The Political Epistemics of Rural Conservatism

• In Event: 147 - Regular Session. Political Sociology 2

Abstract

This paper, based on nine months of immersive ethnography, 40 in-depth interviews, and extensive document analysis, examines the underpinnings of conservative partisanship in "Shale County," one of the poorest yet most politically conservative localities in the United States. I show that its Republican partisanship is located in five sources: 1) opposition to the perceived environmentalism of the Democratic Party, which is viewed as antithetical to the coal industry’s well-being; 2) ostensible social distance and dissimilarity between residents and liberal politicians, which undermined the formation of cultural identification and trust; 3) opposition to government assistance programs that offered direct cash assistance to the poor, which ran against the grain of the local moral and religious order; 4) a tendency to conflate “lumpenization” and the emergence of a “gray zone” with “welfare dependence,” which precipitated symbolic violence and antipathy toward the poor; and 5) the generalization of negative experiences with local government to the national political sphere. My findings emphasize how personal experiences with the local political structure, which was marked by personalism, patronage relations and corruption, shaped how Shale Countians interpreted national political events and personas, even when those events and personas bore little relation to events and personas operating at the local level. Unlike existing models of working class conservatism, which often convey political knowledge as an isolated, independent object and presume a rational political decision-making process, my analysis works toward the construction of a relational-pragmatist model of political decision-making and a political epistemology of emotiveness and experience.

Author

• Philip George Lewin, Florida Atlantic University