In The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Katherine J. Cramer seeks to understand political attitudes by listening to how citizens themselves articulate, frame, and justify their views. Systematically selecting communities throughout Wisconsin, Cramer joined existing formal and informal groups for semi-structured conversations multiple times across a five-year period that included the Great Recession, the election of President Barack Obama, and the election and failed recall of Governor Scott Walker.
Out of these conversations, Cramer identifies a set of attitudes and beliefs she terms “rural consciousness,” which encapsulates a sense of self, of shared values, and of relationships with other groups, all of which are deeply rooted in location. The people Cramer talked to understand their own identity as closely tied to their rural locale, and as distinct from the identities and values of those who live in cities, especially the “M&Ms” (Madison and Milwaukee). In particular, Cramer’s subjects believe rural citizens work harder but importantly, receive fewer rewards than urbanites.
The political consequences of this perspective are wide-ranging. Madison is home to Wisconsin’s state capitol, and the association of government with urban values and priorities generates considerable distrust and yes, resentment of government in general and public employees in particular. Rural residents believe that their interests and values are denigrated and ignored by urban citizens and state government, which to rural citizens are two closely overlapping groups.
The resulting resentment, Cramer shows, sheds light on key puzzles in contemporary American politics. For example, in a time of increasing economic inequality, why are rural places with poorer-than-average populations dependably Republican on election day? Cramer convincingly shows how lived experiences lead rural voters to view the enemy (if you will) not as the rich or as multinational corporations, but as the denizens of cities, despite the fact that urban and rural residents share many other demographic characteristics that are associated with partisanship. The very rich may get a much bigger slice of the economic pie, but rural residents perceive little hope of ameliorating that reality. Instead, they focus their antipathy on urban residents, particularly government employees, whom they view as taking more than their fair share of the remaining—and increasingly shrinking—portion of the pie.
Cramer’s key insights characterize rural Wisconsinites specifically, but illuminate public opinion more generally. Many rural citizens express preferences that would be coded on surveys as “favors small government,” “prefers lower taxes,” or “supports conservative politician Scott Walker.” Yet, Cramer shows how these attitudes are based not in ideology but in relationships to specific experiences, actors, and objects. Cramer’s discussants do not view government and public spending as inherently bad. They would be delighted to see more public money spent on rural schools, roads, and services. Their experiences, however, lead them to conclude that government will not expend a fair share of tax dollars in rural places, but on cities and suburbs, and in providing benefits to the (less hard-working) public employees who live there. While the characterization of political attitudes as non-ideological will sound familiar to anyone who has read Philip Converse, Cramer’s nuanced work shows how her subjects’ attitudes are rooted in a logical rationale, even if not in a traditional left/right ideology as social scientists understand it.
Any good book leaves you with as many questions as answers. Cramer’s central focus is rural citizens and rural resentment. Toward the end of the book, Cramer discusses the ways in which “the politics of resentment . . . are used for political advantage by our political leaders” (p. 211). Given what we know about elite-opinion leadership, future scholars might explore the degree to which rural resentment is already present and waiting to be exploited by vote-seeking politicians (as Cramer suggests Scott Walker was so skilled at doing) or is created or shaped by ambitious elites.
The limits of this research are largely addressed by the author, from the non-standard approach to public-opinion measurement to the challenges of generalizing from discussants who are older and more male than the general population. Cramer spends considerable time on the question of whether and to what extent rural resentment is a racialized phenomenon; like others, I would put more weight on the impact of race than Cramer ultimately does. A particularly important consequence of the methodological approach is that by focusing on people who participate in regularly-meeting groups, Cramer’s subjects are likely more social, enmeshed in larger social networks, and more likely to join organizations than are other citizens. Cramer notes this but a more elaborated discussion seems warranted given the likely connections to her argument. For example, so much of rural resentment is rooted in an us-versus-them mindset: Are citizens who engage in such social interactions more likely to think in terms of an “us” than those who do not?
More generally, Cramer employs the conversations in which she participates as a means by which citizens’ attitudes are revealed and understood. Another research tradition suggests that these groups and their interactions also might be viewed as processes by which attitudes are formed and shaped. One is struck, for example, by how often the speakers Cramer quotes note the experiences of others to justify their claims. Gaining knowledge of shared experiences and imbuing them with political meaning—that is, developing group consciousness—is likely aided to a considerable degree by the social connectedness and interactions that the gatherings Cramer visits provide. Exploring those dynamics should inspire future inquiry.
Any reservations are outweighed by the significant contribution this book makes to our understanding of attitudes and attitude formation in American politics. Cramer carefully specifies the ways in which the experiences and interactions of rural life help to generate a set of beliefs about who is worthy and who is not, and about who is wronged and who is to blame. The resulting resentment translates into a politics rooted in group identity that can be particularly divisive and consequential for democratic politics. Following the presidential election of 2016, the obvious relevance of these insights beyond Wisconsin is one of the many reasons I commend this book to all students of American politics.
