Katherine J. Cramer

This book is pretty fascinating, especially in light of political events that have taken place since the book was published in 2016. I struggle to understand how people vote for Republicans, so any little peek into the thought process behind it helps. This book isn't really about partisanship, but how being rural tends to lead to a sense of alienation, resentment, and how politicians exploit that for the politicians gains.

I grew up in a very small town in New York state, so a lot of the conversations I read about in this book sounded familiar to me. While this book is specific to Wisconsin, I think it probably would hold up in a lot of rural areas. The thought is that the people in the Big City don't care about the rural areas, the rural folks don't see any return on their tax money, so they feel disconnected from the political process. The elites have captured this by turning the animus toward public employees rather than on them, the people with all of the power and money (who, believe me, are not public employees, for the most part).

While reading this book I decided to do some research on act 10. The Wisconsin State Journal reports, 10 years later, that inequality in school districts has increased since Walker's policies were implemented. So again, elites disguising themselves as common people all about ordinary folks were able to tap into that resentment and rural consciousness to get policies enacted that were not helpful to anybody but those who were already in the elite. Meanwhile the people of Wisconsin lose.

Most poignant in this book was the quote at the end: "My fear is that democracy will always tend toward a politics of resentment, in which savvy politicians figure out ways to amass coalitions by tapping into our deepest and most salient social divides: race, class, culture, place. This does not exactly make for a pleasant public life. When we get to a point where we do not actually have a public life, when we turn away from politics because it brings resentment rather than hope to the surface, democracy ceases to exist." Case in point: Trump's presidency.

Of course, we have Wisconsin to thank for the election of Joe Biden as our 46th president. Once again showing what this book described: there's more to people than just the red/blue divide. Smart Democrats should realize that and start doing something about it.… (més)