In “Strangers in Their Own Land” and “The Politics of Resentment,” Arlie Hochschild and Kathy Cramer explore anger and resentment among working class rural whites. Hochschild (2016) underscores the racialized nature of this resentment in Louisiana. Many of her interviewees faulted the federal government for allowing immigrants and people of color to “cut the line,” moving past working class whites. According to Cramer (2016), anti-state sentiments in Wisconsin are motivated not by enthusiasm for small government, but instead by frustration with urban elites. While these and other studies have generated important insights about political beliefs in rural America, a great deal remains unknown. For example, how do rural residents in other regions of the U.S. view the state? And how do the political beliefs of people who are poor and/or homeless compare with those of working class whites? This project fills these gaps by focusing on the worldviews of people experiencing homelessness in the Intermountain West.
My research team and I conducted interviews with 81 people experiencing homelessness in Western Montana. The small city where we collected data is amenity-rich and adjacent to public lands. Like most of Montana, wages are low, poverty rates are around 15%, and affordable housing is limited. The dataset contains roughly equal numbers of participants who grew up and/or became homelessness in: Missoula, rural areas and small towns in the region, and large urban areas across the country. This made it possible to compare participants’ experiences of homelessness, worldviews, and views of the state by rurality.
As Hochschild and Cramer might predict, participants offered sharp criticism of the federal government during their interviews. They rarely faulted it for being corrupt, inefficient, or too large, focusing instead of its stinginess. They shared stories of struggling to make ends meet with low wages, feeding themselves and their families on miniscule SNAP benefits, and languishing for years on Section 8 waitlists, to illustrate their claims about the inadequacy of federal anti-poverty programs. Rural and urban participants alike dreamed of a future in which the federal government would play a larger, not smaller, role in the lives of its neediest citizens.
Many participants also bemoaned the shrinking prosperity and crumbling infrastructure in the U.S. Rural and urban participants offered different explanations for the country’s decline, though. Participants who had grown up and become homeless in urban areas tended to blame it on changing demographics. White flight and immigration, they believed, had made American cities unsafe and unappealing places to live, at least for whites. Their rural counterparts tended to focus on in-migration. Former residents of amenity-rich rural communities described how population growth often led to rising housing costs, which had pushed them out of their housing, and often out of the community altogether.
These findings suggest important differences in the worldviews and political beliefs of people experiencing homelessness in the amenity-rich West, the Midwest, and the South. It also suggests that anti-state sentiments might be shallower and less intense among whites experiencing homelessness than among working class whites.
