This is very very valid. I read an essay about 6 months ago on this. No clue where, by who, title, etc., or I’d give a cite.
But the author, a respected sociologist, said the so-called white working class racism is a facile false answer. A lot of what’s going on is that rural and small town America is dying economically. These people were raised from birth to want to live only near their ancestors and never want to leave that county. They don’t want a handout.
They want living in a nothing’s happening dead end town or rural county to be a viable lifestyle with similar economic benefits to life in a city. The 1940s/1950s were no Golden Age, but they were an era when a lot of sudden prosperity hit the middle and working class and by and large, that tide did raise all boats, both suburban and rural. Not quite equally, but things were not economically stagnant in 1950s Smallsville or Bumfugue County. A 1950s Smallsville resident thought the whole country, including him, was going plenty good and getting better all the time.
Of course it greatly helped that after WWII the US saw some of the smallest income inequality figures ever. And the nature of work then had lots more room for smart but uneducated workers. And notso smart workers. All could earn a living wage. Not a city wage, but they didn’t pay city prices since there wasn’t that much of a consumer goods economy . Yet.
They see the changing world of the last ~20 years as an assault on their lifestyle and their heritage. Not their wallet; their heritage. They can’t move to wherever the jobs are because their psychological attachment to their grandfather’s plot of land and their lifetime neighbors is stronger than their pangs of economic need.
This economic disconnect will only get worse as the cities continue to accelerate away from the depopulating hinterlands. And the cultural disconnect will become only wider as well.
These folks desperately want there to be a solution that doesn’t feel like a handout, doesn’t force them to change their behaviors and self-reliant mindset, AND leaves them free to live in granddad’s house with grandad’s neighbor’s family downline still living next door. While being able to afford all the crap they see on TV and online. And for their kids to get a good education then upon graduation still want to stay in the same old town.
That’s all an unfulfillable fantasy. But lots of people vote for pols who will promise you that your fantasy isn’t.