In this timely book, Katherine Cramer sets out to capture how rural residents in Wisconsin “create and constitute perceptions of themselves and use these to make sense of politics” (p. 22). Through group interviews conducted from 2007 until November 2012 in twenty-seven communities across eight designated regions, Cramer finds that rural Wisconsinites have developed a perspective of politics held together by three common beliefs: rural areas are ignored by policy makers; rural areas do not receive a fair share of resources; urban dwellers do not understand or respect the distinct way of rural life. When these perceptions find their way into political life, they result in resentment against specific out-groups. Perhaps most interestingly, rural dwellers come to resent the position and power of public employees, a resentment that shines through in their support of political figures like Scott Walker.

Cramer’s book systematically goes about summarizing her extensive field research and findings. The second chapter outlines her political anthropological methods. The third establishes the nature of rural consciousness (along the lines of the perceptions listed here) and also discusses how that consciousness is embedded in Wisconsin history and politics. The fourth chapter juxtaposes often-used data on inequality with the rural Wisconsinites’ perception of distributional disparities. The fifth chapter then links these findings to how rural-dwellers use their framework to make sense of politics. The sixth chapter illustrates those politics, showing why resentment-driven rural dwellers come to support less government and less redistribution. The seventh chapter provocatively argues that political resentments can substitute for political ideology. Resentment serves as a guide that identifies opponents and specifies actions to combat the perceived power and privilege of those opponents. The seventh chapter illustrates how this resentment lens has shaped how Wisconsin rural dwellers comprehended the Great Recession and the rise of Scott Walker. The concluding chapter speculates on the role of resentment in democracy in general, the role of geographic space in the construction of political identity, as well as how interpretivist methods can be used in conjunction with positivist methods. Cramer’s book is easy to read, one chapter flowing logically into the next, the concrete leading into the more abstract.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of this book is its vague definition of “resentment,” especially in terms of being an emotion. Are we sure that what drives rural Wisconsinites is resentment rather than anger or contempt? These emotions have different types of cognitive antecedents and action tendencies. In simplest terms, anger stems from cognition that an individual or group has committed a bad action against one’s self or group; the action tendency is to punish that group. Contempt is connected to beliefs that a group or object is inherently inferior or defective; the action tendency toward avoidance. Resentment (at least in my own treatment) comes from cognition that one’s group is located in an unwarranted subordinate position on a status hierarchy; the action tendency is to take actions to reduce the status position of groups in a superior status position.

These are not trivial distinctions. They matter in terms of assessing severity of the problem and identifying solutions. As the book points out, rural residents often see public employees as the opponent. If the strongest emotion at work here is indeed resentment, then rural dwellers have come to see public employees as part of a hierarchical system. While the public employees on the top of this hierarchy may be decent people, they occupy an unjust group position in terms of power. Changing the perceptions that create the emotion of resentment would be a difficult task. The state and political leaders could re-structure day-to-day interactions in ways that either erode the perception of the existence of group-based hierarchy that underlies resentment or provide higher status to the rural dwellers so that they no longer sense living as a member of a subordinate group. Cramer does offer some suggestions on how this difficult, but not impossible, task of eroding resentment could be accomplished.

But what if anger, not resentment, is driving rural voters. Perhaps public employees are not seen as a separate caste group, but public employee unions just got away with too much in terms of rights and benefits. In most theoretical treatments of the emotion, punishment can quench anger. In this light, rural dwellers’ support for Act 10 (limiting public unions' rights) can be seen as anger-driven punishment. On the positive side, emotion theorists often hold that punishment can quench anger. In this case, perhaps Act 10 will help balance the scales between groups and we might expect a relatively rapid return to less confrontational politics.

Finally, the strongest emotion at play here may be contempt. In the case of contempt, the opponent is not seen as a normal decent actor who happens to occupy an undeserved group status position (resentment) or a normal decent actor who has committed a blameworthy act by reaching for too much, but rather the opponent has some inherently bad qualities. It may be that rural dwellers have come to see public employees in terms of a self-righteous group incapable of treating rural dwellers as equals. The professors at the university and their like might be perceived as a form of “limousine liberal” who need to construct the rural dweller as a defective in order to support their own sense of self-righteous superiority. In this case, rural dwellers hold contempt for groups that hold rural dwellers in contempt. If this is the case, Hillary Clinton’s comments about “deplorables” and Obama’s comments about those clinging to guns and religion become especially important for reinforcing rural political perceptions.

The interviews produce some material for all three of these emotions. The problem with Cramer’s treatment of emotion is that it fails to provide a clear beginning definition of resentment as an emotion. Accordingly, it is difficult to assess the relative power of other emotions at play in the interviews.

Cramer’s study of resentment brings up another issue. The emotion of resentment is built on individual perceptions of “group.” There are some possible group distinctions that simply do not come into play in Cramer’s interviews. Wisconsin rural dwellers are overwhelming Christian, but this possible group identity does not seem as powerful as one based on rural geography. Also, many, if not most, of the interviewees must be gun owners, but again this seems to play little role in the formation of perception of group. Why are these groups not salient in this study?

In terms of consciousness of group, one of Cramer’s biggest contributions is to point out how little rural dwellers discuss race. As she summarizes, “I observed little overt racism in rural Wisconsin” (p. 166). In some ways, this is hardly surprising as Cramer’s rural respondents were living in homogeneous white communities. It is very likely that rural dwellers’ perceptions about race are firmly embedded somewhere in their minds, but in my own experience, these ideas seldom come up in active conversation. Within my own rural clan, discussion about race and other national political issues generally takes a back seat in importance to local property taxes. As in Cramer’s study, property tax increases are often perceived as part of a rigged game that unfairly sends money to public employees. Yes, indeed, I found much in Cramer’s book highly accurate.