Co-existing with Strangers

some thoughts on American democracy as we lock into Biden vs. Trump 2.0

We released the podcast episode this week of the live revival on stage at KQED that I wrote about last week. If you haven’t listened yet, check it out.

Speaking of revivals, this week felt like the official launch of the Biden vs. Trump revival, and I’ve had some thoughts as I’ve taken in the news.

I’ve been mad for more than a week about this op-ed column in The New York Times, by Paul Krugman, called “The Mystery of White Rural Rage.”

Now, as someone who grew up in West Virginia, I am admittedly prickly about media depictions of rural white people as a monolith. But this one got my back up for good reason. I found it wildly incurious about the forces that have been transforming and undermining rural community cohesion for decades, from corporate consolidation, technology, trade policy, and energy and agricultural transitions. The concluding lines of the column I found particularly insular and fatalistic: “But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.” 

I hoped for more from a Nobel Prize winner in economics.

On the one hand, this is not new. Power struggles between the urban centers of population and capital and less populated rural communities have always been at the center of American democracy. But as a journalist, I’m troubled by mainstream media’s failure to dig in with more nuance at this moment of profound polarization. 

Dismissively throwing your hands up in the air doesn’t help a democracy in crisis. Neither does smugness, like this insulting moment broadcast from MSNBC this week. I understand that anchoring live news can make you a little slap-happy, but Rachel Maddow joking that she could understand Virginia voters' concerns about immigration because they share a border with West Virginia? Coming from a slick cable news studio, this kind of thing looks to me like the rich kids in the high school cafeteria punching down. 

These cheap shots are costly for a democracy in crisis. After all, this came to my attention because the moment was grabbed and then shared by Republican leaders in West Virginia looking to score their own points. People don’t always vote on policy, after all. They respond to how candidates make you feel. When candidates, or “elite media,” talk down to you, it’s easy to just respond with a hearty, “Eat this.”

Considering the same book about “White Rural Rage” that prompted Krugman’s column, Colby College government professor Nicholas F. Jacobs made a different point about the sources of current political discontent in rural communities, in the outlet The Daily Yonder: 

Scholars, again, and again, and again, however, have shown that there is something distinct about rural people’s motivations, and it isn’t rage….They feel unheard. They worry about the future of their community and their kids having to move away. They do so much with so little and they resent it when someone from outside their community steps in and pretends to know what they think (especially when they pretend to have the facts). Far from the stereotypes you find in White Rural Rage, we find that rural folks are overwhelmingly proud of their communities, but feel that elites look down on them, stereotype their cherished ways of living, typecast them in broad strokes – simply put, see nothing, but rural rage.

Of course, many people in America feel rage these days, for good reason. On foreign policy questions to be sure. And domestically, so many Americans feel rage about dislocation, like the place where they have belonged may no longer be a sustainable home. Rebecca Solnit wrote about this feeling in the Bay Area in an essay in February’s The London Review of Books. It’s called “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley,” and I caught it thanks to a recommendation from the California Sun, my favorite statewide source that does a wonderful job curating headlines from across this impossibly diverse and large state). 

Solnit’s essay beautifully captures the generational changes underway in San Francisco, where there’s plenty of prosperity and AI technology is on the march, but how many of us worry about whether we have a spot in whatever new world is emerging? The feeling may be familiar to people who live in any expensive city across the country, the tenuousness of your rootedness. There’s the cost of living, and there’s the tattering of our social connections. Solnit describes how technologies have enabled more ease and created more aloneness in our daily lives, even as we hand over all the data points of our minute-by-minute activities. “We are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been,” she writes. 

Now, I know from living in Berkeley that being around entrepreneurial energy and ever-growing prosperity does create a certain verve. It makes me pause and consider recalibrating my personal risk tolerance; I wonder what kind of new worlds I might help create if I could gather up my confidence and best elevator pitching skills. 

But on the other side of that wave of possibility, I wonder what all that accumulated wealth is eroding. As Solnit writes, 

You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. [emphasis added] The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity.

As the end of this week of presidential campaign news, I want to hear more about the potent feelings of dislocation in rapidly changing cities like San Francisco and in small rural communities with their own accelerating affordability crises. 

Losing your sense of home is a trauma. It’s a narrative you could explore in stories about migration and immigration, or about having to move to access health care, or about how global capital is draining out of or arriving en masse to small towns in America. "The decision to pick up and actually, like, move my bed has been one of the greatest heartbreaks of my life," a former resident of Gardiner, Montana, said in a story on NPR this week after getting priced out. "Incredibly difficult, because of how place-based our lives are."

Elections remind us that, even with the internet, our lives continue to be very place-based in America. But there are a lot of similar heartbreaks and compounding challenges unfolding in really different places. We need more ways of understanding that, not glib jokes about building walls between them. 

On that note, if this has made you think about essays you’ve enjoyed or writers I should check out, please leave a note in the comments. I hope you’ll keep digging and reading and sharing with me. We have a lot to work through this election year!

Until next week, 

Anna 

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As we make new episodes for you, I thought I’d share a few archival episodes that recent news has made me look back on. 

• All the talk about immigration in the State of the Union and in exit polls reminded me of this episode from 2018 called “I Married a Dreamer during the Trump Presidency.”

• President Biden’s call for increased penalties for fentanyl trafficking made me think about Mark Strickland, a first responder whom I interviewed in 2017 about the opioid epidemic in my home state of West Virginia. We called that episode “I Can’t Fix It: A First Responder and Heroin.”

• The discussion that followed Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation protest of the war in Gaza made me think about this conversation with Terry Kaelber, whose husband David Buckel self-immolated in 2018 to protest climate change. 

• On the lighter side - Rolling Stone’s piece about changes at Queer Eye made me look back at our lovely episode with Bobby Berk, who’s departed the show. 

• Finally, the Oscars ceremony this weekend makes me remember the joy of catching Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, last year’s big winners for Everything Everywhere All At Once, about friendship and creative collaborations as their big awards season was catching fire.