In just about a month, Scott Walker’s eight years as governor will end. There’s much to be learned from his rise and fall.
Political scientist Katherine Cramer explains Walker’s ascent in her 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” Beginning in mid-2007, Cramer attended and recorded scores of wide-ranging discussions at Wisconsin diners and truck stops.
Cramer defines “rural consciousness”: love of one’s community, coupled with the belief that city-dwellers have completely different values. She summarizes: “People in small-town Wisconsin [told me] that urbanites ignore people in rural areas, take in all of their hard-earned money, and fundamentally disrespect and misunderstand the rural way of life.”
Cramer’s data demonstrate that tax dollars tend to flow from big cities to smaller communities, not the reverse. The broad generalization about disrespect for rural communities overlooks the myriad family, friendship and business relationships between urban and rural Wisconsinites.
Smaller communities have a very legitimate concern: Their lifeblood has been manufacturing and farm-related jobs. Those have diminished drastically in America, while the population is ever-expanding.
In 1979, America had 19 million manufacturing jobs; today it’s about 12.7 million. The number of farms has dwindled from more than 6 million in the mid-1930s to about 2 million today. Globalization, automation, digitization and corporate acquisitiveness have done this, and will continue to do so.
What’s needed now is a strengthening of education and training in smaller communities, particularly for computer and service-related professional skills. Many politicians, however, have chosen to capitalize upon rural resentments, and to undermine, rather than build up, vitally needed education.
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