The Protection Racket Media has spent the last few weeks running with a new narrative of panic pornography: “white rural rage.” Along with “Christian nationalism,” these media explanations of the current dysfunction in American politics start and end with Donald Trump and his alleged “threat to democracy.”
The general gist of these narratives is that Trump spent 2015-16 blowing dog whistles to bigots and transformed them through misinformation into angry conservo-populists. Trump and his cult have essentially hoodwinked voters, especially in the rural South and Midwest, by feeding them on xenophobia and anger over true progress in America. Trump and his “white rural rage-ists” will undermine the institutions of the republic — not to mention the institutions of the cultural elite.
To put it mildly, this overlooks a very long stretch of political, cultural, and economic history. The collapse of confidence in these American systems began long before Trump — decades before, in fact, and had nothing to do with race. The signs of this betrayal began in the rural and industrial Midwest not long after the launch of the Great Society and the Vietnam War warped American fiscal policy, destroyed agricultural markets, forced farmers and small bankers into retreat, and left massive destruction in our one-dominant manufacturing base.
Salena Zito has written about these issues for years, but she’s not alone. Over the weekend, I had a chance to read Andrew Malcolm’s gripping true-crime book, 1986’s Final Harvest: An American Tragedy, about a 1983 double-murder of a banker and his employee in Ruthton, Minnesota. Long before Andrew became my podcast partner and good friend 16 years ago, he worked as bureau chief for The New York Times in Chicago, where he first wrote about the murders of Rudy Blythe and Deems “Toby” Thulin just over 40 years ago.
After sandbagging Andrew for fun (and it worked!), we discussed the book in depth. Andrew relates some wonderful stories about his experience on the story and in writing the book, but we discuss the profound disturbances in rural and industrial America caused by fiscal manipulations, industrial policies, and especially the massive disruptions of runaway inflation on farmers and farmers’ bankers. The murders of Blythe and Thulin reveal much more about how American farmers and the industrial base got betrayed by Washington policymakers — and how it bred resentment and distrust for generations afterward.
The issue driving populists on both sides of the political aisle isn’t “rage,” either inchoate or focused. It’s the betrayal of the ethos that governed rural America: Take care of the land, and the land will take care of you. Its origins go back to the massive redistribution of capital to the urban centers in the 1960s, the deficit spending that forced the US off the gold standard and triggered ruinous inflation rates for a decade, and the abandonment of American manufacturing to the enticements of deregulation and free trade — which may have produced benefits for the US overall, but laid waste to the rural and industrial heartlands.
The experts thought they knew better. The elites wanted “progress.” Is it any wonder that their failures and the damage they caused have alienated the people who paid the price of those failures — especially when the experts and elites kept failing, right through the pandemic and the changes they imposed to deal with it, which turned out to be largely unnecessary?
The podcast is below, but before we get to it, just recall why the Protection Racket Media needs to gin up slanderous narratives like “Christian nationalism” and “white rural rage.” The US establishment media now entirely come from the elite institutions that created this massive destruction and betrayal and want to desperately distract from it now by pretending the anger just materialized out of Trump’s wizardry. They want to rewrite history as well as the present and sneer at tens of millions of Americans who have waited decades for someone to address their decline and despair.
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