‘White, Conservative, and Dumb’—and Other Lies About Rural America

IT WAS COLD — even for northwest Iowa in November. And I was late.

I thought I could make up time if I took the back way, a route I’d driven many times before. But the one-lane bridge across the Rock River was out and, judging by the abandoned construction site, it hadn’t been open for a while. I had moved away four years earlier and was a little behind on local traffic patterns.

To locals, the region surrounding the Big Sioux River drainage basin—stretching across parts of Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota—is known as “Siouxland.” To most Americans, this is flyover country.

I grew up in Siouxland, crisscrossing the region for family gatherings, 4-H horse shows, and trail rides, but I knew my time there was limited. Through TV, I learned about life in the big city and what the rest of the country thought of hicks, hillbillies, and hayseeds like me. I learned that to be successful, I had to leave. And so, like many of my classmates, I left as soon as I could.

I went to college in Minneapolis and pursued a career in media; after graduation I spent time in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., working on shows such as Monday Night Football and Good Morning America.

But on the morning of May 12, 2008, everything changed: Hundreds of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided an Iowa meatpacking plant, arresting 389 community members. At the time, I was a media producer for Sojourners, so I traveled to Iowa to cover the humanitarian response organized by Sister Mary McCauley, parish administrator of the local Catholic church.

Within hours of the raid, Sister McCauley had the entire community of 2,269 residents organized. When I interviewed her a few days later, the church was full of children still waiting to be reunited with their families. The church’s fellowship hall was filled with clothes, meals, and supplies for the children; community volunteers worked through legal paperwork on behalf of those detained. In a moment of complete chaos, community members rose to the challenge and stood together with their neighbors. It was at this point I realized the power of rural organizing. I was hooked.

Leveraging the gifts of the community

IN MARCH, AS the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus erupted around the world, rural hospitals in the U.S. faced a particularly grim reality: Like hospitals across the nation, they faced a shortage of personal protective equipment such as N-95 masks and gowns. But unlike their urban and suburban counterparts, rural hospitals were already struggling. According to a 2017 study, 41 percent of rural hospitals operate at a loss, a result of decreasing Medicare reimbursements, more patients with underlying conditions, and fewer patients with private insurance. “We’re stretched thin as it is,” one hospital CEO told the Washington Post. “We’ll improvise and make it work however we can.”

As cases of COVID-19 skyrocketed, I thought about McCauley and all the organizers like her that I’ve met in the 12 years since the Postville immigration raid. Many of the best community organizers I know would never give themselves that title. They don’t work for a campaign or an organization. Often, they’re just everyday folks who believe their community is worth fighting for.

I met some of these everyday folks on that cold day back in November. After a 20-minute detour to find a working bridge, I finally arrived at my destination: the Fruited Plain Cafe, a coffee shop on the main drag in Sioux Center, Iowa. Like many communities in the state, Sioux Center has experienced a rapid demographic change due to a large influx of agricultural workers from Mexico and Central America. Just a generation ago, nearly all the town’s residents would have claimed Dutch heritage. Today, 36 percent of the children in the school district are minorities, the majority of them Latino.

The cafe—which converted its rear storage room into a small performance venue—regularly hosts Bible studies, political rallies, and indie rock shows, including concerts by The Ruralists, a band started by cafe owner Laremy De Vries, his two neighbors, and a drummer from the local high school. But that day the cafe was hosting the launch of RuralOrganizing.org, a new national organization dedicated to building progressive change in rural America.

As I assembled the digital slide projector and arranged the chairs into a circle, I reflected on how the area had changed. The last time I was here, I lived in a town with a population of 800 in a remote corner of the district represented by Steve King, a U.S. member of Congress who often made national news for his white nationalist rhetoric. But over the past four years, northwest Iowa residents had made progress. They started public LGBTQIA pride events. Local law enforcement officials implemented pro-immigrant policing policies. The state’s Republican leaders disavowed Rep. King. All this would have been almost unthinkable four years ago, but these days it’s not unique to northwest Iowa.

The launch party at the Fruited Plain was unforgettable. Nearly 100 rural leaders from around Siouxland—including small business owners, pastors, advocates, and even some candidates seeking elected office—spent the day discussing strategies for positive local change. We talked about how most politicians favor larger metropolitan areas despite the need for policies that address rural problems. We explored ideas for investing in small local businesses and enacting policies that support rural grocery stores, pharmacies, and clinics.

And in the evening, in front of a crowd of Anglo and Latino community members, The Ruralists and Che Apalache—a Grammy-nominated bluegrass band featuring Latin American musicians—brought down the house.

At its heart, this is what community organizing is all about. Community organizers equip people to leverage their own gifts and affirm the gifts of others in pursuit of the common good. They solve local and global problems by creating unity and affirming diversity among seemingly unrelated groups of individuals.

‘White, conservative, and dumb’

SINCE 2016, WITHOUT a full grasp of the dramatic transformations taking place outside our cities and suburbs, much of the media has embraced President Donald Trump as a defining symbol of rural America. They developed analyses based on stereotypes that rural people are white, conservative, and dumb and ignored anyone who didn’t fit the narrative.

This shortsighted analysis mirrors a blind spot in our civic infrastructure. Take health care: As U.S. hospitals began facing the coronavirus pandemic, rural communities had an older population with smaller hospitals, many of which lacked intensive care units. This blind spot extends to philanthropy, too: In a 2015 study for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, economist John L. Pender found that only 6 to 7 percent of all foundation grant dollars go to rural areas, even though rural areas represent 19 percent of the U.S. population.

Instead of providing rural-specific solutions to rural-specific problems, such as a lack of access to health care, candidates create campaign strategies based on stereotypes. On the Right, politicians such as King in Iowa, Kris Kobach in Kansas, and Jim Jordan in Ohio spread lies and ignite fears among the rural electorate to promote their own political agenda. On the Left, Democrats fall for stereotype-based punditry, with political candidates either outright ignoring rural voters (think Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign) or watering down progressive messages to seem more like Republicans.

As a result, rural voters—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—are the most often misunderstood voters in American politics. This is particularly important given that rural and small-town voters have a disproportionate impact on our national politics: Today, half of the U.S. population lives in just nine states. That means half of the national population shares 18 senators. Meanwhile, the other half of the country’s population shares the remaining 82 seats in the Senate. When Republicans and Democrats both engaged small-town and rural communities, this bias affected the parties equally. Today, however, the Republican Party has become disproportionately rural and the Democratic Party disproportionately urban, which means a red vote now has more clout than a blue one.

But most of the stereotypes about rural voters are wrong: Rural doesn’t mean white. The majority of Indigenous Americans (54 percent) and a quarter of African Americans live in small cities, towns, and rural communities. Between 2000 and 2010, the Asian American population of rural communities grew by 37 percent; the Hispanic population grew by 46 percent.

And rural areas aren’t necessarily conservative. According to data from the Pew Research Center, rural voters’ partisan affiliation was equally divided between Democrats and Republicans from 1999 to 2009. After the 2016 election, the GOP emerged with a 16-percentage-point advantage among rural voters. The 2018 midterm elections, however, demonstrated the power of small grassroots investment in strategic rural engagement: A Reuters analysis found that Democrats increased their share of rural votes in more than 50 congressional districts. Even in two Iowa districts that voted for Trump in 2016, Democrats came out on top.

Granted, some of the narratives we hear about small towns are true. The U.S. has rapidly transformed from a rural and agricultural nation into an urbanized and industrialized one. In 1900, 40 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas, compared with more than 80 percent today. That means just one in five residents of the U.S. call rural America home, despite it making up 97 percent of the country’s land mass. As a result of this dramatic change, rural America is in the middle of an economic and identity crisis that is reshaping American politics.

The antidote to propaganda

MORE THAN ANY political pundit, theorist, or pollster today, the late French philosopher, sociologist, and theologian Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) has shaped my understanding of the invisible fault lines in our current political landscape. When Ellul was born, nearly 255 million people lived in urban areas. By the time he wrote his first book in 1946, about 746 million people lived in cities.

Ellul understood industrialization, urbanization, and automation as components of a system striving for “absolute efficiency” in “every field of human activity.” He believed the pursuit of such efficiency created alienation—a feeling that creates fertile ground for political manipulation. “The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frame of reference,” he wrote, “all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will.”

Sound familiar? If Ellul were alive today, I’m sure he’d have a lot to say about the current state of our public discourse.

But Ellul doesn’t just assess democratic decay; he also provides valuable insights for anyone looking to overcome it. “An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda,” Ellul says, “only when he is cut off from membership in local groups.” In other words, Ellul sees authentic, organic relationships as the antidote to propaganda. Or as he puts it: “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.”

Organizing, like all other aspects of modern life, has been automated and optimized. One-on-one conversations have been replaced by mass, impersonal emails. Phone calls have been replaced by artificial intelligence-generated text message programs. As a result, locally rooted community organizing has been replaced by organizational agendas, public opinion polling, and politics rather than conversations with our neighbors.

While these tactics can be tempting for organizers short on time and resources, they also risk reinforcing the very system we are working to overcome. The solution to propaganda isn’t better propaganda. The solution to propaganda is authentic, organic relationships.

A new way across the river

COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE invested in building authentic bonds across traditional cultural divides have created civic resilience that enables them to make progress at the local level, despite the current partisan climate. Often, these bonds are the result of survival as civic investments have been drained from remote area.

And that is what’s working in Sioux County. Leaders there have rooted their efforts firmly in authentic relationships and dialogue. These conversations, like in any small town, happen organically at places such as the Fruited Plain. Harold Heie, a former Christian college professor and administrator, has taken this idea to a new level through his website RespectfulConversation.net, where he models—and teaches others to facilitate—intentional discussions among folks who disagree about controversial public issues, both digitally and face-to-face. In a recent series of discussions, Heie brought together eight Sioux County Christians who vary in their support for the Trump administration.

On his website, Heie writes that the purpose of these conversations is to “seek a better way to engage those with whom we disagree.” And he will be the first to tell you that this kind of exchange is not a tool of persuasion; even after a dozen intense, intentional community conversations among the participants in the group discussing Trump, there was little agreement—except that our political discourse is broken and real dialogue is hard work.

Heie and his neighbors successfully created a safe and welcoming space to express disagreements while also building a local culture that still values human connection. There’s little doubt in my mind that this culture is responsible for much of the forward momentum in the community. Sure, sometimes relationship-based change takes longer and sometimes conversations themselves don’t make tangible progress. But authentic relationships across traditional lines of difference create the right conditions for movements to emerge.

Similar efforts are taking shape across the country. In Nelsonville, Ohio—in a region that has been rocked by poverty and addiction—local leaders host a community dinner every Thursday for the sole purpose of building bridging relationships across cultural and economic divides. These dinners have unleashed a wave of civic engagement that is transforming the local political landscape.

Likewise, in Martinsville, Ind., leaders have rooted their local initiatives in community dinners. As community members became aware of local environmental issues, they worked to clean up a 38-acre superfund site and send postcards to their representatives and the EPA in support of policies that would benefit their community.

Even in my hometown of Brookings, S.D., community members concerned about the Trump administration’s immigration policies hosted weekly meals and English classes with members of the undocumented community. It’s no coincidence that a state lawmaker there, a Republican, introduced legislation—with strong community support—to provide driver’s examinations in Spanish for the local immigrant population.

With the dramatic polarization in our politics and the temptation to take shortcuts with automated organizing, relationships generated through gatherings such as these seem almost radical.

But relationships are what we do in rural America. We know if we empower and equip rural leaders to build local relationships, identify challenges and solutions from within their communities, develop positive political agendas that prioritize their interests, and mobilize support for legislation, they have the experience and expertise to develop rural-specific solutions for rural-specific problems and rebuild rural communities that are empowered, thriving, and equitable.

We just need to find a new way across the river.