Nobody actually cares about rural people
Ramp Hollow, White Rural Rage, and the scapegoating of rural people
I’m tired this morning, but I’m tired every morning. I think I’ve started over 50% of these round-ups with “I’m tired.”
This week my focus has been rural. I’ve been having a bit of a weird shift of identity in recent months that all tangentially got kicked off by reading Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll. This is a book that may enter the canon of “books that made Josiah crazy.” Other entries would include Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher, and, more recently, Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. These are books that shifted my thinking on things, opened me up to tons of rabbit hole, and are books I reference so frequently that it becomes irritating to those around me. (Ask my girlfriend how many times I’ve brought up any of these books and she’ll give you a dead, exhausted stare. I think I’m an exhausting person to live with.)
Here’s a few things Ramp Hollow has impacted with my thinking. First, I’ve become really interested in agriculture over the past few months. This is something that I never thought I would be interested in, which ties in with the shift of identity here. My upbringing was sort of a rural-urban hybrid. This is pretty common and leads to some of the weird parts of sociological research on rural people. As Tyler Austin Harper explained it in a recent article for The Atlantic,
Scholars in rural studies make a distinction between subjective rural identity and objective rural residence—in other words, seeing yourself as rural versus living in a place that is geographically rural according to metrics like RUCA. The thing is, rural identity and rural residence are very, very different.
More on this article later. When you’re in a hybrid area that doesn’t quite classify as rural proper, it ends up being a matter of personal identification. There’s a version of me that could have easily become more rural. There were rural things in my upbringing. But, for a variety of reasons, I’ve always considered myself a “city slicker” at heart.
This was in part because I wanted to be a writer or a musician for most of my life. I liked academia and I have always liked cities. When my family visited Chicago on a vacation when I was 14, I remember thinking that navigating the large city felt very natural. Did it actually? Or did I just want it to because I liked a series of signifiers I associated with big cities? Hell, I was a stupid 14-year-old—I could have just thought I was a city guy because I liked How I Met Your Mother and they seem to enjoy living in a city. Either way, I’ve always had this “city boy trapped in a small town” attitude that I’ve come to repudiate in myself in the past few years.
That being said, I’d still love to live in Chicago. When I got a haircut yesterday, I mentioned that I would be going to Chicago for a buddy’s wedding (hence the need to clean up with a haircut). The hairdresser made a joke like, “Don’t get shot!” I always forget that’s the impression people have of the city because my experiences there have been nothing like that, even in the rougher parts of town. Those kinds of comments give me a sour taste in my mouth.
But increasingly I get the same sour taste in my mouth about comments people make about rural settings as well. I had another impactful vacation as a teenager where my family visited the Appalachians. While I didn’t want to live there and didn’t get some stupid sense of identity out of it like the Chicago trip, it did lead to me growing increasingly frustrated during 2016 when it became fashionable to frame Trump as the fault of poor white southerners (and not, as is statistically the case, middle class or upper class suburban whites).
I had three childhood homes. The first was a house a stone’s throw away from downtown Des Moines—about as urban as you can really get in Des Moines. There was a busy street in front of the house and I wasn’t allowed to go into the front yard unsupervised for this reason. I was about seven when we moved away from that house. The second was a farmer’s house that my family rented. The farmer used the land as his workplace but moved away from the farm, renting out the house. So I lived on a huge corn farm for a bit, and spent a lot of my childhood exploring ponds and forests nearby. The house was about fifteen minutes away from a suburb in Des Moines and a few small towns. We moved away from there when I was about twelve or so. My third childhood home, which my parents still live in, is in a small town about a half hour north of Des Moines. It’s a growing town with suburban developments springing up slowly around it. My family was part of that. My parents bought some land and built a house, right before the housing market crashed. I spent my time riding bikes around town and up gravel roads.
This combination isn’t quite rural or urban, proper. It’s a hybrid. And so your identity relies a bit on which aspects you want to emphasize. I never really fit in with the small town and so I always longed to live close to downtown Des Moines or to move to a large city. My brother became enamored with wildlife and went on to study aquarium sciences. There are a variety of responses to this same hybrid upbringing.
Returning to my newfound interest in agriculture—this has been an unexpected shift for me because of all that background. I had a lot of contempt for the cornfields around me for a long time. Now I’m incredibly interested in them. At the bachelor party I wrote about last week, one of the fellow groomsmen worked in ag business. Most of my life, my eyes would glaze over at the mention of this subject. But instead, I got really excited to ask about it all.
I’m also especially interested in how agriculture intersects with politics. Food production is, after all, the most important aspect of any human social arrangement. It’s the oldest form of labor. Nevertheless, it’s often treated as an afterthought in most people’s political thinking. Leftists often like to talk about food, but they often like to talk about access to food and the resources needed to afford food. This is an incredibly important aspect to it, but the actual production of food plays an important part in all of that.
This collides with another thing: my complicated feelings toward the Midwest as a region. For NaNoWriMo in 2021, I wrote a novel that is now sitting as a rough draft on my computer. I need to finish it. One of the primary themes of the book is the history of the Midwest. I was working through a lot of these emotions at the time. I think there will be some more coherent essays from me in the coming months addressing some of this (my round-ups are usually unedited and pretty stream-of-consciousness, sorry about that).
This all ties into some interests that have laid dormant the last few years and I’m excited to re-explore. Environmental history, political and historical ecology, and geography are all subjects I’ve been vaguely interested in, but haven’t had enough interest to really dive into. That’s changed now. I’m falling down this rabbit hole.
So on that note and with that incoherent rambling, welcome to the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’m watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
I’m going to skip the “new from me” section this week since I didn’t release anything this week. However, I did release three podcast episodes last week, so go check those out. One on the Fruitless free feed. Two episodes (this one, and this one) on the Patreon feed. I’m also going to skip the Film section, because I didn’t watch any movies this week.
Reading
I finally finished Ramp Hollow. This thing is a masterpiece to me. Stoll is an incredibly good writer and he has an incredibly compelling outlook. The general gist is that the book is a political and class-oriented analysis of Appalachian history, arguing that “countryfolk” and “mountain people” are an example of the American peasantry—a concept we often avoid despite it being really helpful in understanding much of the agrarian history of the country. He draws direct parallels between Appalachia and the process of enclosure and the destruction of the commons in 16th century England.
My notes on the book are difficult to parse through because I had a habit of just copying and pasting whole chunks out of the ePub I had. Since I read the book for an upcoming episode of the Fruitless Bookclub, I’ve been spending the last few days trying to make my notes coherent enough that they’ll be useful in the episode. 25 pages of block quotes is not easy to build a conversation around.
But I couldn’t help myself! He has such good quotes. For instance:
Privileging the needs of peasants, campesinos, and smallholders over those of capitalists means acting averse to some of our closely held assumptions. It means accepting the limitations of agrarians without viewing money spent on their betterment as a financial investment. The brutality of enclosure will only cease when we cease to regard people and landscapes as instruments of wealth. Freedom, in order to have any meaning, must include the freedom to live in a village and farm as a household, with all its uncertainty. The question we need to ask of every migration from country to city is whether it originated from a government scheme or corporate gambit that so degraded a people’s autonomy as to give them no choice. We need to know history in order to make policy. Otherwise, we might allow an old story to think for us, a story told for centuries that has never told the truth.
Agrarians, country folk, subsistence farmers—whatever term you want to use to refer to them, have a really weird place in class analysis. Marx didn’t do a very good job addressing them, and most liberal or conservative thinkers had an even more negative view of them. As Stoll writes, “Like hunters and herders, they belong to a stage before modernity, but unlike the others their work remains essential to modernity.”
The contradictory attitude toward rural people is a mainstay of modernity. They are both the backwards people that modernity is there to fix, but also you can’t get rid of the need for food. It’s always there. There will always be rural people as long as humans need to eat, barring some miraculous discovery of large scale lab grown food production (I’m skeptical of this ever becoming the case). No matter how advanced and civilized you want to imagine your civilization, you will always need people covered in soil growing your crops and herding your meat.
Of course, the interests of these people are very often ignored. They often don’t have political representation—at least, not as much representation as rich white urbanites. As Stoll writes in one of his more biting comments,
Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia made his irrelevance irrefutable when he whimpered to National Public Radio a month after the [2014 Freedom Industries chemical] spill, “Industries win, people lose. It’s an old formula.”If a U.S. senator admits his helplessness to discipline or regulate the coal industry, then the people have no representation.
Rural whites, however, are the punching bag for liberal whites. We saw this in full swing around the 2016 election, and we are watching a similar sentiment hit the mainstream with the 2024 election. In 2016, we got Hillbilly Elegy, and J.D. Vance’s condescending and pathologizing attitude toward the Appalachian stock he comes from. His career since has shown how far that attitude really goes toward defeating reactionary politics (it doesn’t). This year, we got White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.
As Tyler Austin Harper’s fantastic review of the book highlights, this is an act of scapegoating that a) explicitly ignores actual, empirical data about rural whites, and b) pushes the blame away onto people with very little political representation in order to ignore the areas actually cultivating racial prejudice and political violence. Harper speaks to multiple political scientists cited by Schaller and Waldman who felt their research was misused to a degree that it could qualify as malpractice. In one stunning section, Robert Pape, one of the political scientists cited in the book, says the book used his data to make an argument completely contrary to the research he did.
When I contacted Pape to ask whether he thought that his research had been misused, he was unequivocal.
He directed me to the slide in his report cited by Schaller and Waldman to back up their claims. Schaller and Waldman rely on the slide to point out, correctly, that 27 percent of Americans with insurrectionist views are rural and that these views are slightly overrepresented among rural people. However, they ignore what Pape explicitly described, in big bold letters, as the report’s “#1 key finding”: that there are approximately 21 million potential insurrectionists in the United States—people who believe both that the 2020 election was stolen and that restoring Trump to the presidency by force is justified—and they are “mainly urban.” The authors fail to explain why we should be more worried about the 5.67 million hypothetical rural insurrectionists than the 15.33 million who live in urban and suburban areas, have more resources, made up the bulk of January 6 participants, and are the primary danger according to Pape’s report.
“They are giving the strong impression that our study is supporting their conclusion, when this is false,” Pape told me. He added that this isn’t a matter of subjective interpretation. The political scientist stretched his arms so that his right and left hands were in opposite corners of the Zoom screen: “Here is their argument. Here is their data. And there’s a gulf in between.”
This is an incredibly old sleight of hand that Ramp Hollow explores in length. Looking to a region stripped barren by the extractive coal industry, the timber industry, and the tourism industry and then blaming them for the tensions in this country should be ridiculous on its face. And yet, so many liberals so impulsively rely on the stereotypes and caricatures of rural people to explain the ills of this country.
Of course, the right doesn’t escape this so easily. For the right, rural people are a political chip. Republicans love to frame themselves as the party of the working, ordinary man in the years since Trump. The want to be the party of farmers and (white) workers. Of course, almost everything they do or want harms these same people, and often they rely on an image of the working class or the agrarian class that they’ve formed in their head. I recall Steven Crowder making fun of the concept of black farmers in an old clip that circulated Twitter. If you have even a basic, grade school understanding of American history, you would understand black farmers have been a huge part of this country’s development. But for the right: the workers are white, and farmers are white.
Agrarian politics, much like any working class politics, is almost entirely absent from the major political parties in the country. Both have equal contempt for rural people. Liberals blame them for racism. Conservatives fetishize the white ones while actively pushing policies to make their lives worse.
There’s a mildly personal aspect to some of this, despite my complicated relationship with the “rural” side of my identity, as I laid out earlier. My Dad’s side of the family comes from Appalachia. By that I mean that they arrived in the Midwest by the end of the 19th century, so this isn’t recent memory by any means. Part of the Appalachia trip my family took in high school was so my Dad could find old graves of distant relatives.
After reading Ramp Hollow, the migration patterns here line up. I’m not certain what class my family would have fallen into. I like to imagine they were agrarians and smallholders rather than large-scale farmers that introduced factory farming or speculators that came for coal, but I’m not certain. However, the migration to the Midwest aligns with one of the trends of country folk displaced by the extractive industries that demolished the region and sent it spiraling into poverty.
People moved to the Midwest to make money. They needed money because their subsistence practices were uprooted by industry. The story of my family moving to the Midwest is the story of a “peasant” reluctantly embracing capitalism. In the process, joining the march West that would displace more Plains Indians and would chop down the prairie for large scale corn production. Iowa is always called a prairie, but it’s not. It used to be. 80% of Iowa was tallgrass prairie before the arrival of large scale food production. Now it’s 0.1%. The cornfields and soybean fields are scars just as much as they are the “breadbasket” of the world (another myth, but that’s for a different article).
There is something horrifying to me whenever I think about this for too long. We have no conception of the prairie prior to colonization. The landscape has been fundamentally altered. And in a lot of ways, the Midwest is a similar victim of extraction. Not as much coal or mineral extraction (although, we did have that), but the extraction of our topsoil. Those large factory farms will leave once this topsoil is gone and our “prairie” becomes a desert. The cities will probably remain, relying on different industries like the insurance industry in Des Moines. But the rural landscape will disappear in the coming century. And the Midwest will be like Appalachia—poor and rural, blamed for their own poverty and declining life expectancy by the very people that extracted their livelihood.
This will all get glossed over by the simple reality that rural identity and rural residency are different things. People living in the suburbs or in close proximity to the metro will consider themselves rural and continue to demand the policies that destroy the lives of the actual residents of rural regions. Racial hatred will increasingly be stoked and blamed for this declining economic situation. It’ll be framed as the fault of a “Hispanic invasion,” rather than of large ag businesses extracting and then ditching the wasteland they produce.
As I wrap up here, I want to leave you with this excerpt from an article by Eric Waggoner from the weeks after the 2014 chemical spill in West Virginia that was briefly mentioned above. Stoll quotes this article, and I think it’s fitting. A resident of West Virginia and English professor, Eric Waggoner responds spitefully to everything to produced the poverty and exploitation he was surrounded by. This will be Iowa’s story soon, just replace some of the industries with our local versions.
But something about this confluence, the way I had to bring potable water to my family from two hours north, the strange look of the landscape wreathed in rain and mist, the stench of a chemical that was housed directly upstream from the water company -- something about all of that made me absolutely buoyant in my rage. This was not the rational anger one encounters in response to a specific wrong, nor even the righteous anger that comes from an articulate reaction to years of systematic mistreatment. This was blind animal rage, and it filled my body to the limits of my skin.
And this is what I thought:
To hell with you.
To hell with every greedhead operator who flocked here throughout history because you wanted what we had, but wanted us to go underground and get it for you. To hell with you for offering above-average wages in a place filled with workers who'd never had a decent shot at employment or education, and then treating the people you found here like just another material resource -- suitable for exploiting and using up, and discarding when they'd outlived their usefulness. To hell with you for rigging the game so that those wages were paid in currency that was worthless everywhere but at the company store, so that all you did was let the workers hold it for a while, before they went into debt they couldn't get out of.
To hell with you all for continuing, as coal became chemical, to exploit the lax, poorly-enforced safety regulations here, so that you could do your business in the cheapest manner possible by shortcutting the health and quality of life not only of your workers, but of everybody who lives here. To hell with every operator who ever referred to West Virginians as "our neighbors."
To hell with every single screwjob elected official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren't followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power. To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast.
To hell with everyone who ever asked me how I could stand to live in a place like this, so dirty and unhealthy and uneducated. To hell with everyone who ever asked me why people don't just leave, don't just quit (and go to one of the other thousand jobs I suppose you imagine are widely available here), like it never occurred to us, like if only we dumb hilljacks would listen as you explained the safety hazards, we'd all suddenly recognize something that hadn't been on our radar until now.
To hell with the superior attitude one so often encounters in these conversations, and usually from people who have no idea about the complexity and the long history at work in it. To hell with the person I met during my PhD work who, within ten seconds of finding out I was from West Virginia, congratulated me on being able to read. (Stranger, wherever you are today, please know this: Standing in that room full of people, three feet away from you while you smiled at your joke, I very nearly lost control over every civil checkpoint in my body. And though civility was plainly not your native tongue, I did what we have done for generations where I come from, when faced with rude stupidity: I tamped down my first response, and I managed to restrain myself from behaving in a way that would have required a deep cleaning and medical sterilization of the carpet. I did not do any of the things I wanted to. But stranger, please know how badly I wanted to do them.)
And, as long as I'm roundhouse damning everyone, and since my own relatives worked in the coal mines and I can therefore play the Family Card, the one that trumps everything around here: To hell with all of my fellow West Virginians who bought so deeply into the idea of avoidable personal risk and constant sacrifice as an honorable condition under which to live, that they turned that condition into a culture of perverted, twisted pride and self-righteousness, to be celebrated and defended against outsiders. To hell with that insular, xenophobic pathology. To hell with everyone whose only take-away from every story about every explosion, every leak, every mine collapse, is some vague and idiotic vanity in the continued endurance of West Virginians under adverse, sometimes killing circumstances. To hell with everyone everywhere who ever mistook suffering for honor, and who ever taught that to their kids. There's nothing honorable about suffering. Nothing.
To hell with you. This is the one moment in my adult life when I have wished I could still believe in Hell as an actual, physical reality, so that I could imagine you in it.
See you next week.