Over the past few years, Arlie Hochschild has been in conversation with citizens of Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia; Jenny Reardon has been biking through her home state of Kansas, talking to farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the prairie; and Lisa Pruitt has straddled the rural-urban divide over the course of her life in Arkansas and California and as a scholar of rural legal access.
As the nation braced for a decisive election, this conversation — recorded on October 21 — sought to illuminate the frequently overlooked yet politically potent voices emanating from America’s rural heartlands and small towns. The panel was moderated by Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies.
About the Speakers
Arlie R. Hochschild is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, details rise of the right. Her latest book, ‘Stolen Pride: loss, shame and the rise of the right’ is based on six years of field work in eastern Kentucky and focuses on the politics of pride and shame. In particular, it focuses on the distress caused by “structural shaming” in an era of post-70s economic decline, a shame which enhances the appeal of Trump’s politics of displacement.
Lisa Pruitt is Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis. Pruitt’s work reveals how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales, (e.g., material spatiality, lack of anonymity) profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. This work also considers how rurality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity, including through a lens of whiteness studies and critical race theory.
Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.
Cihan Tuğal (moderator) studies social movements, populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion. In his recent publications, he discusses the far right, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and populist performativity in Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines. Tuğal is currently working on a book that will incorporate these case studies, along with an analysis of populism in Brazil. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.
Watch the panel above or on YouTube.
Listen to the panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MARION FOURCADE] Hello, everybody. My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the Director of Social Science Matrix. I am absolutely delighted to welcome you to this event today. So this week actually is very special because we have not one but two Matrix On Point events. So that’s a bit unusual. But of course, we live in pretty unusual times.
So the reason for this convergence of activity right before the end of October is, of course, that we are bracing for yet another momentous presidential election, perhaps the most momentous election in our lifetime. So in today’s panel, we wanted to gain insight into the frequently overlooked, yet politically potent voices emanating from America’s rural heartlands and small towns.
And we found the absolutely perfect trio of voices to talk about it. And I am so proud that we are bringing them together. Not only because they are all brilliant scholars, but because they showcase a vibrancy of the research that is being done across the UC system. So we have Davis, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz right there. And then Berkeley again.
So for the past few years, Arlie Hochschild has been in conversation with the citizens of Pikeville, Kentucky in the heart of Appalachia. Jenny Reardon has been biking through her home state of Kansas talking to farmers and ranchers and other denizens of the prairie. And Lisa Pruitt has straddled the urban rural divide over the course of her life in Arkansas and California and as a scholar of Rural Legal Access.
So this is a very exciting panel. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology here at Berkeley, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies. Note that the panel that we will have on Friday is called– is titled Shifting Alignments, and that panel will present research on political scientists and legal– from political scientists and legal scholars about the changing demographic dynamics within the Democratic and Republican parties. So please come for that too. And then we have a bunch of author meets critics events in late November and December.
But now it is time to hear about the voices from the heartland. And it is time for me to introduce our moderator, Cihan Tuğal, who has also been working on related issues. Cihan needs barely any introduction. He’s a fixture here at matrix. comes here often. He’s professor of sociology at Berkeley. He’s the author of three books and countless articles.
He studies social movements populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion. In his recent publications, he discusses the far right, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and populist performativity in Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines. All right? He’s currently working on a book that will incorporate all of these case studies, along with an analysis of populism in Brazil, as if the other ones were not enough.
[LAUGHTER]
He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy. So without further ado, welcome. And I turn it over to Cihan.
[APPLAUSE]
[CIHAN TUĞAL] OK. Thank you, Marion. I’m not thrilled to be facing this election season, but I am very excited to be here to discussing it with these esteemed colleagues. So we’ll go in this order. Arlie, Lisa, and then Jenny. So first, I want to introduce Arlie Hochschild. I mean, she’s a real person who doesn’t need any introduction, but I’ll say a few words on her.
So she’s a Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology here at this University, and it was really painful to lose her. I was so sad when she left us. It’s not the same without her, and that’s an additional reason I’m so happy to see her here. So her 2016 book, Strangers in their Own Land, Anger and Mourning on the American Right details the rise of the right in the United States.
And her latest book is Stolen Pride, Lost Shame, and the Rise of the Right is based on six years of fieldwork in Eastern Kentucky and focuses on the politics of pride and shame. In particular, it focuses on the distress caused by structural shaming, as she calls it, in an era of post ’70s economic decline, a shame which enhances the appeal of Trump’s politics of displacement.
And even though not immediately related to this topic, we also know her as the primary sociologist of emotions and one of the foremost sociologists of gender and culture in the United States and worldwide. So next, we’ll have Lisa Pruitt, who is distinguished professor of law at UC Davis.
And her work reveals how the economic spatial and social futures of rural locales, for example, material spatiality and lack of anonymity, profoundly shaped the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. This work also considers how rurality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity, including through a lens of whiteness studies and critical race theory.
And last but not least, we’ll hear from Jenny Reardon, a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice, and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research.
She is the author of Race to the Finish, Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, published by Princeton University Press, The Post Genomics Condition, Ethics, Justice, Knowledge after the Genome published by Chicago University Press. And recently she started a project to bike over 1,000 miles– oh my god, through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers, and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.
And it’s really, really important, I think, to hear all of these voices from the heartland, as the title of the panel calls it, because we are in a bubble. And we really need to bring in these voices through critical lenses, of course. So join me in welcoming the panelists–
[ARLIE HOCHSCHILD] Great. It’s wonderful to be here and I share Cihan’s dread of the moment we’re in, but very much welcome the chance to explore that conceptual space between talk talking to people, fieldwork, hanging out, and what you go home and think about. So what I thought I’d do in my 12 to 15 minutes, hold me to that, is talk about first a kind of a larger story that all of our projects may have in common. And then to take you with me on a journey into Pike County, Kentucky.
And this is– I’m theorizing. I’m not sure of this. But it seems to me that the story begins three decades ago with the turn to neoliberal policies, NAFTA, and offshoring, and automation– that’s not government, but automation– and migration flows. These are all external to the particular places we’re looking at. And in my case, the declining price of coal.
So those are all external factors, but they cause, over time, prosperity divides that were there before but got exacerbated. And that’s between classes, between blue collar and white collar. And blue collar being defined increasingly by whether you have a BA or not, and rural and urban exacerbated prosperity divides.
I think there have been exacerbating effects 2008 hit the middle class in urban areas, but it hit rural areas in blue collars harder. COVID, for many reasons we know about, hit the middle class and urban areas hard, but it hit rural areas and blue collar areas harder. And 2008, Did I mention that? That hit harder. Even climate events, if you don’t have insurance on your home, is a harder hit.
So there’s more– and I’m looking at emotions– more anxiety in the classes that are at the bottom side of the prosperity divide. Now, I think all of this sets the stage, creates a kind of a culture of predisposition to charismatic leadership. We know from Max Weber, there’s bureaucratic rational leadership.
And that’s kind of like Biden. He said, oh, don’t look at my face. Look at what I’ve done. Look at my accomplishments. Look at the policies. That’s bureaucratic, rational leadership. Whereas Donald Trump offers us, look at me, all charismatic leaders do that. And my relationship to you, that’s where it’s at. That’s what my power is, and it’s what– you have to look at my signal.
So it gives us– I think, it calls for us to be more attuned than we ordinarily would be to the play of emotion, both what these strains cause people to feel, and I’m going to argue it’s shame, and the power of a charismatic leader to appeal to shame. So let me now take you on a brief journey to Pike County. Little green light. OK. How’s that.
Good.
Can you hear me OK?
Yeah.
Yeah All right. So here we are. And all right. This is what I saw a lot of. And where we are is in Kentucky. Not just Kentucky, but the light green part of it that’s Eastern Kentucky. This is congressional district Kentucky 5, which is the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the country.
It used to be– how beautiful the place is. Honestly, you wouldn’t think there was any problem. And this occurred to me driving around, what could be the problem? It’s just such a beautiful place. And these are kinds of the scenes you would see driving in from Charleston, West Virginia. And this is Pikeville itself.
This whole area used to be 80% for FDR New Deal Democrats. They were 80% for Bill Clinton. Not Hillary, but bill. And now in this– Kentucky 5 is 80%, the last two elections, for Donald Trump. And I went there and I’m taking you there because I wanted to know why. Why that switch?
So quickly, this is how it is. Pikeville seemed like a gem of a little town. But outside it, these are the hollers. And people in the hollers say Pikeville, that’s where the rich people live. And we live in the hollers. There’s always a dog in the road. It’s–
[LAUGHTER]
Somehow, sort of an ownership thing. And by the way, there’s often a single lane. And what I wondered happens when you have a car going up the mountain and a car going down. It turns out, people there know the terrain so well that they know how far back up the one driver would have to back up in order to make way for the second car, or the other driver would have to do. And they adjudicate that. All this local knowledge makes it, you’re a stayer. And suddenly, you’re going to have to be a leaver. But this is the kind of feeling you have about a place and the knowledge you have.
So OK. This is the look. I’m just sharing with you the look of the place. I know the guy who grew that corn. OK. But it’s not just any old place. And this isn’t coal, but it’s what the coal is inside of. This used to be a place of enormous pride and coal. We kept the lights on. We won World War I. We won World War II. We produced the energy.
And it isn’t just national pride, local pride and having coal. But these are coal miners who are locally seen, as you might imagine, a vet coming home from World War II, a great pride. And they’re proud of their blackened faces. We worked for our wage. And they have a–
[LAUGHTER]
–a little edge about their pride of coal. Like if they’re used to being told, now that’s just dirty energy. We need clean energy. Don’t you care about climate? This is an industry organization, friends of coal, as you can imagine. All right. This is the mayor of Coal Run. And he described his district, well, I’m mayor of two malls on each side of Route 23.
And he said, coal hasn’t really disappeared. And he’s in front of a mile-long coal train that was filled with coal. And this is paradox 1. My favorite word, paradox. Under Donald Trump, the big promise was, I’m going to bring back coal. Me, me, my powerful self will bring back coal. And I’ll also bring other well-paid jobs in. And you’ll be happy.
In the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, he did not bring back coal, continued to decline, and new jobs– none of them came into the area. He offered them tax cuts, but how’s that going to help the second poorest district in the country? Not at all. So they got nothing economically out of Trump’s four years.
But this train is carrying coal because under Biden, who promised to cut coal, it actually went up because of the Ukraine paradox 1. So when coal jobs went out, people, especially the young and the educated, left for the Midwest industrial towns. And when coal went out, something else came in, and that was a crisis in drugs.
You’ve heard of the term deaths of despair. This is a center of that. Kentucky and West Virginia are the epicenter of Purdue Pharma’s marketing focus. In two states that don’t believe in regulation. Oh, big, bad government, deep state, you don’t want to regulate anything. And so the government didn’t know that Purdue had sent 75 salesmen. This just to Kentucky alone. And Oxycontin.
So I saw a lot of graves of young men. They were rural. They were blue collar. And in the Appalachian Morning News, you would see the death notice. But it would never give the cause. Shame. OK. All of this, I’m making this quick, I think, has led to a desire for charismatic leader, and that would be Donald Trump. These are faces of people that [INAUDIBLE].
And this is a neo-Nazi who brought a white supremacist March to town. And that’s what I did. I said, this is a perfect storm. Jobs are gone. Opiates are in. And now a bad answer to a real problem. But let me just, in the two minutes I have, say what I think it came down to.
This is a very proud region. And they– high on feeling individual responsibility for their fate. They were what I call a pride paradox. They would blame themselves for failure, and they were in an economic district that required them to fail in essence. Meanwhile, in blue states, happier economic circumstances in a more circumstantial culture of pride. So they were blaming themselves for a lot that was going on, that was structural.
And I believe that Donald Trump is a shamed man for his own reasons, which would be neither here nor there for us. Except that I think it gave him an acute understanding of the power of shame. And I believe that he’s put us through what I would call a four-moment antishaming ritual. It goes like this.
Moment one, he says something transgressive– all immigrants are poisoning the blood of America or they’re eating your pet cat and dog. OK. Moment two, the punditry shames Donald Trump. You can’t say that we’re an immigrant society. You can’t say that. That’s a lie. You can’t repeat lies.
Moment three, Donald Trump becomes the victim of the shaming. Oh, that hurt. Have you been shamed like I’ve been shamed. It hurts. I mean, look what they’re doing. They’re beating up on me. And he becomes the victim, and he talks to his followers as fellow victims. And then in moment four comes the great roar back. Out of victimhood, he becomes the rescuer of the shamed.
I believe that America, the Democratic part of America, has been listening to moment one and moment two, where he makes a provocative statement and the punditry shames him. And that the Republican part of America has been listening to moment 3 and moment 4, where he’s the victim and he and he roars back.
So I think we need to become bilingual. We need to understand what is said rationally, but we need to understand what is said emotionally. And then talk in a language they can– others understand whatever we have to say about real solutions to their real problems. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[CIHAN TUĞAL] Thank you very much. So, Lisa.
[LISA PRUITT] All right. Well, it’s great to be in Berkeley today. What a lovely weather day you arranged for us. And I am probably the odd person out on this panel, because the field work that I’m going to report on isn’t field work in a typical sense. I grew up working class in a community very much like the one where Arlie has spent several years.
I grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and a persistent poverty county. One major difference from what Arlie described is that it was not a coal County. But my father was a long haul truck driver, and my mother was a teacher’s aide. So I am a dual national of bright blue California where I have lived for 26 years teaching at UC Davis. And I left Arkansas more than 35 years ago.
But I still have family living in Arkansas, including my mother. And so to some extent, the conclusions that I have come to about this political moment are really informed much more, shall we say, informally by my community of origin. And also, what I see in the community where I live and work now and the excesses of the bright blue bubble.
So the talk I’m going to give today is really critical of this bright blue bubble, and the role that all of us play in this unfortunate political moment in which we have been living for almost a decade. So I start with a tweet by an SNL guy the night that Trump was elected, “Rural = so stupid.” And then a photo of a bumper sticker I took in the northern neck of Virginia in 2011.
So this was Obama’s first term, a very rural area that is literally in the northern neck of Virginia. And so someone had made bumper stickers that said, we’re rural, not stupid. So there has been this long standing awareness by rural people of how they are viewed outside their communities.
So the Trump moment, yes, it is accentuating, it is aggravating, but this is not a new phenomenon in terms of how rural people feel and how they know they are perceived. All right. There we go. Oh, I was in Iowa two days ago, so I don’t have as many nice photos as Arlie does. But rather than bring you photos of my hometown, which would look very much like the ones that Arlie showed you, I thought I’d show you a little bit out of rural Iowa from Saturday, where I was driving through Boone County, Marshall County, Story County.
And so here’s the Republican office. Here’s the Republican headquarters in Boone County, which has a population of about 30,000. And the County seat has, I think, about 15,000. It’s really a very vibrant downtown, a little bit like Pikeville. Looked very vibrant. I’m always surprised when I go into a community like that and it is doing so well. It is actually quite a vibrant main street.
Now, just a few miles away from where the GOP headquarters was in Boone County, I took this photo. And so the Democrats are there too, and look at the issue that they’re leveraging. And if I have time, I’ll circle back to this. What we don’t do enough of is look for the common ground.
Many states, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, among them are going voucher crazy– well, we don’t really talk about vouchers anymore. We talk about school choice. This is going to have a huge impact on rural communities. And so there are ways that progressives can build bridges and find issues that rural communities also care about. And I would submit that we’re not doing that nearly enough.
And this one– this photo, I’m going to share because it really illustrates what Arlie was just saying. This was just down the road in Madrid, Iowa, also in Boone County. And I had never seen this particular sign before. I suspect that this homeowner had this sign made. And it perfectly reflects what Charlie was saying. They are coming after me because I am fighting for you.
So you and I are one and the same, and I’m going to protect you. Remember this absurd comment that he made a few weeks ago about how he was going to protect women? Yeah. Anyway. So I think the overarching point, again, of my rather admittedly disjointed talk is this. We have seen the enemy, and he is us. In other words, we are part of the problem.
We are in this unfortunate feedback loop with rural America. They hear what we say. And I studied some of the language out of the 2008 election. Let me see if I’ve got that. There’s a few– we had this acute polarization along the rural or urban axis in the 2008 election. Obama was cast, as Uber urban, and Sarah Palin took on the mantle of Main Street.
And The New York Times and lots of media of that ilk took this up, and they engaged in merciless rural bashing. And at the time, I thought, well, it’s a good thing that my rural friends don’t read The New York Times. But what happened shortly after that? We all fell into our media silos, and social media gave people the ability to take nasty things that were said about rural people and serve them right up in those people’s newsfeeds. And that is what has been happening.
So let me go back to where I wanted to go with this. And really, I’m just building off what Arlie was saying. We have failed to see rural America. I’m talking about, again, we bright blue Californians living in our bubble. And when we do see them, we talk about them– we talk about flyover states and yeah, whatever. We talk about them as the idiots who vote against their own interests, as if we think this is going to help convince them to listen to what we have to say that might bring them into our political camp.
When we do see them, we tend not to see their complexity. And that’s one reason I’m a fan of Arlie’s work. Is she’s going into these communities, like the one that she depicted in Louisiana and now in Kentucky, and she’s showing us nuance. We malign them. We call them names. I just want to give one example of how, again, there’s this talking past each other.
So color blindness, this is one that comes up in my community of origin. And it’s what I was raised with. My mother was so proud to raise me to be colorblind, because she knew what the predecessor to color blindness was in the South. And so this was– she wears her color blindness like a badge of virtue. And a lot of people there do, because that was the successor to open racial discrimination.
I didn’t realize until I was in a conversation with her, I think it was 2012 in the run up to Obama’s re-election, and she declared herself colorblind. She was put off by Obama. She voted for him in 2008. But my mother was a lifelong Democrat, very active in Democratic Party politics.
And suddenly, she’s saying she’s not going to– she doesn’t know if she’s going to vote for Obama again, because he said that thing about people who have a small business, they didn’t build it. And I said, no, what he meant was, right. you know the Commonwealth and yada, yada, yada, and so forth. And she said, well, I’m colorblind.
And I was flummoxed, because I’ve been living the life of the mind for a couple of decades. And I know that you don’t say you’re colorblind. We understand racial disadvantage. We’re not playing this colorblind game. And that was the first moment when I realized that we really are talking different languages. And Arlie mentioned a couple times, she’s focused on the working class people, those without a BA. Where do we learn things like colorblindness is not realistic? It’s per se. It’s not the thing. We learn them in institutions of higher education.
So there is all this information that has not been shared, and it’s not that easy. The Southern Poverty Law Center published a study a few years ago that showed that every public school in the country had done a bad job of teaching about the realities of slavery. So at what point is this information going to come through to people who didn’t have the benefit of a BA?
So they say they’re colorblind, for example, we call– am I at five ish? OK. They say they’re colorblind. We say, well, that’s racist. What? It’s like the Louisianans. These are people who see themselves as virtuous. And we don’t take the time to say, oh, well, here’s what I mean. Let’s talk about the history of racial disadvantage. Let’s talk about the legacy of this. It’s just like, you’re an idiot.
I mean, I see it. I see it among my extremely confident students at the University of California at Davis. They are very, very certain that they know everything. We are very certain. We are very certain as liberal elites that we know everything, that we have the right answers. And not only that, we say, oh, white privilege. You idiot, can’t you see your white privilege?
Those coal miners and those people who are living very disadvantaged lives are like, what on Earth are you talking about? So we are undermining our ability to have a meaningful conversation with people who don’t share our educational foundation. What I see is a lot of progressives who would rather be right than build cross-racial coalitions. We are so self-satisfied.
I love that little bit of marital advice, do you want to be right or do you want to stay married? We would rather be right than have tough conversations that bring people along to our understanding. And you know what, we might find out that we’re not absolutely right about everything. So we’d rather be right than build– than do the hard work of building cross-racial coalitions.
Is persuasion dead? What do we talk about? We don’t talk much about persuading the persuadables, although I am hearing it more these last few weeks of the election. Mostly, we talk about turning out the base. So we’re not having those conversations that we need to be having to persuade people that our way of doing things is the right way of doing things.
So back to Arlie. We need to be asking questions. We need to be seeking a basis for empathy. So here’s an example. This is David Brooks column from a few days ago, which I actually thought was very good. He’s talking about Trump, is a nightmare. Why is it that Harris isn’t running away with it? Why isn’t she running away with this election? Why are we told, every morning we get up, oh my God, it’s gotten even closer.
Very painful for we progressives. I know we’re scared. We’ve all admitted up here that we’re scared of what’s coming down the pike. But look at this example. A 2022 USC survey found that 92% of respondents agreed with this statement. Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin, which is why only a third of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they supported using race as a factor in college admissions.
And I bet everybody in this room is in favor of using race in college admissions. So how do we have the conversations with people that would share this foundational understanding of racial disadvantage, and how do we balance that and maybe work with the sense of– this belief in colorblindness, this deeply, deeply held belief that so many people still embrace?
So I’ve written a couple of pieces that have been published in Politico. I’m highlighting them here. This was published in 2022 before JD Vance was elected Senator. I was one of the earliest people to criticize JD Vance’s book when it came out, and all the liberals were going, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
But you know what my observation was. He is throwing poor white people that raised me under the bus. And as Sonia Sotomayor wrote the book and she threw her Latina and Latino colleagues under the bus, we would not be praising her. If Barack Obama In Dreams for My Father had said these lazy people that I worked with in Chicago, we would not have eaten it up.
But when he put down working class white people, the initial reaction was almost universal positive. And I wrote a response to that, which was, I’m happy to say, well-received. The New York Times called it perceptive. And here we are. Look where JD Vance is now, where the left finally woke up. But it goes back to what Arlie was saying, we don’t see white class disadvantage. And that’s what led to this sort of beautiful embrace of Hillbilly Elegy by the left when it was initially published.
All right. I’ll just close with this, another political column. What is the Democrats– what has to be the progressives goal right now in the run up to the election? Lose by less. Fetterman was a great role model in getting out and visiting every state in Pennsylvania twice when he ran for Senate. And that’s what I wrote this piece about.
The Democrats have committed malpractice in the extent to which they have neglected rural communities and the investment that it takes to garner rural votes. Remember Chuck Schumer saying in 2016, for every vote– for every blue collar vote, we lose in Western Pennsylvania, don’t worry, we’re going to pick up two Republican women in the Philadelphia suburbs. And it didn’t work out. You can’t just leave rural voters unattended to. It’s another way of seeing them to have infrastructure, to have organizers in those communities. All right. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
[CIHAN TUĞAL] Thank you very much, Lisa. And finally, we hear from Jenny Reardon.
[JENNY REARDON] OK. So now for Kansas. You’ll hear a lot resonances with the previous talks, but you’ll also, I think, hear some new things. OK. So usually, it so goes California, so goes the nation. That’s what I heard growing up in Kansas and my friends who are here just don’t know yet because you’re not in California yet. So anyway.
But so I have recently gone back to my home state of Kansas in the wake of– actually, now it’s been a few years. In the wake of the 2017 election, decided to bike across the state– actually, I’m not biking across. I’m biking around like an idiot. If I really wanted to bike across, I would have done that four times by now.
And as I’ve done this– I teach at UC Santa Cruz in the sociology department, and I have put Frank’s book, What’s the Matter With Kansas, on my syllabus for issues and problems in American society that I had to start teaching on January 10, 2017. I was pretty sure none of my students would know anything about Kansas. So I decided when I went home to see my mom, I would go on my own little what’s the matter with Kansas tour and take some photos to put my PowerPoint. And that was going to just be it. But that’s not what happened.
And as I did this, I found things that Frank would have predicted. Like, there’s a lot of very conservative fundamentalist Christian signs that you will encounter, like this one here. But there was also a lot of things that I would not have expected. So as part– and I had learned that by cycling, I had decided right after Brexit to bike from London to Berlin. And I realized that that was like the best thing I’d ever done to learn about politics and my entire life.
And so I decided, what have I biked around Kansas? And I asked my friends, what do you think is more difficult, London to Berlin or Kansas? They were like, definitely Kansas. Anyway. OK. I won’t go into all the things I can say there. But as part of my tour– it’s a digital tour, I stopped at my best friend from college’s family farm, and she now lives in a home that she converted from the school house, the one room school house that her uncle and father went to school in.
And so this home continued its school functions that evening and served as a base for my personal What’s the Matter With Kansas discussion, and which I wanted to ask her family. So why was it that folks in Kansas voted for Trump? Why don’t most Kansans believe in climate change and why do they hate the EPA?
So there was a lot I learned from that conversation. One thing I want to throw in here real quick, I’m going to focus on what Uncle D said to me. But Aunt Amy– the family was totally split on who they voted for. But aunt Amy voted for Trump, and partly because– her argument was, and I’m hearing this about the San Francisco election right now, because he’s rich, so he doesn’t have any interest in it. He’s going to be neutral, because he already has money. So that’s what we’re hearing in San Francisco right now, too. So I thought I’d say that.
But I want to focus on Uncle D. So Uncle D, I’ve known for a long time. I went out to the farm when I was in college. I was one of these science nerds, and Uncle D would say, you know nothing up there on the hill to learn about the land. You need to be here. So we went out and we learned about the land.
And I dug out. I did a bunch of hard stuff and worked on tractors and whatever. So he and I have a long history of talking about a number of things, and so I’ve been looking forward to resuming the conversation. So I had some questions for him. And first I led by saying, so what are– what’s accounting for the deeper forces that have led to the increased challenges that face family farms? And this is a family farm.
And I asked him if the problem is big Ag? And he responds, what is big Ag? He’s like, what are you even talking about? The decline in family farms, he explained, had not been caused by big corporate farms taking over, so-called big Ag. Rather, improvements in agriculture created by mechanization and automation, so-called precision agriculture allow fewer farmers to control more land.
And this is something I’m hearing a lot about, is the role of technology and forcing people off the land. And how much it costs to be in agriculture now. And I’ve been thinking about to talk about whiteness, and which I have been talking about actually explicitly with people and finding ways to talk about it, which is an interesting thing we could talk about here.
That it’s hard– that the farmers and ranchers, by and large, in Kansas are all white. And that is partly the problem of getting into it now. As diversity, DEI, things of efforts have affected all kinds of other areas, it has made very little inroads into farming and ranching. And I think it’s important to think about why.
So anyway, so I then move on. I ask Uncle D about another perceived threat to farming, the EPA. Why do his fellow farmers hate the EPA? Because, he tells me, they want to regulate cow flatulence. So my tactic all along is to press people about details of where they are, where we stand, like, this ground.
And I said, so how is that working here? I pressed for details. And I say, this sounds like an apocryphal story, the government wants to regulate cow farts. It’s not the same problem as the one created by my use of the term big Ag. It is powerful symbolically, but what power does it have to really describe what is going on?
Although its votes rarely have the power, at least recently, to shift national elections, Kansas long has been a place where powerful symbols that shape national political discourse are made. Even the very question, what’s the matter with Kansas, which far preceded Thomas Frank By about 100– I don’t, 75 years.
But I’m interested in what is going on in Kansas, on this farm? So what’s the matter here? So in the same evenhanded, quiet way that I’ve come to expect from Uncle D, he accepts my point. So I ask again, what is the problem with EPA? What had this federal agency done that had directly impacted his farm? So he cites a few examples.
He said, it used to be that the food and drug administration regulations– first h said, new food and drug regulations of antibiotics. He said, it used to be that farmers could mix in their own antibiotics into the feed for their animals. Now, because of renewed concerns about their environmental and health effects, they will need certification from a vet.
Now, this example made sense to me because I had just earlier that day been to this amazing store, Bluestem, where you can– was kind of a Walmart for farmers where you can get anything, including all kinds of things– not anything, but all kinds of things, including plastic cow heads to practice your roping to medications for your livestock. These are vaccines to give to your cattle right here. So this ability to walk in and purchase these drugs is under threat without having to go to some vet.
So his second example is the Farm Service agency, the FSA. During the AG depression of the ’80s, he explains to me, the FSA provided subsidies intended to create a safety net for farmers, yet it did so too late after rural banks began to fail. Now, what struck me in both of these examples is that they do not involve the EPA.
The FDA and the FSA, yes. The EPA, no. So my thought there was, the problem with the ETA is not the problem with the EPA, but the problem with government regulation more generally. And the problem with government regulation is not a problem with government regulation, but the deeper problem of alienation. The feeling that the problems one is dealing with are not seen or understood.
The problem is not that the people in Kansas are ignorant, stupid– I think we should just eliminate that language from our political discourse– or fail to understand the truth, but that the truths produced by the population centers, which is Uncle D’s language, fail to map onto their realities and frequently threaten their ways of life that they have given all but their life for. And I can’t go into the health statistics of farming, but they are stark.
Although unseen by many scientists and federal agencies, which I study science in my other– most of the time, the roots of these ways of life run deep in this nation. They are those of the people of these prairies formed in, and I will stumble over the next words, white settler imaginaries, should we be using that language here, who are formed to understand themselves as rugged, free, hardworking, and God loving and know who know how to grow food and get on with the practical work of living. A lot more to say right there, but I only have a few minutes.
Yet, God and freedom and hard work fail to train our eyes on the action in these prairies that easily eludes but nonetheless creates the conditions of life and death. The ways of life of the family farm are under threat, and all the charisma and power of a billionaire, all the blustery invocations of greatness, of God, of country will not change the deeper forces at work, what my best friend’s uncle describes simply as mechanization.
In the name of progress and efficient, Tyson– all the photographs here are ones that I took on the bike ride, by the way– Tyson took cattle to the semi-arid plains of Western Kansas, and the planet’s largest underground aquifer is now being drained to sustain agricultural industrial meat production. In the name of precision, the machines grow more powerful, while the lives of too many become marginal or locked up. This is Leavenworth, which I just biked by two weeks ago. Leavenworth Federal Prison.
In the name of progress, God, and country, we don’t sully our commitment to hard work with too much talk of race or other forms of discrimination, to get to your point, Lisa. But sully we must for machines, God, truth, and hard work will not keep the water from running out, schools from closing, and towns from folding. How can we see the land anew?
So in my own small effort to forge the vision needed to live at ecological and social breaking points on the still, it has to be admitted, heartbreakingly beautiful plains and prairies of Kansas, in the fall of 2017, I decided to start biking around the state. In a time of media and tech-accelerated clickbait, I decided what I wanted to cultivate was a slow, don’t go fast on the bike, situated, ground up view of what’s happening. And what I have found is a state in transition.
In 2010, the deeply conservative Sam Brownback became governor and became a leader of the Tea Party backlash against Obama. He mobilized social conservatives by acting to severely restrict abortion and rejected federal funding for public health care. He also made such deep cuts that huge– tax cuts that budget deficits resulted.
This is my bike. This is whiskey, by the way. In response, Moody’s downgraded Kansas bonds, making it harder for Kansas to pay for things. This led to spiraling problems. School funding was cut to such a degree that the state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Job growth fell to a fraction of the national average.
Things got so bad in Kansas that in February of 2017, the Republican Kansas State house acted to repeal, acted against their Republican governor, to repeal Brownback state tax cuts and to implement tax increases. In July of 2017, Trump announced Brownback’s nomination to the newly created US ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom.
And Brownback went off to DC in January of 2018, taking his culture, war politics with him and leaving the state in ruin. My biking in Kansas began at this moment. And what I have discovered is a state eager to leave behind its what is the matter with Kansas reputation, and to get to work solving urgent, complex problems. The popularity of the Democratic Governor Laura Kelly– has anyone heard of her?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Yeah.
[JENNY REARDON] Two people, but most of you have not. That’s interesting. It may seem remarkable in itself that there is a Democratic Governor of this deeply red state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats almost 2 to 1. But it is even more remarkable that Kelly is deeply popular, 62% approval rating, making her the second most popular Democratic Governor and the eighth most popular governor overall.
Bucking what’s the matter with Kansas thesis, Kelly has been popular partly because she has focused on jobs and the economy, and she has delivered. Walmart, for example, chose to build its first case ready beef facility, I know you’re all not cheering about this, but in the part of Kansas Olathe, where my mom lived, and creating 667 new jobs.
Overall, the Kelly administration has brought 60,000 new jobs to Kansas, and this includes dairies– where are my dairy cows. OK. This includes dairies that are leaving California for Kansas, which has attracted the cheese industry to invest. Remarkably, during this period, the state also has witnessed what I would have thought, what I’ve said would have been impossible seven years ago, passage of major water law designed to conserve water.
Through silty land, these all were taken two weeks ago, once known as the dust bowl, course electric cables to power pumps to pull up water to feed the corn and milo that feeds the cattle that feeds the machines that process is one third of the beef produced in the US.
Wow.
This is partly because this region sits atop the nation’s largest underground aquifer. However, now that water in the aquifer is running out. It’s highly variegated conditions combined with a deep tradition of privatized land management has made it tough to address this issue, what many now recognize is a crisis. And this, I took, in the district water management. This red represents 80% decline. So you can see it really is declining.
But the fact that Kansas collects more data about water than any other state, a fact that goes against this reputation as anti-science, along with the astute leadership of a new generation of women leaders, this is changing. Lindsey Vonn, who is from my district, elected, yeah, who worked as a field organizer for Sharice Davids, also in my district, the first openly LGBT Native American voted to the house, was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives in November 2020.
In 2022, she worked across the aisle with Republican Jim Minix to try to pass an omnibus water bill. They got clobbered. They were opposed by agricultural interest groups. But the next year they succeeded. And when I was out in this region two weeks ago, I heard a lot of praise for Vonn, who was credited for coming to the district. And it is a long way, 400 miles from the Capitol. This is the third most remote place in America. And listening and learning.
Now through a variety of legal mechanisms, the producers, those who own water rights and use it to produce agricultural products, now are agreeing to work together to reduce water use. Now, granted, important questions remain like, who should be voting on who decides what to do with the water?
But the difference between now and five years ago when I was first out in Western Kansas is that those questions are on the table and being discussed. And one thing that unites these dynamic new women leaders in Kansas is that they have not been baited by the culture wars. There are many who have tried to make denying transgender rights a big issue in Kansas. This is heartbreaking, and it is maddening.
But Governor Kelly’s response has been effective. She has not made it a campaign issue. But when the time comes, she vetoes everything that comes across her table that would infringe upon those rights. And even though Kansans came out in full force, yes, to vote against a change to the state Constitution that would have changed its language about bodily autonomy and opened up a route for the state legislature to all but ban abortion, Kelly did not make this a campaign issue either. She stuck to the issues she knew would win rural votes in Republican Kansas– jobs, keeping towns from rolling away at the Ogallala Aquifer depletes, keeping schools from closing.
This is not to say that Frank’s what’s the matter with Kansas thesis is entirely wrong. One of the most significant votes to take place in Kansas in two weeks will be for the school board– state school board. Most of the positions are open, and it could become deeply conservative and return Kansas to its fate 20 years ago when members of that body declared evolution is a false doctrine and mandated the teaching of intelligent design. But that aside, I think we might learn more in this moment if we stopped asking, what’s the matter with Kansas and start looking at what’s going right?
[APPLAUSE]
[[CIHAN TUĞAL] OK. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jenny. That was really mind opening. So we have ample time for questions from the audience, and somebody will be passing around the mic. So if you could raise your hand, I’ll stack the questions. OK. Yes.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Hello. Sorry, I’ve never used a mic. So keeping with this insight that rural and Republican does not equal stupid, can you guys theorize the anti-vaccination sentiments?
[JENNY REARDON] OK. So the anti-vaccination sentiments. So one of the– I think vaccinations come along with public health, come along with government. It’s a part of that more general critique of government, of people who are far away from us who don’t understand my children, their health needs.
Right now, interestingly, this is also affecting the transgender rights issue. There’s a big– the government doesn’t understand biology. That’s part of the critique happening right now. The thing that I was most struck by was a– I didn’t put up any signs I saw. By the way, there are not many signs in Kansas. People aren’t putting up signs, and I have more to say about that.
But one was one that struck me was save women’s sports with two X’s. And so I think– and there’s this embrace of the whole truth discourse, science discourse, and turning it back on people. So I think it’s gotten caught up in all of that. I think that’s what all the anti-vaxxer– it’s a much longer conversation to have about that, but that’s only two seconds about it.
[ARLIE HOCHSCHILD] I think that says a lot from what I saw as well. Interesting, in Kentucky, similarly, there is a Democratic Governor who’s very popular because he’s doing great things. He’s brought a lot of economic opportunity in, and it’s interesting to study how he talks about COVID and about vaccinations. It is not from on top, and scientists tell us– he begins by saying– at 5 o’clock, he came on every day. He’s kind of– I’m with you, is what it said.
He said, we’ve never had to face something exactly like this, so we’re not quite sure. Our scientists are working around the clock to help us. But we’re going to have to go with the best information we have. And then he took it from there. And that is, we should get vaccinations. And you know, where Kentucky, team Kentucky.
He would always appeal to state pride, which he then put together with a muted– science doesn’t go with an insult. It doesn’t go with shaming you for not having a BA. He gave it to you. He didn’t take away your pride. Well, we scientists know because we’re educated. You country bumpkins don’t know. It undid that. There was something healing that we have to look at. We need to learn to talk that talk.
Yeah.
[LISA PRUITT] Yeah. Andy Beshear is– I love following him on Twitter. He is a master communicator. If you don’t follow him, follow him. I really hoped that Kamala would pick him as her running mate, because he is– he does this so well. He does the humility. It’s Team Kentucky. Love Kentucky. Kentucky people are so great. We know how to get things done. Amazing, amazing communicator.
But back to your question. I think things are getting worse by the moment in terms of this feedback loop that I’ve described and that we’re in. Five years ago. I had hope. But I see things happening where we are closer and closer to the precipice where we cannot– I don’t know how we step back because of the level of distrust that exists.
And so I think if the pandemic had happened pre-Trump, we wouldn’t have had all this pushback against the vaccines. We wouldn’t have had all this pushback against masking. But everything got politicized after Trump did his, as you say, this dance, this shaming. So sorry to be so negative. The upside is Andy Beshear. The downside is, I’m not sure how we get out of this mess.
[JENNY REARDON] And Laura Kelly.
Laura, I love Laura.
[LAUGHTER]
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Yeah. Thank you so much for this panel. I had a question that plays into some of what you’ve been discussing right there, which is, there’s a panel last week, I think, at matrix where the long held contention that all politics is local was then, well, maybe now all politics is national. We’ve got national media, national social media, national existential questions that are going to be answered by nationally held bodies, such as the Supreme Court, maybe through these mechanisms that are national, the Electoral College.
But what you’re pointing to, especially with this perhaps contradiction between a Democratic governor of a deeply red state, you’re drawing on really the staying power of the local, of the decline of coal, of the aquifer. Very local processes, geological processes might be affecting these national questions. So just testing out that question of have we moved from all politics is local to all politics is national, where do you find yourself responding to these kinds of contentions?
[ARLIE HOCHSCHILD] I’ll take that one. It’s fascinating to me, the local how different the discourse is about coal, what the locals say about it, what nationals think locals are saying is completely different. The most extreme group that I came to know– Eastern Kentucky Patriots, sent a group to Washington in 2020, and we’re very interested in renewables.
They’d look at some of– there are 300 sawed off mountains in Kentucky where– just mountaintop removal. And they’re saying, hey, be good to have solar panels up there. Be good to have wind turbines. That could give us good jobs. So the locals are looking for solutions and for local leaders and the national– So the circumstances, and we began with that, there are external factors that are at play. But the solutions, I think, are local to– and people who can hear locally.
Let me say one more thing, which is that there’s a whole literature, which I’d love students to do more on, that indicates that the left is less good at reaching out across the aisle than the right is. There’s a study, Pew study, my research assistant, Kirsten’s, who’s half of my book is really thanks to her digging here.
A Pew study that showed that a higher proportion of liberals are likely answer yes to the question, I break off contact with people who say something that I disagree with. Liberal Democrats do that a lot more than conservative Republicans. And the paradox, again, is that another finding shows that conservative Republicans are more likely to feel better about you and accept you if they sit down across the table from you, if they get to look at you and see how you smile and what is it you say. How do you blow your nose? A kind of more personal. So what a paradox. The very thing the left is too snooty to do is what the right is waiting for. That’s an opportunity.
Yeah.
[JENNY REARDON] I think it’s interesting because the thing about biking is, my friends and partners have been worried about, as a queer woman biking across the straight, this could be a problem for you. But the reality is that the bike actually– having an adventure to share with them. Also, you have ridden the roads that they navigate. You understand the conditions. And there’s always real curiosity about–
Basically, I have not found, who the hell are you? I’m like, well, how did you get here?
[LAUGHTER]
What did you eat? Why are you doing this. And think that– I think there’s been a lot of real interest– I doubt I’ve been would be able to talk to the people in the way that I have except that–
That we see you.
And also, I share a love of the land. And I think that really helps. Like, I care about the place. I always think that Donna Haraway’s point about, you have to have some skin in the game. You’ve got to– you can’t just come in with your critique. I did an interview last week with the head of GMD 3, the general– so one of the general– the Water Management District folks.
And he said, I really appreciate that you didn’t come in here with an angle. We’ve been burned. So yeah, I think because I really come into this with a real curiosity and love for land, I think that really helps. And on the national local thing, of course, it’s both. I mean, I– when I was driving the 400 miles, because I didn’t drive 400 miles from– I was at the prison, the federal prison in Leavenworth, which is far east as you could get all the way to far west.
But so I got a rental car and drove and dropped it off, and then bike from there. And anyway, I listened to a lot of talk radio. And that is national. The corporation that bought up all the local radio stations, like– and so people are imbibing national discourse. But it lands locally–
Yes.
–OK? And so I think there is this– there’s a real dialectic relationship between those things. And I find it fascinating watching how it lands differently in these different places. I was thinking a lot about that. That’s great.
[INAUDIBLE]
[CIHAN TUĞAL] I think Lisa wanted to say something.
That’s OK.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] A favorite concept of mine is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous statement, in politics, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. It seems to me that we have– we not only have a disconnect between how we hear things, how we receive truths, or the blue commentary on the red truth, but it seems to me that there is a fire hose of misinformation that is coming at people. And if they are unable to parse it, then their truth is not necessarily truthful, but it’s the product of this fire hose of misinformation.
I’m not saying that people who go to college automatically become expert at parsing bullshit. We may become experts at making it and disseminating it even. But we recognize that certain things are and certain things aren’t. We recognize that creationism is a fanciful construction of a religious minority. We recognize that evolution is a truth.
In a world in which people cannot recognize the fanciful and the artificial and the completely nonsensical and the crazy from the truth, how are we to– when you’re sitting across the table, it seems to me you can’t make much progress in the conversation until you can get them to get away from the nonsense.
I think if you went to the people of Eastern Kentucky or the people of rural Kansas and said– talk to them about federal funds transfers, they would be stunned to discover that they are paying out a small amount of taxes and receiving a ton of money from, guess who? California. So they better shut up or we may stop sending the money. I think they have no clue that they’re living on federal funds and federal programs, and we’re the ones that are paying for them.
And they would be– I think they would be stunned to discover some of the truths that we to be truthful because of the way they hear these things constantly, whether it’s Fox News, whether it’s social media, whether it’s Donald Trump, whether it’s the local politicians. What do we do about that? How do we get over that? How we get past that?
[LISA PRUITT] So first of all, I just wanted to speak to the assertion that California’s subsidizing Kansas. There’s actually a lot of sophisticated work on that. I’d be happy to send you some. It depends on how you count things. So it’s not as simple as is often asserted by Krugman, who loves to do his white rural rage thing about every three months in The New York Times.
So it is actually more complicated. It depends on what you count. We would say the same thing– I mean, when we talk about the would be state of Jefferson up North, these people, don’t they know– Siskiyou County is getting a lot more from us than the other way around and so forth.
But, look, I don’t think any of us know how we’re going to– how we’re going to solve the disinformation– misinformation problem. I mean, if someone’s got a good idea. But the only thing I to do is to try to chip– is to try to have conversations with people and try to chip away and educate about where you are getting your information. Because there’s a lot more egregious examples of misinformation than Kansas being subsidized by California. And again, the nuances of that. I’m much more concerned about other types of misinformation than the subtleties of income transfers.
[ARLIE HOCHSCHILD] I would say that income transfers are a matter of shame to the people that get transferred to. They don’t like being on welfare. They depend on it. And they admit it. But they want to be– their pride system has them looking to be contributors, looking to be workers.
And I’ve talked to unemployed coal miners, a daughter of one, who said, as soon as dad was laid off, we went with our food stamps to another store out of the community. Didn’t want people to see it. There’s a whole hierarchy, oh, we’re not like them, them being people who are reliant on– so that’s fact. That’s a fact too. It’s feelings, but feelings are part of the factual world, I guess, as I think it is.
And I guess the second thing I would say is we need to know more about denial. How does denial Happen I think there are structures of plausibility that shift and make it more likely that you’re going to go into a fictional world, and doesn’t have to do with intelligence. And doesn’t even have to do entirely with education. It has to do with feelings. And we have to get rational about feelings.
In other words, got to really grok how they work and what’s going on. And finally, I would say that the left has been in denial about a whole bubbling trend for the last two decades, and especially since Trump, who’s lit the match, has come on the scene. So we’ve not been factual. We’ve not really looked at what’s going on. We’ve been in denial too.
[CIHAN TUĞAL] We’re past 1:30. Maybe the last words from Jenny, if you want to speak to that last question. [JENNY REARDON] Well, I’ll just say briefly. I think we all have a lot to learn about mis- and disinformation. I think in terms of the civic capacity of this nation to think about knowledge, science, and truth is so small. And it’s not that all of us in the room are enlightened either. I think there’s a lot to learn. And I think the more we can be open to that mutual empathy and learning and not being in denial, the better off we’ll be.
[LISA PRUITT] I’ve thought a lot about stubbornness and emotion or how do we characterize stubbornness? Because I think there’s a lot of stubbornness that is keeping both sides from having the conversations and reaching the places that they need to– where they need to be so we can move forward more constructively. Because it just seems like once somebody has dug in their heels, that– I mean, whatever Trump says is helpful and good and right. Then there’s all this shame about having to back up and say, oh, right? So I think stubbornness on both sides plays a huge role in what’s happening.
[CIHAN TUĞAL] Thanks again to all the panelists and to the audience.
[APPLAUSE]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
