Left-behind rural communities speculate preemptively on the present, not the past

Evidence

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s (2018) in-depth ethnography of America’s rural heartland (conducted during a period overlapping with Hochschild’s study) throws further light on this inchoate sense of collectivized uncertainty embodied in grassroots neopopulism—casting it as an integral part of the relational moral self, which is grounded in practices of mutual responsibility. Rather than passively responding to such uncertainty, “left-behind” communities (in Wuthnow’s words) employ preemptively “makeshift solutions” (4) to desperate problems, precisely in order to maintain their imagined togetherness. They “workshop” responses to growing economic risks and “don’t let themselves get anxious about it” (166), while remaining “realistic about the shortcomings of their communities” (79). Such responses seem to focus the speculative imagination on the present. Contrary to the much-discussed yearning for returning to America’s past, left-behind communities’ political speculations seemed much more attuned to the here and now (Skocpol and Williamson 2016). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 284

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contests the ‘nostalgic return-to-past’ reading of neopopulism that dominates cultural commentary — valuable contrast with the reader’s own catalog of past-facing movements. — connects to: Material artifacts left on abandoned land encode departed human hopes — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 208; Left-behind communities’ political imagination focuses on the present, not a nostalgic past. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 437
• QUESTION: If left-behind communities are focused on the here and now, what explains visible nostalgia in populist aesthetics? Worth investigating whether present-focus coexists with past-symbolism.