Thomas Frank's
Listen, Liberal, and a number of his columns on The Guardian, in particular
this one from March, are the most insightful things I've ever read about this phenomenon. Another good book by Joe Bageant is
Deer Hunting with Jesus.
I grew up in a two-stoplight town in southeastern Indiana. My father taught at a tiny liberal arts college there, so we were upper middle class transplants in a small working-class town. Looking back on it, the college professors as a group were some of the most bigoted I've ever seen. I remember our crude stereotypes of rural lower-class white people and the way we dismissed and judged people who weren't in our social class. The worst thing about it all is that we were likely the best-behaved college professor family in town - most of the rest were worse, and people actually breathed a sigh of relief when they realized that we weren't
that bad.
There's been a long, slow-burning, ignored crisis among rural and some suburban American whites. Drug abuse rates and suicides are through the roof, exceeding that of every American ethnic group except maybe some Native American groups. Polls consistently show these people are consistently the most pessimistic about their odds to get ahead. They woke up from the American Dream. Essentially any reason to live has gone out the window for a lot of people, and the wave of fundamentalism and "family values" in the 1980s-2000s was part of an effort to bring meaning to people who otherwise had none. This is now receding, and the despair is leading to new waves of nativism and right-wing populism both here and in much of the rest of the Western world. It goes even deeper because of the disdain that people within the liberal establishment have for them - the non-college-educated are social pariahs and they are reminded of this at every opportunity. That's a recipe for anger and successful demagoguery.
