Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment considers the central influence of a “rural consciousness” in contemporary American politics, linking it especially to the rise of the Tea Party movement and the electoral candidates, such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whom its members champion. Of the many novel elements of Cramer’s book, none stands out as starkly as its self-reflectiveness—its willingness to make the author herself an important part of the story. It is true that many scholars, especially those who employ the sorts of interpretive methods that drive Cramer’s analysis of rural consciousness, have envisioned themselves less as the “modest witnesses” of scientific lore and more as active participants (subjects even) in their research. But Cramer’s personal and intellectual background makes her embrace of interpretive methods, as well as the embedding of self to which those methods have given rise in her prose, particularly intriguing.

Cramer writes of being an avowed positivist whose previous scholarship in the area of American public opinion sought out causal instead of constitutive explanations; it employed data for the sake of prediction rather than as illustrative of the intersubjective meanings that simultaneously support and challenge existing patterns of privilege. Accordingly, Cramer’s uncovering of the rural-urban divide that propels rural consciousness in Wisconsin is, in part and like all research, a journey of scholarly discovery. But Cramer’s book also registers in a more personal domain. Indeed, as a lifelong Wisconsin resident and believer in “Wisconsin nice,” Cramer intimates that nothing in her experience prepared her for the bracing “politics of resentment,” and the abiding rural/urban divide through which that politics flows, that she encountered in the daily conversations of her fellows—conversations that took place not in formal governmental venues but rather in diners, gasoline stations, and other informal meeting spaces throughout the state. At once scholarly and personal, these conversations with ordinary folk across her home state stand as both the beating empirical heart of her book and springboards for Cramer’s own personal intellectual quest to discover the roots of the angry politics that she considers so out of character for her home state.

But not out of national character. For the rural consciousness in evidence in Wisconsin evokes the long-standing American populist trope that contrasts the “people”—a virtuous, but besieged majority—with malevolent, powerful minorities of all sorts (e.g., Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 1998). In this regard, a gentle criticism of The Politics of Resentment is that it doesn’t sufficiently tether Wisconsin’s rural consciousness to the nation’s populist, “counter-subversive” tradition—a tradition whose elaborations of racial and sexual majorities as victims of “subversive” minority populations are mimicked in rural residents’ identification of state employees and racial minorities as unfair beneficiaries of the tax dollars of Wisconsin’s hard-working and deserving but neglected rural (largely middle-aged, white) population (e.g., Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 1987). Cramer thus misses an opportunity to explore how contemporary rural consciousness (both in Wisconsin and elsewhere) is embedded in the American grain, a shop-worn expression of the manifold, widely-shared economic, political, and personal insecurities that attend to everyday life in modern liberal democracies. Such a connection would deepen Cramer’s analysis, both linking it to core (if frequently disavowed) aspects of the historic American experience with white male supremacy and providing additional support for her astute recognition that the grievances that animate rural consciousness in Wisconsin are inflected in part by racial dynamics.

Even granting this omission, Cramer’s use of rural consciousness as her book’s analytic engine is persuasive. The move that it makes away from “interest” and toward “identity” (a move that is at the center of Cramer’s intellectual journey) is especially useful. Indeed, as Cramer writes, scholars of American public opinion conventionally understand citizen interest in objective, frequently economic, terms. Accordingly, one would be said to be voting in one’s interest, for example, if one votes for candidates whose policy preferences align with their material circumstances. Such a focus on interest, however, can lead to unfortunate presumptions of the sort that inform Thomas Frank’s popular (2004) tome What’s the Matter with Kansas?—if a citizen’s voting preferences align instead with candidates whose policy agendas do not support their economic circumstances, that citizen is thought to be irrational, ill-informed, or, simply, a dupe.

Imagine, for example, how so many of the rural Wisconsinites whom Cramer interviews would fare under such a scholarly fixation on their (presumably objective) interests. These folks, Cramer writes, would almost certainly benefit from the expenditure of greater governmental resources and, in general, a more energetic and responsive state government. Yet she finds instead that they tend to support small government, reduced governmental regulation, and the electoral candidates (especially Tea Party favorite Scott Walker) who articulate such policy positions. By conventional understanding, these rural folks are voting against their own interests and supporting public officials whose policies will do nothing to help them and, in some cases, will simply further impoverish their already struggling communities. And so, when one of Cramer’s interview subjects concludes a typical anti-urban and anti-government thought with the confession that “I don’t have any facts, but that’s the way I look at it” (p. 69) a reader sympathetic with Frank’s view may find confirmation of their suspicions that rural consciousness amounts to little more than ignorance that can be manipulated by unscrupulous political elites.

But Cramer’s use of the rural-consciousness analytic points us less to questions of interest, and more to those of identity. And the concept of identity fixates on different questions entirely: Who are we? Who are they? What do we (and they) deserve? As Cramer makes clear, interpretive methods are especially useful for interrogating such questions of identity because those questions are infused with the matter of collective meaning—a matter that is, at its core, a question of how it is that people perceive, or interpret, their lives. Accordingly, rural consciousness is not so much a marker of attitude or an expression of interest; it is a collective belief system according to which many rural Wisconsinites both make sense of and articulate their perceptions of powerlessness and alienation—perceptions that fuel a quasi-populist resentment towards state employees and other perceived, undeserving beneficiaries of governmental largesse.

Whether such a politics of resentment operates in the interests of Wisconsin’s rural folks is thus beside the point. To the extent that it acts as both constituent and expression of their collective identity, rural consciousness serves altogether different goals. These goals, as Cramer’s book establishes, register more in the domains of historical memory and sacred meaning than they do in the domain of rational interest that is the hallmark of much public-opinion scholarship. Cramer’s use of identity as her primary analytic category thus testifies both to the central role of rural consciousness in Wisconsin politics and to the appropriateness of interpretive methods for analyzing the politics of resentment that animate both her home state and the nation as a whole.