Commentary
Pardon me, but I’m not finished with my commentary on President Biden’s continuing insulting of Americans who want to Make America Great Again.
Referring to them with the term “MAGA” as a descriptor comes across in a derogatory way, much like a racist would use the “N” word.
“This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history,” Biden said in the White House on July 6, 2022, as he escalated his rhetorical attack on the Republican Party.
Two months later, standing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in a nationally broadcast television appearance, he said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our republic.”
It’s as if the Biden campaign felt that referring to these Americans as “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, wasn’t demeaning enough.
Biden’s use of “MAGA Republicans” in a derogatory tone, as he does, of Americans who seek to Make America Great Again, is reprehensible.
But, but, but what about the name-calling of former President Trump?
While Biden supporters may remind us of Trump using “crook” or “crooked” when referring to the president, it is the president he has nicknamed, not Biden supporters.
With MAGA living in Biden’s head, Trump need not remind his MAGA supporters that they are the target of the Biden campaign.
Just who are these Americans that Biden insults? When you look at the red states on a map, they reside in what has become known as flyover country, between the elite east and the left coast.
In Matt Taibbi’s review of the book, “White Rural Rage,” he said it was “a compendium of Hee Haw caricatures of hayseed America mixed with a blunt diagnosis: rural Americans are disproportionately racist, conspiratorial, authoritarian and supportive of political violence.”
“Rural Americans,” the book authors Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller wrote, “are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Schaller described rural voters as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.”
Sound Familiar?
“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it, and unfortunately there are people like that.” – Hillary Clinton, September 10, 2016
Then there was President Obama’s remark in 2008 about working-class voters in the Midwest: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
They’ve Got It Wrong
As someone who has lived in rural America for most of my life, with the exception of a year in rural Morocco while serving in the Air Force, I believe the observations of the White Rural Rage are baseless.
Disbelieving the authors, Taibbi sought the opinion of Les Leopold, director of the Labor Institute, who had just written Wall Street’s War and Workers, which he says is a “thorough deconstruction of most of White Rural Rage.
“One of the chief deceptions of the 21st century, namely that working-class voters are driven by racism and xenophobia, and not by a more simple enraging motive; they’ve been repeatedly ripped off by the wealthy donor to both parties.” Leopold states.
I found further opposition of the “rage” claim by Nicholas F. Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College. In his piece, published by Politico, What Liberals Get Wrong About “White Rural Rage” – Almost Everything, he said the problem with “rage” is being misinterpreted and misunderstood. What the authors are getting wrong about rural America is exactly what many Democrats have been getting wrong for decades and appear to be doing so again in this critical presidential election year.
“They approached the topic as journalists and committed the same errors countless reporters have made when they share with the outside world what they saw from a few days traversing some small town in ‘flyover country.’
“This shoddy analysis and faux expertise does real damage. It is clear that the overwhelming portrayal of rural America as angry and irrational feeds into and amplifies the divisions between rural and urban Americans, overshadowing the shared challenges and aspirations that cut across these geographic lines.
“Ruralness is not reducible to rage. And to say so is to overlook the nuanced ways in which rural Americans engage in politics. They are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect.”
In denying the existence of rural rage, Jacobs believes “the rural political identity has morphed into resentment – a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and the political party that seeks to empower them. Democrats.”
About Biden’s Perceived Threat
Jacobs and his colleague, Dan Shea, became interested in whether President Biden’s campaign message about the threat to democracy under a Trump presidency, and found that “the ‘threats’ to democracy just aren’t there,” after testing the hypothesis on a representative sample of rural voters.
So, What About Trump?
“I do know that there is something particular about Trump’s appeal in rural America, women are more likely to vote for Trump; so are young people, so are poor as well as rich. Place matters,” wrote Jacobs.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
