Wuthnow emphasizes that he tried to keep his personal views out of the narrative, just as he and his assistants tried to do in the interviews. From my reading, he is credible when he writes, “We’ve tried as best we could to set aside our disagreements with some of the things we heard, seeking instead to listen and understand.”
It is not until his epilogue that he clearly acknowledges, “I’m part of the liberal elite, … and … opposed nearly everything about the Reagan and Bush administrations, favored much of President Obama’s efforts and voted for Hillary Clinton.” Despite his political views, he conveys a genuine respect for those he and his team interviewed. That said, he is not entirely successful at keeping his political views out of the narrative, as will become clear in this review.
Moral communities / Wuthnow states early in the book that “understanding rural America requires seeing the places in which its residents live as moral communities” (his emphasis). I found his use of this term interesting because James Buchanan employed the same term in his 1981 monograph “Moral Community, Moral Order, or Moral Anarchy” to describe a situation in which a set of individuals identify “with a collective unit, a community, rather than conceive themselves to be independent, isolated individuals.” Buchanan recognized that people will “identify simultaneously and with various degrees of loyalty with several [such] communities.”
Wuthnow doesn’t cite Buchanan but sees a moral community in much the same way. He, along with Buchanan, doesn’t make any claims as to whether moral communities are good or bad. According to Wuthnow, such a
community draws our attention to the fact that people interact with one another and form loyalties to one another…. Understanding communities this way differs from the notion that people are independent individuals who form opinions based strictly on their economic interests and their psychological needs.
Both Buchanan and Wuthnow recognize that the loyalties within moral communities can generate hostility between communities. Wuthnow sees
a darker side to the togetherness townspeople experience, [with there being] a strong sense of “us” and “them.” The result “ranges from negative stereotypes to overt discrimination.
While he points out that not all small-town residents engage in such exclusionary behavior, he follows up with:
It was one of the ways the subjects I interviewed maintained their sense of identity. They probably revealed more than they realized when they said the people they knew were all the same.
Another similarity in Buchanan’s and Wuthnow’s understanding of moral communities is that those communities are not confined to geographically small areas. Buchanan is clear on this when he extends such communities from those of nuclear families to the nation state, with ethnic, racial, and religious groupings included, with each of us generally being in several moral communities at the same time, along with people outside our small geographic area.
Given Wuthnow’s focus on small, rural towns, it would be easy to assume he limits his understanding of moral communities to geographically small communities. But much of what he sees as characteristics of these communities—such as shared views and ideologies that create common understanding and a sense of “us vs. them”—don’t depend on physical proximity. Consider his comment on a moral community and those who share such a community:
They know the norms of the community well enough to abide by them without having to give them much thought. A common identity is publicly affirmed in the stories they tell…. [The community includes] people who rarely [interact] with [each other]…. The norms they espouse pertain to a large share of the population…. [This moral code] is enabling in terms of the expectations its members reliably take for granted and at the same time is constraining in terms of the beliefs and activities it encourages and the ones it discourages.
I believe he agrees with Buchanan that we can identify with, and be influenced by, the views of widely dispersed people in several moral communities, including those pertaining to political ideology.
Does voting reflect morality? / Wuthnow does not include voting in his index. Yet much, though not all, of what he discusses influences the voting decisions of people in rural settings.
The book opens with six paragraphs discussing the role of the rural vote in Donald Trump’s 2016 election as president. This discussion includes such topics as racism and misogyny, grievance and resentment at Washington and being left behind economically, and “backward” voters whose conservative ideological beliefs ostensibly motivated them to vote against their interests as Wuthnow interprets them. These voters were also affected by the view that morality in American is declining, a perception that is discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.
Wuthnow notes that both rural and urban voters see the votes of the other as clear evidence of their moral deficiency. He is cautious about making moral judgments about rural voters. But his urge to do so, at least subtly, is there, as I discuss below. In his defense, it is a common urge.
Many of us are far too quick to see those who vote differently than we do as morally flawed, if not evil. In fact, research indicates that people’s voting decisions are not very good indicators of their moral behavior. Voting decisions are overwhelmingly influenced by emotional attachment to particular issues and political ideology, which are generally more the accident of people’s backgrounds than thoughtful moral deliberation. We are identifying with members of our moral political community when we vote the way we know they are voting. We’ve all heard some updated version of the Pauline Kael tale where a Blue State voter says, “I can’t believe Trump won; I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” That voter may be mythical, but her political moral community probably includes millions of Americans. If Wuthnow had interviewed her, he could have written that she probably revealed more than she realized with that statement.
With the growing emphasis on identity politics, how people’s votes are seen to reflect their views of others has taken on increased moral significance. When voting for policies to allegedly help a group suffering from discrimination, the measure of a voter’s morality is his intentions, which for many are automatically considered good if he votes for the policy and bad if he votes against it. Good intentions are not irrelevant to moral decisions, of course, but they are hardly the whole story.
This is not to deny that members of some groups have been deprived of the basic freedoms and legal opportunities available to others (African Americans, Native Americans and homosexuals come to mind), and that the moral thing to do is give them those freedoms and opportunities. A policy doing this would generate positive-sum benefits, leaving us all better off materially as well as morally.
Unfortunately, the policies motivated by identity politics often exempt the mistreated from the responsibilities that have historically been associated with the successful instead of providing them with more freedom and opportunity. Furthermore, identity politics has created a political dynamic in which increasing numbers of groups have benefited from claiming that they have been treated unjustly. The result is an increasing number of people identified as members of unjustly treated groups are being pitted against each other in a negative-sum process of political transfers in which they compete over who is suffering most from social injustice. This is hardly an effective way to bring us together by promoting social justice or harmony.
It is hard to believe that a rural voter who votes against such a policy because she believes it is socially divisive and harms the people it is supposed to help is less moral, or more bigoted, than a city voter who votes for it because he believes the opposite. Wuthnow almost seems sympathetic to this view, at least momentarily, when he writes, “Most people living in rural America are probably no more prone toward bigotry than many people living in suburbs and cities.” But in the very next paragraph he states that the
anger that prompts rural Americans to lash out at Washington is a source of bigotry as well. It can be a thin line from arguing that Washington is broken to saying that President Obama was illegal, stupid and untrustworthy because he was African American.
No one can deny that there are bigots in rural America, just as there are in urban America and everywhere else where humans live. We are instinctively and emotionally a tribal species. And when expressing ourselves through voting or political speech, we sometimes embrace ideas that we would never consciously espouse or exhibit—or even tolerate—in other contexts. The line between how we vote and how we act is not thin; indeed, it is quite thick.
Our tribal instincts make expressing our moral anger at opposing voters far easier than considering the possibility that those voters are decent people.
Unfortunately, politicians are very effective at harnessing these tribal passions by demonizing political opponents and those opponent’s voters in order to get their own voters to the polls. Hate is more effective politically, and divisive socially, when voting is depicted as having that same moral significance for good or evil as decisive actions. Our tribal instincts make expressing our moral anger at opposing voters far easier than considering the possibility that voters who disagree with us are decent people doing what we are doing: expressing their emotional attachment to what they genuinely believe is good for America. Yet doing the latter would be far more conducive to social harmony than judging the morality of others by whether they vote like us or against us. The former is far too strong and evidence that too many of our differences have become politicized.
Getting to know you / The most effective way to moderate our “us vs. them” impulse is by interacting with “them” as individuals, as Wuthnow recognizes. He states, “Research on prejudice toward people unlike yourself shows that knowing someone personally usually has a significant effect in reducing prejudice.” He follows up with some examples of this happening in small communities.
Before talking about prejudice, he emphasizes that “the limited opportunity for social interaction in small places force people to mingle on an equal footing” and he gives examples of people interacting socially across class lines. It doesn’t eliminate the “us vs. them” impulse, as he makes clear, but it surely helps reduce it more than identity politics. Wuthnow seems to accept, at least cautiously, the view of the small-town people he interviews when they say that “when you live in a large place, … you can isolate yourself from people unlike yourself if you want to, but in rural communities you can’t.”
He cites Harvard political scientist Robert Putman on the importance of social interaction within communities. Putman’s 2000 book Bowling Alone worries that Americans’ involvement in their communities (e.g., visiting neighbors, being members of civic organizations, doing volunteer work) has declined to troubling levels. According to Wuthnow, Putman observes that this disassociation has not been the case in small towns and rural areas. Wuthnow provides support for this notion by referring to a survey he did in the late 1990s in which he found “that residents of small towns or rural areas were significantly more likely than residents of cities or suburbs to feel they can count on the neighbors for help if someone in their family became seriously ill.”
The observed politeness of people in small towns relative to that of people in cities is, at least in part, a result of the greater social mingling in the former than in the latter. Wuthnow doesn’t emphasis the politeness of small-town folks, if he mentions it at all, yet it is clearly reflected in the pattern of helping others that he does discuss in some detail as a strength of small towns. Yet, toward the end of his book, he reveals his bias by indicating that people’s good acts do not reflect their moral status if those people do not vote the “right” way.
Do good intentions trump decisive action? / In addition to the greater social interaction between different social groupings in small towns than in cities, Wuthnow recognizes that religion “plays an important role in holding the community together [and] … supports the family values that people hold dear and tells them that they should care for their neighbors.” Yet he sees a contradiction in the clergy’s and lay members’ caring for neighbors. What they “usually missed seeing,” according to Wuthnow, “was that how they voted also affected provisions for the needy.” They voted for conservative Republicans who “opposed welfare spending, favored regressive tax policies.”
Wuthnow sees this as a moral “blind spot” based on the “small-town view that local charity and volunteering were better than government programs.” He doesn’t consider the possibility that individuals taking decisive action with their own money to help the poor are engaged in an act that is both more moral and effective than is expressing good intentions with an indecisive vote that costs the individual voter effectively nothing for the purpose of having the government force everyone to contribute the same way. And speaking of blind spots, he doesn’t consider how much more likely the small-town contributor is to follow up on his contribution to see if it is used effectively than is the voter to follow up on his vote to determine how much the policy he voted for (if enacted) benefits the poor after being processed through state or federal legislatures and bureaucracies.
Conclusion / I give Wuthnow credit for describing the concerns, resilience, virtues, and flaws found in small-town America. My biggest concern with his book is its tendency, in most cases implicit, to attribute too much moral significance to how people vote.
I recognize this tendency is not limited to him or to those embracing the same political views he does. He was more explicit in describing how people in small American towns lived and interacted with each other as friends and neighbors. From those accounts I got the strong impression that Wuthnow would give small-town American higher marks for how they acted outside the voting booth than for how they voted in it. And he might agree with me that the former is a better measure of their decency than the latter.
