An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America White Rural Rage has become a best-seller--and kindled an academic controv

[Sympthsical]

35. Let's put it this way

It could have been retitled Confirmation Bias: The Novel, and that would have sufficed for purpose. Every stereotype imaginable, every explanation for electoral movements, every idea urban people have about white rural types is confirmed with a lot of jargon and sleight of hand.

And I'll be honest. I'm probably closer to being one of the "elites" that gets stereotyped than most people even here. I'm white, upper middle class, gay, probably way overeducated by this point, and living in the Bay Area.

I am who Republicans are talking about half the time.

But I also grew up poor and spent a lot of time in more rural areas because my parents had family and friends there. I spent my weekends riding horses and feeding goats and fucking around with hay bales. There is something to the criticism that the professional classes that populate a lot of our party's ideological and opinion-shaping sectors is out of touch with lower economic classes. I think people are oversensitive to the criticisms at our electoral detriment. Because I want the party to win, and I want our policies to be awesome for the working classes. I've still got that union blood running through my veins. My father was a devoted Teamster all his life.

Our biggest mistake - and one that redounds to the benefit of corporations - is that our differences got shaped into a culture thing. It's mostly a class thing. As long as we're all fighting, they win. So I think the professional classes - the "elites" people talk about - love the culture thing. They can fight that one cost free. They can talk about it all day long. And if they can get everyone else to talk about it all day long and see it as more important than class, they keep winning.

What are they going to do, talk about poor people all day? Who wants to discuss that?

Yeah. That's not what cable news or any media is about to do. It isn't sufficiently divisive enough to get eyeballs. For politicians, it isn't enough to drive voters to the polls out of antipathy to others. Antipathy motivates.

But this stuff just isn't helpful. It's corrosive. It's wrecking our country. But people are so engaged, so used to it at this point, and so defensive about it (I suspect because they identify as one of the "elites" even though they really are not - which is another trick in use here), they just don't want to have the conversation openly and in good faith.

I mean, just look at threads like this and the discussion around this book. It's all attempts at confirmation bias and defensiveness all the way down.