Like many Victorians—from Dickens to Marx, who sometimes worked alongside her at the British Museum—Eliot thought a great deal about the working class. Her thoughts were not simple or always sympathetic, especially when they turned to the rural world she knew best. In particular, Eliot loathed the way that artists rendered the countryside as a laughing menagerie of red-cheeked peasant girls and bright-eyed shepherds: “No one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry.” The child of Warwickshire could not disguise her contempt for the notion that rural workers were natural incarnations of goodness. Over one hundred fifty years later, we can only imagine the asperity with which Eliot would have greeted the idea that a rustic “heartland” is the storehouse of national virtue, whether in Britain or America: “The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups. . . . To make men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.”
These days, metropolitans run little risk of idealizing America’s rural working class. In 2020, Donald Trump won 65 percent of rural voters. In many very rural, very working-class places—such as Rusk County, Wisconsin; Mingo County, West Virginia; or Choctaw County, Oklahoma—the number approached 70, 80, or 85 percent. While some progressives imagine that Trump voters in the countryside largely own auto dealerships and pleasure boats, a glance at Rusk, Mingo, or Choctaw—where per capita incomes range roughly between $21,000 and $32,000 per annum—shows the poverty of this conceit. Trump’s grip on rural districts has not been made possible by “salt-of-the-earth millionaires,” as one writer termed them in The Atlantic, but by the single largest demographic group in the American countryside—white voters without college degrees, in households earning well below the national average.
For much of the twentieth century, Rusk, Mingo, and Choctaw—like much of the white, working-class American countryside—voted Democratic, intensely so during the New Deal era and to lesser degrees as recently as the early Aughts. But since then, these voters have joined a larger national migration of working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party. And they have been joined by great numbers of non-white voters, including perhaps half the Hispanic electorate and an unprecedented share of black Americans, according to recent polls. In Choctaw County, this group likely includes a significant portion of the working-class Native population, whose Democratic allegiance is on the wane. Still, it is rural white workers—farmers, servers, haircutters, mechanics, cashiers and cashiers’ husbands—who are usually understood as the lead characters in this historic reversal of class and party loyalty.