Rural rage and revenge

The “rural rage” discourse that’s so often wheeled out but rarely unpacked should not be seen as the simple offshoot of political and economic change. To a large degree it has been created by national media operatives and Republican agents that are skilled at exploiting latent anxieties and fears, inflaming sentiments that — truth be told — Democrats have been slow to understand.

Right-wing lobbying groups and think tanks like the Family Research Council, the Federalist Society, Moms for Liberty, and Project 2025 have been working full time with celebrity politicians like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and countless others to fan the flames of a radicalized anti-immigration, anti-LGBT, and anti-clean energy politics. The goal is fomenting fears and stoking some of the most craven reactionary sentiments in recent American history.

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It should be stressed that few of the far-right politicians who make the news today have any experience with actual legislation. But whether they hold authentic beliefs or not ultimately doesn’t matter because the whole point is to act as if their feelings are sincere.

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The GOP is now afraid to do anything that might improve conditions for citizens lest Biden reap credit for it.

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We need to appreciate how powerful the machinery is of what political scientist William Connolly calls a “resonance machine” — a self-reinforcing radio, television, and internet echo chamber that silos political interests, mainstreams fringe ideas, stirs up fears, and transposes them as the basis for a legitimate politics. Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Daily Wire, and Truth Social are all geared to doing precisely this — providing traction for ideas that people in rural communities feel validate their anxieties, even as they do not provide a way to overcome them.

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Like the frantic efforts of the wizard of Oz to create an illusion of power, the ginning up of resentment and the valorization of a strong leader as the only way out must continually play up the outrage and conjure deep state conspiracies to keep people on edge.

The result is a volatile cocktail: an aggrieved community, one that raises hopes for rural revenge fantasies that ultimately prove to be dead ends as policy. Thus, “rural rage” is, to a considerable extent, a concoction that exploits the country’s most vulnerable, inducing them to turn against the very institutions that could help them.

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This is neoliberalism with a vengeance, one that produces the precise conditions of an unregulated market that further impoverishes the working and middle classes. It also plays into the hands of radical Christian evangelicals committed to a world in which (white) men, armed with their god-given right to rule, lord it over the country and the world, regardless of impact on family health, long-term economic development, education quality, or mitigation of climate change.

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The short-term emotional catharsis secured in the process relies upon a politics that undercuts the well-being of the larger community. Republican states that refuse to draw upon federally-subsidized Medicare funding for expanded services to citizens to make a point of repudiating the welfare state provide an alarming example of how self-destructive this politics can be.

  Politico