{"id":1460284,"date":"2024-03-01T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-02T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1460284"},"modified":"2024-03-01T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-02T03:00:00","slug":"taibbi-msnbc-paul-krugman-panic-over-white-rural-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/taibbi-msnbc-paul-krugman-panic-over-white-rural-rage\/1460284\/","title":{"rendered":"Taibbi: MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taibbi: MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage”<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This week in undisguised class hatred: the New York Times and MSNBC slobber over a new book on the domestic threat<\/p>\n

\u201cTom, I\u2019ll start with you,\u201d<\/em> began Mika Brzezinski. \u201cWhy are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released\u00a0White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots \u2014 you\u2019d have to be pretty high to call Scranton \u201crural,\u201d but whatever \u2014 then Schaller read off small town America\u2019s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most \u201cracist,\u201d \u201cxenophobic,\u201d \u201canti-immigrant and anti-gay,\u201d \u201cconspiracist,\u201d \u201canti-democratic,\u201d they \u201cdon\u2019t believe in an independent press or free speech,\u201d and are \u201cmost likely to accept or excuse violence,\u201d for starters.<\/strong><\/p>\n

White Rural Rage<\/em>, which I made the mistake of reading,\u00a0<\/em>is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed\u00a0by Thomas Frank<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The People, No<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original \u201crigged games\u201d in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a \u201cfrantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,\u201d and waged a \u201cshameful insurrection against law and national honesty.\u201d<\/strong> A populist caricature in\u00a0Judge\u00a0<\/em>magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten\u00a0Of Mice and Men<\/em>, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. <\/strong>Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other \u201cessential workers,\u201d the people working those jobs were demonized\u00a0during the crisis\u00a0<\/em>as\u00a0murderous<\/a>\u00a0horse-paste eaters<\/a>\u00a0and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired \u201cmisinformation\u201d that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.<\/p>\n

Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0spent the last year\u00a0telling \u201cignorant\u201d Middle America<\/a>\u00a0its negative feelings about the economy are \u201cdemonstrably false<\/a>,\u201d because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, \u201cBidenomics is still working very well<\/a>.\u201d When\u00a0White Rural Rage\u00a0<\/em>came out this week he rushed to review it, the intransigent refusal of yokels to accept his wisdom being his favored current hobby horse. \u201cThe Mystery of Rural White Rage<\/a>\u201d is remarkable on multiple levels, one being that after spending so much energy talking about the health of the economy, he pulls out an economic version of Sam Kinison\u2019s classic \u201cMove to the Food!\u201d routine:<\/p>\n

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and\u00a0imports<\/a>\u00a0play a role, but it\u2019s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers. Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas.\u00a0So why don\u2019t rural workers go where the jobs are?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

He answers his question: \u201cSome cities have become unaffordable\u2026 and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

To recap: globalization and technological change have devastated small towns and made the urban keyboard warriors richer, and rural voters can\u2019t move to the cities because they can\u2019t afford to. <\/strong>However, instead of being grateful for the \u201chuge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia\u201d in the form of federal programs paid by the taxes of luckier citizens like Krugman, small town America is unaccountably hostile.<\/p>\n

Schaller and\u00a0White Rural Rage\u00a0<\/em>co-author Paul Waldman make the same point, that \u201ccities produce far more of the nation\u2019s wealth,\u201d and rural citizens are increasingly \u201csubsidized by the taxes paid by higher-income metropolitans.\u201d <\/strong><\/em>What gives? Why won\u2019t they shut the fuck up?<\/p>\n

\u201cFor so long,\u201d complained Waldman on\u00a0Morning Joe, \u201cDemocrats have been told\u2026 that in order to get rural voters\u2026 you have to go there\u2026 you have to show them that you understand\u2026 You have to put on a Carhartt jacket and go down to somebody’s farm, right? Maybe milk a cow?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cYes!\u201d exclaimed* Mika.<\/em><\/p>\n

But it turns out, a sad Waldman pronounced, that you \u201cdon\u2019t have to do any of that,\u201d because Donald Trump didn\u2019t. He just \u201cgave [rural voters] a way to essentially give a big middle finger to Democrats, to people who live in cities and to the rest of the country.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Morning Joe\u00a0<\/em>set looked perplexed.<\/p>\n

Why would that work better than wearing a Carhartt jacket and milking a cow? It didn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n

Educated America. We\u2019re in good hands!<\/strong><\/p>\n

*The correct phrase is really \u201c\u2018Yes,\u2019\u00a0dipshitted\u00a0Mika,\u201d but I was afraid the usage would throw off some readers. For future reference, it may come up again<\/em><\/p>\n

Subscribe to Matt Taibbi’s Racket News substack here…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nFri, 03\/01\/2024 – 17:00<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bRead More<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taibbi: MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage” Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News, This week in undisguised class hatred: the New York…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1460284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1460284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1460284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1460284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1460284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}