Cramer - Politics of Resentment (Race)

The Politics of Resentment
Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin

and the Rise of Scott Walker
k at h e r i n e j. c r a m e r
the uni versit y of chicago press chicago and london

Making Sense of Politics through Resentment 15
ing to income may instead think of herself as “middle class.” Social- class
identities are a function of income, occupation, and education, but they
also incorporate a sense of what people value and the lifestyles they pre-
fer (Jackman and Jackman 1983).
Class is not something that people just have—it is something that
they do. They give meaning to their social- class status through the food
they eat, the clothes they wear, the sports they play, and so on (Bourdieu
[1979] 1984, chap. 3; see also Lareau 2008). People give meaning to their
identities through their everyday life and interactions with others, and
those meanings in turn structure how they make sense of the world.19
The connection between social- class identity and geographic place
may be particularly important for politics. Because identities are per-
ceptions, not necessarily consistent with objective circumstances, other
people, including politicians, can influence and manipulate them. And
because dividing lines may be most easily exploited when they have
physical markers, identities rooted in geographic spaces are ripe for the
politics of resentment. Geographic boundaries allow us to actually draw
lines between types of people, particularly between the haves and the
have-nots.
I am focusing on place as a dimension of the politics of resentment
because it is intertwined with another social category that is highly rel-
evant to redistributive policy in the United States: race. Race has been
central to debates over what role the government should play in redistri-
bution since at least the Civil War. In their book, Fighting Poverty in the
US and Europe, Alesina and Glaeser (2004) explain that, until the Civil
War, the federal government did not have the capacity to redistribute
wealth. After the war, three things came together: a stagnant economy
among farmers, enormous increases in wealth for some people (this was
what we call the Gilded Age, after all), and a government with increased
power, not only real but demonstrably so—it had just successfully freed
the slaves.
At that point in time, the rural-versus-urban divide, race, and redis-
tribution collided. Rural economies were particularly hard hit and var-
ious rural-based movements arose, in which people argued for redistri-
bution. Their focus was on increasing inflation so that farmers could pay
their debts. But in essence they were asking for the federal government
to take from the very rich and redistribute to the rural poor.
These movements became what we now call populism. As populists
tried to make their arguments, they tried to appeal to African Amer-
16 Chapter One
icans—an overwhelmingly poor population at the time. And pretty

quickly, enemies of populism invoked racism to combat these calls for
redistribution.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation to com-
bat the Great Depression changed the debate about redistribution, and
the United States practiced significant redistribution until the 1960s.
The Republican Party found itself out of power—until a change that be-
gan with Barry Goldwater’s successful candidacy for his party’s nom-
ination in 1964 provided a blueprint that the party built on in later
years. He gained support in that race by appealing to a coalition of Mc-
Carthyites (anticommunists), anti– New Dealers, and Southerners com-
mitted to segregation. That coalition has underpinned Republican suc-
cess ever since. As Alesina and Glaeser (2004) argue, whether or not
Republican politicians were intentionally using race, when they ran on
an anti– New Deal platform, they were appealing to those opposed to
integration.
Arguments against redistribution still benefit from the unfortunate
fact that racist sentiments persist. As Alesina and Glaeser show, across
the globe opponents of the welfare state have succeeded by tapping into
cultural heterogeneity, whether racial, religious, or otherwise. In the
United States, it is in the interests of the Republican Party for attention
to class to be diverted to attention to race.
In fact, race is quite likely the reason that public opinion in the
United States has not shifted in a redistributive direction as much as it
has in other countries, despite rising economic inequality. In most afflu-
ent member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co- operation
and Development, governments have responded to rising inequality with
greater redistribution—but not in the United States (Kenworthy and
Pontusson 2005). Some say that the relative weakness of labor unions
and socialist movements (Korpi 1983) and the low voting rates among
low-income voters (Kenworthy and Pontusson 2005) in the United States
have resulted in less pressure for redistribution than in other countries.
Another part of the story, though, is the composition of the poor in
the United States. As I noted at the start of this book, support for re-
distribution among middle-income voters in the United States is much
lower than it is in other countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development with comparable levels of affluence and
structures of inequality (Lupu and Pontusson 2011). Scholars argue this
is because a greater proportion of the poor in the United States are racial
Making Sense of Politics through Resentment 17
minorities (Alesina and Glaeser 2004). They argue that racial difference
reduces the connection that middle-income voters feel toward the poor.
Without a psychological connection to the poor, middle-income voters
are less likely to support redistributing resources toward them (Lupu
and Pontusson 2011; see also Lane 2001).
The history of the intertwined nature of race, place, and class under-
scores that the alliance of rural voters with a party pressing for less gov-
ernment has roots in human action—it has not popped out of thin air. In
fact, in the populist era, the relationship was reversed: farmers were al-
lied with populists calling for more redistribution. Looking closely at the
way rural residents understand politics today helps uncover the many
layers of the publics’ interpretations of who is on their side and where
they place the role of government in these battles.
Listening closely to rural voters also helps reveal how the meaning of
“populism” has changed in the contemporary United States. Political ac-
tors often claim to be populist as a shorthand for conveying that they are
especially close to the people and are railing against politics as usual.
Present- day U.S. candidates who call themselves “populist” are not nec-
essarily so. 20 Because we live in a time when distrust in government is
the norm, there is often a political benefit in running against government
and in making the claim that government is out of step with the concerns
of the public.
But the white- collar composition of our national, state, and local gov-
ernments calls into question the extent to which those seeking office are
on the side of “the people” in a populist division of people versus the
powerful elite (Carnes 2013). Also, how often are so- called populists
these days operating outside the party structure? For example, are Tea
Party candidates really separate from the Republican Party and the or-
ganizations that support it? That does not appear to be the case, as Re-
publican Party elites and the Fox News network have been key players in
Tea Party activism (Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin 2011).
When populist appeals are made, do we really have genuine “discon-
tent stem[ming] from the disparity between those who hold no power
versus those who do” (Barr 2009, 31)? For example, in the rural conscious-
ness I observed, many people living in rural places thought that their com-
munities were not receiving their fair share of resources. And yet, em-
pirically the evidence on this is unclear, as I explain in greater detail in
chapter 3. Also, on many issues their stances were similar to the policy
priorities of the party in power: Act 10, gun control, and reducing taxes,

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The Politics of Resentment

Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin

the uni versit y of chicago press chicago and london

icans—an overwhelmingly poor population at the time. And pretty

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