Q&A: Does Democracy Require Upward Mobility, or Just Stability?

By Olivia Weeks and Dee Davis

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Over the past few weeks the Daily Yonder has aired a new audio series on our Rural Remix podcast feed. It’s called Backroad Ballots: Rural Politics in 2024, and it’s meant as a discussion forum for what’s at stake in America’s countryside in this election year.

Last week we added a bonus episode from a recent Rural Assembly Everywhere event, in which Center for Rural Strategies President Dee Davis sat down with political scientists Katherine Cramer, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Hahrie Han from Johns Hopkins University. This week’s newsletter is an edited version of that conversation.

Enjoy their insightful discussion about the challenges facing American democracy, rural resentment and economic populism, and what it means to rebuild trust in struggling communities.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Dee Davis, The Daily Yonder: Welcome to Rural Assembly Everywhere. This is a great chance for us to talk with two powerhouse scholars, Kathy Cramer and Hahrie Han. Kathy is at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, go Badgers. She has been one of the co-chair people of the Commission on Reimagining our Economy and has worked with Rural Assembly and with Whitney Kimball Coe on that commission. Hahrie Han and I served together on the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, so this is kind of like a reunion and I’m glad to get a chance to talk with you guys.

So here’s a question I’d like to ask both of you. It seems like every four years we’re told this is the most important election for the future of our democracy. If we don’t vote this way or that way, we’re going to lose the whole shebang. And each time it seems as if the rhetoric gets ramped up, there’s more invective, there’s more passion, more anger.

Katherine Cramer: Some of it is just to freak people out and scare them because that is a great motivator and a way to get people to the polls and get them to vote. And a lot of the challenges that people are facing are not new.

It’s not as if, say, the last four years or the last eight years have suddenly brought, for example, people’s economic challenges about, right? I mean, people in rural communities, for example, a lot of folks have been really having a hard time making ends meet for decades, right? At the same time,it’s not clear whether [Donald Trump] will accept the results of an election and the things he said about retribution to his political opponents once in office do make me wonder whether there is something to be said for this election [being] really important for the future of our democracy and the kinds of liberties that I think, myself included, have taken for granted for my life, my entire life.

Hahrie Han: First of all, let me just say that it’s really nice to be here and thank you for the opportunity. And I always love having a chance to talk with you, Dee, and always with Kathy, too.

I largely agree with what Kathy said. I think it is true that too often people use that sense of threat as a way of trying to motivate people to turn out. And to your point, it can kind of lead to this cycle in which people tune out because it seems like, “well, they told me it’s a threat last time and we’re still here.” And so why would I pay attention this time? But I do think there is something unique about the challenges in this moment, particularly because things that we had taken for granted for a long time in our democracy just aren’t taken for granted anymore. Things like the peaceful transition of power. There are certain norms about political violence and democracy that I think people had taken for granted for a long time that no longer seem like things that we can necessarily assume will be true. And so there’s a way in which it feels to me, as Kathy said, that even though I resonate with the sense that these challenges aren’t new at all and that the sort of rhetoric around threat is certainly not new, I do think there is something potentially unique about this moment.

But then maybe the other thing that I’ll add is I do feel like the kind of cycle that you’re describing is a sign of the way in which this moment that we’re living in in the 21st century is just one of tremendous uncertainty. You know, like the structure of our economy is changing, the socio-political dynamics are changing, technology is changing. Everything is changing at once. And I think our political system is struggling to catch up.

You can listen to Backroad Ballots on the Rural Remix feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

DY: In a recent essay about how data is being used to look at rural voter rage and racism and rejection of the system, Nick Jacobs from Colby College said there’s a real difference between rural rage and rural resentment. Kathy, you wrote the book on rural resentment. What’s your take on that and the difference?

KC: Well, I agree with Nick. In my mind, resentment is not new to the Trump era, right? But this sense among many people in rural areas that “people around here are working hard and we’re good people and it doesn’t seem to us that we’re getting what we deserve.” Not in terms of money or resources, not in terms of attention from decision makers, and not in terms of respect from people making those decisions. That’s an undertone. It’s not necessarily rage or nastiness, but it can be turned into rage when the right politician comes along and says, you’re right to be so upset and you should be angry and vote for me and I’ll make America great again. And I think part of the undertone of that conversation about rage versus resentment is the role of racism.

So the White Rural Rage book Jacobs wrote about, right, was saying, you know, really, when you boil all that resentment down, it’s really about racism, right? It’s really about white folks in rural areas, being racist, and that racism being fomented by candidates. And I don’t want to downplay racism. I think racism is unfortunately a huge part of American political culture.

But I would say that’s not unique to rural areas. And I would say that the kind of resentment I heard about in rural areas is the sense of “I’m not getting my fair share. I’m working my rear off, as is everybody I know, and we’re still not getting ahead.” That’s my sense of the difference.

DY: Hahrie, I have a democracy question. You’re the director of the Agora Institute on democracy at Johns Hopkins, go Blue Jays. And it seems to me that usually when we talk about democracy, we think about how we’re registered or how we vote or how we govern or sometimes how others label us. But two years ago here in Eastern Kentucky, we had this devastating flood, 46 people were killed, thousands were made homeless. And we saw acts of courage and heroism and 1400 people were saved from the water. People were nursed and nourished and sheltered. And it was done by locals, it was done by strangers, nobody with any sense of wanting a dime or recognition in return, they just did it. I’m interested in what the underlying tenets of democracy are. Is it about helping our neighbors or is it about what’s in it for me? 

HH: Yeah, I remember that flood. I think that a lot of times when people think about what democracy is, the first thing that people think about is Congress. It’s a building where laws are made and there’s a structure, or the Supreme Court which has these pillars in front of it or something like that. But in my mind, part of the reason why I became a political scientist and part of the reason why I was drawn to studying democracy is that democracy is the work of people figuring out how we want to forge a common life together.

And that’s a really hard question to answer. Anyone who’s been in a family knows that it takes a lot of work to make the family work. I have a partner and two kids and when the four of us are just figuring out where to go for dinner or where we’re going to take a vacation, it’s a discussion, let me tell you. And we are all genetically related to each other, right? And so then if you take it and multiply that out to a large society where you have millions of people who all come from really different backgrounds, some live in urban areas and some live in rural areas, some people were born in the United States and some people weren’t and on and on and on. You think about all the differences and wonder, how does a community of people at a small or a large scale do the work of forging a common life together? And that’s why it is important to have structures and institutions and places where we begin to channel some of that decision making.

But to get to your question of what’s at the heart of it, when communities across America are in crisis, what we see is people recovering and doing something very human, right? Which is the natural instinct to want to help each other, and that’s true whether you are like me or whether you’re not like me. You know that people have this desire to want to help their fellow person and we see that emerge again and again. And so I think in some ways the challenge of our politics in a lot of ways is like how do we build a system that allows those natural instincts to come out? Because right now the system that we have, the two parties, the candidates, all the different trappings of what we think of as formal democracy are not really working that well and I think there’s a wide variety of reasons why that happened.

But that doesn’t mean that at the heart of it you don’t have a group of people who really are trying to answer that question of what does it mean for us to be in community with each other and what are the commitments we’re willing to make to each other or not. You know, I think that there are some very basic questions there that still animate the work of democracy – or at least I like to think that they do – at its very best.

DY: About a year ago we were finishing up doing a series of polling rural voters and looking at messages that resonate and then doing special kind of focus groups in different rural communities and in some ways what we found wasn’t that surprising. There was a kind of drift to the right by rural voters but there were some things that I was surprised by. One was just the kind of economic populism we were seeing, and particularly how strongly anti-corporate messages were resonating in rural areas. And then in our focus groups we heard these compelling messages and the focus groups were focused on economic prospects.

Let me just read you a few of these. This is from a participant in Ohio. “If working made you rich then day laborers would be millionaires. It just doesn’t work that way. We listen to so much of this crap that poor people are indoctrinated with that. They carry that shame.”

Here’s a participant from Wisconsin. “There’s a lot of loss in this room and there will be for those who haven’t experienced it yet. They will.” 

And here’s a participant from Kentucky. “The cavalry ain’t coming. We’re the cavalry. You have to make a stand and say who’s my neighbor out there? Him, her. I don’t got much but oh hell for God’s sake these people got nothing.”

I’m interested in how much democracy rests on the idea of one generation doing better than the last generation. How much of the system that we believe in really depends on a sense of economic prosperity?

KC: That’s a great question. I mean in some respects it rests too much on that idea of what social scientists call social mobility, where you earn more than your parents did. A lot of folks in those focus groups – if I remember right in the ones we did for our commission, Dee – people just wanted stability. Like how I was talking about before this feeling of insecurity. They want to grow up in a place and get a job there and stick around their family like their dad or their grandma used to be able to. In some respects there’s this myth of prosperity like that’s the good life. You achieve, achieve, achieve. Well I’m not sure that’s what people really want. They just want stability. They want enough to have the good life which for a lot of people means a job that doesn’t take away their dignity and ability to be and have a little bit of time with their loved ones.

HH: So if you’ll forgive me for a second for being a little bit professorial in answering this question. There’s a political scientist at Cornell, I think she just retired, her name is Valerie Bunce and she has a definition of democracy that I really love. She says democracy is unique among all other forms of government because it requires that people accept uncertainty over outcome in order to have certainty over process. So I don’t know in any given moment if my guy’s going to win the election, if my party’s going to win the election, I don’t know if the policy that I want is going to pass, I don’t know exactly what the impact of whatever government does is going to be on my family’s economic fortune or something like that. But what differentiates democracy is a certain set of rights and responsibilities that I commit to that make me want to stay in the process, which is different if you think about an authoritarian regime. If Russia has an election, we know who’s going to win. We know it’s going to be Putin, we know what the outcome is, we just don’t know how he’s going to get there. We don’t know what the process is that’s going to be there.

So it’s the opposite in other kinds of governments. And I think about that definition a lot in relation to the question that you asked and what Kathy was just saying, because I think that I totally agree with what Kathy is saying. On the other hand, it’s also true that when we’re asking people to do this really hard thing, which is to accept uncertainty over outcome, what happens when the range of outcomes we start to ask them to accept becomes too big? So if you’re asking me to buy into a system where I may not know that my children are going to be able to have a healthy living, or that I won’t be able to feed my family, or that because of the color of my skin, I’m going to be threatened by the police, or whatever the things are, then yes, I am more likely to withdraw from that system.

It’s a logical response when that range of outcomes becomes too broad. And so I think that what Kathy is saying is totally right, that there are a lot of people that aren’t necessarily seeking constant advancement or just seeking a stable life. But there has to be some sort of sense in which there’s boundaries on how bad it can get, I think. And because of the uncertainty that we have right now, there are a lot of people out there who feel like, I’m not sure that I’m willing to accept the boundaries that you’re asking me to accept. And I don’t think that’s totally unfair. And so I think it’s a work of government then to sort of narrow the range of outcomes that people are asked to accept, and for people to be able to have more voice in the process.

DY: Okay. I have a final question for you guys. So when Deborah and James Fallows were doing their Our Towns book and television series, one of the things that intrigued me was the sense that they said that if they came into a town and asked what needed to be done, people would name the issues, and they would come together across lines, and work together, and laugh together, and be good natured, and figure out solutions. And if they came into a town and asked politically, what side are you on, that the community immediately divided. People went into their corners, and it was hard to get them to come back together for this communitarian purpose. So I’m interested in, one, how divided we are, and two, how do we rebuild trust? How do you rebuild faith or consent of the governed?

HH: In my mind that’s part of a bigger problem, I think, where too many people experience politics as a spectacle. It’s like a game that I watch other people play, and it’s almost like amusement, right? And every now and then, every four years, I get to go, and I get to pick this candidate or that candidate the same way that I go to the store, and I pick, you know, Hunts or Heinz ketchup or something like that. And in those situations, it’s no surprise that identities are categorical, right? Because we’re just watching a game, and so it’s the red team versus the blue team. And so I think what we really need to do is think about how we create a situation in which more people think of politics as experience. I think what I really liked about what the Fallows were describing is that, when you ask people how to solve problems together, people have natural instincts and habits and ways of coming together. But we don’t give people that opportunity often enough, you know? And so in some ways, I think the question is how do we recreate a system where more people are invited into opportunities to solve public problems together, and then sort of think about how those experiences can then be laddered up to shape a different experience about what politics can be.

KC: I so agree with that. When you ask people which side they are on, they do seem very divided in terms of partisanship, right? But then when you ask people, “What are the big concerns around here, and what do you think we should do about them?” people come together. I think in part it’s a big failure of our communication systems and the way in which we engage with people on social media – it’s not about conversation or seeing each other as humans. These platforms are designed for us to provoke one another. That’s how they grab our attention and keep us logged in, right? And so it’s partly social media, but I also think the evaporation of local media across the country takes away from people a forum in which people are thinking about and addressing what’s going on right at their own doorstep. And I think local government for me is like a source of great hope where people can be re-engaged, like Hahrie’s talking about. People can be reminded that it’s pretty straightforward how you do that, like you actually just talk with one another and see each other as human beings.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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Photo credit: This conversation took place at Rural Assembly Everywhere 2024: Nurturing Thriving Communities.