From White Rural Rage (Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman, 2024) pp35-7
In her study of rural resentment in Wisconsin, political scientist Katherine Cramer met local farmers who had been devastated by agribusiness domination and the predatory corporate practices crushing family farms. But Cramer found that these farmers were far angrier with urbanites, liberals, and Democrats than they were with conservative Republicans who raised gobs of Big Ag campaign cash rather than raise policy objections to consolidation.
Natural resource extraction, a core component of many rural economies, is also in decline. In 1985, there were 178,000 coal mining jobs in America 38 But the industry fell into steep decline – not, as Republicans told people, because of environmental regulations, but mostly due to automation and competition from natural gas and, eventually, renewables that are cleaner and cheaper than coal. What were people from rural coal states like Wyoming, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania left with? Fewer jobs, their previously beautiful landscapes scarred by mountaintop removal, and a bunch of empty promises.
Still, voters wanted politicians to keep lying to them about a coal revival that was always just the next “red wave” election away. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton risked her candidacy when she told a CNN town hall that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Folks in coal country took this as proof that Clinton was hostile to them and their interests. Her quote was repeated endlessly to show what an out-of-touch elitist she was. But few people heard and fewer remember the rest of what she said: “And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.
Contrast Clinton, and her candor, with Donald Trump, who went to West Virginia, put on a hard hat, and told the easiest of campaign lies: “For those miners, get ready because you’re going to be working your asses off” he told a cheering crowd. But Trump didn’t revive the coal industry. In fact, he failed to stop its continuing decline. Only 50,000 coal jobs remained in the United States when he took office, and by the time his term ended, that number had fallen to 38,000 – a 25 percent decline during his four years in office.
Did voters in coal country punish Trump for letting them down? No. In 2016, the two biggest coal-producing states, Wyoming and West Virginia, voted more heavily for him than any other state: They favored him by margins of 46 and 42 points, respectively. Four years later, they voted for him by margins of 43 and 39 points, that small decline mirroring exactly the three-point drop between 2016 and 2020 in the margins by which Trump lost the national popular vote.
For all that environmentalists have warned about the climate change effects of burning coal, in the end, coal’s demise is being driven by free-market capitalism more than anything else. And true to form, capitalism doesn’t care what it leaves behind when it departs; that’s the problem coal country faces. Given domestic and global market forces, Trump cannot be blamed for the continuing decline of coal or other U.S. mining sectors. It is fair, however, to blame him for making outlandish promises that neither he nor any other president could deliver.
What’s ironic about the transformation of rural economies is that most locals grasp the hard realities. In a 2017 survey conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, rural voters who said their communities had not recovered from recent job losses were asked if they thought it would be better to bring back “the same types of jobs” recently lost or to “create jobs in new industries?” By a two-to-one margin, 61 percent to 30 percent, rural residents advocated for creating jobs in new employment sectors. * In other words, a solid majority of rural citizens agrees with the economic solution that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, promised those beleaguered West Virginia coal miners in 2016. Confirming what rural voters already knew to be true did not however, help Clinton come Election Day.
University of Oregon historian Steven Beda explains that the steady conversion of extraction-based rural jobs into service sector employment wreaks more than economic havoc on rural communities. Transitioning, struggling rural economies also experience a “Walmart effect” that destroys the core identity upon which many rural communities were built. “The identity of rural communities used to be rooted in work. 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 [sic] in Utah or the Camas Papermakers in Washington,” writes Beda. “How do you communicate your communal identity when the work once at the center of that identity is gone, and calling the local high school football team the ‘Walmart Greeters’ simply doesn’t have the same ring to it?” Tectonic economic forces are decimating rural economies, but economic decline is having an even more nefarious impact: It is erasing rural identities.
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