At the risk of assuming too much from the review in Vox of The Left Behind - Decline and Rage in Rural America by Princeton’s Robert Wuthnow, and without having seen the book yet, a suggestion is offered here that might shed light on the resentment of small town America, and their incapacity to explain it.
Try this: it's not "moral decline" or racism or the diversity of the nation that has Trump’s America in rage. They're struggling to name something much more basic and visceral than those specific things; and they are repeating the lines and memes that focus their fear by media that want them angry and helpless. It’s more fundamental than those things.
They fear in our time what their intellectual forebears, particularly from the South, feared in theirs: encroaching, pervasive, irresistible empiricism that challenges their assumptions about the world, America, their communities, their business and themselves. They can no longer just "believe" what they want to believe, for their own motives, and demand that those beliefs go untested. They live in a culture of surveillance—not intrusive spying, but constant useful tests—that instantly sees and judges their worldview and makes them accountable. Is this not like the culture of the Old South, desperately rationalizing slavery for itself and facing the onslaught of publishing, photography, and media that saw them as never before, and that put their self-image, their economy and their "way of life" to the lie? The nostalgia and romanticism that put Dixie in a Magnolia-scented trance so strong it masked the self-evident lies by which they lived have a counterpart in our own time, when small-town America and all of its self-mythologizing are being, on one hand, wildly indulged and played to, and on the other, coldly and brutally evaluated for their empirical value. Both cultures demanded as fundamental the right to see themselves as they liked, as different, separate, inherently equal or even superior to the quotidian mechanistic one they oppose. Neither one could succeed against that empiricism that judges them and finds them wanting against standards they don't understand, don't like, and can't defeat. Carrier doesn’t care about “small town” narratives. The wind energy companies in Oklahoma and Texas don’t are about “way of life”. They’re making decisions based on now and tomorrow, not then and yesterday, not on narratives, not on nostalgia.
We're in the throes of change both like and vastly greater than the ones from the mid 19th century, and now as then, the culture of engineering, quantification, and science has all the advantages. Today's small town America is a cell on someone's Excel spreadsheet. It isn't "government" they're against. It's governance: rational decisions; measurement; tests; applied empiricism in the context of markets and global competition. They can't retreat from that, no matter how cruelly and cynically they're being stroked and indulged and lied to by their own leaders. They can’t “teach the controversy” about things that aren’t controversial. Coal isn’t coming back. Evolution in schools isn’t going away. Questions that are settled can’t be re-opened for long when the answers are proven and useful.
It’s 2018. That’s all. The crucial difference between today’s secessionism and that of the 19th century is that they have no geography in which to actually live their retreat from the present. They can hate it, but there isn't a square foot of America that uses a different kilowatt or a different hour or a different BTU or a different dollar. Contrary to all these absurd diagnoses that America is "coming apart" the country is knit tightly, instantly, and profitably by the bedrock benchmarks for how we make decisions and measure results, and none of them are belief-based. That’s why they're enraged. They're being held by reality to the quotidian standards of empirical governance. They want the freedom to pretend, and they can't have it anymore for the same reasons they can't buy groceries with Confederate money: it's not good anymore, anywhere, not even in their communities, households, churches and Trump rallies. Even their own kids won't take it.
Trump is a death-rattle, not a renewal. He can throw every Federal regulation away but until he repeals GAAP accounting, the Periodic Table and Newton's laws, he will lose as the era of self-regulation, shared best practices, cost internalization and empirical accountability gains strength. Initiatives like Project Gigaton are deploying weapons-grade empiricism the way Grant deployed the repeating rifle. Trump's election is Pickett's Charge revisited: loud and doomed.