The Politics of Resentment

Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

By: Katherine J. Cramer

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Since the election of Scott Walker, Wisconsin has been seen as ground zero for debates about the appropriate role of government in the wake of the Great Recession. In a time of rising inequality, Walker not only survived a bitterly contested recall that brought thousands of protesters to Capitol Square, he was subsequently reelected. How could this happen? How is it that the very people who stand to benefit from strong government services not only vote against the candidates who support those services but are vehemently against the very idea of big government?

With The Politics of Resentment, Katherine J. Cramer uncovers an oft-overlooked piece of the puzzle: rural political consciousness and the resentment of the "liberal elite". Rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct values of their communities and allocate a fair share of resources. What can look like disagreements about basic political principles are therefore actually rooted in something even more fundamental: who we are as people and how closely a candidate's social identity matches our own. Using Scott Walker and Wisconsin's prominent and protracted debate about the appropriate role of government, Cramer illuminates the contours of rural consciousness, showing how place-based identities profoundly influence how people understand politics, regardless of whether urban politicians and their supporters really do shortchange or look down on those living in the country. The Politics of Resentment shows that rural resentment - no less than partisanship, race, or class - plays a major role in dividing America against itself.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2016 The University of Chicago (P)2017 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.

Wonderful Book, Bad Audio Performance

A truly wonderful book that details the nuances and beliefs of small towns. A great one for people seeking to understand small town outlooks on life and politics.

However the narrator Coleen Marlo has a very affected way of speaking and can't pronounce many english words, such as "rural" which she pronounces as "roar -ral." This decreased my enjoyment of the audiobook by a lot.

Worthwhile but not super enjoyable

First off I didn’t really like the narrator. She had an annoying way of speaking which ranged from way too annunciated to sounding like she needed a sip of water.

The book itself is irritating in a sense because the author seems to be overcompensating and buying into the false perceptions her subjects have. Naturally anyone listening to this will wonder “are they right?” about some basic stats that are repeatedly referenced by the “rural” people, specifically that they don’t get their “fair share” of government expenditures. It takes many chapters before she addresses this question and seems to kind of tap dance around it and find a way to say they’re not totally wrong, then give the facts and, in fact, they’re totally wrong. Since this is a key premise of the book, I saw it as the whole meaning of the book should be “how do we get the rural people to understand that the injustice is not anyone else’s fault and in fact they are the ones being disproportionately helped” but instead she frames it as a legitimate concern along the lines of “the rural people are angry because they feel they don’t get their fair share so how do we accommodate them?” I was hoping to come away understanding their surprisingly well argued valid concerns and instead came away angry at them and resenting them for not caring to know any correct facts and being racist, lazy and narrow minded.

Insightful

Excellent explanation to answer questions I had about the situation in rural areas. Why they hold their opinions

A Deep View of Rural America

Through interviews, Cramer paints a refreshingly rich picture of the political psychology of rural Wisconsonites.

Negligence of the Gov to show performance

Amazing book that Cramer put hundreds of hours of interviews and writing in. To me it shows how the government fails to provide a receipt of goods to rural people of what their tax Money is going to, in turn, causing the rural conscious to have an extreme disliking for public programs and workers that do not benefit them, while still taking their tax money.

Important, but shallow

There’s a lot of very good information here. Sadly, while the author periodically holds back from explaining how misinformed her interviewees are, she never stops making her contempt obvious. Clearly, when they complain about the Department of Natural Resources, they’re a: misinformed, b: racist, or sometimes c: complaining about not seeing people like themselves on the boards.

The possibility that there’s an actual substantive problem with the DNR is not considered. This isn’t to say that there aren’t cognitive and social issues that go into this stuff, but her endless calls for respect are pretty explicitly limited to procedural respect, to spending time with people. A better approach would include more of a sense of policy trade offs. Maybe they shouldn’t get what they want from the DNR (or from UW-Madison etc.), but if you go into the trade offs and establish that they have the inferior side of the argument you can at least have some respect for them as people. Instead, she assumes that they’re wrong about everything.

Sometimes she even checks. For example, she talks to people who feel like Walker listened to them more than Doyle did, and proves this wrong by counting the number of public appearances he made in the North, without having that listed in the claims she’s disproving.

The book’s central thesis is important and well argued. It would be a lot richer and more valuable if it were more like a modern ethnography and less like a Victorian exploration of an exotic breed of savages. In particular, more time suggesting reasons they believe things that do not involve them being hoodwinked, less time speculating slander that is explicitly not based in her interviews.

incredibly insightful

as a person who grew up in cities and large towns who now lives in a rural area, I have learned a lot from this book. there are significant and substantive power imbalances structured into our form of government. these real and unjust power imbalances combined with our racially and socially stratified society is a recipe for permanent division and conflict. this is an incredible example of well done research.