Don’t expect White Rural Rage to win too many hearts or minds. Under the subtitle The Threat to American Democracy, it’s more likely the book will offend. Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman profess “not to denigrate or mock our fellow Americans who live in rural areas”, but at times appear to do so.
Their first chapter title is Essential Minority, Existential Threat. Chapter six, Conditional Patriots. Pro-tip: nobody likes being branded irredeemably deplorable.
Schaller is a political science professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Waldman a former op-ed writer at the Washington Post. They seek to cover a lot of ground but often come up short.
For starters, the authors refuse to grapple with the age-old concept of “blood and soil” as a driver of politics. Brexit in the UK, the rise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the persistence of the far-right Le Pens in France are labeled as mere byproducts of globalization and inequality. When it comes to the US, this means neglecting arguments posited more than two centuries ago by John Jay, the first supreme court chief justice, in Federalist No 2.
“I have as often taken notice,” Jay wrote, “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.”
Native Americans might have something to say about that but a lot of white Americans in rural areas do trace their roots back a long way and do not like being told what to do – or even the appearance of it – by urban elites. Fear of immigration, whatever the immigrant roots of such communities, is also a simple fact of politics.
Schaller and Waldman also ignore the role of resentments stoked by the Iraq war in cementing the bond between rural America and Donald Trump. The fact is, residents of Republican-run states are more than 20% more likely to join the military and after Iraq and the great recession, the disconnect between white rural America and coastal and cognitive elites swiftly became a chasm.
In 2016, parts of the US that felt the effects of the 9/11 wars more as reality than abstract moved to the Republican column. According to Douglas Kriner of Boston University and Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota, “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan could very well have been winners for [Hillary] Clinton if their war casualties were lower.”
Wisconsin is the 20th-most rural state. A quarter of Michigan is rural. Pennsylvania has been characterized as Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in the middle. As Trump prepares for his rematch with Joe Biden, all three states are toss-ups.
Schaller and Waldman also downplay the impact in rural areas of Democratic messaging on hot-button issues such as crime. It’s no longer just “the economy, stupid”. Culture wars pack an outsized punch. Outside New England, white rural Democrats are a relative rarity.
Inexplicably, Schaller and Waldman do not examine the case of Jon Tester, the three-term Democratic senator from deep-red, highly rural Montana who faces a stern fight to keep his seat this year. In 2020, in the aftermath of widespread protests for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis officer, but also rioting and looting, Tester criticized his party.
“I think the whole idea about defunding police is not just bad messaging but just insane,” Tester told the New York Times. “We didn’t come out with strong advertisements saying, ‘Rioting, burglary is not demonstration and it’s not acceptable.’”
Personalities matter too. “You cannot have Chuck Schumer talking rural issues to rural people,” Tester said, about the Brooklyn-born New Yorker who leads the Senate. “It ain’t gonna sell.”
A century and a half ago, northern rural Protestants formed the backbone of the union army that won the civil war and helped vanquish slavery. Things have very definitely changed.
“One can even argue that rural areas around the country have lost their distinctiveness,” Schaller and Waldman write. “One can find Confederate flags flying in rural areas in every corner of the country, all the way to the Canadian border.” In rural New York in 2018, for example, a sign beneath one such flag read: “Heritage not Hate.”
Apparently, “live free and die” really is an ethos. Schaller and Waldman catalogue white rural shortcomings such as high rates of gun deaths, lower life expectancies, high out-of-wedlock birth rates. In 2021, vaccine hesitancy put Oklahoma, Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi and Wyoming – heavily rural, reliably Republican – at the top of the Covid-fatality list. Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Washington – all Democratic – were at the other end.
Elsewhere, Schaller and Waldman criticize Chip Roy, a conservative firebrand congressman from Texas, for failing to push for rural-focused government programs. They acknowledge that Roy is principled in his stance against big government – but fail to mention that unlike 139 of his fellow House Republicans, and eight senators, he voted to certify Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.
White Rural Rage is strongest when it points to systemic features that enable rural US states to punch above their weight politically, most obviously the Senate, where each state gets two votes regardless of size.
“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators,” Schaller and Waldman write. “Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators – past, present, and forever.”
It’s a cold, hard fact. If white rural Americans are angry, they are also powerful. Democrats can either keep on cursing the darkness and losing elections – or deign to light a match.
White Rural Rage is published in the US by Penguin Random House
