We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
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What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
Cars have nearly nothing to do with this. It started with the industrialization of farming.
Farm towns existed at normal intervals because it took a much larger labor pool to manage them. 200 acres was a lot to manage about 100 years ago. By the 1970’s 400 acres was a normal sized family farm in the US.
Modern machinery can cover nearly 200 acres in a day. There is no reason to have thousands of people per small town anymore. It takes a tiny fraction of that manpower to achieve the same output.
1910 machinery starts to transform farming, killing small subsistence farms.
1920 factories in large towns start draw labor of off small subsistence farms
1930 cheap cars make it easier to travel great distances, small towns start to decline
1930-50s telephones, refrigerators, radios and TVs allow people to live even greater distances apart
1970s new pesticides allow for an even greater mega-farms, and fewer family farmers
1980s Free trade kills off most industrial jobs in small towns
1990s collapse of USSR means rush of cheap engineering labor, depreciates well paying technical jobs
2000s reinvestment into oil fracking and other oil extraction methods causes dutch-disease (taxes come from oil, so little interest in industry)
2010s spike in cheap synthetic drugs rolls through rural America
We’ve had a constant selection pressure for people who are economically and socially adaptable to move away from small towns since the start of the industrial revolution.
The issue is who is left in the towns. It’s people who are socially and economically highly resistant to change.
What’s interesting is why they are so resistant, studies show it’s an overdeveloped sense of fear. They are terrified of moving to a new location. I know many people who refuse to visit any city because “it’s too dangerous”. People in small towns today live in a constant state of fear. Political and religious organizations have stoked that fear to a fever pitch.
Unsurprisingly, depression and anxiety rates are high in rural communities. Areas that also have poor mental health services. So they use drugs and alcohol at a higher as a form of self-medication.
Fear is absolutely part of it, but there’s also a lot of people who just don’t like cities.
Do you have a source for this? I’m not doubting you because it seems plausible, it just seems like interesting reading
Add in:
1956-1992 The interstate highway system bypassing previously established travel routes. This kills the business of diners, gas stations, and motels that previously serviced travelers.
1980s Hypermarts and supercenters. The ease of transportation of goods across the country put local small businesses into competition with larger businesses based thousands of miles away. Why go to local stores when Walmart has everything in one place? Profits that once stayed in the local economy with local business owners are now funneled far away.
About the time where biomass started to decline.
Farm tech covers the pre ww2 changes, but NAFTA and globalization in general really killed rural America. Car factories, coal mines, steel mills, textile factories, lumber mills and more are drastically reduced in the US, the people that used to work in those place are still alive though.