Tag Archives: Rural America

Suicide By MAGA

Most of us have read about “suicide by cop”–a (hopefully rare) situation where someone desiring death purposely provokes a standoff with police. I don’t think MAGA cult members are that intentional, but I do think the result will be the same. The pandemic was a precursor: data shows that the MAGA science-deniers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID died in far greater numbers than more sane Americans.

Who coined that phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”?

The Trump administration has already taken a meat-ax to medical research, derailing promising research into cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s and other deadly diseases. Those cuts will hurt all of us–Red and Blue alike. But as Paul Krugman recently pointed out, the administration’s radical changes in social spending, immigration policy and tariffs won’t simply hurt tens of millions of Americans — they will land disproportionately on Red, rural Americans.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

I’ve previously posted about Trump’s horrendous “Big Beautiful Bill” that will rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy. The bill contains savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that will hurt all poor folks; but will disproportionately devastate Trump-supporting rural areas.

Krugman notes that Medicaid is a far more important program than most Americans realize.

Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

Ditto the impact of the drastic cuts to food stamps.

Many people–even those who are opposed to the “Big Beautiful Bill”– fail to recognize its very foreseeable impact on rural hospitals.  Hospitals in areas with low population density and a high percentage of patients who cannot pay for care struggle to stay open even now. Without Medicaid reimbursements at current levels, most will close. 

Most of us also fail to understand the role that Medicaid and Medicare spending play in supporting what Krugman calls “rural and left-behind local economies.”

For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

We are already seeing the impact of Trump’s immigration vendetta on the nation’s farmers.  Our agriculture relies heavily on hired workers, and some two thirds of those workers are immigrants–most of whom are undocumented. Farmers are already seeing the results of the threat: even workers who are legal residents or native-born citizens feel unsafe from the ICE goons who very clearly think all Brown people are illegal immigrants–so we see growing reports of workers decamping out of fear of arrest and deportation.

And then there’s the trade war.

In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports…

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Krugman is kinder than I am. I have given up any illusion that Trump voters are merely naive or uninformed. I’m pretty sure that MAGA voters are so wedded to their racism and grievance that they will support their own suicide if that’s what it takes to “own the libs.” 

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Investigating Rural Rage

Over the past several years, it has become impossible to ignore America’s urban/rural divide. The causes of that divide are subject to debate, and the focus of a good deal of research. Back in 2018, Robert Wuthnow–a noted scholar– published a book based upon eight years of interviews with rural folks across the country. It was titled The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, and Wuthnow was interviewed about his findings by Sean Illing of Vox.

it made for fascinating, albeit depressing, reading.

The interviews were conducted between 2006 and 2014, and included people in every state in the country. The research team limited its focus to small towns with fewer than 25,000 people and excluded those close to suburbs or cities in recognition of data showing that suburban and exurban cultures differ from those of more isolated small towns.

Approximately 90 percent of small-town America is White, a demographic factor that explains a great deal (although Wuthnow notes that diversity is growing even in these precincts, as Latinos increasingly settle in them).

Wuthnow argues that the anger being expressed in rural America is less about economic concerns and more about the “perception that Washington is threatening the way of life in small towns.”

And just how, Illing asks him, is Washington accomplishing that?

I’m not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that’s why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There’s a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame “others.

They believe that Washington really does have power over their lives. They recognize that the federal government controls vast resources, and they feel threatened if they perceive Washington’s interest being directed more toward urban areas than rural areas, or toward immigrants more than non-immigrants, or toward minority populations instead of the traditional white Anglo population.

These attitudes have hardened as small-town America has continued to empty out. These smaller communities have lost population steadily over the last few decades, and Wuthnow’s interviews and the book’s title reflected that reality. As he points out,

It’s not as though these people are desperate to leave but can’t. They value their local community. They understand its problems, but they like knowing their neighbors and they like the slow pace of life and they like living in a community that feels small and closed. Maybe they’re making the best of a bad situation, but they choose to stay.

They recognize themselves as being left behind because, in fact, they are the ones in their family and in their social networks who did stay where they were. Most of the people I spoke to grew up in the small town they currently live in, or some other small town nearby. Often their children have already left, either to college or in search of a better job somewhere else.

In that sense, they believe, quite correctly, that they’re the ones who stayed in these small towns while young people — and really the country as a whole — moved on.

That feeling of being left behind generates resentment–and that resentment is directed toward politicians they don’t like and especially toward people who don’t look or pray the way they do.

Wuthnow also found significant fear of change– expressed as a fear that traditional moral rules were “being wiped out by a government and a culture that doesn’t understand the people who still believe in these things.”

I think the concerns about moral decline often miss the mark. I think a lot of white Americans in these small towns are simply reacting against a country that is becoming more diverse — racially, religiously, and culturally. They just don’t how to deal with it. And that’s why you’re seeing this spike in white nationalism.

Wuthnow cautions against painting rural America with too broad a brush, and of course he’s right. Not all small towns are filled with seething reactionaries, just as not all urban neighborhoods are enclaves of brotherly love. Still, the data about opioid addiction and suicide rates should give pause to the notion that every small town is Mayberry or Green Acres or even Schitt’s Creek.

I missed Wuthnow’s book when it came out. I need to find it, because in the three years since its publication, the anger he studied has gotten more delusional and considerably more dangerous. It’s as if the people Wuthnow interviewed were fireplace tinder, and Trump and his sycophants were the arsonists who lit the match…

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