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Chicago Studies in American Politics
The Politics of Resentment
Since the election of Scott Walker, Wisconsin has been seen as ground zero for debates about the appropriate role of government in the wake of the Great Recession. In a time of rising inequality, Walker not only survived a bitterly contested recall that brought thousands of protesters to Capitol Square, he was subsequently reelected. How could this happen? How is it that the very people who stand to benefit from strong government services not only vote against the candidates who support those services but are vehemently against the very idea of big government?
With The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer uncovers an oft-overlooked piece of the puzzle: rural political consciousness and the resentment of the "liberal elite". Rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct values of their communities and allocate a fair share of resources. What can look like disagreements about basic political principles are therefore actually rooted in something even more fundamental: who we are as people and how closely a candidate's social identity matches our own. Using Scott Walker and Wisconsin's prominent and protracted debate about the appropriate role of government, Cramer illuminates the contours of rural consciousness, showing how place-based identities profoundly influence how people understand politics, regardless of whether urban politicians and their supporters really do shortchange or look down on those living in the country. The Politics of Resentment shows that rural resentment no less than partisanship, race, or class plays a major role in dividing America against itself.
With The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer uncovers an oft-overlooked piece of the puzzle: rural political consciousness and the resentment of the "liberal elite". Rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct values of their communities and allocate a fair share of resources. What can look like disagreements about basic political principles are therefore actually rooted in something even more fundamental: who we are as people and how closely a candidate's social identity matches our own. Using Scott Walker and Wisconsin's prominent and protracted debate about the appropriate role of government, Cramer illuminates the contours of rural consciousness, showing how place-based identities profoundly influence how people understand politics, regardless of whether urban politicians and their supporters really do shortchange or look down on those living in the country. The Politics of Resentment shows that rural resentment no less than partisanship, race, or class plays a major role in dividing America against itself.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 23, 2016
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September 8, 2018
The subtitle of this academic study is “Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin & the Rise of Scott Walker.” Katherine Cramer visited rural groups in extra-urban parts of Wisconsin for five years to see how people perceived the government in Madison and if it was serving their needs.
What she uncovered is a vast resentment of country folk towards their urban counterparts: rural dwellers believed their tax dollars were siphoned off to pay for government employees in the cities who in turn created regulations which strangled enjoyment of country life, e.g., fishing and hunting, among other things.
Cramer warns those of us whose opinions differ not to consider rural inhabitants ignorant, but to consider they have perceptions upon which their opinions are formed and these perceptions are formed as a result of their rural residency. I am tempted to apply the very strictures several of her interviewees use throughout her period of study: if I believe it, true or not, doesn’t that make it valid?
I thought country people were to be admired for their down-home values and common sense. If you could only get a copy of this book to read one of the final sets of reactions to the recall vote of Walker in 2012 which Cramer painfully transcribed, starting about page 196, it is the short course to understanding the rest of the book.
This was a difficult book for me to read because it was so infuriating. The country folk she spoke with met in small groups, one of which was a group of businessmen who met every day in the middle of the morning for a game of dice--'just for an hour or so,' they defended it.
I’m sorry, but anyone who then tells me that they do not consider other people know the meaning of hard work sounds positively ludicrous. I’m not here to judge them, and couldn’t care less what they do with the most productive hours of the day, but they really shouldn’t be pointing any fingers.
It turns out from my reading of these “meetings” is that people sit around and voluably winge for an hour or so, complaining about this and that, what they don’t have and what they wish they did have. Taxes come in for a large percentage of the discussion points and since I come from a state known for high taxes, Taxachusetts, I am wondering what on earth their property taxes could be that they so cramp their style, what with all that “hard work” they keep on about.
The groups internally trade inaccuracies and then promulgate them around town. It is terribly frustrating to hear them talk about how the government (Fish & Game) might come in and look in their freezers for all the fish they stocked there, proof of their illegal overfishing. No, I don’t understand, even after reading these fivve years of interviews, what these people want. They want less regulation they say, even saying they’d prefer drunk driving and pollution controls be rolled back.
I give Professor Cramer credit for being able to stick it out. She was prepared when the state went belly-up for old Scott Walker, enemy No. 1 of public employee unions. Some of the comments about how there were people being paid excessive overtime sounds much like what I read in the Boston Globe this week, with some public employees making hundreds of thousands of dollars in excessive overtime charges.
It happens. It doesn’t happen everywhere and it doesn’t happen all the time. (It happens, I might add, with people who think they are smart when they are not.) The crime has been exposed, the people will pay it back and then go to jail. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out the system we set up to ensure fairness. Cramer concludes her study with these ideas that sound remarkably familiar in today’s political commentary:
What she uncovered is a vast resentment of country folk towards their urban counterparts: rural dwellers believed their tax dollars were siphoned off to pay for government employees in the cities who in turn created regulations which strangled enjoyment of country life, e.g., fishing and hunting, among other things.
Cramer warns those of us whose opinions differ not to consider rural inhabitants ignorant, but to consider they have perceptions upon which their opinions are formed and these perceptions are formed as a result of their rural residency. I am tempted to apply the very strictures several of her interviewees use throughout her period of study: if I believe it, true or not, doesn’t that make it valid?
I thought country people were to be admired for their down-home values and common sense. If you could only get a copy of this book to read one of the final sets of reactions to the recall vote of Walker in 2012 which Cramer painfully transcribed, starting about page 196, it is the short course to understanding the rest of the book.
This was a difficult book for me to read because it was so infuriating. The country folk she spoke with met in small groups, one of which was a group of businessmen who met every day in the middle of the morning for a game of dice--'just for an hour or so,' they defended it.
I’m sorry, but anyone who then tells me that they do not consider other people know the meaning of hard work sounds positively ludicrous. I’m not here to judge them, and couldn’t care less what they do with the most productive hours of the day, but they really shouldn’t be pointing any fingers.
It turns out from my reading of these “meetings” is that people sit around and voluably winge for an hour or so, complaining about this and that, what they don’t have and what they wish they did have. Taxes come in for a large percentage of the discussion points and since I come from a state known for high taxes, Taxachusetts, I am wondering what on earth their property taxes could be that they so cramp their style, what with all that “hard work” they keep on about.
The groups internally trade inaccuracies and then promulgate them around town. It is terribly frustrating to hear them talk about how the government (Fish & Game) might come in and look in their freezers for all the fish they stocked there, proof of their illegal overfishing. No, I don’t understand, even after reading these fivve years of interviews, what these people want. They want less regulation they say, even saying they’d prefer drunk driving and pollution controls be rolled back.
I give Professor Cramer credit for being able to stick it out. She was prepared when the state went belly-up for old Scott Walker, enemy No. 1 of public employee unions. Some of the comments about how there were people being paid excessive overtime sounds much like what I read in the Boston Globe this week, with some public employees making hundreds of thousands of dollars in excessive overtime charges.
It happens. It doesn’t happen everywhere and it doesn’t happen all the time. (It happens, I might add, with people who think they are smart when they are not.) The crime has been exposed, the people will pay it back and then go to jail. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out the system we set up to ensure fairness. Cramer concludes her study with these ideas that sound remarkably familiar in today’s political commentary:
“One can view as misinformation or ignorance the perceptions among rural folks that they are victims of distributive injustice, but the conclusion that people vote the way they do because they are stupid is itself pretty shallow. It overlooks that much of political understanding is not about facts; it is about how we see those facts.”Indeed. Well, these folks may not be stupid, but they are sure acting like it. Rural consciousness indeed. If you don’t go looking for the truth, you may not stumble upon it.
June 30, 2021
I took me all of 3.5 seconds to realize Ms. Cramer and I approach the world from very different political positions and that I'd probably disagree with every single conclusion she reaches in this book.
But I'm a Wisconsin girl. And Ms. Cramer is a Wisconsin girl. And I thought...maybe if I can get over my natural prejudices, I will learn something. Maybe our shared love of Wisconsin will give us enough commonality to actually talk about the issues besetting our state and not just insult one another.
Yeah, nope, that didn't happen.
In fairness, I'm probably not the intended audience of this book. Despite the fact that I spent 3 years in Madison attending law school and grew up outside Milwaukee, I'm not a progressive, UW Madison professor. And she unabashedly addresses this book to the type of readers who think northern Wisconsin is full of...let's see, what does another review of this book call them? "uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins."
In fairness to that guy's review, though, it isn't like this book is going to change your mind. If anything, if you go in knowing nothing about rural Wisconsinites, you will walk away thinking they are all uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins. You'll just probably tag on there: "uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins...who lack the education to know better and are too bitter to train otherwise."
I admire Ms. Cramer for getting out of her comfort zone and meeting people who not only disagree with her, but vocally speak against everything she stands for. That takes guts. But what I find frustrating is her desire to wrap up her book in this veneer of objectivity. She's not objective. I suppose none of us are at the end of the day. But she's truly at the peak of the controversy. Act 10 impacted her. She consistently highlights how fish-out-of-water she felt with her clothes, her car, her gender.
In fact, she consistently emphasizes her own perceptions, experiences, emotions. And that's fine. Call this a memoir. But don't look on this as some scholarly breakthrough. It isn't. Her very shock that people living outside of Madison and Milwaukee despise Madison and Milwaukee demonstrate how out of touch she is with rural life. Yes, she tried to overcome it through interviews and writing this book. But her portrayal of rural Wisconsinites as bitter, racist old white men means she misses so much.
But hey! At least we can all agree Charlie Berens is great.
But I'm a Wisconsin girl. And Ms. Cramer is a Wisconsin girl. And I thought...maybe if I can get over my natural prejudices, I will learn something. Maybe our shared love of Wisconsin will give us enough commonality to actually talk about the issues besetting our state and not just insult one another.
Yeah, nope, that didn't happen.
In fairness, I'm probably not the intended audience of this book. Despite the fact that I spent 3 years in Madison attending law school and grew up outside Milwaukee, I'm not a progressive, UW Madison professor. And she unabashedly addresses this book to the type of readers who think northern Wisconsin is full of...let's see, what does another review of this book call them? "uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins."
In fairness to that guy's review, though, it isn't like this book is going to change your mind. If anything, if you go in knowing nothing about rural Wisconsinites, you will walk away thinking they are all uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins. You'll just probably tag on there: "uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins...who lack the education to know better and are too bitter to train otherwise."
I admire Ms. Cramer for getting out of her comfort zone and meeting people who not only disagree with her, but vocally speak against everything she stands for. That takes guts. But what I find frustrating is her desire to wrap up her book in this veneer of objectivity. She's not objective. I suppose none of us are at the end of the day. But she's truly at the peak of the controversy. Act 10 impacted her. She consistently highlights how fish-out-of-water she felt with her clothes, her car, her gender.
In fact, she consistently emphasizes her own perceptions, experiences, emotions. And that's fine. Call this a memoir. But don't look on this as some scholarly breakthrough. It isn't. Her very shock that people living outside of Madison and Milwaukee despise Madison and Milwaukee demonstrate how out of touch she is with rural life. Yes, she tried to overcome it through interviews and writing this book. But her portrayal of rural Wisconsinites as bitter, racist old white men means she misses so much.
But hey! At least we can all agree Charlie Berens is great.
November 10, 2016
Hard to read really - I skimmed some of it and dipped into it in several places. Seemed to make the same points over and over about how white people, mainly lower middle class and of middling educational accomplishment, who live in rural communities across Wisconsin, are resentful of public employees, immigrants, minorities and people who live in cities - all of whom are believed to get more than their fair share of public resources, to have more of a voice in politics and government, and to be mostly lazy and undeserving They believe this stuff even though rural people get more government resources in terms of per capita spending than do their much despised fellow citizens in the cities.
So, basically, these uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins, and their rural myths and biases, are the heart and soul of this entire book. The book provides lots of direct quotations in extended conversations, recorded in has stations and diners and coffee shops across the state over a period of a year or so. After last night's election experience, I can't bear to read any more of the book. I am sure these white Wisconsinites are lovely people in many ways. But they are holding back America and for the next four years we will pay the price for their misinformed and prejudiced views, and their reckless and destructive political influence. So I will be looking for something else to read.
So, basically, these uninformed and prejudiced bumpkins, and their rural myths and biases, are the heart and soul of this entire book. The book provides lots of direct quotations in extended conversations, recorded in has stations and diners and coffee shops across the state over a period of a year or so. After last night's election experience, I can't bear to read any more of the book. I am sure these white Wisconsinites are lovely people in many ways. But they are holding back America and for the next four years we will pay the price for their misinformed and prejudiced views, and their reckless and destructive political influence. So I will be looking for something else to read.
June 15, 2017
As a lifelong Wisconsinite and 11-year Madisonian, I suppose I am in the prime market for this book about the way our state's rural-urban divide has played out on the political stage. While I grew up in what was generally considered a small town, it was nevertheless a town of just over 10,000 people less than an hour away from Madison; which is to say, I grew up with little to no idea of what life was like for those in the northern third of WI. I still don't and that was partly why I picked up this book. Cramer's methodology is fascinating, and as a fellow introvert I am extremely admiring of her willingness to insert herself into strangers' conversations.
It's a very worthwhile read, though somewhat repetitive at times. Which could be considered a sign of the pervasiveness of "rural consciousness" basically everywhere outside of M&M (Madison and Milwaukee): a lot of people had the same opinion, basically boiled down to "the government in Madison doesn't listen to or care about our needs as rural people, and they're lazy weirdos to boot". Whether that's factually accurate or not is sort of beside the point, since that rural consciousness so strongly influences the way these citizens vote, and it is literally how they make sense of the world.
Cramer's prescription is to demand better of our elected officials, which would be great if more people were willing to be that engaged with their government, but I am fairly cynical on that front. I do not see the rural-urban divide in Wisconsin going away anytime soon, but perhaps if we start listening more, as Cramer did, we can come to a better understanding of why it exists and how it might be mitigated in the future.
It's a very worthwhile read, though somewhat repetitive at times. Which could be considered a sign of the pervasiveness of "rural consciousness" basically everywhere outside of M&M (Madison and Milwaukee): a lot of people had the same opinion, basically boiled down to "the government in Madison doesn't listen to or care about our needs as rural people, and they're lazy weirdos to boot". Whether that's factually accurate or not is sort of beside the point, since that rural consciousness so strongly influences the way these citizens vote, and it is literally how they make sense of the world.
Cramer's prescription is to demand better of our elected officials, which would be great if more people were willing to be that engaged with their government, but I am fairly cynical on that front. I do not see the rural-urban divide in Wisconsin going away anytime soon, but perhaps if we start listening more, as Cramer did, we can come to a better understanding of why it exists and how it might be mitigated in the future.
August 18, 2016
Easy five star. She did an excellent job with the research and in relaying it in digestible bites. I love how she breaks up the narrative with actual conversation.
It was insightful to me as someone who is a native Wisconsinite and passionate about politics. I consider myself as having grown up in rural Wisconsin, but Cramer shows that people who live in the northern third of the state really consider that different from, say, my hometown of Lodi (population: 2,800 25 minutes north of Madison).
I read this alongside Joel Rogers book, Why The White Working Class Matters as well as Scott's book Seeing Like a State. Both helped me understand what's going on in Wisconsin and rural America and provided a sort of synergy to Cramer's work.
Excellent read.
It was insightful to me as someone who is a native Wisconsinite and passionate about politics. I consider myself as having grown up in rural Wisconsin, but Cramer shows that people who live in the northern third of the state really consider that different from, say, my hometown of Lodi (population: 2,800 25 minutes north of Madison).
I read this alongside Joel Rogers book, Why The White Working Class Matters as well as Scott's book Seeing Like a State. Both helped me understand what's going on in Wisconsin and rural America and provided a sort of synergy to Cramer's work.
Excellent read.
December 23, 2024
“If the main divide that people see in the political world is not Democrats versus Republicans but, instead, us versus the government, or people with my work ethic versus people without it, shouldn’t we spend more time measuring identities that are more meaningful to people than partisanship?”
Honestly I started this book two years ago, wasn’t feeling it, and just picked it up again as I was unpacking. Great way for me to learn more about what happened with Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and very relevant to current national politics.
I like how Cramer puts forth the raw data (conversation excerpts) for readers to process on their own before pointing at her own conclusions. The conclusions feel obvious, yet must not be in many ways given the strengthening politic divide in Wisconsin and the nation over the past decade. Some reviews of this book are weird and say that Cramer depicts rural Wisconsinites as uneducated bumpkins which is not at all what I saw happening. Also people are like “it’s not an easy read” — that’s true, an ethnographic political science book isn’t exactly intended to be an easy read. Yet, it is well written.
Honestly I started this book two years ago, wasn’t feeling it, and just picked it up again as I was unpacking. Great way for me to learn more about what happened with Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and very relevant to current national politics.
I like how Cramer puts forth the raw data (conversation excerpts) for readers to process on their own before pointing at her own conclusions. The conclusions feel obvious, yet must not be in many ways given the strengthening politic divide in Wisconsin and the nation over the past decade. Some reviews of this book are weird and say that Cramer depicts rural Wisconsinites as uneducated bumpkins which is not at all what I saw happening. Also people are like “it’s not an easy read” — that’s true, an ethnographic political science book isn’t exactly intended to be an easy read. Yet, it is well written.
July 10, 2017
Report of very interesting research into how people make political decisions. However to say this book (similar to 'Hillbilly Elegy') "explains Trump" (which the author herself does _not_say_) is a gross over-interpretation.
The research was begun in the early 2000s and continued for quite a few years. As a result, the timing was perfect to analyze the rise and attempted recall of Scott Walker. And as the book was not only timed right but also thoroughly presents an unfamiliar viewpoint, it's often referenced to "explain Trump", even though that wasn't at all the thrust or intention of the research.
A goal of the research was to figure out "how people reach the conclusions they do?" ...Not whether or not those conclusions are in some sense 'true', nor whether or not people have been 'hoodwinked', but simply "what frame do they use to make sense of their political world?" The book's answer is there is a "rural consciousness", it's at the core of a class identity, and it provides the ready-made frame for thought that leads to conclusions that are quite "reasonable" in that frame but often make little sense in some other frame for thought.
Some conclusions from the book: Voting is more about "identity" than anything else, and other factors like economics and racism are filtered through that identity. Voting is based on very persistent _perceptions_, which aren't necessarily factually true. Some citizens feel thoroughly removed from 'urban culture' or 'globalization' or 'modern times' or whatever, so much so they continue to feel thoroughly misunderstood and ignored and outright "dissed"; and no current effort comes anywhere even remotely close to bridging that cultural divide. And emphasized most strongly by the author: Choosing a direction is _not_ideological_: for example support for Walker's "small government" direction comes not from any inherent or theoretical preference (in her own exact words: "I am going to make the bold claim that support for small government is more about identity than principle."), but simply from the following reasoning chain- this town is about to dry up and blow away, government is not solving the problem (in fact government is making it even worse by taking tax dollars), so government doesn't work, so get rid of it. (Whether or not this is actually true [the case is at best dubious] is irrelevant. That it's _perceived_ to be true is what matters.)
The book breaks significant new methodological ground ...positively. While privately keeping copious notes and records, and using statistical tools fairly heavily, the researcher emphasized actually talking to people, not relying on "scientific" surveys. And perhaps most notable, the researcher was not afraid to actually change her test hypothesis mid-research - conventionally thought to be an experimental no-no, but in fact one that makes a lot of sense where a single research project can occupy a decade of the researcher's life. The fact the book presents some results that are actually useful -while still being academically rigorous- suggests the large methodological shift is a good idea.
It's interesting both that the methodology required the researcher to actually listen face to face, and that a large segment of the population felt ignored (and misunderstood). In many cases, citizens of retirement age reported this was the first time ever anyone from the "big city" had actually listened to them. I find that a damning indictment.
The biggest reason I say this book "doesn't explain Trump" but rather is only one piece of the puzzle, is the slippery definitions of 'urban' and 'rural'. Looked at one way, about half the population of Wisconsin lives outside the 14 counties that form the major metro area, making a neat urban/rural split. But looked at another way, only about 1/5 of the population lives in the major cities (Madison and Milwaukee) and less than 1/10 of the population lives in truly small towns. That leaves an awful lot in the middle (small cities? suburbs/exurbs? recent transplants? citizens having it both ways?). Even though the big cities were almost universally anti-Walker, he won the recall election anyway, and the small town vote alone certainly wasn't anywhere near large enough to have given him that victory.
Also Wisconsin is somewhat unique. It includes a very large area (half the state!) with almost absurdly low economic activity. And it has one department (DNR) that seems to have lost all connection with the citizenry (despite its significant efforts to connect). One common complaint that in my experience is _not_ unique is that money isn't worth the same everywhere. What's "pocket change" to an urban person is a "vacation weekend" to a rural person. And as urban citizens purchase vacation properties in rural areas, they drive prices so high the local residents can't compete. (This reminds me of complaints years ago that buyers from California made it virtually impossible for Oregonians and Washingtonians to buy waterfront property in their own backyard.) Another is that the patchwork of laws and rules and regulations don't fit together in any comprehensible way. The book reports citizens that have completely given up hunting or fishing because there were so many rules enforced so capriciously that being "picked up" was essentially random. Given the high penalties, some judged hunting and fishing simply not worth the risk. Yet another is that gross economic inequality is greatly exacerbating existing divisions (urban/rural in this case).
All in all a very interesting and important read ...but not -as is sometimes advertised- anywhere near the whole picture of an "explanation of Trump".
The research was begun in the early 2000s and continued for quite a few years. As a result, the timing was perfect to analyze the rise and attempted recall of Scott Walker. And as the book was not only timed right but also thoroughly presents an unfamiliar viewpoint, it's often referenced to "explain Trump", even though that wasn't at all the thrust or intention of the research.
A goal of the research was to figure out "how people reach the conclusions they do?" ...Not whether or not those conclusions are in some sense 'true', nor whether or not people have been 'hoodwinked', but simply "what frame do they use to make sense of their political world?" The book's answer is there is a "rural consciousness", it's at the core of a class identity, and it provides the ready-made frame for thought that leads to conclusions that are quite "reasonable" in that frame but often make little sense in some other frame for thought.
Some conclusions from the book: Voting is more about "identity" than anything else, and other factors like economics and racism are filtered through that identity. Voting is based on very persistent _perceptions_, which aren't necessarily factually true. Some citizens feel thoroughly removed from 'urban culture' or 'globalization' or 'modern times' or whatever, so much so they continue to feel thoroughly misunderstood and ignored and outright "dissed"; and no current effort comes anywhere even remotely close to bridging that cultural divide. And emphasized most strongly by the author: Choosing a direction is _not_ideological_: for example support for Walker's "small government" direction comes not from any inherent or theoretical preference (in her own exact words: "I am going to make the bold claim that support for small government is more about identity than principle."), but simply from the following reasoning chain- this town is about to dry up and blow away, government is not solving the problem (in fact government is making it even worse by taking tax dollars), so government doesn't work, so get rid of it. (Whether or not this is actually true [the case is at best dubious] is irrelevant. That it's _perceived_ to be true is what matters.)
The book breaks significant new methodological ground ...positively. While privately keeping copious notes and records, and using statistical tools fairly heavily, the researcher emphasized actually talking to people, not relying on "scientific" surveys. And perhaps most notable, the researcher was not afraid to actually change her test hypothesis mid-research - conventionally thought to be an experimental no-no, but in fact one that makes a lot of sense where a single research project can occupy a decade of the researcher's life. The fact the book presents some results that are actually useful -while still being academically rigorous- suggests the large methodological shift is a good idea.
It's interesting both that the methodology required the researcher to actually listen face to face, and that a large segment of the population felt ignored (and misunderstood). In many cases, citizens of retirement age reported this was the first time ever anyone from the "big city" had actually listened to them. I find that a damning indictment.
The biggest reason I say this book "doesn't explain Trump" but rather is only one piece of the puzzle, is the slippery definitions of 'urban' and 'rural'. Looked at one way, about half the population of Wisconsin lives outside the 14 counties that form the major metro area, making a neat urban/rural split. But looked at another way, only about 1/5 of the population lives in the major cities (Madison and Milwaukee) and less than 1/10 of the population lives in truly small towns. That leaves an awful lot in the middle (small cities? suburbs/exurbs? recent transplants? citizens having it both ways?). Even though the big cities were almost universally anti-Walker, he won the recall election anyway, and the small town vote alone certainly wasn't anywhere near large enough to have given him that victory.
Also Wisconsin is somewhat unique. It includes a very large area (half the state!) with almost absurdly low economic activity. And it has one department (DNR) that seems to have lost all connection with the citizenry (despite its significant efforts to connect). One common complaint that in my experience is _not_ unique is that money isn't worth the same everywhere. What's "pocket change" to an urban person is a "vacation weekend" to a rural person. And as urban citizens purchase vacation properties in rural areas, they drive prices so high the local residents can't compete. (This reminds me of complaints years ago that buyers from California made it virtually impossible for Oregonians and Washingtonians to buy waterfront property in their own backyard.) Another is that the patchwork of laws and rules and regulations don't fit together in any comprehensible way. The book reports citizens that have completely given up hunting or fishing because there were so many rules enforced so capriciously that being "picked up" was essentially random. Given the high penalties, some judged hunting and fishing simply not worth the risk. Yet another is that gross economic inequality is greatly exacerbating existing divisions (urban/rural in this case).
All in all a very interesting and important read ...but not -as is sometimes advertised- anywhere near the whole picture of an "explanation of Trump".
March 3, 2017
The third and final book in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy, the Politics of Resentment joins Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in their Own Land as explorations of the Trump voter's sociology. Whereas the latter two look at Kentucky/Ohio and Louisiana, Resentment looks at Wisconsin. I read it with a very particular question: why did the Blue Wall fail?
Two big ideas stand out to me, the first is the main theme that Cramer has: rural consciousness is a valuable, important thing. People who don't live in cities are aware of that fact immensely, and they see it in a multitude of ways. 1. They see cities as being less hardworking, as they do less physical labor. 2. They see cities as being bastions of government employees. 3. They see cities as being overpaid and less deserving. 4. They (tacitly) see cities as less white. 5. They see cities as less "cohesive" or community-centered (neighbors do not know each other).
These five ways of seeing cities (and the five inverse ways of seeing themselves) interlock and feedback on one another. They bind together to create what I would call an "adjacent class"- a class of people who are every bit struggling as the poor in cities and facing the same enemies, but because of Place see themselves as moral opposites.
What you notice when you read Vance and Hochschild (and now Cramer) is that the would-be Trump voters have a split-relationship with "The State". They live in a way that they both desperately need help from the state, but at the same time are condemned and oppressed by it. Vance describes how the child protection services that ought to protect him bred fear and distrust in his family. Hoschschild describes poor chemical plant workers who, on one hand, need the government to step in and protect their environment, but by doing so would destroy some of those jobs that they hope to enjoy. Cramer describes a similar paradox: the rural people of Wisconsin need the Department of Natural Resources to protect the game and fish from overexploitation, but they themselves resist its protection and chafe under things like licensing and fees. At the same time, both the Wisconsinian and Louisianian states allow large corporations to get away scot free.
Who else deals with a state that is at once absent and oppressive? Who else deals with a state that both fails to enforce and uses too much force? The black American. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement with an easily explainable, readily apparent problem. Anybody who is compassionate, sane and statistically literate knows that there is something wrong, something dystopian that needs to be fixed.
But the problems outlined in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy are subtle. They're not microaggressions aggregating over somebody's lifetime, they're nanoaggressions aggregating over an entire town, an entire region's lifetime. Ultimately, what I think they come down to is a failure in governance:
There are well-governed, and unwell-governed, parts of the country. In the US, when I go to the suburbs or the gentrified areas of New York or DC, I am fairly close to well-governed areas. The cops are quick, the firefighters are a few moments away. The worse part of my interactions with the government is usually the DMV. The best parts of my interactions with the government are when I go to the national Disneyland that is our national parks.
The farther you get away from economic centers the less resources are that marshalled for you. When you have a history of racist oppression, black neighborhoods are first to be ignored- but so are regions that have simply always been poor, or, worse, getting poorer. The capacity of the state begins to weaken in those regions, breeding resentment. Those economic centers -the segregated suburbs- can thereby use this resentment. They can elect anti-redistributive leaders who stop the outflow of resources to the poorer regions even more and create private enclaves like those described by Naomi Klein in the Shock Doctrine. These anti-redistributive leaders thereby make the poor complicit in their own destruction.
So, why did the Blue Wall fail? The failure of Democrats within states, and the failure of national Democrats and the federal government to deter the rusting of the Rust Belt seems to be the primary reason. The rusting itself creates a feedback effect where local governments fail to govern, and then states fail to govern, and then those who /promise/ they will not govern, themselves begin to govern and increase the rate of failure. The federal government, state government, and civic society are, throughout this process, more and more of a target of resentment.
And then a city-dweller... a lawyer... an old, frail lady... ignores you completely, exactly as you expected.
Two big ideas stand out to me, the first is the main theme that Cramer has: rural consciousness is a valuable, important thing. People who don't live in cities are aware of that fact immensely, and they see it in a multitude of ways. 1. They see cities as being less hardworking, as they do less physical labor. 2. They see cities as being bastions of government employees. 3. They see cities as being overpaid and less deserving. 4. They (tacitly) see cities as less white. 5. They see cities as less "cohesive" or community-centered (neighbors do not know each other).
These five ways of seeing cities (and the five inverse ways of seeing themselves) interlock and feedback on one another. They bind together to create what I would call an "adjacent class"- a class of people who are every bit struggling as the poor in cities and facing the same enemies, but because of Place see themselves as moral opposites.
What you notice when you read Vance and Hochschild (and now Cramer) is that the would-be Trump voters have a split-relationship with "The State". They live in a way that they both desperately need help from the state, but at the same time are condemned and oppressed by it. Vance describes how the child protection services that ought to protect him bred fear and distrust in his family. Hoschschild describes poor chemical plant workers who, on one hand, need the government to step in and protect their environment, but by doing so would destroy some of those jobs that they hope to enjoy. Cramer describes a similar paradox: the rural people of Wisconsin need the Department of Natural Resources to protect the game and fish from overexploitation, but they themselves resist its protection and chafe under things like licensing and fees. At the same time, both the Wisconsinian and Louisianian states allow large corporations to get away scot free.
Who else deals with a state that is at once absent and oppressive? Who else deals with a state that both fails to enforce and uses too much force? The black American. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement with an easily explainable, readily apparent problem. Anybody who is compassionate, sane and statistically literate knows that there is something wrong, something dystopian that needs to be fixed.
But the problems outlined in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy are subtle. They're not microaggressions aggregating over somebody's lifetime, they're nanoaggressions aggregating over an entire town, an entire region's lifetime. Ultimately, what I think they come down to is a failure in governance:
There are well-governed, and unwell-governed, parts of the country. In the US, when I go to the suburbs or the gentrified areas of New York or DC, I am fairly close to well-governed areas. The cops are quick, the firefighters are a few moments away. The worse part of my interactions with the government is usually the DMV. The best parts of my interactions with the government are when I go to the national Disneyland that is our national parks.
The farther you get away from economic centers the less resources are that marshalled for you. When you have a history of racist oppression, black neighborhoods are first to be ignored- but so are regions that have simply always been poor, or, worse, getting poorer. The capacity of the state begins to weaken in those regions, breeding resentment. Those economic centers -the segregated suburbs- can thereby use this resentment. They can elect anti-redistributive leaders who stop the outflow of resources to the poorer regions even more and create private enclaves like those described by Naomi Klein in the Shock Doctrine. These anti-redistributive leaders thereby make the poor complicit in their own destruction.
So, why did the Blue Wall fail? The failure of Democrats within states, and the failure of national Democrats and the federal government to deter the rusting of the Rust Belt seems to be the primary reason. The rusting itself creates a feedback effect where local governments fail to govern, and then states fail to govern, and then those who /promise/ they will not govern, themselves begin to govern and increase the rate of failure. The federal government, state government, and civic society are, throughout this process, more and more of a target of resentment.
And then a city-dweller... a lawyer... an old, frail lady... ignores you completely, exactly as you expected.
June 24, 2016
This author lucked out covering this topic at such a pivotal moment in Wisconsin politics. It's too easy for a liberal-minded person such as myself to make assumptions about those who choose to support Scott Walker and the current Republican dominance. This book challenged many of my assumptions and helped me understand perspectives I normally might dismiss as irrational or illogical. I only wish the author had discussed the role of media (e.g. talk radio) in shaping the consciousness of many in the state. Perhaps a topic for another book.
July 15, 2021
A 4.5 for the spirit and labor that animated this book, but a 3.5 for the argument. Cramer went around rural Wisconsin interviewing small coffee groups and other little informal groups about their views on politics, the economy, etc. This was clearly a ton of work, and she gives an interesting explanation of her methodology, which I would call a form of political ethnography but she describes more as qualitative polling. I certainly agree with her critique of the "positivist" faux-scientific method of much of political science. Just because you narrow down through regression analysis, for example, that small-town whites over 60 living on fixed incomes are the most likely group to vote for Scott Walker doesn't mean you really understand why. That takes the kind of face-to-face research Cramer did. Moreover, she is clearly worried (and rightfully so) about the growing resentment and polarization not just in our politics but among Americans themselves, even in "nice" Wisconsin. Her non-condescending, open, and listening-centered attitude and methods are a crucial bridge between regions and political cultures, and I'ld like to see more of that spirit in academia and the larger society.
The two key terms for understanding this argument are rural consciousness and politics of resentment. The first term was more useful and original, as it's a way of recasting the way we think about politics. Rural consciousness refers to an identity (others might call this a moral geography) in which one sees oneself defined by a place more than an ideology, and that place is defined as hard-working, humble, and also ignored and oppressed. The bad guy in this mindset is the state government and the city folk in MIlwaukee and Madison, who A. don't work hard compared to rural folk. B. Don't understand rural lifestyles/values and are condescending C. Control state government and funnel money out of the rural areas. Cramer argues convincingly that these folks aren't really conservative (at least on the economic liberal v conservative axis) in the sense that they have a principled opposition to big gov't. Instead, they believe that big gov't overlooks people like them and serves the undeserving; that's why they want it cut: because of their rural consciousness/identity, not because of political ideology. This thesis may have its limits, but it is interesting to think of politics in this more grounded, local way, and Cramer's research is very innovative in this respect.
Cramer argues that this rural consciousness has been harvested effectively by Republicans like Scott Walker, who claimed to champion the ignored rural areas and to war on unions and public employees (two despised targets among rural folk) as soon as he took office. In the politics of resentment, you vote based less on your own interests and more on a desire to see the other side taken down a peg and to kind of scream out your anger. This seems to me to be negative partisanship just given a new name, but Cramer shows it operating in Wisconsin quite clearly.
Listening to these rural folks in their coffee klatches and such, I can't help but feel like there's a lot of BS going on. Cramer, for instance, shows that their political worldviews are based on untrue claims. No, rural areas do not give more in taxes than they receive in benefits; the opposite is true. Moreover, they are not underrepresented in the State House. If anything, rural areas have been fetishized on the right as the "real America" and the "forgotten America" and received disproportional deference.
Now fo a little criticism: there's a fine line between objectivity and deference, and I think sometimes Cramer lets her sympathy for these folks tip into deference that obscures their motives and beliefs. The most prominent example of this is race. These are overwhelmingly white areas, and we all know that "urban" and "inner-city" are code for black people and other minorities. Cramer argues that racist comments did come up much and that when rural people talked of city people they resented it was really politicians and public employees (also a gender aspect to that latter point, btw). However, I think that absence was largely because A. people aren't going to just volunteer racist-type comments to a UW-Madison professor and B. Cramer didn't seem to be asking much about race. When you look at rural WIsconsinites voting behavior, especially in light of Donald Trump, it seems that racist and nativist appeals are hugely appealing to them or that they don't see his behavior as racist, which is in and of itself a problem. Cramer acknowledges some racial resentment on the part of her subjects, but she also seems really hesitant to explore race more thoroughly.
A political scientist I work with often says "Pay more attention to what people are doing, not what people are saying." The flaw in Cramer's methodology is that it lets people whose behavior suggests strong racial resentment presents themselves in a favorable light; in other words, they get to control the results of the study, to an extent. Her methods are interesting as part of the puzzle, but they need to be combined more systematically with historical analysis. For example, we know the GOP has long accused Democrats of harvesting the votes of blacks and public employees through generous gov't benefits (the new plantation critique), so resentment in small towns against public employees is in many cases connected to race. Moreover, Cramer posits rural consciousness as a sort of ideal type, but this is a static and synchronic mode of analysis. Shifting contexts make rural consciousness and hte people who have it look and behave very differently (just think about how differently these people look in light of the rural embrace of Trump, who clearly violates their self-professed commitment to civility and "niceness) as contexts shift. So in sum, this is a worthwhile book with important limits.
The two key terms for understanding this argument are rural consciousness and politics of resentment. The first term was more useful and original, as it's a way of recasting the way we think about politics. Rural consciousness refers to an identity (others might call this a moral geography) in which one sees oneself defined by a place more than an ideology, and that place is defined as hard-working, humble, and also ignored and oppressed. The bad guy in this mindset is the state government and the city folk in MIlwaukee and Madison, who A. don't work hard compared to rural folk. B. Don't understand rural lifestyles/values and are condescending C. Control state government and funnel money out of the rural areas. Cramer argues convincingly that these folks aren't really conservative (at least on the economic liberal v conservative axis) in the sense that they have a principled opposition to big gov't. Instead, they believe that big gov't overlooks people like them and serves the undeserving; that's why they want it cut: because of their rural consciousness/identity, not because of political ideology. This thesis may have its limits, but it is interesting to think of politics in this more grounded, local way, and Cramer's research is very innovative in this respect.
Cramer argues that this rural consciousness has been harvested effectively by Republicans like Scott Walker, who claimed to champion the ignored rural areas and to war on unions and public employees (two despised targets among rural folk) as soon as he took office. In the politics of resentment, you vote based less on your own interests and more on a desire to see the other side taken down a peg and to kind of scream out your anger. This seems to me to be negative partisanship just given a new name, but Cramer shows it operating in Wisconsin quite clearly.
Listening to these rural folks in their coffee klatches and such, I can't help but feel like there's a lot of BS going on. Cramer, for instance, shows that their political worldviews are based on untrue claims. No, rural areas do not give more in taxes than they receive in benefits; the opposite is true. Moreover, they are not underrepresented in the State House. If anything, rural areas have been fetishized on the right as the "real America" and the "forgotten America" and received disproportional deference.
Now fo a little criticism: there's a fine line between objectivity and deference, and I think sometimes Cramer lets her sympathy for these folks tip into deference that obscures their motives and beliefs. The most prominent example of this is race. These are overwhelmingly white areas, and we all know that "urban" and "inner-city" are code for black people and other minorities. Cramer argues that racist comments did come up much and that when rural people talked of city people they resented it was really politicians and public employees (also a gender aspect to that latter point, btw). However, I think that absence was largely because A. people aren't going to just volunteer racist-type comments to a UW-Madison professor and B. Cramer didn't seem to be asking much about race. When you look at rural WIsconsinites voting behavior, especially in light of Donald Trump, it seems that racist and nativist appeals are hugely appealing to them or that they don't see his behavior as racist, which is in and of itself a problem. Cramer acknowledges some racial resentment on the part of her subjects, but she also seems really hesitant to explore race more thoroughly.
A political scientist I work with often says "Pay more attention to what people are doing, not what people are saying." The flaw in Cramer's methodology is that it lets people whose behavior suggests strong racial resentment presents themselves in a favorable light; in other words, they get to control the results of the study, to an extent. Her methods are interesting as part of the puzzle, but they need to be combined more systematically with historical analysis. For example, we know the GOP has long accused Democrats of harvesting the votes of blacks and public employees through generous gov't benefits (the new plantation critique), so resentment in small towns against public employees is in many cases connected to race. Moreover, Cramer posits rural consciousness as a sort of ideal type, but this is a static and synchronic mode of analysis. Shifting contexts make rural consciousness and hte people who have it look and behave very differently (just think about how differently these people look in light of the rural embrace of Trump, who clearly violates their self-professed commitment to civility and "niceness) as contexts shift. So in sum, this is a worthwhile book with important limits.
November 15, 2017
In the past few years, a variety of liberal academics have adopted a "Gorillas in the Mist" sensibility when trying to understand conservatives. Like Dian Fossey, they creep, wearing a ghillie suit, through thick and steamy jungles alien to them, hoping to grasp what it is that makes these creatures tick. Sometimes they become fond of these primates, and in their own clumsy way, try to improve their lives by protecting them from threats they appear too dumb to see. Like Fossey, most of them are obsessives with tunnel vision, bound in chains by premises invisible to them. Katherine Cramer, author of "The Politics of Resentment," fits right into this model, even if Wisconsin is a long way from Rwanda, and a lot colder. She offers us a book that is half morality play, half sociology study, and all clueless.
As the subtitle says, the focus of this book is “Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” For a certain type of liberal, Scott Walker is Beelzebub, Prince of Lies, and the framing of this book by Walker’s actions shows that Cramer is that type of liberal. The reference to “consciousness” is another liberal tic. But the clearest telegraphing of Cramer’s obsessions comes from the title’s reference to “resentment,” the central theme of the book, used like a dead fish to whack us repeatedly in the face. For liberals, opposition to liberal policies is never well-considered; it is always resentment, a sub-rational cluster of negative feelings flung wildly at the wrong targets, usually as a result of manipulation of the ignorant by the malignant Svengalis of Fox News. On the plus side, though, Cramer never uses the related French word “ressentiment,” so beloved of the incoherent post-modernist philosophers on whom most modern leftist ideology is based. For that, I will count my blessings, since when reading this book, they are few and far between.
This is an academic work, not a popular work, so some allowances should be made. Technical references to other academics are constant. Methodology is repeatedly discussed in detail. Stilted language and terminology abounds. On the other hand, Cramer is not totally lacking in self-reference. She is proudly aware she is a Madison-based liberal academic, driving out in her Volkswagen Jetta to other, mostly rural, areas of the state to strike up conversations with a broad range of people (around forty different small groups) to understand what makes them pick the berries they do—I mean, to understand what makes them think and vote the way they do. She notes her “shock” when Walker wins his recall election: “Living in Madison, support for Walker was invisible, and pretty much taboo.” (I wonder what Trump’s election was like in Madison? Fun for people like me, I suppose.) But she’s not that self-aware—she regularly beclowns herself with statements like “[Goldwater] gained support in that [1964] race by appealing to a coalition of McCarthyites (anticommunists). . . .” and that whenever Republicans “ran on an anti-New Deal platform, they were appealing to those opposed to integration.” On balance, she tries hard, but sometimes trying hard just isn’t enough to succeed.
Cramer’s core question, the reason why she traveled around the state conversing with different small groups, is one that seems to bedevil liberals, even though (or because) it is not a very intelligent question. It is “why do working class people oppose liberal policies, especially bigger government, when bigger government seems more likely to give them other people’s money?” Or, as Cramer phrases it, she wanted to “examine what it looks like when people who might benefit from more government instead prefer far less of it.” She rejects the idea that this is “a central debate about the appropriate role of government.” Instead, it is “something else: resentment toward our fellow citizens.” As becomes clear throughout the book, by “fellow citizens,” she means exclusively “government employees,” whose reputations she is determined to rescue from the mire into which their own actions have sunk themselves. In short, this is a paean to government workers and a song of sympathy for their underappreciation by rural bumpkins, structured around whining that government workers are hurt by irrational demands for smaller government.
Cramer begins her story with the brouhaha surrounding the new governor’s, Scott Walker’s, introduction of a budget bill (Act 10) in February, 2011, that among other effects, sharply limited collective bargaining with government employees other than police and firefighters, and “required all [government] employees to increase their payroll contributions for health and pension benefits (to a tune of a 10 percent cut to many of their paychecks).” Before we proceed further, it is beneficial to review some undisputed history and facts. Working backward, what Cramer does not tell us here, but what we can tease out of other parts of her book and some basic research, is that payroll contributions of government employees were made to increase because government employees had been receiving massive benefits, far higher than of those of private employees, on top of their already exceptionally large wages (as I parse below). So, “pay cut” is a propagandistic term, although in economic terms it is not entirely wrong. Nor does Cramer note that the “increase” required was for government workers to pay at least 12.6% of the actual costs of their health care benefits, when up to that time they had paid an average of 6%, as opposed to the 50% or more paid by most private sector employees. And Act 10 required them to pay 5.8% of their own pension benefits (again, not noted by Cramer) when almost all private sector employees get no pension at all other than what they save for themselves. The horror!
More generally, though, Cramer ignores the pernicious effects of the mere existence of unions for government employees. She celebrates repeatedly that Wisconsin, in 1959, was one of the first states to permit them. She does not tell us why they were not permitted before that, other than to make the curious claim that “There was a fear, or at least an argument, that collective bargaining for government workers would inhibit the provision of public services to citizens.” “As recently as 1936, [government] employees were referred to as ‘tax eaters.’ ” (In our house, you can make that date 2017.) The answer why they were always forbidden earlier is clear—because they are a public evil, and until public virtue declined, no legislator would countenance the damage to the republic that was certain to result, and did result. Unions of private sector employees involve bargaining between two parties, employee and employer, each of which has something to gain and something to lose, and each of which absorbs its own gains and losses. Unions of government employee involve bargaining between two parties, employees and elected officials, with the benefits accruing to both parties, and all the costs being handed to a third party—the employer, i.e., the taxpayer, who is given no voice at all in the negotiation of the terms of employment. Elected officials (almost always Democrats) get the support (via advertising and endorsements) and votes of the union leadership, and often the votes of the members (who in any case are forced via required union dues to financially contribute to the election of officials they may not personally vote for). Government employees receive pay, pension and health benefits vastly greater than private sector employees, which ratchet constantly upward as new politicians seek union support. The taxpayers, future taxpayers mostly, get the bill—hence, “tax eaters.” Among many other wicked effects, this is the main cause of the effective bankruptcy of, among other states, California and Illinois (but not Wisconsin, thanks to Scott Walker, though we’re getting ahead of ourselves).
Anyway, back to February 2011, and the first page of this book. Cramer celebrates that thousands of people illegally occupied the Wisconsin Capitol to protest Walker’s proposal. Most of them, of course, could do so because they were government employees who were given time off at taxpayer expense, or jobless people such as students or retirees. (As one of Cramer’s conversation partners accurately says, “Why were the private sector people showing up only on the weekend? That’s because if they’d called in sick to their employer they would have been fired.”) This was all an attempt to coerce the Legislature to obey the will of the shrillest. In an infamous corollary, “Two days later, fourteen Democrats in the state senate fled to Illinois, in an effort to block the bill.” Cramer does not note, of course, that this act was profoundly anti-democratic, although I suppose that’s obvious, nor does she seem at all critical of it. Neither does she note the numerous death threats to Walker and Republicans, and other bad behavior by the “protestors.” But the bill was ultimately passed, and had the effects Walker and his supporters desired.
What’s that you say, government employee? You say that government employees are paid less, showing they need the unions? Cramer disagrees with you, though she tries not to. She shows “distributions of incomes for [government] and private workers in low-income areas (where the average total income was under $30,000) and then also in higher-income areas (where the average exceeded $33,500). What we see here is that in both low- and high-income areas, for low and middle ranges of incomes, [government] workers are making more than private workers. In low-income areas, only among the very highest income percentiles are private workers earning more than [government] employees. But in high-income areas, the top 15 percent of private workers are making a great deal more than the top 15 percent of [government] workers.” Let me translate that. In every segment of workers except the top 16 or so percent of wage earners, government workers earn a higher wage. The only thing surprising about this is Cramer’s surprise—everybody knows that a small slice of private sector employees has very high income. Looking at Cramer’s graphs, it appears that at the 85th percentile, the average government worker’s income is about $75K, as is the average private worker’s; at the 90th percentile, $100K vs. $110K, and at the 98th percentile, $120K vs. $150K. Even at the high end, in other words, government workers make almost as much as the highest-paid private sector workers.
And although Cramer does not mention it, if you dig deep enough into the data on which she bases her conclusions, you find that although they do include pensions, they do not include health benefits—and as her conversation partners repeatedly complain, and Cramer does not dispute, government workers in Wisconsin receive enormous dollar values of health benefits. This analysis also ignores the almost total job security that government workers (not just tenured professors like Cramer) receive, making them essentially totally insulated from job performance requirements, an extremely valuable benefit no private sector worker has. And finally, leaving aside that much of the substantive work of many government employees is of negative social value, their productivity is much lower than that of private sector workers, so relative wage per unit of output is even higher. My conclusion, and the conclusion of those whom Cramer interviewed, is that government workers have it easy and need to have their power broken, and Scott Walker is awesome for doing so. The only unfortunate thing is that such actions are not nationwide, yet.
From this discussion of Walker’s successes (which occurred in the middle of her series of conversations; this book was published in 2016), Cramer turns to finding an answer to her core question through the prism of her conversations. She realized pretty quickly, when trying to answer her question, that it wasn’t, as liberals assumed, “that somehow the Republican Party has fooled people into not noticing that they are opposing the very kind of government programs that might help them out.” Rather, “In rural areas, there is a great deal of pride in the idea that ‘help’ is about letting people work hard enough so they can make it on their own. The sense I got from these conversations is that help, for many, is about providing jobs, not welfare.” While this is common sense and should not be a surprise to anyone, at least Cramer was able to grasp and admit that her preconceptions had been proved wrong. It is at least stumbling in the right direction. But let’s not go too far. When Cramer expresses dismay that during the Great Recession, “Many people in rural communities looked around and saw themselves in a place perpetually stuck in disadvantage, and they resented public employees who seemed to be protected from hardship, all because of the hard work of people like themselves in hard times,” she never considers whether this resentment is entirely rational because the perceptions are wholly accurate.
For Cramer’s purposes, in the rural areas which are her focus, all government workers are paid substantially more, on average, than private sector workers. And yet she wonder why it is that “public servants” are resented. At least she is able to admit that some sound possible basis for the resentment, such as when a man who has broken his health logging all his life cannot retire at seventy, since he has no pension, but notes that government workers can retire at fifty with a pension equal to 70% of income and generous health care benefits (on which no income tax has to be paid), including the ability to get many years of health care benefits for free by using accumulated sick leave pay. (It is not totally clear how accurate these claims are. Cramer does not dispute them, and she always seems to dispute claims with which she disagrees, but from the discussion around Act 10, it’s evident that there is some pay-in element to both pensions and health care for government workers. Glancing at the UW website, for example, it is true that the retirement age is 50, but only for police and firefighters; others are 55.)
Another common theme of Cramer’s conversations was that rural areas were not getting their “fair share”—that Madison and Milwaukee hogged the taxpayer dollars, especially for schools. As Cramer shows, this is not really true, although viewed from some angles it is at least partially true. Her interlocutors also complained about high gas prices (a more important issue to people who drive more, obviously), and, most importantly, that they lacked power and their concerns were ignored by the big city people who had the power. They don’t like relying on tourism, either, which is seasonal, unreliable, and degrading. None of this is surprising, but it’s interesting.
Cramer struggles with race. She finds a grand total of zero racism among any of her interlocutors (although some resentment against local American Indians). She notes that “resentment” she finds everywhere was “almost always directed at white people: government bureaucrats and faculty members at the flagship public university.” But she follows this with incoherent babbling, such as “At the same time, given the way arguments against redistribution in the United States have historically been made by equating deservingness with whiteness, these conversations are about race even when race is not mentioned.” Cramer would have been better served by just admitting that she couldn’t find any racism, again contrary to her preconceptions. But that might have been a bridge too far for the people paying her salary—not the taxpayers, of course, but her superiors at the University of Wisconsin, whom she constantly praises and toadies to, throughout the book.
Cramer also struggles with the idea that government workers could be anything but paragons of virtue. Her conversation partners often complain about specific actions by government workers, especially by the Department of Natural Resources. Cramer always defends the DNR. But when rural residents complain that researchers from the University of Wisconsin ignore rules against gas boat motors on a lake, and laugh at and humiliate residents who ask them to stop using the gas motors, Cramer falls all over herself to make sure nobody thinks she agrees with these rural ingrates: “I want to remind my readers, especially those of you who work at an institution of higher education that puts considerable efforts into serving the broader public, that these are perceptions. They are not necessarily accurate. Maybe the stories I just relayed were examples of miscommunication. I certainly encountered claims about UW-Madison activity that were false.” Excuse me while I vomit.
Similar, but more sophisticated and nuanced, questioning lies at the core of Joan Williams’s "White Working Class" and Arlie Hochschild’s "Strangers in Their Own Land." Williams’s answer is that we need advertising, celebrating the federal government, directed at the poor—in essence, educating the working class as to who their lordly benefactors are. However, she at least recognizes the importance of moral virtue to the working class, and the role it plays in distinguishing them, to themselves, from the poor—i.e., from the lazy recipients of government handouts (regardless of the accuracy of that stereotype). She also recognizes the resentment of the working class against the “professional-management elite,” who lack moral virtues and are perceived as not working hard, yet despise the working class. Hochschild, in a similar but distinct vein, claims that the answer is that “emotional self-interest," as in the belief that others are cutting in line ahead of them and attacking their dignity, often trumps “economic self-interest.” That's an unsophisticated understanding, but tends, again, towards a moral distinction.
Both Williams and Hochschild come much closer to the truth than Cramer, who mostly seems befuddled. None come as close as Jonathan Haidt, who directly addresses this question through the prism of morality—namely, he concludes that economic, or more broadly “rational,” interests are often or mostly trumped by morals, which are primarily innate and, for most people, are not at all like the morals of Cramer, or of Williams or Hochschild. Of the six moral foundations Haidt identifies, probably the one most relevant here is “fairness/cheating”—these “rural” people Cramer talks with think it’s immoral for the government to take by force from some just to give to others, because it’s unfair and cheating, even if the “others” are themselves. This is not a matter of rational calculation, as Haidt explains and Cramer totally fails to understand; it is pre-rational, although very much a form of cognition. The varied reasoning offered to Cramer when she tries to pin her interlocutors down on why they don’t want more government handouts, from a feeling it’ll still cost them, to a feeling government is too big, or too wasteful, or too stupid, are not necessarily wrong reasoning, but they are, for the most part, offered up by people who have already made the decision that too much government is immoral, and are trying to find rationales to explain their already existing conclusion. (Of course, as Haidt outlines, Cramer and people like her do as much, if not much more, such rationale-finding, what Haidt calls “reasoning-why” as opposed to the prior “seeing-what.”)
[Review finishes as first comment.]
As the subtitle says, the focus of this book is “Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” For a certain type of liberal, Scott Walker is Beelzebub, Prince of Lies, and the framing of this book by Walker’s actions shows that Cramer is that type of liberal. The reference to “consciousness” is another liberal tic. But the clearest telegraphing of Cramer’s obsessions comes from the title’s reference to “resentment,” the central theme of the book, used like a dead fish to whack us repeatedly in the face. For liberals, opposition to liberal policies is never well-considered; it is always resentment, a sub-rational cluster of negative feelings flung wildly at the wrong targets, usually as a result of manipulation of the ignorant by the malignant Svengalis of Fox News. On the plus side, though, Cramer never uses the related French word “ressentiment,” so beloved of the incoherent post-modernist philosophers on whom most modern leftist ideology is based. For that, I will count my blessings, since when reading this book, they are few and far between.
This is an academic work, not a popular work, so some allowances should be made. Technical references to other academics are constant. Methodology is repeatedly discussed in detail. Stilted language and terminology abounds. On the other hand, Cramer is not totally lacking in self-reference. She is proudly aware she is a Madison-based liberal academic, driving out in her Volkswagen Jetta to other, mostly rural, areas of the state to strike up conversations with a broad range of people (around forty different small groups) to understand what makes them pick the berries they do—I mean, to understand what makes them think and vote the way they do. She notes her “shock” when Walker wins his recall election: “Living in Madison, support for Walker was invisible, and pretty much taboo.” (I wonder what Trump’s election was like in Madison? Fun for people like me, I suppose.) But she’s not that self-aware—she regularly beclowns herself with statements like “[Goldwater] gained support in that [1964] race by appealing to a coalition of McCarthyites (anticommunists). . . .” and that whenever Republicans “ran on an anti-New Deal platform, they were appealing to those opposed to integration.” On balance, she tries hard, but sometimes trying hard just isn’t enough to succeed.
Cramer’s core question, the reason why she traveled around the state conversing with different small groups, is one that seems to bedevil liberals, even though (or because) it is not a very intelligent question. It is “why do working class people oppose liberal policies, especially bigger government, when bigger government seems more likely to give them other people’s money?” Or, as Cramer phrases it, she wanted to “examine what it looks like when people who might benefit from more government instead prefer far less of it.” She rejects the idea that this is “a central debate about the appropriate role of government.” Instead, it is “something else: resentment toward our fellow citizens.” As becomes clear throughout the book, by “fellow citizens,” she means exclusively “government employees,” whose reputations she is determined to rescue from the mire into which their own actions have sunk themselves. In short, this is a paean to government workers and a song of sympathy for their underappreciation by rural bumpkins, structured around whining that government workers are hurt by irrational demands for smaller government.
Cramer begins her story with the brouhaha surrounding the new governor’s, Scott Walker’s, introduction of a budget bill (Act 10) in February, 2011, that among other effects, sharply limited collective bargaining with government employees other than police and firefighters, and “required all [government] employees to increase their payroll contributions for health and pension benefits (to a tune of a 10 percent cut to many of their paychecks).” Before we proceed further, it is beneficial to review some undisputed history and facts. Working backward, what Cramer does not tell us here, but what we can tease out of other parts of her book and some basic research, is that payroll contributions of government employees were made to increase because government employees had been receiving massive benefits, far higher than of those of private employees, on top of their already exceptionally large wages (as I parse below). So, “pay cut” is a propagandistic term, although in economic terms it is not entirely wrong. Nor does Cramer note that the “increase” required was for government workers to pay at least 12.6% of the actual costs of their health care benefits, when up to that time they had paid an average of 6%, as opposed to the 50% or more paid by most private sector employees. And Act 10 required them to pay 5.8% of their own pension benefits (again, not noted by Cramer) when almost all private sector employees get no pension at all other than what they save for themselves. The horror!
More generally, though, Cramer ignores the pernicious effects of the mere existence of unions for government employees. She celebrates repeatedly that Wisconsin, in 1959, was one of the first states to permit them. She does not tell us why they were not permitted before that, other than to make the curious claim that “There was a fear, or at least an argument, that collective bargaining for government workers would inhibit the provision of public services to citizens.” “As recently as 1936, [government] employees were referred to as ‘tax eaters.’ ” (In our house, you can make that date 2017.) The answer why they were always forbidden earlier is clear—because they are a public evil, and until public virtue declined, no legislator would countenance the damage to the republic that was certain to result, and did result. Unions of private sector employees involve bargaining between two parties, employee and employer, each of which has something to gain and something to lose, and each of which absorbs its own gains and losses. Unions of government employee involve bargaining between two parties, employees and elected officials, with the benefits accruing to both parties, and all the costs being handed to a third party—the employer, i.e., the taxpayer, who is given no voice at all in the negotiation of the terms of employment. Elected officials (almost always Democrats) get the support (via advertising and endorsements) and votes of the union leadership, and often the votes of the members (who in any case are forced via required union dues to financially contribute to the election of officials they may not personally vote for). Government employees receive pay, pension and health benefits vastly greater than private sector employees, which ratchet constantly upward as new politicians seek union support. The taxpayers, future taxpayers mostly, get the bill—hence, “tax eaters.” Among many other wicked effects, this is the main cause of the effective bankruptcy of, among other states, California and Illinois (but not Wisconsin, thanks to Scott Walker, though we’re getting ahead of ourselves).
Anyway, back to February 2011, and the first page of this book. Cramer celebrates that thousands of people illegally occupied the Wisconsin Capitol to protest Walker’s proposal. Most of them, of course, could do so because they were government employees who were given time off at taxpayer expense, or jobless people such as students or retirees. (As one of Cramer’s conversation partners accurately says, “Why were the private sector people showing up only on the weekend? That’s because if they’d called in sick to their employer they would have been fired.”) This was all an attempt to coerce the Legislature to obey the will of the shrillest. In an infamous corollary, “Two days later, fourteen Democrats in the state senate fled to Illinois, in an effort to block the bill.” Cramer does not note, of course, that this act was profoundly anti-democratic, although I suppose that’s obvious, nor does she seem at all critical of it. Neither does she note the numerous death threats to Walker and Republicans, and other bad behavior by the “protestors.” But the bill was ultimately passed, and had the effects Walker and his supporters desired.
What’s that you say, government employee? You say that government employees are paid less, showing they need the unions? Cramer disagrees with you, though she tries not to. She shows “distributions of incomes for [government] and private workers in low-income areas (where the average total income was under $30,000) and then also in higher-income areas (where the average exceeded $33,500). What we see here is that in both low- and high-income areas, for low and middle ranges of incomes, [government] workers are making more than private workers. In low-income areas, only among the very highest income percentiles are private workers earning more than [government] employees. But in high-income areas, the top 15 percent of private workers are making a great deal more than the top 15 percent of [government] workers.” Let me translate that. In every segment of workers except the top 16 or so percent of wage earners, government workers earn a higher wage. The only thing surprising about this is Cramer’s surprise—everybody knows that a small slice of private sector employees has very high income. Looking at Cramer’s graphs, it appears that at the 85th percentile, the average government worker’s income is about $75K, as is the average private worker’s; at the 90th percentile, $100K vs. $110K, and at the 98th percentile, $120K vs. $150K. Even at the high end, in other words, government workers make almost as much as the highest-paid private sector workers.
And although Cramer does not mention it, if you dig deep enough into the data on which she bases her conclusions, you find that although they do include pensions, they do not include health benefits—and as her conversation partners repeatedly complain, and Cramer does not dispute, government workers in Wisconsin receive enormous dollar values of health benefits. This analysis also ignores the almost total job security that government workers (not just tenured professors like Cramer) receive, making them essentially totally insulated from job performance requirements, an extremely valuable benefit no private sector worker has. And finally, leaving aside that much of the substantive work of many government employees is of negative social value, their productivity is much lower than that of private sector workers, so relative wage per unit of output is even higher. My conclusion, and the conclusion of those whom Cramer interviewed, is that government workers have it easy and need to have their power broken, and Scott Walker is awesome for doing so. The only unfortunate thing is that such actions are not nationwide, yet.
From this discussion of Walker’s successes (which occurred in the middle of her series of conversations; this book was published in 2016), Cramer turns to finding an answer to her core question through the prism of her conversations. She realized pretty quickly, when trying to answer her question, that it wasn’t, as liberals assumed, “that somehow the Republican Party has fooled people into not noticing that they are opposing the very kind of government programs that might help them out.” Rather, “In rural areas, there is a great deal of pride in the idea that ‘help’ is about letting people work hard enough so they can make it on their own. The sense I got from these conversations is that help, for many, is about providing jobs, not welfare.” While this is common sense and should not be a surprise to anyone, at least Cramer was able to grasp and admit that her preconceptions had been proved wrong. It is at least stumbling in the right direction. But let’s not go too far. When Cramer expresses dismay that during the Great Recession, “Many people in rural communities looked around and saw themselves in a place perpetually stuck in disadvantage, and they resented public employees who seemed to be protected from hardship, all because of the hard work of people like themselves in hard times,” she never considers whether this resentment is entirely rational because the perceptions are wholly accurate.
For Cramer’s purposes, in the rural areas which are her focus, all government workers are paid substantially more, on average, than private sector workers. And yet she wonder why it is that “public servants” are resented. At least she is able to admit that some sound possible basis for the resentment, such as when a man who has broken his health logging all his life cannot retire at seventy, since he has no pension, but notes that government workers can retire at fifty with a pension equal to 70% of income and generous health care benefits (on which no income tax has to be paid), including the ability to get many years of health care benefits for free by using accumulated sick leave pay. (It is not totally clear how accurate these claims are. Cramer does not dispute them, and she always seems to dispute claims with which she disagrees, but from the discussion around Act 10, it’s evident that there is some pay-in element to both pensions and health care for government workers. Glancing at the UW website, for example, it is true that the retirement age is 50, but only for police and firefighters; others are 55.)
Another common theme of Cramer’s conversations was that rural areas were not getting their “fair share”—that Madison and Milwaukee hogged the taxpayer dollars, especially for schools. As Cramer shows, this is not really true, although viewed from some angles it is at least partially true. Her interlocutors also complained about high gas prices (a more important issue to people who drive more, obviously), and, most importantly, that they lacked power and their concerns were ignored by the big city people who had the power. They don’t like relying on tourism, either, which is seasonal, unreliable, and degrading. None of this is surprising, but it’s interesting.
Cramer struggles with race. She finds a grand total of zero racism among any of her interlocutors (although some resentment against local American Indians). She notes that “resentment” she finds everywhere was “almost always directed at white people: government bureaucrats and faculty members at the flagship public university.” But she follows this with incoherent babbling, such as “At the same time, given the way arguments against redistribution in the United States have historically been made by equating deservingness with whiteness, these conversations are about race even when race is not mentioned.” Cramer would have been better served by just admitting that she couldn’t find any racism, again contrary to her preconceptions. But that might have been a bridge too far for the people paying her salary—not the taxpayers, of course, but her superiors at the University of Wisconsin, whom she constantly praises and toadies to, throughout the book.
Cramer also struggles with the idea that government workers could be anything but paragons of virtue. Her conversation partners often complain about specific actions by government workers, especially by the Department of Natural Resources. Cramer always defends the DNR. But when rural residents complain that researchers from the University of Wisconsin ignore rules against gas boat motors on a lake, and laugh at and humiliate residents who ask them to stop using the gas motors, Cramer falls all over herself to make sure nobody thinks she agrees with these rural ingrates: “I want to remind my readers, especially those of you who work at an institution of higher education that puts considerable efforts into serving the broader public, that these are perceptions. They are not necessarily accurate. Maybe the stories I just relayed were examples of miscommunication. I certainly encountered claims about UW-Madison activity that were false.” Excuse me while I vomit.
Similar, but more sophisticated and nuanced, questioning lies at the core of Joan Williams’s "White Working Class" and Arlie Hochschild’s "Strangers in Their Own Land." Williams’s answer is that we need advertising, celebrating the federal government, directed at the poor—in essence, educating the working class as to who their lordly benefactors are. However, she at least recognizes the importance of moral virtue to the working class, and the role it plays in distinguishing them, to themselves, from the poor—i.e., from the lazy recipients of government handouts (regardless of the accuracy of that stereotype). She also recognizes the resentment of the working class against the “professional-management elite,” who lack moral virtues and are perceived as not working hard, yet despise the working class. Hochschild, in a similar but distinct vein, claims that the answer is that “emotional self-interest," as in the belief that others are cutting in line ahead of them and attacking their dignity, often trumps “economic self-interest.” That's an unsophisticated understanding, but tends, again, towards a moral distinction.
Both Williams and Hochschild come much closer to the truth than Cramer, who mostly seems befuddled. None come as close as Jonathan Haidt, who directly addresses this question through the prism of morality—namely, he concludes that economic, or more broadly “rational,” interests are often or mostly trumped by morals, which are primarily innate and, for most people, are not at all like the morals of Cramer, or of Williams or Hochschild. Of the six moral foundations Haidt identifies, probably the one most relevant here is “fairness/cheating”—these “rural” people Cramer talks with think it’s immoral for the government to take by force from some just to give to others, because it’s unfair and cheating, even if the “others” are themselves. This is not a matter of rational calculation, as Haidt explains and Cramer totally fails to understand; it is pre-rational, although very much a form of cognition. The varied reasoning offered to Cramer when she tries to pin her interlocutors down on why they don’t want more government handouts, from a feeling it’ll still cost them, to a feeling government is too big, or too wasteful, or too stupid, are not necessarily wrong reasoning, but they are, for the most part, offered up by people who have already made the decision that too much government is immoral, and are trying to find rationales to explain their already existing conclusion. (Of course, as Haidt outlines, Cramer and people like her do as much, if not much more, such rationale-finding, what Haidt calls “reasoning-why” as opposed to the prior “seeing-what.”)
[Review finishes as first comment.]
March 11, 2017
I didn't expect an ethnography of rural voters to be gripping, but Cramer did a really good job of explaining and justifying her methodology clearly, and then providing the goods. Her research was careful, and self-aware, and the story of the difference between what she expected to find and what she did find is fascinating.
Much like with Hillbilly Elegy, this book is pointed to as a way of understanding the election of Trump. Unlike with Hillbilly Elegy, this was somewhat written with that in mind. A large section of the book is devoted to different perceptions of Scott Walker in Madison and in rural Wisconsin, and it has clear parallels between the antipathy urban voters feel for Donald Trump and the way that he excites (or at least doesn't scare) many other kinds of voters.
I think that one of the most important things that Cramer has done is more than explain why rural constituencies feel how they do about their governments, but to also actually give them a voice. In her primary sources, many ideas that seem strange at first glance become clearer, especially when she looks at why people might feel that way despite it not matching the truth.
One thing that many characters say, although not in as many words, is that rural areas don't produce significant revenue, and so don't have a significant say in the state legislature. Their experience of this is that they aren't served by the state–several people mention the way that they give more in taxes than they get back, even though the reverse is true–the state gives more to the rural areas than it taxes, and in some ways the urban areas subsidize the rural areas.
So why do they feel like they don't get that much back from the state? Part of it is that there's more infrastructure to maintain when people are more spread out–there are all the roads, and schools can only be close to so many people, etc, but a large part of it is also that money is usually designated to be used in a specific way, and that way doesn't usually make that much sense in the rural communities because those communities don't get real seats at the legislature. When you get more back than you put in, but most of it is earmarked for things that won't help you, then your real experience is that your tax dollars are being wasted.
This provides a clear problem for legislators to solve–some constituencies don't have power in the legislature, and feel like they're not being served. Either serve them, or figure out a way to give them back local control. This will be enormously useful in figuring out how to continue having rural populations in a modern society.
Much like with Hillbilly Elegy, this book is pointed to as a way of understanding the election of Trump. Unlike with Hillbilly Elegy, this was somewhat written with that in mind. A large section of the book is devoted to different perceptions of Scott Walker in Madison and in rural Wisconsin, and it has clear parallels between the antipathy urban voters feel for Donald Trump and the way that he excites (or at least doesn't scare) many other kinds of voters.
I think that one of the most important things that Cramer has done is more than explain why rural constituencies feel how they do about their governments, but to also actually give them a voice. In her primary sources, many ideas that seem strange at first glance become clearer, especially when she looks at why people might feel that way despite it not matching the truth.
One thing that many characters say, although not in as many words, is that rural areas don't produce significant revenue, and so don't have a significant say in the state legislature. Their experience of this is that they aren't served by the state–several people mention the way that they give more in taxes than they get back, even though the reverse is true–the state gives more to the rural areas than it taxes, and in some ways the urban areas subsidize the rural areas.
So why do they feel like they don't get that much back from the state? Part of it is that there's more infrastructure to maintain when people are more spread out–there are all the roads, and schools can only be close to so many people, etc, but a large part of it is also that money is usually designated to be used in a specific way, and that way doesn't usually make that much sense in the rural communities because those communities don't get real seats at the legislature. When you get more back than you put in, but most of it is earmarked for things that won't help you, then your real experience is that your tax dollars are being wasted.
This provides a clear problem for legislators to solve–some constituencies don't have power in the legislature, and feel like they're not being served. Either serve them, or figure out a way to give them back local control. This will be enormously useful in figuring out how to continue having rural populations in a modern society.
June 11, 2017
So this book was hard to read after reading Evicted, which followed Milwaukee residents who were unable to pay for rent. So reading about all these old white dudes talking about how rich everyone in Milwaukee is was pretty galling.
Anyway, the book demonstrates how horrible the US political system is at dealing with the needs of the poor/working poor in any area. And because their needs are not met, their resentment turns towards the government and those they see as not deserving, which is pretty much anyone not from a rural area.
I believe there are some weaknesses in her method - she focused mostly on retirement age Wisconsinites, which is going to skew the results a bit. For her media analysis, she focused solely on newspapers, and didn't account for TV news and radio. And while completely out of the scope of her study, it would have been interesting to see if there was a consciousness among Milwaukee. (When she needed an urban view, she often referred to groups in Madison. And there is a divide between Madison and Milwaukee - they aren't monolithic urban areas.)
Anyway, the book demonstrates how horrible the US political system is at dealing with the needs of the poor/working poor in any area. And because their needs are not met, their resentment turns towards the government and those they see as not deserving, which is pretty much anyone not from a rural area.
I believe there are some weaknesses in her method - she focused mostly on retirement age Wisconsinites, which is going to skew the results a bit. For her media analysis, she focused solely on newspapers, and didn't account for TV news and radio. And while completely out of the scope of her study, it would have been interesting to see if there was a consciousness among Milwaukee. (When she needed an urban view, she often referred to groups in Madison. And there is a divide between Madison and Milwaukee - they aren't monolithic urban areas.)
November 13, 2017
I'm not sure if interviews consisting of groups of aging, anonymous, rural coffee klatch "down and outers" is the best way to distill what's going on in Wisconsin politics. But it's the route taken buy this University of Wisconsin- Madison investigator. The results are a bitter brew indeed, infused with big city hate and small town belly ache. With conversation steeped in animosity and mistrust of all things "different" from one's self. Different from the rural way of life. Does this kind of thought percolate in other states? It was interesting how KJC showed that social groups can dictate ones political views, often based on how facts are "seen" or "perceived".
"Politics of Resentment" serves up a luke warm understanding the rise of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. One distilled with the tired cliché's of "us against them", "rich verses poor", "public verses private". Why do we teach these things to each other?
"Politics of Resentment" serves up a luke warm understanding the rise of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. One distilled with the tired cliché's of "us against them", "rich verses poor", "public verses private". Why do we teach these things to each other?
July 21, 2017
The snippets of conversation and their interpretation were interesting and too few. On the other hand, the accompanying explanation of why and how the research was done, and how the study participants perceived the author, was a bit over-long.
December 2, 2021
Rural voters in Wisconsin are studied as a microcosm of rural right-wingers and their politics of resentment. They think government neglects them, they don't like cities, and think minorities don't work and are undeserving. Nothing earth-shattering found just the opinions of aggrieved bigots in rural areas.
September 29, 2024
The best kind of political science!!
February 18, 2025
“One can view as misinformation or ignorance the perceptions among rural folks that they are victims of distributive injustice, but the conclusion that people vote the way they do because they are stupid is itself pretty shallow. It overlooks that much of political understanding is not about facts; it is about how we see those facts.”
The Politics of Resentment had some five-star insights that were hampered by two-star editing. Cramer's field work involved hanging out with dozens of social groups in suburban and rural Wisconsin over five years. Unfortunately, much of what she learned is repeated chapter after chapter, many of which finished with the same conclusions - which is a rather large hint that the book really should have been reorganized. I'd guess this could have been 20% shorter, increasing the digestibility without leaving too much on the table.
(Updated in 2025 from three to four stars because I keep coming back to those five-star insights)
Some notes and thoughts:
• Cramer defines "rural consciousness" (RC) as a place-based perception that 1) the culture and lifestyle of one's community aren't well-understood or respected by those in urban centers, 2) one's community pays too much in taxes and doesn't receive its fair share of benefits, and 3) one's community is systematically ignored by those in power, so decisions made in the halls of power do not consider local voices.
• RC creates extremely fertile ground for resentment.
• While most people value hard work, the definition of hard work varies with location; rural areas tend to take pride in physical labor and think of desk jobs as easy, regardless of hours worked.
• Rural areas tend to believe the harder one works, the more one deserves; based on the definition above, they tend to highly resent their tax dollars going to city centers and the high salaries that many desk jobs earn. This is despite the fact that poor rural towns receive more funding back than the tax dollars they contribute.
• Rural dwellers often feel they lead tougher lives than suburban or urban dwellers, and there are many understandable reasons why (higher levels of poverty, disappearing jobs, disappearing schools and towns, etc.).
• RC typically involves resentment of not only the government, but also of public employees of all sorts - including school teachers. This is largely because in the poorest areas, public employees get paid significantly more than average, and they are not perceived to be working "hard." This is why rural areas were so supportive of Scott Walker's Act 10 (that stripped away collective bargaining rights for most public employees in WI).
• RC says that tax dollars don't help their communities at all, so even government programs that could dramatically improve their lives (such as universal health care) are viewed with intense skepticism. This is where their support for "small government" comes from - notably not because they believe government should do less in general. (Resentment rather than libertarianism.)
• Walker leveraged RC heavily in his campaign, referring to Madison as "down there" despite being from a town south of Madison and while speaking directly east of Madison - implying his connection with the northern, more rural area of the state.
• Rural voters are not inherently Republican, as evidenced by much of Wisconsin history - but the current Republican party is effective at tapping into RC and resentment, while the current Democratic party continuously fails to redirect that anger at the policies responsible for worsening peoples' lives.
The Politics of Resentment had some five-star insights that were hampered by two-star editing. Cramer's field work involved hanging out with dozens of social groups in suburban and rural Wisconsin over five years. Unfortunately, much of what she learned is repeated chapter after chapter, many of which finished with the same conclusions - which is a rather large hint that the book really should have been reorganized. I'd guess this could have been 20% shorter, increasing the digestibility without leaving too much on the table.
(Updated in 2025 from three to four stars because I keep coming back to those five-star insights)
Some notes and thoughts:
• Cramer defines "rural consciousness" (RC) as a place-based perception that 1) the culture and lifestyle of one's community aren't well-understood or respected by those in urban centers, 2) one's community pays too much in taxes and doesn't receive its fair share of benefits, and 3) one's community is systematically ignored by those in power, so decisions made in the halls of power do not consider local voices.
• RC creates extremely fertile ground for resentment.
• While most people value hard work, the definition of hard work varies with location; rural areas tend to take pride in physical labor and think of desk jobs as easy, regardless of hours worked.
• Rural areas tend to believe the harder one works, the more one deserves; based on the definition above, they tend to highly resent their tax dollars going to city centers and the high salaries that many desk jobs earn. This is despite the fact that poor rural towns receive more funding back than the tax dollars they contribute.
• Rural dwellers often feel they lead tougher lives than suburban or urban dwellers, and there are many understandable reasons why (higher levels of poverty, disappearing jobs, disappearing schools and towns, etc.).
• RC typically involves resentment of not only the government, but also of public employees of all sorts - including school teachers. This is largely because in the poorest areas, public employees get paid significantly more than average, and they are not perceived to be working "hard." This is why rural areas were so supportive of Scott Walker's Act 10 (that stripped away collective bargaining rights for most public employees in WI).
• RC says that tax dollars don't help their communities at all, so even government programs that could dramatically improve their lives (such as universal health care) are viewed with intense skepticism. This is where their support for "small government" comes from - notably not because they believe government should do less in general. (Resentment rather than libertarianism.)
• Walker leveraged RC heavily in his campaign, referring to Madison as "down there" despite being from a town south of Madison and while speaking directly east of Madison - implying his connection with the northern, more rural area of the state.
• Rural voters are not inherently Republican, as evidenced by much of Wisconsin history - but the current Republican party is effective at tapping into RC and resentment, while the current Democratic party continuously fails to redirect that anger at the policies responsible for worsening peoples' lives.
November 21, 2016
In the year leading up to the Trump upset few predicted the historic anomaly of Trump's victory. Few understood the political, social and cultural underpinnings of Trump's rise to the White House. Kathy Cramer early on based on very meticulous and thorough research into the collective minds of rural Wisconsin identified the reason(s) for politics in the age of Trump. Unfortunately, like most academic works the media and pundits paid little attention, even though it foretold the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election and the reason(s) why.
September 6, 2017
Didn't get four stars because at times it was repetitive almost to the point of being condescending, which is kind of ironic given the project she is undertaking here. That being said, the exploration of what she terms "rural consciousness", though problematic in certain respects, will certainly restructure my thinking in important ways.
Essential reading in the Age of Trump.
Essential reading in the Age of Trump.
Read
August 15, 2021If you are asking yourself "Why are they voting against their own interests?" you should read this book. It is academically grounded and yet highly readable and super important for ALL of us who don't live in communities of 2,500 people or less.
November 22, 2016
This is THE book if you want to understand Trump's election.
May 19, 2021
I'm... not sure how to rate this one. On the one hand, reading about (mostly) old (mostly) white (mostly) men in rural areas complain about Madison and Milwaukee got a little old. On the other hand, that's the actual point of the book, and the author did great work traveling around the state, having and documenting these discussions. I mean, I'm a resident of a "rural" county as defined in the book (though in a college town within that county), and yeah, no lies detected. You'll hear that kind of talk, ad nauseum. I had never thought of it as a specific type of social consciousness, but I guess it makes sense. It's a set of shared understandings ("BIG WISCONSIN CITIES THAT START WITH M ARE BAD!" "PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE LAZY!" "WE AROUND HERE ARE SOMEHOW DIFFERENT AND BETTER THAN THOSE PEOPLE AND ARE GETTING SHAFTED!") that inform belief and behavior. It makes sense, and puts into words what I kind of understood, probably to begin with.
That doesn't mean it was any easier to read, though. I found myself getting physically angry at the anonymous people being interviewed, partially because I *KNOW* these people. Well, not the specific people in the book (probably), but you get the idea. It was especially hard to read as we're attempting to emerge from a pandemic through which many of these same people decided that part of their identity was to refuse to wear masks to keep others safe, so the whole "we care about and take care of each other" part of the rural WI identity rings just a little more hollow. In a less cynical, pandemic-weary emotional state, I might have been able to read it a little more clinically and a little less emotionally, but alas, 2021 me finally go around to reading this, so 2021 me is the one reflecting on it.
Despite being a little older, there are still lessons to be gleaned from this work. Lots of them. In the end, that's what I'm basing my rating on. There's an important understanding here that, with or without legitimate cause (or, probably, with some cause in some ways and entirely without cause in others), a sizeable piece of our state thinks it to be somehow separate from another sizeable piece of our state... and as a result, that piece of the state feels aggrieved.
One star, if we're looking at how crabby the conversations made me, but my emotional state is not what's being evaluated here. Five stars.
That doesn't mean it was any easier to read, though. I found myself getting physically angry at the anonymous people being interviewed, partially because I *KNOW* these people. Well, not the specific people in the book (probably), but you get the idea. It was especially hard to read as we're attempting to emerge from a pandemic through which many of these same people decided that part of their identity was to refuse to wear masks to keep others safe, so the whole "we care about and take care of each other" part of the rural WI identity rings just a little more hollow. In a less cynical, pandemic-weary emotional state, I might have been able to read it a little more clinically and a little less emotionally, but alas, 2021 me finally go around to reading this, so 2021 me is the one reflecting on it.
Despite being a little older, there are still lessons to be gleaned from this work. Lots of them. In the end, that's what I'm basing my rating on. There's an important understanding here that, with or without legitimate cause (or, probably, with some cause in some ways and entirely without cause in others), a sizeable piece of our state thinks it to be somehow separate from another sizeable piece of our state... and as a result, that piece of the state feels aggrieved.
One star, if we're looking at how crabby the conversations made me, but my emotional state is not what's being evaluated here. Five stars.
January 17, 2021
I read this book about a year after Trump was elected into office. Disappointed, hurt, and feeling betrayed by the American people, I picked this book up without really knowing what it would be about.
Today, 4 years later, boy am I glad that I got the chance to read this book when I did. This book shows that the “problem” in America lies much deeper than Trump. The problem, unfortunately and surprisingly, runs much deeper than plain old racism. Although the research in this book is mostly based off of personal anecdotes and interviews, Katherine spent years solidifying her theories and uses years of interviews to support them.
This book opened my eyes to the frighteningly large divide in America. Although I knew that this divide existed, having lived in a bubble my entire life (CA & NYC) I was never given the chance to empathize with the people on the other side of the divide. Through numerous interactions and interviews, Katherine takes the reader along for a ride in Wisconsin and we as readers are able to see a little bit of why some voted for who they did. I began to see how the difference in culture, environment, and way of life may have caused for some people to vote for Trump. These people needed change and many strongly believed that Trump would be the one to bring that change. Often living in towns that experience a brain drain, many of these people needed the major bubbles of the country (like DC) to care about them. This promise for change and care in states like Wisconsin is exactly what Trump promised. In fact, many of these people voted for Obama prior to Trump. Katherine shows that at the end of the day people are people. And when people are pushed into a corner and they feel as if their country has abandoned them and their way of life, they get resentful. And therefore, many ultimately ended up voting for perhaps the most radical and groundbreaking president to date.
Today, 4 years later, boy am I glad that I got the chance to read this book when I did. This book shows that the “problem” in America lies much deeper than Trump. The problem, unfortunately and surprisingly, runs much deeper than plain old racism. Although the research in this book is mostly based off of personal anecdotes and interviews, Katherine spent years solidifying her theories and uses years of interviews to support them.
This book opened my eyes to the frighteningly large divide in America. Although I knew that this divide existed, having lived in a bubble my entire life (CA & NYC) I was never given the chance to empathize with the people on the other side of the divide. Through numerous interactions and interviews, Katherine takes the reader along for a ride in Wisconsin and we as readers are able to see a little bit of why some voted for who they did. I began to see how the difference in culture, environment, and way of life may have caused for some people to vote for Trump. These people needed change and many strongly believed that Trump would be the one to bring that change. Often living in towns that experience a brain drain, many of these people needed the major bubbles of the country (like DC) to care about them. This promise for change and care in states like Wisconsin is exactly what Trump promised. In fact, many of these people voted for Obama prior to Trump. Katherine shows that at the end of the day people are people. And when people are pushed into a corner and they feel as if their country has abandoned them and their way of life, they get resentful. And therefore, many ultimately ended up voting for perhaps the most radical and groundbreaking president to date.
January 1, 2017
Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment is the indispensable book to explain Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. Kramer, a political ethnographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, performed a statewide survey of Wisconsin in 2007 and 2008, prior to the fractious recall attempt on Governor Scott Walker. Cramer’s field work suggests that the prominent divide, at least in Wisconsin, is between rural and urban residents. Rural folk, she gathers, view the world through the lens of place and class. Motivated by distinct values and lifestyles, as well as economic hardship, these people have a fundamentally distrustful view of government and the public sector.
Illuminating and eerily prophetic, Kramer’s findings provide greater insight into Trump’s success. Trump exceeded expectations among blue-collar working-class voters, and his performance in rural areas exceeded that of previous Republican nominees. Kramer, who interprets her findings within a strictly state setting, does not extrapolate her conclusions to divine a national mood. Rather, she finds that, at least in Wisconsin, rural voters exhibited resentment towards public officials, who they viewed as wasteful and unproductive, and aversion to elitism. This “rural consciousness,” Kramer writes, is also shaped by concerns of economic injustice. Rural folk were angered by the possibility that their tax dollars, funneled through a burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus, were not making their way back to rural areas.
Kramer identifies three overarching elements of rural consciousness: the belief, well-founded or not, that rural areas were getting ignored by decision makers in major metropolitan centers; that they were not receiving their fair share of public spending; and that urban lawmakers and public officials had no insight into the values and lifestyles of rural people. This rural-urban dichotomy features prominently in Kramer’s findings; in fact, she concludes that it has a more binding effect on voting preferences than political partisanship. Class and location matters, she argues, because it factors into the identities of rural voters.
Kramer’s methodology- going to local coffee spots and gathering places in randomly chosen towns across Wisconsin- is entirely novel. In fact, she argues- rightly- that this type of survey approach should be more common in opinion analyses of voters. “[P]oll-based analyses of opinion ought to be accompanied not just by focus groups or in-depth interviews by also by listening methods that expose us to the conversations and contexts of everyday life.” Perhaps this would have been a useful corrective for the presidential polls, which grossly underestimated Trump’s performance. “We would do well to acknowledge that sometimes there is no substitute for sitting down with people and listening to their perspectives in order to measure what those perspectives are,” she advises.
The Politics of Resentment is the indispensable, must-read study of how Trump, champion of the rural and working-class, captured the presidency. Kramer’s entirely novel field survey approach, which provides a closer and more personal window into voter sentiment than traditional polling, is a whiff of fresh air amidst the statistical noise of political polling. Her conclusions should be especially worrying to governmental fixtures and establishmentarians: rural voters, animated by class and geographical setting, resent the dismissive attitudes of political elites toward their economic and cultural conditions. While Kramer might have been better to elaborate on the national implications of her findings, her insights help those baffled by the meteoric success of President-elect Donald Trump.
Illuminating and eerily prophetic, Kramer’s findings provide greater insight into Trump’s success. Trump exceeded expectations among blue-collar working-class voters, and his performance in rural areas exceeded that of previous Republican nominees. Kramer, who interprets her findings within a strictly state setting, does not extrapolate her conclusions to divine a national mood. Rather, she finds that, at least in Wisconsin, rural voters exhibited resentment towards public officials, who they viewed as wasteful and unproductive, and aversion to elitism. This “rural consciousness,” Kramer writes, is also shaped by concerns of economic injustice. Rural folk were angered by the possibility that their tax dollars, funneled through a burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus, were not making their way back to rural areas.
Kramer identifies three overarching elements of rural consciousness: the belief, well-founded or not, that rural areas were getting ignored by decision makers in major metropolitan centers; that they were not receiving their fair share of public spending; and that urban lawmakers and public officials had no insight into the values and lifestyles of rural people. This rural-urban dichotomy features prominently in Kramer’s findings; in fact, she concludes that it has a more binding effect on voting preferences than political partisanship. Class and location matters, she argues, because it factors into the identities of rural voters.
Kramer’s methodology- going to local coffee spots and gathering places in randomly chosen towns across Wisconsin- is entirely novel. In fact, she argues- rightly- that this type of survey approach should be more common in opinion analyses of voters. “[P]oll-based analyses of opinion ought to be accompanied not just by focus groups or in-depth interviews by also by listening methods that expose us to the conversations and contexts of everyday life.” Perhaps this would have been a useful corrective for the presidential polls, which grossly underestimated Trump’s performance. “We would do well to acknowledge that sometimes there is no substitute for sitting down with people and listening to their perspectives in order to measure what those perspectives are,” she advises.
The Politics of Resentment is the indispensable, must-read study of how Trump, champion of the rural and working-class, captured the presidency. Kramer’s entirely novel field survey approach, which provides a closer and more personal window into voter sentiment than traditional polling, is a whiff of fresh air amidst the statistical noise of political polling. Her conclusions should be especially worrying to governmental fixtures and establishmentarians: rural voters, animated by class and geographical setting, resent the dismissive attitudes of political elites toward their economic and cultural conditions. While Kramer might have been better to elaborate on the national implications of her findings, her insights help those baffled by the meteoric success of President-elect Donald Trump.
September 10, 2017
Using an innovative, ethnographic methodology, Cramer listens to small groups of people trying to make sense of politics through their informal conversations. Visiting with each group more than once over several years, she uncovers a social identity they share that she dubs "rural consciousness" which is characterized by a learned distrust of liberal-urban elites who are seen as inimical to their way of life. This identity, more than any principle, she argues, is what inclines them to vote in ways that to an objective observer would undermine their interests, particularly their economic well-being. They have a fundamental sense of being the victims of economic injustice, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. At the very least, she argues that politicians need to listen to these voters more intently. It seems it will take much more than that.
May 8, 2023
If you read this book prior to the 2016 election you wouldn't have been surprised by the outcome. Wisconsin elected Obama in 2008 and in 2012 before swinging in the opposite direction. Many rural and suburban counties changed from left leaning to right leaning in 2016. Within these pages you will read about people from rural communities discuss how they feel ignored and forgotten about by their government. Despite the fact that voting for republicans is not necessarily in the best interest for rural communities, people from these areas continually do so. Republicans have found a way to communicate to these communities while democrats continue to struggle.
Cramer discusses that distrust and disenchantment with the government is not the same as support for limited govt. She mentions that people in small communities find small govt appealing because they perceive that govt is not of or about communities like their own. This is one of the the explanations she offers throughout this book for why rural communities would vote for a party that may not be in their best interest.
Cramer stated that her "purpose was to better understand how people in particular places ascribe meaning to their political world". She completed this by getting out in the actual world and interacting with people from across the state. Her dialogue and discussion throughout the book is worth your time to read about.
Cramer discusses that distrust and disenchantment with the government is not the same as support for limited govt. She mentions that people in small communities find small govt appealing because they perceive that govt is not of or about communities like their own. This is one of the the explanations she offers throughout this book for why rural communities would vote for a party that may not be in their best interest.
Cramer stated that her "purpose was to better understand how people in particular places ascribe meaning to their political world". She completed this by getting out in the actual world and interacting with people from across the state. Her dialogue and discussion throughout the book is worth your time to read about.
July 9, 2017
Being a proud Wisconsinite from a "rural" county (as assigned by Dr. Cramer) I was eager and excited to read this book. I left the state during the time of her case study and recently returned. While I wasn't surprised at the us vs. them resentment, I was still surprised and kind of hurt because I, myself, am a public employee. I value the last line of her book, where she encourages "us" not to vote on party lines, but to vote for people who represent us because the people who we think are representing us, probably aren't actually representing us.
February 8, 2019
This is an excellent study of how people understand politics in rural Wisconsin, and is applicable to understanding what Cramer calls "rural consciousness" elsewhere. My only criticism of the book is that she writes off media as an influence too early, and does not mention right-wing talk radio as a potential element in the way the people she talked to interpreted such things as taxes and public employee unions.
May 9, 2019
This book was so frustrating (and not just because of her ridiculous use of 'folks' - it is not endearing or in any way likely to make rural people see you as "one of us", so stop). This book is frustrating because it portrays rural people realistically. Having grown up very rural and now living rural again I connected with so much of what she said.
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