prairies burned, and woods razed. My grandpa went to sleep every night listening to the refrain of “Bob White!” whistling from quail. Now that there is no underbrush for the quail to survive it, I have only ever heard their call described to me, agriculture changed, the land changed, and rural America changed.
When my grandpa lived in the same world as Bobwhite quail, farmers were not specialists or businessmen. Since then, agriculture was stripped of “culture” and replaced with “business.” Rather than conserving and cultivating, standard farming practice is to now eliminate all life but one crop. They grow deserts. Land has been stripped of life. Rural America has been stripped of its people, too. When small farmers could no longer succeed - a policy choice - their kids or they themselves loaded up the truck and left home to find work. Families who had been in one place, even one farm, became removed from the land and placed in subdivided little brick houses in places like the South End of Louisville. When my grandpa made this journey in the mid 1960s, entire neighborhoods in the working-class parts of the city were populated by people from one particular county. Whereas Louisville of the 19th century had Germantown and Irish Hill, Louisville of the 20th had little Grayson and Breckinridge and Hart Counties. They may not have traveled by boat, but they were something of immigrants.
Now their relatives still in the home country are accused of being full of rage. I’m not sure if that is the word I’d use. When my great aunt talks about how Leitchfield used to have a thriving downtown, or when my grandma complains about how the old Grayson Springs country store is run down, or when my grandpa sits on the back porch trying to imitate a quail song to me, I don’t sense rage. America’s rural citizens are lamenting and mourning, not raging.
I wonder if Krugman or Gerth or Schaller or Waldman have ever seen what happens when a farmer sells his place because the kids moved away and, well, there’s nobody to pass down his life’s work to. I would invite them to a day with my great uncle as he maintains every inch of his half-acre subdivided lot, meticulously trimming crepe myrtles and hoeing his garden. There is despair in his restlessness. In much of rural America, there is an endemic hopelessness. Aside from the numerous errors in their research, called out by legitimate researchers in publications like Newsweek and Reason Magazine, the roots of this hopelessness are only so mysterious to the respectable urban experts because they know so little about the history and present state of rural areas.
If they were to study the history of rural areas, or even talk to someone from a rural area (Wendell Berry has extended a written invitation, and I’m sure Papaw or Uncle Fred would too), they would find that the modern economic structure has led to the destruction of the land, leading to the destruction of communities, and leading to the destruction of people. It should not be surprising that they then vote for a similarly hopeless and cynical man in the form of Donald Trump. The urban experts are right that Trump is a dangerous, violent, wannabe authoritarian dictator - the man is saying so himself these days. But the urban experts will find that one cannot win a war against despair, especially when they know so little of their enemy fellow citizens.
Grant Avis is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2026. He is studying political science and history at the University of Louisville.