The New York Times (1/5/17) runs a case for Trump built on racialized right-wing myths.
The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi wrote a piece last month (12/9/16) reporting that “major newspapers, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months.” Perhaps that explains why some of the Trump-sympathizing columns they do manage to turn up—like a piece that ran today in the Times (1/5/17)—leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic and accuracy.
To be fair, the Times op-ed wasn’t written by a self-professed Trump fan, but by Robert Leonard, the news director for an Iowa country music station, who says, “I consider myself fairly liberal,” and confesses that he has “struggled to understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I respect—and at times admire—can think so differently from me.”
Key to understanding these Trump-voting neighbors, Leonard says, is their theological belief that people are born bad. Though to hear him explain their worldview, it would be more accurate to say they believe that progressives are born bad: The conservative culture, he writes,
views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous…. Rural conservatives feel that their world is under siege, and that Democrats are an enemy to be feared and loathed.
Rural Trump fans, on the other hand, are apparently the salt of the earth: “They’re hard workers…. They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops,” he says of two representative Trump enthusiasts of his acquaintance, teenage go-getters whom he quotes declaring: “Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.”
It’s not clear how this kind of name-calling and chest-beating contributes to anyone’s understanding of national politics, but I’ll skip over Leonard’s musings on Original Sin, which are hardly factcheckable, and take a look instead at his economic analysis of the urban/rural divide, to which he attributes much of Trump’s attraction:
In state capitols across America, lawmakers spend billions of dollars to take a few seconds off a city dweller’s commute to his office, while rural counties’ farm-to-market roads fall into disrepair. Some of the paved roads in my region are no longer maintained and are reverting to gravel….
In cities, firefighters and EMTs are professionals whose departments are funded by local, state and federal tax dollars. Rural America relies on volunteers….
Urban police officers have the latest in computer equipment and vehicles, while small-town cops go begging….
In this view, blue counties are where most of our tax dollars are spent, and that’s where all of our laws are written and passed. To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better.
Now, Leonard does follow this up this litany by saying that “we recognize that the truth is more complex.” That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that this is total nonsense. Rural areas do not subsidize urban areas; rather, it’s the cities that subsidize the countryside. As Mother Jones (2/16/12) has pointed out:
Among predominantly rural states, 81 percent received more federal spending than they paid in taxes. In contrast, 44 percent of urban states received more federal spending than they paid in taxes.
When states look at their internal divisions between rural and urban counties, they find the same thing. In Indiana, notes New Geography (2/4/10):
Just the consolidated city-county of Indianapolis/Marion County sends $420 million more to the state annually than it receives every year. That’s equal to the entire public safety budget of the city. The rest of the metro area sends another $340 million to the state annually.
Similarly, a 2009 Georgia State University study found that the Atlanta metro area accounted for 61 percent of state tax collections but only 47 percent of expenditures. A 2004 University of Louisville study found that the state’s three major urban regions—Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky (south suburban Cincinnati)—generate over half the state’s tax revenues but only receive back about one third in state expenditures, an annual net outflow of $1.4 billion per year.
The blue regions give more than the get when it comes to highway spending. (source: Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy)
Road spending in particular is notoriously skewed toward rural areas. “For all its talk of geographic inequality, rural Minnesota has been getting more than its fair share of road money for a long time,” reports the streets.mn blog (1/14/15), with a map illustrating which counties get less in state highway funds than they contribute (mostly Minneapolis/St. Paul and their suburbs) and which get more (most of the others). A Brookings report (3/1/03) taking Ohio as a case study found that
urban counties consistently took home a smaller share of state highway funds than suburban and rural counties relative to
their amount of vehicle traffic (vehicle miles traveled), car ownership (vehicle registrations) and demand for driving (gasoline sales).
On an individual level, too, rural residents are more likely to receive government benefits than urban or suburban residents; a Pew survey (12/18/12) found that 62 percent of rural residents had received Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare or unemployment benefits, vs. 54 percent of urban dwellers and 53 percent of suburbanites.
I wouldn’t argue that these subsidies are unjustifiable; the countryside, after all, is where we get most of our food from, and the inefficiencies that come with spreading out to work on agricultural land are probably inevitable. But to ignore the fact that taxes generally flow from the metropolitan centers to the hinterlands, in an effort to justify a fantasy of rural grievance, is frankly poisonous. (It’s pointedly a racialized grievance: Leonard’s sole example of the kind of “pure nonsense” that “liberals worry about” is the idea of white privilege, making his stereotypes of hard-working Trump voters and sleepy “liberals” all the more insidious.)
I saved my favorite part of the op-ed’s case against the cities for last. It’s when Leonard complains:
If I have a serious heart attack at home, I’ll be cold to the touch by the time the volunteer ambulance crew from a town 22 miles away gets here.
Yes, if you live out in the country, you’re probably going to be farther away from a hospital than if you live in a big city. You could put a hospital within five miles of everyone—if you built approximately 150,000 new hospitals across the country, about 30 times the current number.
Voting for Trump, though, with the idea that he will do something about the hospitals-too-far-away problem would be childish. If op-ed pages can’t find writers who can make a grown-up case for Trump, perhaps they should be willing to allow the case to go unmade.
Jim Naureckas, who grew up on a farm in Illinois, is the editor of FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
There is no small irony in deeming those enthralled by someone determined to sow the earth with salt to be “the salt of the earth”.
The times article was opinion. Ergo it appeared in the Op-Ed section. Nothing wrong with that.
But isn’t it OK to criticize someone’s opinion. I think this article was pretty clear that Leonard was not stating facts.
Opinions need to be based on facts. When an opinion piece demonstrably uses falsehoods, easily disproven assertions, or bad logic, then it needs to be called out — especially when it is given an prominent place like the NYT Op-Ed pages.
There is also an “opinion” that earth is flat
Nothing wrong with arguing that someone’s opinion is dumb, especially when the basic facts supporting their opinion are so wrong.
Excellent article Jim. There is something insidious about this when the Times fails to correct the record. If the opinion is shaped by purported facts that are untrue then journalists have an obligation to correct them. This is where the Times falls short. If they choose to run the piece, they should also choose to correct the record with an editor’s note. It is this lack of accountability that allows falsehoods to feed ignorance.
I’m sorry that FAIR made this argument. It is more complicated than that. Please read what Dean Baker has to say on the article. You know, if you think things are just peachy now then go ahead with this taker and maker argument. I find it divisive and obscures who the real enemy is. Sure, keep us fighting among ourselves while the owners of capital pick our pockets.
One of the biggest problems with city living is income inequality – prices are inflated because some people have so much money. If everyone living in rural areas basically has the same, then there should be no income inequality. Even if they don’t have any money, they can rely on bartering or exchange to get what they need.
Seems like they are living in a post-government, post-economic utopia and, instead of enjoying it, they’re just out to blame the “other”.
While people in rural counties complain about being neglected these are also the same people who vote against tax increases and govt programs that overwhelmingly help them Years ago there was a vote in Georgia on a bill that would have helped rural residents’ access to emergency care. Atlanta, which would have gained few benefits from this, overwhelmingly voted for it. Rural residents voted against it. Rural Americans have spent decades undermining their own benefits and programs that would help them, even if they do not always realize it.
http://www.georgiatrend.com/April-2011/Broken-System/
As usual, you choose to make the same mistake all of the other educated sufferers of tunnel vision make. It doesn’t matter what the statistics say if the PERCEPTION is that people are paying too much in taxes and getting nothing back for it. And they perceive it that way because no one is paying them any attention, unless they do something that can be used to perpetuate the lie that they are undereducated rednecks with yards full of derelict vehicles and hound dogs under the porch.
Unless and until y’all come down off your pedestals and make the effort to get to know those “rural voters” as the perfectly normal human beings they are, you can continue to enjoy the depredations of the Kochtopus and the GOP and the GOP-Lite Democrats who screwed Bernie Sanders over in favor of a candidate they were told repeatedly was thoroughly disliked. And are now blaming everybody else and their cousin because they lost.
I lived the first half of my life with “those people,” and they are just as diversified as any city-dweller. Indeed, based on comparative population, perhaps even more so. And if you’re going to reject people solely because they don’t share every one of your values, I suggest the one who lacks a sense of diversity is not the country dweller.
There is a valid reason why more money goes to rural roads than the ones in the city—it’s the only way people have of getting anywhere. They can’t pick up the bus on the corner, or hop into the subway. If you want to get from point A to wherever, you drive. So do all the trucks delivering the groceries and the Amazon boxes and whatever else is needed for normal living. So, yes, it DOES make them angry when cities where people have access to public transportation but won’t use it, which causes massive traffic problems, spend millions on yet another bypass or overpass or added lanes while their sole means of transportation is full of potholes for lack of funds.
Usually, FAIR is my go-to source for countering media narratives, but maybe some of y’all need to spend a year or three living in the country before you analyze someone else’s misrepresentation of rural people by applying your own.
I did spend 5 years living in a rural area, and if I had a choice, I would prefer the rural living over more urban living. However the jobs aren’t in the country. I’ve looked. The article was very mean spirited towards city dwellers and liberals and suggested that they “sleep in”, everyday instead of getting to work. Maybe that’s because we have non-traditional work schedules where we work into the late hours of the night, serving and servicing the shrinking middle class, who can still get up at the crack of dawn because they work from “9 to 5”.
It seems like people who have the greatest persecution complex are also the people who think they are better than other people.
Keep blaming liberals and electing Conservatives. Those corporate tax breaks and bathroom bills will be freeing-up the funds for rural road care any second now.
BTW, the “perception” over here is that these people are morons and/ or bigots. It would be nice if someone could find some facts dispelling this belief.
Add to this, people attending a Republican Congressperson’s Town Hall meeting, covered by NPR, where the Tea Party disruptor’s shouting out “get BIG GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE.” They have been duped and some are so dump they don’t even know it. They don’t care and don’t want to take the time to learn and understand the truth.
Once again Fair constructs a straw man argument. The full quote from the op-ed is:
“In this view, blue counties are where most of our tax dollars are spent, and that’s where all of our laws are written and passed. To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better. We recognize that the truth is more complex, particularly when it comes to social programs, but it’s the perception that matters — certainly to the way most people vote.”
Nowhere does the author assert the truth of rural perceptions. But the author is quite correct in noting rural antipathy to urbanites. I disagree with his religious argument that says because of theological views rural voters will vote for authoritarian Republicans.
Worst of all, the only hope we have in combatting Trump is a healthy fourth estate– institutions that hire actual reporters and go through some form of fact checking. But Fair seems to make a habit of misrepresenting and co-mingling op-ed pieces with editorial positions resulting in undermining the only weapon available to us in fighting fascists like trump.
I’m a long time FAIR supporter, but sometimes I wonder if FAIR and I are reading the same article. Naureckas writes “…in an effort to justify a fantasy of rural grievance…” when I don’t think the author was making any such effort. In my reading the author was just trying to illustrate attitudes he does not subscribe to.
There is generally a word limit assigned to any piece, so given more space perhaps the author would have debunked the attitudes of others and it would have been clearer that these were not his opinions. And who knows what the editors did to the material the author submitted.
To find fault with this article in a valid way one would need to demonstrate that rural people do not hold the views ascribed to them by the author. Naureckas instead found fault with views ascribed by the author to rural people. While I agree wth Naureckas critique and learned something from it, it still seems inappropriate to the article that it claims to critique.
Mr. Leonard’s last sentence meant so much to me. “Given the philosophical premises Mr. Watts presented as the difference between Democrats and Republicans, reconciliation seems a long way off.” Mr. Leonard wanted to understand the people who lived in his community. He understands things need to change in the way Americans treat each other. I believe that will never happen if we are unwilling to listen stories which seem different from our own. Our view of the story is not the full picture. (Check out ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’.) And please read Mr. Leonard’s original op-ed!
Mr. Naureckas wrote “It’s not clear how this kind of name-calling and chest-beating contributes to anyone’s understanding of national politics,” yet he used these phrases in his opinion piece.
• “Another way to put it is that this is total nonsense.”
• “–leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic and accuracy.”
• “But to ignore the fact”, “in an effort to justify a fantasy of rural grievance, is frankly poisonous.”
• “If (NYT) op-ed pages can’t find writers who can make a grown-up case for Trump, they should be willing to allow the case to go unmade.
• “I’ll skip over Leonard’s musings on Original Sin, which are hardly factcheckable,”[sic]
I agree; facts cannot repudiate “philosophical worlds” and “foundational principles,” and good ol’ Faith. But when we liberals start spouting facts, we’re saying much more. We like to believe that since we know The Facts, we are smart. The corollary could be that if someone ignores or does not believe The Facts, they are dumb. It seems to me that although Mr. Naureckas’ comments are not specifically name-calling, they sure elicited the feeling that Mr. Leonard, Mr. Watts and his rural community are lesser than those who use facts to prove their points.
Mr. Naureckas’ opinion might validate how we liberals view ourselves, but unfortunately it also reinforces what conservatives believe of us.