Donald Trump seems an unlikely champion of rural Whites in the South. Yet his message resonates with this group’s sense of being marginalized and displaced, given cultural, economic, and historical forces over which they have little control.
Over the last 75 years, small scale family farming in this region has declined, but a rural agrarian world view still powerfully influences the politics of the present. Trump’s message is attuned to a collective sense of loss, as rural-agrarian traditions fade. Shrewdly, Trump validates rural alienation and grievance and redirects it toward government, politicians, elites, and ethnic minorities. He voices rural people’s resistance to urban cosmopolitan values and other changes they don’t want.
The South was predominantly rural until after World War II. Small scale family farming sustained the rural Southern economy since the earliest white settlers arrived. Contrary to popular belief, 75% of white rural farmers in the South never owned slaves, according to a PBS documentary, “Conditions of Antebellum Slavery,” part of a series on Africans in America. Census data from 1860 in an archive at University of Virginia also confirm that only about a third of white Southern families owned slaves. Similarly, W.J. Cash, in his classic book, “The Mind of the South” (1941), emphasizes the centrality of the small yeoman farmer to the history of Southern agriculture and culture.
Small family farms still predominate in the South and comprise from 80% to 95% of farms in the region, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology Report published by the US Department of Agriculture in 2021. Small family farms produced food for their own consumption and for markets and have relied largely on family labor. Today, many in rural areas no longer own much farmland but retain smaller parcels and commute to nearby towns and cities for jobs, while farming on the side. Still, farming remains a cultural ideal.
In many ways, wage-based jobs are seen as a step down from farming. These jobs don’t involve the hard physical labor of farming, but are often less challenging and require a more limited range of skills. Historically, small farmers had a fair amount of freedom and discretion in their work. Their tasks were diverse. They decided what to do, when, and how. Their work required ingenuity, problem solving, and contained an element of risk. Tasks changed with the seasons and the weather. The work involved a high level of personal responsibility: making sure their families were fed solely through their own efforts. They were their own “bosses.” They had some degree of economic security, even though they weren’t always bringing in much cash. They and their family members could redouble their labor in a tough year. They weren’t necessarily paid every season, but there wasn’t unemployment either.
Taking a paid job in a factory, for example, where they are told what to do by bosses outside the local community, and given limited hours, and routine, repetitive tasks, marked a surrender of personal independence. From a cultural perspective, the shift from a rural to a predominantly urban and now global market economy represents a loss of personal and familial self-reliance. As small businesses in nearby towns are driven under by large corporate chain stores, local jobs are fewer. With increased automation, even chain store jobs are disappearing, threatening more economic insecurity.
Feared erosion of self-reliance and feared disintegration of supportive local institutions like schools and churches, which formed the moral center of communities, is a theme in today’s rural culture. Rural people have a history of suspicion and distrust of institutions outside the community: of government, larger market forces, authority, and elected officials who may inflict social and economic “progress” on them. Rural Southerners may admire Trump because he is seen as defiantly “his own boss” and beholden to none. He openly derides government and portrays it as undercutting personal and economic independence. Donald Trump is seen as a bulwark against change. Equally appealing, he fights a government that is unresponsive to local interests, which taxes and dictates social and economic policy. With Trump’s outspoken “America First” stance, he aligns himself against a global economy, which threatens the distinctively local.
Some of these anti-government attitudes may not make full economic sense since people in rural areas have long utilized government subsidies for agriculture. They have been beneficiaries of agricultural extension services and public works projects to improve local roads, bridges, and power supplies. However, the concept of personal freedom may have a higher value than any other consideration.
Self-interest may be measured by freedom from outside influence more than money. As a reflexive anti-authoritarian, Donald Trump has an intuitive grasp of these priorities and exploits them for his own political and financial advantage.
Trump forges a strange alliance with rural whites of the South in other ways. Working on a small farm was traditionally a family enterprise and there wasn’t necessarily a perceived need for much formal education. The agricultural cycle often interfered with children attending school for portions of the year because labor was needed on the farm. “Book learning” was often irrelevant to farming and was devalued, relative to outdoor labor on the land, especially for men.
At the same time, white people in the rural South have historically had some degree of defensiveness about their relatively lower levels of education and urban sophistication. As a group, they are often openly anti-intellectual, a theme not uncommon in American culture. Donald’s Trump ridicule of educated urban elites is a refreshing reprieve for those who feel that their culture is devalued by mainstream America.
Whites in the South hold more conservative social values and tend to be religious and skeptical of urban cosmopolitan lifestyles. For many rural Southern people, local connections with family, neighbors, local churches, and schools remain an organizing principle of community social life. Contacts with people from outside the community of other backgrounds, ethnicities, and levels of education may threaten local social norms and social cohesion. When young people leave the community, for school or for jobs, they may only infrequently come back. The result is a weakening of ties across the generations and in community life.
Participation in mainstream culture comes at a cost to the local community. While many rural Southerners participate in the larger market economy, they prefer to do so in a limited and pragmatic way. They don’t fully embrace urban social norms. Trump’s denigration of urban based, liberal progressive values strikes back at the changes they fear.
Racism of varying degrees in the rural South is undeniable. Historically there has been a power differential and inequitable access to resources for whites and people of color. In the past, strict observance of social distance accompanied and reinforced this power differential.
As making a living in rural America gets harder and small towns and villages die, competition for jobs and other resources can intensify. Increasingly scarce resources may fuel a redirection of white anger onto people of color. At a visceral level, some Southern whites feel that people of color are “taking away” some of the resources that have rightfully been theirs, as well as their position of privilege.
It is easier and simpler to blame a group of people who have historically been unable to defend themselves than to try to understand the complex social and economic forces, and technological changes, that confound even public policy experts.
The federal government may be seen as pushing social change and promoting protections and advantages for people of color while offering little to offset hardships of whites in rural areas. Donald Trump is keenly attuned to the resentments of rural whites and exploits them for political advantage, even if using coded language.
In the rural South, guns have had practical uses and have been widely owned. They are kept for hunting food, for protection against predators on livestock, and self -defense. They prevent incursions of strangers on private property. Guns are important symbols of freedom. Trump’s promotion of gun rights and the National Rifle Association signals that he is aligned with rural people on this issue. His advocacy for gun rights is viewed as a defense against loss of personal and local autonomy.
Trump intuits and channels the grievances of whites in rural areas of the South. Some rural people may see through his lies or dislike his personal style. Some may see him as a flim flam man, or a demagogue, but they like that he is challenging government and liberal progressive orthodoxy. Now that he has lost his reelection, he may be viewed even more sympathetically by those who have experienced their own losses. Most of all he is seen as protecting a fundamental rural value: the right to self-determination, the right to be left alone. This hoped for outcome may be unattainable in an increasingly interconnected world.
Bonny Gardner, a psychologist in Austin, Texas, grew up in the D.C. area and did research on rural Kentucky residents for her doctoral dissertation in cultural anthropology.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2021
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