while national polls show support for impeaching him is growing, it’s still divided sharply along partisan lines. Democrats strongly favor it, while Republicans tend to oppose it.
I’ve been following this story from my little corner of the world in rural Van Buren County, Ark. Tim Widener, 50, who lives outside my hometown, Clinton, summed up the town’s attitude well: “It’s really a sad waste of taxpayers’ money,” he told me.
Mr. Widener could have been talking about anything. His comment reflected a worldview that is becoming ever more deeply ingrained in the white people who remain in rural America — Washington politicians are spending money that they shouldn’t be. In 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory,Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, summed up the attitudes she observed after years of studying rural Americans: “The way these folks described the world to me, their basic concern was that people like them, in places like theirs, were overlooked and disrespected,” she
wrote in Vox, explaining that her subjects considered “racial minorities on welfare” as well as “lazy urban professionals” working desk jobs to be undeserving of state and federal dollars. People like my neighbors hate that the government is spending money on those who don’t look like them and don’t live like them...
It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.
The most dominant news source here is Fox News, which I think helps perpetuate these attitudes.
When local economies are flagging, state governments don’t step in to help as much as they once did.
It means many county governments are getting less money on several fronts. A report from the National Association of Counties from 2016 was titled, “
Doing More With Less.” It’s the new normal.
Local budgets pay for the infrastructure and institutions people deal with every day — schools, roads, water, trash collection, libraries and animal shelters. Cuts to those services are felt in a visceral way.
