The Politics of Resentment - Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago Studies in American Politics (CHUP))

The Politics of Resentment Book Review Ms. Kramer, a University of Wisconsin—Madison Political Science Professor, explored a recent political paradox, “We live in a time of increasing economic inequality, and yet voters continue to elect politicians whose policies respond very disproportionately to the preferences of affluent people.” She examined the origins of this paradox in her home state of Wisconsin, for which rural voters recently tipped the balance from a blue to a red state, seemingly against their own interests. To better understand the opinions of these voters as reported by the usual technique of polling, she personally and repeatedly participated in multiple informal discussions of thirty-nine groups scattered throughout Wisconsin for six years {2007-2012}. The study identified a very rural identity with “us versus them” characteristics leading to resentment of urban and political elites, public employees, and diverse urban populations. A “rural consciousness” was identified that included “three major components…a perception that rural areas do not receive their fair share of decision-making power, that they are distinct from urban (and suburban) areas in their culture and lifestyle (and these differences are not respected), and that rural areas do not receive their fair share of public resources.” In addition, they believed they worked much harder for lower wages than less deserving urbanites, public employees, and recipients of public assistance and that their culture and communities were dying as a result of these discrepancies. Reports are reviewed for previous examinations of these perceived discrepancies by the usual political science statistical techniques. At a superficial level, those reports show that rural residents are right about receiving considerably lower wages but wrong about not getting their fair share of public funds. In 2011, per capita median income was in excess of $70,000 for the richest suburbs, about $55,000 for urban counties (without considering the urban poor), and about $40,000 for completely rural counties. Per capita combined state and federal tax revenues were greater than $10,000 for the richest suburbs, over $6,000 for urban counties, and about $4,000 for rural counties. Per capita percentage returned from taxes paid was about 65% state and 150% federal for urban counties and about 100% state and over 400% federal for rural counties (both state and federal graphs skewed by outliers). However, Ms. Kramer found that the answers from this political science approach didn’t really match the concerns of rural citizens on several important points. The revenues returned to rural regions were often in the form of programs imposed upon then by urban and political elites and staffed by public employees who lived among them. Rural citizens perceived the politicians to be tone deaf to their real needs and the programs to be contrary to their real interests. They perceived the local public employees to be outsiders (them rather than us) with much easier work, better salaries, and enormously better benefits than they had. They perceived their hard-earned tax dollars to be wasted on these programs, public employees, and transfers to what they saw as undeserving urban minorities. This perspective suggests that voters’ preference for limited government was not rooted in libertarian political principles or identification as Republicans but in a strong rural identity with the perception that services were not benefiting deserving, hard-working people like themselves. Politicians, such as Scott Walker, skillfully directed these rural resentments away from Republican policies that favor affluent people and redirected them toward government, the people who work for it, and urban areas that are home to liberals and people of color. This rural identity with these strong resentments was already firmly established as the result of long-standing difficult rural circumstances and generations of community members teaching these ideas to one another in the context of the national political debate. Scott Walker merely reaped the harvest of a field already prepared for him (how’s that for a rural metaphor?). So what are the lessons from these findings? First, as on the national level, citizens tend to vote according to personal identities rather than specific policy preferences, with attitudes toward social groups doing the work of ideology. Ms. Kramer examined the rural identity and its resentments in her state. Nationally, numerous additional divisive identities have been experienced, including those involving race, gender, Northerners versus Southerners, and so on. Second, in Wisconsin, it is necessary to reassess what is going on in rural places and reconsider the policy responses. 1) It is possible that resources rural communities are receiving are not effectively addressing the needs of rural communities. 2) It is likely that some of the resources rural communities are receiving are invisible to the people who live there so they are unaware of the programs they use. 3) The manner in which policy is created and delivered is important. If rural residents feel they have been listened to and respected, they may feel different about the programs that result.My comments about the book: My main criticism of the book is that the “Where Does Rural Consciousness Come From?” section is inadequate. Radio was dismissed as a source with the comment that public radio transcripts were unavailable but that state and local newspapers were a reliable indicator of the local news environment. Has the author never heard of talk radio? Is she unaware of the enormous audience of Rush Limbaugh? As for local newspapers, her study of papers from 2007 to 2011 doesn’t begin to cover the period necessary for “generations of community members teaching these ideas to each other”. In my view, her approach likely missed a substantial contribution from several decades of the extensive Koch political network propaganda machine firmly embedding these ideas in rural and other identities.

Katherine Cramer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, thought she was perfectly suited for her project of interviewing upstate Wisconsin residents on their political views. Wisconsin born and bred, she felt deeply connected to her state. So she was quite stunned by the open hostility she encountered. If she was a professor, the locals demanded, how come she was here upstate with her tape recorder, rather than teaching her students? Who was teaching her students in her absence? It often took Cramer several visits to gain trust.Upstate Wisconsin, north of Milwaukee and Madison, is mostly rural, overwhelmingly white, and accounts for about half the population of the state. From 2007 to 2012, Cramer interviewed some forty different groups, many repeatedly. These were people who met regularly, around the coffee machine in a service station, in the back room of a café, and so on. There was even a group that met to play a special Wisconsin dice game, at which Cramer excelled. The interviewees ranged from working class loggers in the north, to middle-class small-business owners. Over half were men, and many were older or retired. They appeared to be stable, established community members, sometimes political leaders. Cramer’s interviews bridged the election of Scott Walker in 2010 and the unsuccessful recall election against him in 2012. She published her findings in 2016 BT (Before Trump) as The Politics of Resentment.She quickly identified a perspective she called “rural consciousness”: Her interviewees highly prized a self-sufficient outdoor lifestyle of low pay, privation, and hard physical labor; they viewed Madison and Milwaukee—“the M&Ms”—with suspicion and contempt. City folks, including professionals, government employees and academics—these led an easy life sitting behind desks, for which they were grossly overpaid. “Madison” (the capital) did not listen to rural folks, did not care about them, and looked down on them; it simply took their tax money and did not return their fair share in services. Just look at the empty streets and shuttered stores of declining small towns! In short, rural people, were “deserving”; those others were “undeserving.”Cramer explored this resentment. Did rural areas really pay more in taxes than they got in benefits? In fact, the opposite—but that was irrelevant, since the locals regarded much government spending as “waste.” Was it the 2008 collapse and Great Recession? No. Small towns had been declining for decades; maybe only a bit more after 2008. Was it an ideological preference for low taxes and small government? No. They would gladly pay taxes for new school computers; but not on salaries for those lazy undeserving school teachers! Yes, even local school teachers were regarded as agents of “Madison”! Was it racism? Cramer did hear some openly racist remarks—directed at “lazy” residents of an upstate Native American reservation. Negative remarks about “those people in Milwaukee” may have meant racial minorities, but more often designated the despised urban elites, especially government bureaucrats. Cramer did discover one striking fact: in upstate communities the pay, benefits, and job security of public employees significantly exceeded those of private sector workers. Perhaps that helped make them lightning rods for resentment—and led to support for Governor Walker’s cuts in their pay and benefits.Cramer probed: Why did people who complained of the high cost of health insurance in rural areas nonetheless oppose government efforts to expand health services? Over and over she heard something like, “the government must be mishandling my hard-earned dollars, because my taxes are going up and clearly they are not coming back to benefit people like me. So why would I want an expansion of government?”In the end, Cramer was left with a mystery: rural resentment towards cities was hardly new. Nor was it new for politicians like Scott Walker to play to that resentment. But what made that resentment so powerful today and so focused on government at all levels?Bitter resentment of government might seem plausible in a state like Louisiana given its inequality, corruption, and poor public services (see my review of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land in the November/December 2016 issue of Dollars & Sense). But in squeaky-clean Wisconsin? While the British Equality Trust rates Louisiana among the worst states on both inequality and social and health problems, it rates Wisconsin among the best. Wisconsin boasts excellent schools and health services statewide. Until Scott Walker, it was a reliably progressive Democratic state. What happened?To me, it feels almost like a gathering religious movement, a rebellion against evil oppressors sometimes disguised as school teachers, postal clerks, and firemen. Is it in some twisted way a response to growing national inequality? There’s at least one small glimmer of hope: In the Wisconsin primary of April 5, Bernie Sanders got significantly more votes than any other candidate, including Donald Trump.

Katherine Cramer spent a couple years traveling to small-town Wisconsin to listen to people about politics. She’s a great listener, and this book is the result. It’s a bit repetitive in places, and too much of the account reflects a relatively small share of her groups. Still, it’s a great window into the collective minds of the small-town Midwest.Her core argument concerns how rural resentment of urban people and their governments shapes both rural identity and their politics. It’s obviously a timely book in light of Trump’s ability to tap that resentment in a few key states such as Wisconsin. That said, there are some elements of Cramer’s findings that raised questions in my mind, questions that she leaves hanging. Without those answers, it’s hard to know how American politics should move forward.One striking element of the conversations was that public employees in each community were grouped with state government. Someone raised in their town who taught at the local high school for thirty years was, in their worldview, resented as an agent of Madison. The people they grew up with have become villains in their eyes because they teach school. That’s not only sad, but it reflects a disconnection with reality. The high school math teacher who grew up in town is part of the community by any definition.Another villain in rural Wisconsin is the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which manages things like hunting and fishing, regulates pollution. Some of Cramer’s people talk about being afraid of the DNR catching them poaching deer or overfishing, both of which are illegal of course. In the same breadth, these people will say, “and the DNR rules don’t even work! The fishing is terrible these days, and there aren’t any more deer.” Apparently it does not cross their minds that their community of poachers might be responsible for the decline of deer and fish. These communities seem blind to a basic fact about how game management works.That’s a nice illustration of how much cow manure came through in these conversations. Rural Wisconsin believes that they pay more taxes than the cities (they don’t), and that they get less state spending (they don’t). Cramer gently documents other things that just aren’t so, but she always says that it’s important for the rest of us to listen to these voices. I agree that we need to listen to these voices, some of whom are my neighbors too. I think it’s also important to think about where these voices are coming from – where are they getting these falsehoods? I have some thoughts, but I won’t share them here.Having been heard, I think it’s important that the people rural Wisconsin do some listening of their own. For people who claim to believe in personal responsibility, they don’t take much responsibility themselves. If they believe that people can succeed through hard work, and if they really work as hard as they claim, why aren’t they succeeding? If, as they recognize, you need an education for the good jobs, why don’t they get an education? If there are no jobs in their community, why don’t they move where the jobs are? If gas is so expensive, why don’t they move into town? I’ve had my own conversations with people in these towns where they complain about their lazy, no-good relatives who won’t get off their behinds and get a job. Cramer didn’t seem to find many of these kinds of people in her samples.Because of her research strategy, Cramer missed the rural Wisconsinites who moved to town and got a good job. Instead, she talked to the older generation, which tends to complain about their children and grandchildren having left these small towns for small cities like Eau Claire or Wausau. The old folks of rural Wisconsin might listen to their own grandkids.

I only gave this book 2 stars because it was dry. Academic writing can be less dry than this. But maybe the author wasn’t expecting all the attention from mainstream readers, so she kept her style tailored to academics. Otherwise, this book was a good read.The only reason not to read this book is a compliment: the book has been so thoroughly discussed, that there wasn’t much more to it than what you can read in the reviews. The reviews contain lots of praise and lots of criticism, both of which accurately reflect the book.Here’s my main criticism, and an invitation to the author to write a less-dry follow-up, especially post Clinton v. Trump. The author does not explore, very thoroughly, gender as a factor behind resentment. The book examines a little whether the gender of the people speaking to the author matters, regarding the opinions that those people share with the author. But there isn’t enough examination of whether gender is a factor at might cause resentment.My childhood, which anyone can point out doesn’t match everyone’s, and occurring mostly during the eighties, evolved in the following manner. The dads worked in the mills. There was a public debate about whether the moms should work. But it was ok for the moms to work as teachers. Their job was to work with children. The moms could still stay home with the kids in the summer. And the moms’ little salaries (no reason to pay women as much as the men since the moms all have husbands) would let the moms rummage in the summer and shop at the Appleton mall in the winter.Fast forward fifteen years. The dads haven’t gotten much of a raise. They have to work overtime, which means less going up north. And the grandmas and grandpas have to sell everything to pay for the nursing home. Nobody was expecting to inherit a million bucks from their folks (“Folks” in small-town Wisconsin means “parents.” If you mean to say “people,” say “people.”), but grandma and grandpa’s house would have paid for the kids to go to Madison. That would have been nice.Meanwhile, the moms’ salaries are going up. Hey, it’s even illegal to pay the wife less than the men these days. Give Packer fans some credit: nobody really believes that women who do exactly the same work as men should be paid less. Many people hold the opinion that the wage gap is because women choose lower-paying jobs than men, but male teacher to female teacher, nobody makes that argument. And now the wife can pick up the beer tab sometimes.Fast forward another fifteen years. The mill-unions weren’t able to win the insurance fight, or the wage fight. And the mills shut down, or laid everyone off, or sold themselves to someone out of state, or all of the above. The dads relied on promised pensions that aren’t so big now. How were the dads supposed to have contributed a bunch of money to deferred compensation (who ever heard of that, anyway?), when the dads were paying the mortgage? And the social security should be going up with the cost of living, but isn’t.But the moms who were teachers — holy cr@p. They retired at 55, they have big pensions, they have social security, they have cheap medical insurance, and their deferred compensation has the option of a guaranteed rate. They don’t have to worry about their kids paying for nursing homes when the time comes, because those teachers had the option of buying long term care insurance (who ever heard of that, anyway?). These women who read books to children for nine months out of the year are idle and rich.Everyone knows the mills shut down because of the environmental people. Getting a buck, which will let you put a hundred pounds of meat in your deep-freezer and feed your friends and family all winter, is harder and harder because of the DNR. People really do understand business tax and have informed opinions about how taxes have mucked up small businesses.No kidding rural and small town people are mad. The women express the same opinions as the men, too, because even though times have changed to benefit the women, those women thought their men would have more money — the family as a whole would have more money — than what ended up happening. We went from debating whether moms should work, to the wife supporting the husband after retirement, in the time it took for me to go from kindergarten to not even middle age yet.This book predicted Trump. Not only through the evidence of resentment in politics, but also through the excerpts of conversations that Wisconsin people had about Obama v. Hillary. People thought Hillary was more elitist than a man who went to Harvard as did his father before him. Given the things that the interviewees said about women as candidates for president, plus the fact that Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin while campaigning against Trump, and Trump’s victory no longer seems like a mystery to people who voted against him. Hillary was, after all, a government worker.

The author explores what she calls “rural consciousness” to understand how citizens from smaller communities view government policies and the political process. She identifies that they resent the non-rural populace (and public employees in particular) for what they perceive as laziness and for taking more than their fair share of resources. Through small-group conversations, the author puts meat to the bones of her argument, and gives a first-hand look at a population that feels left behind in many ways.