The rage of alienation: the force powering Trump and JZ

WHITE rural voters hold the most significant electoral sway of any demographic in the US, and long before Donald Trump's politics of rage took hold, think-tanks, advocacy groups and government agencies issued numerous reports and warnings about the devastation of rural America and the dire consequences for politics and the fabric of democracy.

Whether or not Trump returns to the White House, his curious appeal to rural Americans is one of the most significant political stories in decades.

Life in America's small towns and counties is entirely different from cosmopolitan coastal cities. The people of the platteland face a variety of painful and sometimes lethal socioeconomic problems – shrinking populations, withering economies, declining wages, rising unemployment, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, poor healthcare, farming job losses and increasing government dependency. (Then throw in an opioid epidemic and a rising wave of “deaths of despair” from gun suicides and drug overdoses).

With a few exceptions – parts of rural America blessed with outdoor and recreational attractions that help to retain residents, and states that have experienced a sudden economic boom from oil or fracking – rural areas are slowly but steadily losing residents, and local economies are shrinking as the rest of America continues to grow.

Globalisation and the greater competition it brings have undoubtedly contributed to the collapse of rural economies once driven by farming, mining and manufacturing. Trump has made it a hallmark of his rhetoric to blame emerging economies such as China for stealing blue-collar American jobs.

However, the assault has also come from within America, most significantly from corporate consolidation and the rising power of giant agribusinesses that have transformed large swathes of the rural landscape. The uncomfortable truth is that small family farms that once fed the nation and kept farmers on the land have been gobbled up by agricultural corporates.

Stagnant populations and withering economies pose many problems. One of the most significant is that a shrinking tax base has led to cuts in spending and reduced public services, with dire knock-on effects – such as the disintegration of infrastructure and consolidation of school districts (which involves closing schools in struggling communities).

In their book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman write that “rural America is increasingly sick and dying" as healthcare facilities close.

Losing their identity

University of Oregon historian Steven Beda says tectonic economic forces have decimated rural economies and erased rural identities.

“The identity of rural communities used to be rooted in work," he says. “The signs at the entrances of their towns welcomed visitors to coal country or timber country. Towns named their high school mascots after the work that sustained them, like the Jordan Beetpickers in Utah or the Camas Papermakers in Washington.” 

However, the steady conversion of extraction-based rural jobs into service-sector employment has changed that. 

“How do you communicate your communal identity when the work once at the centre of that identity is gone?"

Politics

Rural citizens have held an almost mythical status in US politics since the country's founding, when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens".

In the modern era, when politicians want to show they’re authentic, sincere and trustworthy, they inevitably try to leverage a bit of rural cred. Every candidate who can claim a small-town heritage will milk their “small-town values”.

Rural life is a brand that exerts a powerful cultural pull.

Schaller and Waldman write: “There are plenty of differences between the communities you’ll encounter if you visit West Virginia coal country, the Nebraska Plains or California’s Central Valley. But there is also an identifiable set of ideas one can find thick on the ground in all those places, a philosophy and identity that run through rural America.

“They’re patriotic and devout, committed to family and community, and ready to lend a hand. The idea that rural people (or, more specifically, rural whites) are the realest, best Americans is essential to the outsize power granted to the places where they live."

The Republican Party and its rural white voter base enjoy a pivotal advantage in presidential elections, which are decided by an electoral college rather than by a national popular vote. Thanks to the inflated power smaller states enjoy in the electoral college, the past two Republican presidents entered the White House despite losing the popular vote.  

Trump

Trump is the king of rural America and the white rural vote is the cornerstone of the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.

Yet Trump is as far removed from rural people's lives and experiences as anyone could possibly be. He is a lifelong city slicker and a walking repudiation of every value rural Americans claim to hold dear.

Yet rural voters don’t just like him; they worship him. Schaller and Waldman attribute this to the way he has channelled their alienation and rage, and that is what rural people mean when they say Trump “speaks our language”.

“First, he told them they were right: American society is rigged against you by people who aren’t like you and who wish you ill. Second, he let them know that the appropriate reaction to social changes that made them uncomfortable is rage – not quiet acquiescence, not accommodation, not an attempt to understand others’ point of view, but rage. And best of all, they should take that rage and shove it right in the liberals’ goddamn faces."

Trump stroked people’s darkest impulses, and his message to the angry, alienated white rural voter was: “You deserve to feel this way. You have been wronged, cheated and mocked. Now, I will be your wrath. Look at everyone you hate – those overeducated liberals and Hollywood elites and arrogant city people and social justice warriors trying to make you feel bad for being white and being a man and being American. They despise me just as much as they despise you. Let’s show them who this country really belongs to."

Zuma

An understanding of the power of political alienation explains the popularity of South Africa's own Trump, Jacob Zuma, and the unexpected surge in popularity of his MK Party.

There are many parallels between the former US president and Zuma. Both were prepared to cause political mayhem to avoid jail. 

Roger Southall, professor of sociology at Wits University, says that “whereas Trump has captured the machinery and followership of the Republican Party from within, Zuma claims the MK Party is essentially the true ANC which has been betrayed by those who ejected him from the presidency in 2018".

Just as Trump has tapped into the rage of disaffected white rural voters, Zuma has used his powerful rural base in KwaZulu-Natal to leverage cultural resentments and aspects of Zulu exceptionalism. More broadly, he has channelled the rage of the disaffected by becoming a home for a “coalition of the aggrieved”.

Like Trump, Zuma has successfully scratched the itch of perceived exclusion – from Ramaphosa's ANC but also from black economic empowerment. The battle cry is “tear down white monopoly capital for economic liberation".

Perversion of power

Trump and Zuma have problematic relationships with democracy. Trump claims the 2020 US election was rigged by President Joe Biden and shadowy “deep state” political elites. Zuma alluded to the Electoral Commission of SA having fixed the May election in favour of the ANC. 

And both have suggested uprisings in their defence. Trump has indicated that being sent to jail could lead to a popular uprising. Zuma has warned, not so obliquely, that any attempt to prevent the MK Party from assuming power in KZN would lead to violence.

However, in the US political system Trump holds a card Zuma can only dream of.

Voters from rural counties and states enjoy a form of super-enfranchisement that gives them inflated power in the Senate and the electoral college. This system allows white voters – and rural whites specifically – to retain electoral advantages at the national level.

Schaller and Waldman write that county population disparities demonstrate how perverse Senate malapportionment has become. Los Angeles County has more people than any of the 40 smallest states but its 10 million residents must share two senators with nearly 30 million other Californians. A remarkable 120 US counties have more people than the entire state of Wyoming. Yet the Cowboy State’s 581,000 citizens enjoy the same two votes in the Senate as the other 49 states.

The authors of White Rural Rage say these perversions of power will worsen in the decades ahead. By 2040, 70% of Americans will live in the 15 most populous states and choose just 30 of the 100 US senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators.

Threat to democracy

Schaller and Waldman warn that while rural discontent and grievances are hardly new, the survival of the US as a modern, stable, multiethnic democracy is threatened by a white rural minority that, in critical ways, has more power than any other large demographic. This power is often justified on the right by the insistence that these are the worthiest Americans, the ones most possessed of virtue and “values”. 

“This power has already distorted the outcomes our system produces, leaving us in an age of minority rule in which – to take just one example – the party that won fewer votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections managed to assemble an activist 6–3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, one that is now busy remaking the laws all of us live under to conform to a right-wing policy vision that overwhelming majorities of the public do not share," write Schaller and Waldman.

The white rural rage vote brought Trump to power in 2016, and if he wins this year's election he will have the same voters to thank.

Schaller and Waldman warn that this outsized power threatens the world's oldest democracy because the democratic attachments of rural white Americans are faltering.

“Name any force or impulse that threatens the stability of the American political system – distrust in the fairness of elections, conspiracy theorising, the embrace of authoritarianism – and it is almost always more prevalent among rural whites than among those living elsewhere," they say.

And that is possibly the most potent parallel between Trump's power base and that of Zuma's MK Party: not only are their supporters drawn to the machismo of “big man" politics, but they are also suspicious of democracy when it does not go their way.

That is a deeply dangerous concoction. Especially with a dash of rage.

♦ VWB ♦

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