Sarah Smarsh writes:

Sometimes on our farm a nice car would roll up the gravel driveway and a man in a slick suit would get out. He would either be trying to sell us something overpriced that we’d never buy, because of our limited means and common sense, or trying to buy something we’d never sell — namely land, about which my grandfather said, “You don’t get rid of it, because they don’t make any more of it.”

This man would shake our hands before driving off.

“Better count your fingers,” Grandpa Arnie would tell us and laugh.

I’ve shared the story before to explain the gulf I’ve long felt between the essence of the rural white working poor who raised me — honest, flawed people who would welcome just about anyone into our home but a liar — and the red-hatted-fool avatar they’ve been assigned in national discourse.

What a relief, then, to see emerge on the national stage the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, who embodies the earnest, humane, rural people who shaped me and the prairie populism that shaped the progressive foundations of the Great Plains.

Mr. Walz went to a state college, taught public high school and went into government — more than a couple class rungs above my grandfather, who in the 1940s left school after sixth grade to work the Kansas wheat fields with his German American dad.

But when Mr. Walz smiles and his eyes disappear into a good-natured squint — say, while holding a piglet like a baby at a state fair — I see Grandpa Arnie.

With due respect to political statistics, which convey real and important trends, the rural white working class is not a monolith. Among them remains a large and consequential minority of sensible people who even in their vulnerable economic state remain unmoved by charlatans blaming immigrants while amassing corporate wealth.

In recent decades, the Democratic Party has made little direct appeal to them, such that Mr. Walz’s rural background seems downright transgressive on the top ticket. As evidence, some (often coastal) pundits now struggle to find a word for a vice-presidential pick raised in small-town Nebraska beyond “folksy,” since their language about his place of origin has for so long reflected geographic and class biases. “Trump country.” “One of the square states in the middle.”

My grandfather died while I was a first-generation college student, but my grandma — a Bernie Sanders supporter who went on to vote for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — has commented more than once about how Donald Trump would’ve turned Grandpa Arnie’s stomach.

Imagine if the type of person you most loathe became the symbol for your people and place. It has been, for me and so many others, excruciating. [Continue reading…]