The effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on the American economy are widely debated, but there’s at least one field of production whose boom is indisputably a result of his election: the conservative voter ethnography industry. Since Trump’s rise, article after article has tracked down Trump voters in some small town in a formerly Democratic state. The pieces vary in tone — some are journalistically objective, others are more personal — but they all seem to end with the author silently shaking their head, confounded by the unbreachable irrationality of these voters.

Monica Potts’s recent opinion piece in the New York Times is the latest in this genre. Her article focuses on the fight over a new position at a public library in rural Arkansas, which sparked opposition over the county’s ability to pay for the new salary. Potts uses this dispute as a window into the values of rural Trump supporters, and what she finds isn’t pretty. These voters have an ideological opposition to public services, she argues, opposing their extension even when they themselves would benefit. She’s remarkably blunt about the political upshot, making explicit what most of the genre leaves subtextual: “Economic appeals are not going to sway any Trump voters, who view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain.”

This line of argument is widely embraced across the liberal commentariat: Trump voters are an impenetrable bloc, an irredeemable monolith motivated by racism and resentment. Yet what’s remarkable about this image is how thoroughly it’s contradicted by the empirical evidence on rural Republican voters. Far from a homogeneous group, the Republican Party is actually shot through with contradictions that center on what liberal journalists insist can’t possibly explain anything: class.