The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America

For decades, and particularly since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, scholars and pundits alike have been trying to answer the question of why rural Americans overwhelmingly vote conservatively. Wuthnow’s book is squarely located in this genre, alongside recent others such as Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment and Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. Based on a decade of research on rural America, the book is well situated to address this question. Wuthnow consciously positions this book as another explanation for the rise of Trump, and attempts to adjudicate between existing explanations of economic suffering versus racism and misogyny. The book does less to resolve this question than it does to elucidate the ways in which these issues are discussed by rural residents, as well as to introduce new explanations for their voting behaviors. Wuthnow presents rural towns as “moral communities” that are threatened by forces of modernity including deindustrialization, consolidation in the agricultural industry, population decline, and a host of social problems. The ensuing moral outrage, he argues, comes from “a mixture of fear and anger” (p. 6) that rural communities are both disappearing and under siege.