From White Rural Rage (Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman, 2024) pp228-9
Chip Roy is an ideologue, in ways that are both good and bad. He has a firm set of principles he holds to; special interests will be unlikely to buy his support for something he doesn’t agree with. But he is also so intensely opposed to the idea of an active, effective government that he’ll happily push the country toward economic catastrophe as a tool to extract concessions on domestic spending. He’s an advocate of the insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment, that the amendment’s core purpose is to provide a means for the violent overthrow of the system the Constitution created, this view is ahistorical, ignorant of the text of the Constitution itself (which, in multiple places, forbids armed resistance to the government), and reflective of a shocking degree of entitlement for a White man who has never in his life experienced anything resembling actual government oppression. If you go to Roy’s website and read his press releases, you’ll find lots of culture war posturing on abortion and “wokeness” in the military, but you won’t find announcements of grants obtained for the local hospital or new initiatives to bring jobs to rural Texas. As one local Democratic activist in Gillespie County told us when we asked about politicians staging repeated photo ops in which they don khaki shirts and gaze determinedly across the Rio Grande, Roy
“probably spends more time at the border than in his district.” (Roy’s district does not border Mexico.)
For Roy and the legions of politicians like him at all levels of government who represent rural White Americans, everything is working out fine. Their positions get more secure with each passing election, even as their constituents’ problems go unaddressed.
The four factors we identified in this book as the foundation of America’s rural problem provide a political strategy for those who benefit from the status quo. The deep challenges affecting rural Americans – in economic opportunity, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and more – keep so many of them dissatisfied and disgruntled. Their elevated status as the essential minority provides a means to pander to them even as the distance between what they get and what they feel they deserve widens. Their outsize electoral power enables Republicans to retain control of government, often to such a degree that the party is all but exempted from electoral competition. And they are represented at all levels by politicians who use these structural, material, and cultural conditions to manipulate rural Americans in ways that translate into little or no improvement in their lives and often make those lives worse.
For those politicians, the threats we have identified coming from rural White America-racism and xenophobia, conspiracism, anti-democratic beliefs, and the justification of violence – are not threats at all. They’re either not a problem to worry about or, even worse, tools that can be used to maintain the support of those voters and aim their anger in whatever direction the politicians find most advantageous.
Tgk1946's Blog 