Sacrifice zones in rural and non-metro USA: Fertile soil for authoritarian populism

Sacrifice zones — abandoned and economically shattered places, with growing social and health problems — are spreading in historically white rural areas and small towns across the United States. Rural decline, rooted in economic restructuring and financialisation, exacerbates racial resentment to create a breeding ground for regressive authoritarian politics. The paper argues for a multidimensional approach that examines and analytically connects long-term and recent trends affecting economy and livelihoods, institutions, health, and community life. It suggests that people and communities benefit when they can appropriate the wealth that they produce, but that since the 1980s capital has systematically undermined this capacity, especially but not only in rural areas and in intensified form after the 2008 financial crisis. While many Trump voters were affluent suburbanites, another important sector of supporters consists of downwardly mobile inhabitants of zones where the institutions that earlier allowed people to appropriate the wealth that they produced were destroyed and where the social safety net, always fragile, is increasingly in tatters. Scholars and the media have underestimated the human toll of the crisis. The paper concludes by posing several questions of political strategy for the struggle against authoritarian populism, both in the United States and elsewhere.

This paper was presented at the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) 2018 Conference: "Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World"