The American left sure seems to love constructing straw men. The problem they have is that those straw men always seem to fall over and crush them. We've seen it time and time again; most recently with Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I's "baskets of deplorables" and President Biden's hurling insults at "Ultra-MAGA Republicans" (as though wanting to make America great is somehow a bad thing.)
The latest, which isn't really new but which seems to have come back around as the left's bugaboo du jour, are white rural people. "Rural White Rage" is the latest rallying cry, and already, that straw man is fixing to fall on the left and knock them out. At the Washington Times on Sunday, Coalitions Director Don Feder presented us with some thoughts on this latest straw man.
Now, the menace of the moment is something called White, rural rage.
Coming from the left, the attack is ironic. Throughout our history, farmers have been the backbone of the Democratic Party and various progressive movements.
Thomas Jefferson, the party’s founder, believed virtue lay with those who tilled the soil.
Farmers were essential to the populist movement of the late 19th century and the New Deal coalition. The Democratic Party of Minnesota is still officially known as the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party.
The left has done a 180-degree turn here. Rural Americans are now the greatest threat to democracy since the mythical Jan. 6 insurrection. But remember, when the right does it, it’s an insurrection. For the left, it’s a mostly peaceful protest, no matter how many people die or how much property is damaged.
It's not really a 180-degree turn — at least, not recently. A big portion of the political left is made up of coastal elites and professional grievance-mongers, and both of these heavily urbanized groups have been looking down their noses at us rural folks for a long time.
Previously on RedState: It's MSNBC Segments Like This on 'White Rural Rage' That Are Going to Hurt Dems in Election
The great irony is, of course, that this republic — the United States, for the 1,230,392th time, is not a democracy but a constitutional republic — was founded in large part by farmers. Rural people have always been disproportionately represented in our military. And, of course, the great obvious thing that the urban left tends to overlook: Without rural folks, urban people will suddenly find that they don't have a lot to eat.
Leftists sure seem to look out at the land outside the major cities and see a huge, ignorant, fornicating mass of first cousins. But that just isn't true, and that's the biggest part of this huge straw man the left seems to be constructing. I’ve got an MBA in Technology Management. My wife has two Masters’ degrees. I know plenty of rural folks with graduate-level educations. That’s not really here nor there, but it would probably shock a lot of leftists screaming about "white rural rage" to know any of us got past the eighth grade. Yes, lots of us own guns. We’re also pretty law-abiding; crimes just aren’t committed with firearms out here, certainly not at anywhere near the level of the major cities so many of the leftists live in. Yes, we drive big trucks. After all, we need them for various chores or just for getting back and forth in bad weather, but also because we like them, and if the left demands we justify that, our response will be on the order of “Because screw you, that’s why.”
Rural and, in fact, many small-town and suburban communities are peopled with just the sort of people that urban elites and professional grievance-mongers can't abide: independent people, self-reliant people, people who have skills and experience, and who prefer to make their way in the world and want little more than to be left alone. That's why the left is now crying out about "rural white rage" — and this is why white rural and small-town voters are disproportionately Trump voters.
Mr. Feder concludes:
The war on rural America is a war on middle America. Mr. Trump is building a coalition of blue-collar workers, independent businessmen and farmers. This terrifies his opponents.
If the left is allowed to continue driving the economy into the ground, there could be another “back to the land” movement like the one we had during the Great Depression. Then, former journalists and former political science professors could end up as subsistence farmers.
Now that would be ironic.
That would be ironic indeed — and also tragic, as most of these people would starve to death before learning the skills to feed themselves, even presuming they could find a patch of land to hoe. And, after the generations of demonization from the left, I couldn't much blame most rural folks for not having much sympathy for the displaced urban elites who can't figure out how to make a potato patch produce.
And if any of those other urban types — the ones that resort to dressing in black block and starting trouble — want to try any of their usual schtick in the backwoods, well, that won't end well for them, either.
This seems appropriate.
