“…They recognize the caricature of the hick, redneck or hillbilly. Some may wield it comically about their own — as one might in familial company — but they also chafe at generalized conclusions about the oddity or supposed backwardness of rural “culture.” In other periods in Midwestern history, rural agrarian political movements have rebelled against this kind of elitism ( Montenegro de Wit et al, 2019 ; Frank, 2020 ). Yet this antagonism also does political work for right-wing pundits and provocateurs.…”
Section: Imagining and Defining Americamentioning
confidence: 99%
“…2 for a 2011 regional land-cover classification). Much of this Midwestern landscape is an agro-industrial one, with long, complex histories of agrarian politics, coloniality and even populisms ( Graddy-Lovelace 2017 , 2019 ; Montenegro de Wit et al, 2019 ; Frank, 2020 ). Fig.…”
Highlights
Discursive geographic divides inhibit shared politics across country and city chasms.
Agrarian histories and unspoken whiteness hide the color line in the Midwest.
Trump-style ethnonationalism is an unstable articulation of stories and experience.
Rural precarity rarely understood as connected to broader processes of capitalism.
Sympathetic geographic scholarship can help dis- and re-articulate rural stories.
“…They recognize the caricature of the hick, redneck or hillbilly. Some may wield it comically about their own — as one might in familial company — but they also chafe at generalized conclusions about the oddity or supposed backwardness of rural “culture.” In other periods in Midwestern history, rural agrarian political movements have rebelled against this kind of elitism ( Montenegro de Wit et al, 2019 ; Frank, 2020 ). Yet this antagonism also does political work for right-wing pundits and provocateurs.…”
Section: Imagining and Defining Americamentioning
confidence: 99%
“…2 for a 2011 regional land-cover classification). Much of this Midwestern landscape is an agro-industrial one, with long, complex histories of agrarian politics, coloniality and even populisms ( Graddy-Lovelace 2017 , 2019 ; Montenegro de Wit et al, 2019 ; Frank, 2020 ). Fig.…”
Highlights
Discursive geographic divides inhibit shared politics across country and city chasms.
Agrarian histories and unspoken whiteness hide the color line in the Midwest.
Trump-style ethnonationalism is an unstable articulation of stories and experience.
Rural precarity rarely understood as connected to broader processes of capitalism.
Sympathetic geographic scholarship can help dis- and re-articulate rural stories.
“…The rise of Donald Trump has relied on authoritarian and populist rhetoric (Booth 2017;Campbell 2017), characterized by islamophobia, racial resentment, and nativism. Trump's words and acts thus continue a longstanding rightwing US tradition of Othering, which pits some non-elites against 'Othered' groups by dehumanizing the latter (Montenegro de Wit et al 2019). The electoral success of Trump, via this Othering tradition, can be traced back to a decades-long rightwing ideological project, which utilized businesselite-funded think tanks, churches, universities, and media (particularly cable television news and talk radio), to successfully enroll large numbers of people in a shared ideological 'common sense' that involves elements of white supremacy, xenophobia, anticommunism, and free market idealism (Diamond 1995;Berlet and Lyons 2000;Phillips-Fein 2009;Berlet and Sunshine 2019).…”
Section: Populism Us Rightwing Ap and The Inherently Authoritarian Statementioning
This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism's relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics, everyday practices, and in forms of social organizationor 'anarchistic' elements of human social life. Insights from anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the contemporary rise of 'authoritarian populism' and its relation to rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist political projects but are created and reproduced by varying political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of nonelite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of emancipatory politics.
“…Yet scholars looking at the rise of Trump in the US regularly frame their research as being about exploring 'the roots of right-wing populism in the United States' (Berlet and Sunshine 2019, 480; see also Berlet and Lyons 2018;de Wit et al 2019). It is worth mentioning that many of those aforementioned Obama-turned-Trump supporters might be center-right in other parts of the world.…”
Right-wing authoritarian populist movements, parties, and governments arise in great part from the discontents fueled by the iniquities of neoliberal capitalist globalisation. This book breaks new ground in searching for the usually neglected rural roots behind and consequences of such authoritarian populisms. The book is comparative in scope, so that its central argument about the significance of the agrarian and rural order is adequately tested and confirmed. The book is also a call for further global research and study with the aim of identifying possibilities -a 'rural politics' and agential sources -that respectively can be articulated and mobilised to combat such populisms. The remarkable upsurge of farmers and rural workers against the Hindu nationalist Modi regime in India is a powerful testimony to the truth of the very politics that this book seeks to underscore. "
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