Rural Voters’ Pride and the Left’s Prejudice Progressives say the poor go ‘against their interests’ but don’t mind when the rich favor high taxes. By Crispin Sartwell
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-voters-pride-and-the-lefts-prejudice-11571263966
They’re at it again, trying to find the reasons rural Americans “vote against their own interests”—in this case why people out here still support President Trump (though folks I know are wavering). The question was classically formulated by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” But it’s an application of a basic human thought process.
I tell you my views. You disagree with me. I believe my opinion is the one every rational person would come to in an objective assessment of the facts. It’s irrational to disagree with me, especially because I went to a good college and you didn’t, and especially because you are working against your own interests as people like me define them. So what needs explaining is how you could be so irrational.
Sheer genetic redneck boneheadedness is a possibility. If I am feeling generous toward you, I’ll conclude that it isn’t your fault. You are being manipulated by malevolent forces—the surviving Koch brother, Fox News, the Russians, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed. Those are the targets I was aiming at in the first place—after all, who needs to grapple seriously with the views of ignorant, manipulated rubes? After I figure out how to fix Fox News, I can work on fixing you so that you vote according to your interests, as I enumerate them.
What’s missing from this analysis? Social-justice leftists understand the interests of nonrich people in purely material terms. A poor person who isn’t a strong advocate of food stamps or public housing is regarded as plainly irrational. There’s no accounting for intangible qualities such as self-respect, which a particular person or subculture might value highly. By contrast, progressives don’t regard it as irrational when a wealthy person favors high taxes or other policies that would hurt his bottom line. This account of what is and what isn’t in people’s interests, and who is and who isn’t rational, conveniently always militates toward the future to which progressives are already committed.
Yet is it obviously in people’s interests to have the necessities of life provided by the same coercive power that enforces the law? Rural people are supposed to want to be coddled by the same institution that subdues them. They can petition the government for food, but they’ll have to meet its criteria, or even eat what it tells them to eat, to be eligible. In short, the left argues that it’s obviously in my neighbors’ interest to be thoroughly oppressed.
Keeping a degree of autonomy from state power might be in one’s long-term economic interest, in the sense that dependence makes one vulnerable. But there are other interests in play, too, because there’s more to life than material comfort. Human beings have an account of themselves, a set of values, a sense of who they are and what they want to be and what they want their children to be.
Many rural people want to be independent, both as individuals and as communities. They want to be self-determining, and hence free. They’d prefer not to be controlled in every aspect of their lives by the doctrines of Ivy League professors as administered by unaccountable bureaucracies. If you are flatly asserting that that’s irrational, you ought to examine what you mean by rationality.
Even if some rural Americans can’t provide for themselves now, they aspire to. There’s nothing irrational about that, and it’s a basic—the most basic—American value. When the 2020 Democratic candidates come to central Pennsylvania for our votes, they’d do well to keep that in mind.
It would be a mark of rudimentary respect for the people you’re purportedly trying to help to ask them how they define their own interests. If you won’t be doing that, at all, that’s exactly the reason these rural people tend to resent people like you.
Mr. Sartwell teaches philosophy and political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
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