The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America

By Robert Wuthnow

Princeton University Press, 200 pages, $31.95

The United States may be an urban nation today, but the folklore and the mythology of the small town and the agrarian lifestyle are at the heart of the nation’s identity. It was the founding American philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that ’’those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.” It was, by contrast, the founding philosopher of communism, Karl Marx, who wrote of ’’the idiocy of rural life.” Even today, Americans find ’’substantial and genuine virtue” – this phrase, too, comes from Jefferson, who died in 1826 – in American town life. But since the election of Donald Trump, rural and small-town America – vital parts of the Trump ascendancy – have been examined with new scrutiny: with pride from writers such as J.D. Vance (whose Hillbilly Elegy was published a month before Mr. Trump won the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and became a big seller on both sides of the border) and with skepticism befitting the stories of Sherwood Anderson (whose 1919 Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life emphasized the loneliness and isolation of the small town).

Now comes a new, scholarly look from Robert Wuthnow, who went to elementary school in a Kansas town of 600 souls and now teaches amid the ivy-garlanded halls of elite Princeton University, which has an endowment 15 times as big as the endowment of McGill University, the largest in Canada per student. With a cadre of student researchers, Mr. Wuthnow has conducted one of the deepest, most intimate examinations of small-town life ever undertaken.

His findings in Left Behind are neither surprising nor comforting. Towns are the centrepieces of rural life, they are repositories of traditional values, their residents feel they are under siege, their institutions are strong in public support but weak in resources. And many of their citizens are enraged by, insulted by, ignored by and held in contempt by the coastal elites, especially those who inhabit Washington and New York and control the government and mainstream culture.

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All that plus one thing more: In contrast to urban areas, which gave about a third of the vote to Mr. Trump, rural areas sent almost two-thirds of the vote to the Trump column. Indeed, the farther the American town was from an urban centre, the more likely it was to register voter support for Mr. Trump, who was raised in Queens (75 per cent for Hillary Clinton) and who built his real estate empire in Manhattan (86 per cent for Ms. Clinton).

Open this photo in gallery A man shows his support for Donald Trump at a campaign rally on March 5, 2016 in Wichita, Kan., where the Republican party was staging one of its statewide caucuses. J Pat Carter/Getty Images

How New York voted, and whether Mr. Trump heard the voices of small-town America or merely spoke its language by creed or calculation, is not the theme of Mr. Wuthnow’s volume. His emphasis is on the source, and depth, of what he describes in his evocative subtitle: Decline and Rage in Rural America. And on that, his thesis is unmistakable and captured in an epilogue that in many ways is more insightful and powerful than the chapters that precede it:

’’People who feel their rural communities are threatened have few options for taking action that will make them feel stronger. They are too law-abiding most of the time to join an armed militia and too nice to yell a racial slur at a Walmart clerk. The kind of action in their wheelhouse is listening faithfully to [the conservative radio host] Rush Limbaugh and voting to shut down Planned Parenthood.”

In a parade of portraits of American small-town and rural life, Mr. Wuthnow examines drug use, teen pregnancy, the brain drain, cultural challenges and job fears, job loss and joblessness – all what he calls ’’threats to the feelings of togetherness and consensus” valued in these towns. One of his great insights is that in some towns in the South, the resentment of Washington’s encroachment in daily life dates to ’’the federal government’s intrusion on their lives during Reconstruction,” the period beginning in 1865 after the conclusion of the Civil War, when slavery ended and Union troops enforced a harsh peace that included voting and property rights for newly freed blacks.

Mr. Wuthnow summarizes the small-town view of the big-city experts from Washington with disdain and, it must be said, with brutal accuracy:

’’They don’t seem to behave responsibly like you do. They’re devoid of common sense. They talk and talk but don’t get anything constructive done. Their interests are with people who live in cities and don’t look like you. They don’t share your concern for the unborn and the sanctity of marriage.” The irony of the Trump triumph is that the past two American presidents with small-town roots, Jimmy Carter (1977-81) and Lyndon Johnson (1963-69), were Democrats, deeply marked by Plains, Ga., and the Texas Hill Country, respectively.

It was Mr. Johnson who returned to his ranch after the presidency, who said that he was reared in a place ’’where they know when you’re sick and they care when you die.” Today the United States is beginning to realize that it needs to know when the small town is sick, and care that it might die. The deeper irony is that the Manhattan billionaire and the Princeton scholar may be the unlikely couple who taught America that lesson.

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David Shribman, a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a former Washington-based national political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.