In response to Tom Schaller’s and Paul Waldman’s recent book, White Rural Rage, there has been a lot of pushback*. Rural resentment (which is nebulously defined and which ignores how people develop these attitudes–the role of second-hand intermediation by various media sources is studiously ignored) has been cited as the reason, and that resentment is valid.

But what this ignores is what various groups do with their resentment, as white rural people clearly aren’t the only people with grounds for resentment. Urban black voters, for example, have overwhelmingly supported Democratic politicians, who very nearly passed a major expansion of the social safety net that obviously would have improved their lives (and those of other people too, of course). Meanwhile, rural white voters have voted for candidates that opposed many policies that would have materially improved their lives (e.g., minimum wage increases or the aforementioned safety net expansion).

It can’t just be resentment–or if it is resentment, that resentment stems from Elias Esquith’s wonderful (and snarky) phrase “lived secondhand experience.” Across the political spectrum, there is an assumption that the political responses to resentment are logical outcomes of material causes. Sometimes they are, but, more often than not, “lived secondhand experience”–which is to say media–plays a significant role in that resentment, along with more banal things like bigotry as a force that gives people meaning.

*There do seem to be some significant data problems with the work, however.