I’m an avid reader of the Chronicle, but I don’t always stay current with reading it, so I am not sure if it is this week’s edition or last week’s edition (I usually read the print version, as I spend entirely enough time staring at screens.)

And it’s unfortunately behind a paywall.

But, I am going to share enough of the piece to maybe get you interested in Cramer’s book, as I definitely am. The short piece is called The Politics if Resentment, and here’s the money quote.

The resentment I heard toward the cities in this so-called outstate part of Wisconsin had three main components. First, many people in small towns felt they were not getting their fair share of power. Second, they believed that public funds were not distributed fairly. Many voiced their view that tax dollars were being spent on Madison and Milwaukee and not shared with the rest of the state. Finally, they sensed that they did not get their fair share of something else: respect. Many told me that city people just do not understand rural folks. “I mean, we are, like, strange to Madison,” one woman in the far northern part of the state said during one of my first visits to her group.

Cramer’s book is The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

Honestly, I hope it’s something deeper than this because it sounds like so much bootyhootyhootyhoo to me. Most rural residents get disproportionate state funding because of stacked state legislatures and many public services scale readily (i.e., sidewalks cost less per person in New York City than it does in Winthrop, IA.) It also sounds like a cloaked racial comments. (Those welfare queens in Milwaukee, taking all my tax dollars, while I get none, even though it’s super-inefficient to maintain the rural farm to market system, etc. ) I hope it’s not…but I am pretty tone deaf about the dog whistle racism stuff simply because I am so clueless about social cues. I’m going to have to read Cramer’s book to find out.