The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America

by Robert Wuthnow

A moral community draws our attention to the fact that people interact with one another and form loyalties to one another and to the places in which their interaction takes place.

They may be rugged individualists. But they are not fundamentally that. Spend some time in rural America and you realize one thing: people there are community-oriented.

The moral outrage of rural America is a mixture of fear and anger. The fear is that small-town ways of life are disappearing. The anger is that they are under siege. The outrage cannot be understood apart from the loyalties that rural Americans feel toward their communities. It stems from the fact that the social expectations, relationships, and obligations that constitute the moral communities they take for granted and in which they live are year by year being fundamentally fractured.

Rural communities’ views of Washington usually emerge in two competing narratives: on the one hand, the government ignores us and doesn’t do anything to help with our problems, and, on the other hand, the government constantly intrudes in our lives without understanding us and thus makes our problems worse.

Rural communities may not be as racist or as misogynist as critics sometimes claim, but the racism and misogyny are built into the patterns of life that nearly all-white communities have come to accept. And a part of their anger is assuredly the view that the promotion of diversity is a further intrusion of big government.

The missing piece is the fact that rural America is composed of small communities. Nearly everyone in rural America lives in or near a community. These are the communities they call “home.”

when someone comes to visit, she often wishes they wouldn’t because there’s too much work to be done.

They liked the familiar faces they saw at the post office. And yet they were also remarkably attached to the place.

There is a darker side to the togetherness townspeople experience, though. Just as among kin groups, there is a strong sense of “us” and “them.” It seems to “us” that we know each other and are all the same because “us” excludes “them.” The excluded don’t belong. They are the newcomers of different ancestry who don’t quite fit in, the poor who townspeople figure are on welfare and probably up to no good, the teenagers whose names appear on the police report.

Social scientists call this kind of exclusion “othering.” It ranges from negative stereotypes to overt discrimination. By no means do all rural Americans engage in it. But it was one of the ways the subjects I interviewed maintained their sense of identity. They probably revealed more than they realized when they said the people they knew were all the same.

The key point about rural communities, understood in this way, is that the people who live in them are not individuals who make up their minds about issues and elections based on only individually held economic interests or personal anxieties. The communities in which they live influence them as well, defining the moral fabric of what they consider to be right and good. It matters greatly, therefore, if people perceive—correctly or incorrectly—that the communities upholding their way of life are in danger.

population statistics do not begin to capture what it means to people living there when their communities experience significant decline.

Retaining young people who earn college degrees is pretty much a lost cause in most rural communities, people told us.

But any of the kids who have anything going with a four-year degree, they’re gone.” That robs the community of talent, he says, and contributes to its economic decline.

Growing up in a small community makes it possible, as the saying goes, to be “a big frog in a small pond,” which can result in an unrealistic appraisal of one’s talents and perhaps a rude awakening when thrown at some point into a larger pond.

The frog pond is an example of how moral communities generate strong implicit loyalties to the point that they constrain people in ways that may have detrimental effects on their career aspirations.

The quandaries rural communities face in keeping businesses and providing jobs also relate directly to the “brain drain” problem.

Long-time residents composed one side. They were ruggedly independent, wanted the community to be free of outside intervention, and hoped it would remain unchanged. Newcomers—which meant anyone who had arrived in the past two decades—were younger, more liberal and pluralistic in outlook, had more interests outside the community, and more often pushed for zoning and environmental regulations.

cultural divide like this is not unusual, given what studies show about differences among age cohorts, and it wouldn’t be particularly problematic in a rural community except for the fiction that everybody is the same. It bothers long-time residents of small communities who have worked to preserve the community’s shared values to see those values changing.

Conflicts sometimes became so open that the rift dividing the community remained for years. Religion was often the source of disagreement.

These are threats—some more serious than others—to the community’s moral fabric. The moral fabric is the shared notion that what the community represents is right.

Political scientist Robert D. Putnam argued in Bowling Alone that Americans’ engagement in their communities has fallen dramatically during the past few decades. Fewer people visit their neighbors, host their friends for dinner, hold membership in voluntary associations, and do volunteer work.

Residents of small communities explained in interviews that voluntary organizations had sometimes shut down as population declined, more people were working and shopping outside the community, and an aging population had fewer reasons to participate in organizations for children and youth. It worried them nevertheless to see these trends.

people in rural communities attach high value to people who pitch in, giving high marks to people who volunteer and get things organized but withholding respect from people who are too busy to get involved.

People are angry and afraid. “We have a lot of screamers,” she says. “What they’re yelling about may be completely unreasonable, but they have a need to vent.” So they show up at town meetings or they come to her. “Once you blow through all the smoke, a lot of times it’s a problem that isn’t possible to address at this level. It’s very hard for people to understand that. You can give them the reasons but they are taxpayers and feel that somebody should fix things.”

The challenge that brings small-town culture most sharply into juxtaposition with the hard realities of community survival is the quest for jobs.

Mr. French’s approach was basically an acknowledgment of the particularities of small-town culture. People want to feel they have a say in community decisions.

Faith wasn’t a quick fix for their family’s finances or the town’s economy. An outsider would probably say its role was mostly therapeutic. It kept them from being as depressed as they would have been otherwise. When times were tough, it helped them take a longer-term perspective, sometimes steeling their resolve to stick with what they were doing.

They wanted to be viewed differently, not as being better than anyone else but as being just as good.

A way of life that is no longer as self-sufficient as they thought it was feels like a loss of control over their own communities, even if the loss is necessary.

studies suggest about a kind of macho culture prevailing in rural communities.

For instance, Glenn Evans, a Midwestern wheat farmer, shared Mr. Somers’s opinion and raised it one. “What the heck,” he said, “you’ve got all these little towns that hold onto their Swedish heritage or their German roots and now they don’t like Mexicans because they’re from Mexico and want to hang onto their heritage? Give me a break!”

one of the strongest predictors of anti-Muslim and broader anti-immigrant attitudes in the survey was holding firmly to the conviction that only Christianity is true.

The “us” and “them” distinction depends less on articulating what it is about “us” that we like than what we dislike about “them.”