Republicans Will Weaponize Rural Suffering as Long as Democrats Ignore It

But let us not confuse this giddiness with evidence of a winning politics. What terrified me about the Republican National Convention terrifies me still: The Republicans are effectively wielding rural suffering as a political weapon, telling a potent story that — in classic fascist style — deflects the blame onto immigrants and other out-groups. Democrats could demolish these racist lies with a compelling story of their own — one that defuses the Right’s fascist messaging and shows how rural whites and immigrants (many of them in rural areas, of course) are actually being robbed and exploited by the very same profiteers, the same rigged economic system. Is this what the Democrats are doing? Of course not — that’s what makes it a bad dream.

In human form, this nightmare of mine has a name, and its JD Vance.

Despite the internet mockery and couch jokes, Vance is one of the Trump Right’s best messengers yet — and not because he has a stranglehold on rural, working-class authenticity. If Vance — a Yale-educated venture capitalist who, in the un-toppable words of my colleague Hamilton Nolan, ​“looks like he sleeps in a vat of lotion” — manages to pass for ​“authentic,” it says more about this comatose strip mall of a country than it does about him. He’s a poser, but he’s good at it — and he’s telling rural America a dangerously compelling story.

In his RNC speech, Vance spoke to the pain of small towns and rural areas ​“cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class,” places where ​“jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.” As prosperity bled out of these communities, he says, drugs poured in, and he talks about losing people he knew to the overdose epidemic. Then he’s on to lambasting stagnant wages and the rising cost of housing and the growing impossibility, for many people, of buying or even renting a place to live. Who among us can’t relate to this pain? Who has not struggled with opioids or shitty wages or finding affordable housing or has not at least known someone who has? These are defining features of modern American life, especially in rural parts.

And, critical to the story he’s telling, Vance names the cause of this misery, the villains responsible for it: ​“America’s ruling class” (so far, so good) and the ​“millions of illegal aliens” they let into the country to steal your jobs and houses and deal drugs to your kids (and there’s the dark, fascist twist we were waiting for). This story also includes a hero, a savior named Donald Trump, who if reelected will take revenge on the ruling class and embark on a campaign of mass deportations.

Mainstream Democrats have responded with weak sauce, attacking Vance and Trump for the swindlers they are but failing to offer a compelling alternative story.

On immigration, they too often mumble about secure borders and try to sound like Republicans. Harris, for example, has tried to position herself as tougher than Trump on the border, citing her time as attorney general of California and her support for the bipartisan border security bill that Trump helped undermine. And as to what’s causing the rural suffering Vance is speaking to directly, they don’t offer much of an answer at all (unless you count selling camo campaign hats).

This is a grave mistake — politically because more than a third of rural voters could actually be persuaded, and morally because this suffering is very real. And the villains, too, are real, but they have much more in common with Vance and Trump than the immigrants they demonize. Because the truth is that rural areas haven’t been so much ​“left behind” as systematically raided.

In a 2021 essay called ​“Hollowed Out Heartland, U.S.A.,” Marc Edelman, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, documents how, since the 1980s, ​“financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize” rural assets, ​“whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes or stores located in towns and malls.”

At the same time, the merciless logic of capital continues to drive small-scale farmers off the land in favor of bigger and bigger operations — massive monocrop biodiversity deserts dependent on expensive machinery and drenched in the fertilizers and pesticides peddled by massive agribusiness companies. Less farmers means less kids in the local school system, less customers for struggling local businesses, less of a town. And the people who remain do so at great risk to their health: A recent study found that, because of heavy pesticide use, merely living in a farming town is as dangerous as smoking.

“The lion’s share of the vast wealth that rural zones produced and continue to produce has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers,” writes Edelman. Capital has, in short, treated many rural areas as resource colonies, places to plunder and cast aside. It’s no mystery why rural people might feel they’ve been cheated and robbed — they have been. 

This process has spread banking, news, food and maternity-care deserts across vast swaths of rural America. The consequences are dire: Banking deserts mean less access to credit, newspaper closures are associated with increased government corruption and community disintegration, and lack of access to maternity care contributes to the United States’ soaring rates of maternal and child mortality. The rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States has quadrupled since 2002, and drug overdoses now kill more Americans every year than were killed in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined.

“As once vital communities and neighborhoods hollowed out, losing their institutions and the capacity to appropriate the wealth they produce, despair and anxiety triggered violence and addiction,” Edelman writes. ​“Scholars and the media have underestimated the human toll of this crisis.”

This pain, given direction by a story, can easily become rage — and a potent weapon in the hands of Republicans (who have no intention of solving these problems, of course, but know an opportunity when they see one). The Left must defuse this weapon by telling the true story of the plundering of rural America.

Given direction by a new story, this pain could cease to successfully wedge off rural whites, as Vance and company are betting it will. It could instead be a source of unity that offers rural people a place in a shared struggle against the real villains. Against the drug companies that exploited the dead-end emptiness of American life and fueled the overdose epidemic that’s killing our friends from West Virginia to Chicago. Against the private equity funds and corporate landlords and vacation-rental companies and land speculators that are driving us from our homes in small towns and big cities alike. Against the chemical companies poisoning the Midwest with their pesticides and the Gulf Coast with their factories. Against this system that creates profit by feeding people and their beloved places into the meat grinder of the economy. Against the logic of the sacrifice zone itself, and all those who push it and profit from it. 

As Democrats gather in Chicago this week to build out a platform, that’s the story I’ll be listening for. But I won’t be holding my breath, because the villains in this story — the villains plundering us all — also write some pretty hefty campaign checks, and the Democratic Party, by and large, seems more willing to let the boat flounder toward fascism than to name them.