Brian M Downing
A new populism began with H Ross Perot’s presidential campaigns and the Tea Party movement. Both were short-lived but populism came back strong with the Trump victory in 2016. Defeat four years later, the January 6 insurrection, and a slew of indictments of its leader haven’t weakened it. The Trump phenomenon isn’t simply a cult. It’s a gathering of several strands of American life dating back centuries. One of them is rural America.
Rural areas have shrunk in size and political significance in most developed countries. People moved to cities, suburbs spread and spread, and food was brought in from abroad. The US is larger than most developed countries and its countryside has remained large and significant – more so in politics than in culture. Its people have retained traditional beliefs that only fifty years ago were widespread and uncontested. They now feel beleaguered.
Rural dwellers see themselves as hearty and self-sufficient. Forbears crossed the prairies, built homesteads, and prospered. An ethos of mutual help is centered in families, churches, and lodges. Their communities produce the world’s food, instill character, and produce more than their share of soldiers and statesmen. They are governed by longstanding norms that have made them the center of the nation.
They mistrust urban centers for their shady lifestyles and heedless change. Business elites are too powerful and greedy. Most media are sensationalist and immoral. Washington is a distant capital increasingly beset by squabbles and deadlocks. Rural communities settle disputes honorably, often without lawyers.
The belief in self-sufficiency is strong. It overshadows government loans, supports, and information on weather, markets, and agricultural innovations. In this regard rural dwellers are no more guilty than other Americans.
Despite immense urban centers in Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta, the South retains large swathes of rural areas. Traditional outlooks are alloyed with brooding resentments from the past. The South is the only part of America that’s known military defeat and in its view, foreign occupation. Many Southerners held fast to ideas of an honorable cause, Northern overreach, and regional backwardness from the destructive campaigns of Sherman. The ideology weakened with the integrative effects of the world wars. There were grave concerns about draft resistance in 1917 but it went well. Yanks and Johnny Rebs served together in France and came home victorious.
However, over the last half century rural dwellers across America have watched in dismay as the nation took a secular direction, urban areas decayed, and Washington imposed changes. Film and television depicted them in various ways but negative images stand out and have left resentment. The South went from solidly Democratic to generally Republican in a decade.
Rural areas have a long history of populist movements: the Grange, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Roosevelt, Huey Long, Billy Sunday, George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, countless locals on town hustings, and more recently talk radio. Though there are considerable differences in these populisms, there are themes of opposing big government, championing common people, preserving morality, and demonizing opponents.
Frustration over the nation’s direction and failing political system has strengthened these themes and made people dubious of political restraints, increasingly militant, and eager for change before it’s too late.
©2024 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.