Princeton sociologist spent a decade exploring what fuels rural America's outrage

Robert Wuthnow’s new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is a distillation of the Princeton sociologist’s decade of research regarding rural communities. Wuthnow, along with a team of researchers, conducted hundreds of interviews with people living in small towns, on farms, and in rural communities in an attempt to better understand social, cultural and political dynamics. It’s a shorter book written primarily for a non-specialty audience that pulls together some of the main conclusions for all of that research. I was able to draw on more than a thousand qualitative interviews, along with the quantitative data, that my team put together. We had a lot of content, a lot of rich perspective, from people in every state, every region. I was most taken with the loyalty, with the way rural people expressed such pride and identity with their specific communities. They identify so closely with their local schools, their football team, the feeling that there are some concerns but a general affection for the place they live. They believe strongly that this is a way of life that is valuable and worth protecting. People love the familiarity of their communities, the security of knowing a lot of people personally, the ambience no matter whether it’s hill country or prairie or grasslands. Those are the kinds of attachments that they feel deeply, even in their bones, for their rural communities.