Are Rural Populists Particularly Violent?
My new paper in Socius suggests they are particularly NON-violent
What does it mean to be a populist? And does it have anything to do with violence?
Today populism has become uncritical code for probably right-wing racist people and their king-like leaders like Trump, Bolsanaro, and Orban. Further, these populists we’re taught to imagine are probably from rural areas. They’re also probably kind of violent, like to storm the Capitol or get in standoffs with the Federal Government over grazing rights. They’re probably from all that uncivilized land out there outside of the blue bubbles.
About a year ago, a couple professional friends were talking about how fucking annoying it was that “populism” had become right-coded. We all kind of felt the same way: Wait... I feel like I’m a populist, but I’m definitely not right-wing!
When we started looking into what scholars of populism were like, actually using to measure populism, we found questions like this: “When it comes to really important questions, scientific facts don’t help very much,” and “Politics is ultimately a struggle between good and evil.” Is this populism? The answer for us was, no.
So we went back to the basics. What if we asked a bunch of people in rural America just simple things like “I would rather be represented by an ordinary citizen than by a professional politician” and “The people, not the politicians, should make most of the important political decisions.” How would these kinds of opinions interact with support for violence and, say, ethnonationalist tendencies? So, that’s what we did.
Our study was just published in the American Sociological Association’s journal Socius. It’s called “Rural Populism and Tolerance for Political Violence” and is available totally free HERE. So, what did we find?
Well, first, we found that populism is negatively associated with tolerance for political violence in the rural American West. In other words, the more you support ideas like “I would rather be represented by an ordinary citizen than by a professional politician,” the less likely our rural respondents are to support violence as a legitimate political strategy. Weird, huh?
The reason for this, we believe, is that people who support political violence are just plain authoritarian and might not individually have any real attachment to these high-minded ideas about representation. In other words, it appears that today we often conflate being popular (like Trump…sort of) with being populist. Populism is a theory about the relationship between the people and their elected and unelected officials, sometimes referred to as elites, within a democratic system of government.
We could be wrong about this, but the important point is that we found that those who express populist attitudes are less likely to view political violence as a legitimate political strategy.
Second, we did not really find any support for people who are kind of racist and shit being particularly populist, nor particularly tolerant of political violence. We asked a bunch of questions in the genre of Do you believe that “There is discrimination against white people in America today” and found that these sentiments were not significantly associated with populism or support for political violence.
We did, however, find that people with economic grievances were notably populist and quite tolerant of political violence. People who believed that “people like me used to have more opportunities for economic advancement than we do now” were significantly more likely to express populist attitudes and tolerance for political violence. So, when it comes to populism and violence in rural America, it appears that its the economic grievance, not racist shit, that matters.
Here’s the weird part: while economic grievance was the strongest predictor of tolerance for political violence, populism actually weakened this relationship. Populist attitudes were linked to a reduced connection between grievance and violence.
If you want to learn more about the details and complications of trying to measure watery political ideologies like populism, I’d suggest you read some of the paper over at Socius. It’s really hard, and perhaps not even worth it.
My main takeaways from being in the trenches of writing this thing for a bit are that rural people often get subsumed by and obscured by “nationally representative” surveys. Another takeaway is that populism must not be understood as the consequences of popular politics right now in my political world, but rather a one-step more abstract commitment to popular politics in general.
The distinction between a society designed by elites versus one that emerges from a plurality of the people is one of the most critical distinctions imaginable. For me, populism is a plain commitment, when at all reasonable, to the latter. For what ends? Well, that depends. Using what technologies? Well, that matters too. Who is included in “the people?” Well, that matters a whole lot too. But the orientation toward collectivity still stands, which is why you can right-wing, left-wing, radical forms of populism.
If anything, I hope this paper begins to peel some of us away from our default position of calling all nativist, bigoted politics "populist” and allows us to reimagine what a class-based populism from the left might look like.