What Isn't the Matter with Kansas

I will venture that the most offensive and insulting book title in recent years was Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Frank argued that rural voters, especially those in Kansas, did not know what was good for them. The Democratic Party was defending their interests and they were voting for Republicans.

Clearly, they had a problem. They had a mental health problem. Frank wanted to help them out.

Naturally, once the book garnered a lot of attention, other journalists chimed in. Last February journalist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller wrote a book called White Rural Rage.

Writing in the New York Times Emma Goldberg-- one of the better young Times writers-- explained it thusly:

 Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.

Published in February, “White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.

As you can see, the authors have taken their leave from their rational faculties. As for who commits political violence or who condones political violence, people who dwell in rural areas are certainly not on the list.

We can see that these books belong to a genre of blame shifting, indicting Americans in the heartland for crimes and chaos perpetrated by Americans on the coasts. 

But then, the insults leveled against rural Americans provoked a series of counterarguments. Nicholas Jacobs and Dan Shea offered the most intriguing counter-argument, one that does not rely on concepts like resentment.

Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.

Rural Americans define themselves as members of a community. Urban and coastal Americans see themselves as radical individuals, people whose well-being involves overcoming community standards and mores.

The difference is clear; it feels accurate. One might also say that urban America is more multicultural. Different cultures, like different cults to different pagan deities, vie for supremacy. In rural America there is a single encompassing culture. 

Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.

That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often, which Mr. Jacobs has noticed even in his own rural community, Vassalboro, Maine, population 4,520.

“If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”

Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?”

Some years ago Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam addressed these issues. He wrote an important paper, entitled, “E Pluribus Unum.”

The summary explains why in multicultural communities people lose social capital and tend to hunker down, avoiding each other:

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

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