Colby College political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, who last year co-authored a book with Columbia University Press titled The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, has a feature in POLITICO Magazine titled “What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything.” It’s long but, essentially, it argues that a competing book that misrepresents the literature is getting a lot of play.
The setup is long:
If you’ve been watching television or tracking trending topics over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen or read something about “white rural rage.” This is owed to the publication of a new book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, whose thesis is that white rural Americans, despite representing just 16 percent of the American electorate, are a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”
In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Schaller gave this unvarnished assessment of the rage he sees overflowing in the heartland. Rural whites, he said, are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” He called them, “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists.” On top of that, rural whites are also “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”
This premise has triggered a backlash towards rural voters from some on the left. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, said she’s tired of handling rural voters “with kid gloves,” and time has come to pop the “racist, homophobic, sexist bubble” they all live in. Daily Beast columnist Michael Cohen agreed, writing that “these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.” David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief at Mother Jones, piled on, agreeing that “white rural voters [are] the slice of the public that endangers the constitutional future of the republic.”
This latest obsession with rural rage is nothing new. After 2016, when rural voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put former President Donald Trump over the top, Democrats tried to figure out why they had gone so sour on the Democratic Party. Some liberal thinkers called out the left’s reflexive condescension and dismissal of rural voters that escalated during the George W. Bush administration and peaked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Some said the party should increase attention to rural issues and nearby rural communities.
But don’t be misled. The publication and widespread celebration of White Rural Rage among progressive circles is doing something different than those post-2016 post-mortems. It is not an attempt to understand the needs and concerns of rural America. Instead, it’s an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.
The people doing the work of protecting democracy in rural America recognized this immediately. The morning of the MSNBC interview, I woke up to a mountain of messages and threads from rural organizers, community activists and local officials from across the country. Each one was distressed over what they considered the authors’ harsh and hurtful accusations about the communities they cherish and strive to uplift.
What seemingly set apart this book is that the authors claimed to have data backing up their assertions. “We provide the receipts,” Schaller said in the interview. What is their data, my friends and colleagues asked, and why do they get it so wrong?
Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.
Hmm.
I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party.
But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.
The problem with this “rage” thesis is much larger than the fact that my research, and that of others, is being misinterpreted and misunderstood. What the authors are getting wrong about rural America is exactly what many Democrats have been getting wrong for decades — and appear to be doing so again in this critical presidential election year.
While I’m also a political scientist, I’ve followed this debate mostly through the media over the last eight years or so and certainly see plenty of evidence for the rage thesis. But, it turns out, Jacobs is making what at first seems like a semantic argument but is really something different.
Academics can and do disagree on what is motivating non-college-educated whites to vote for Donald Trump. I don’t pretend that we have settled on a single answer. I do know that there is something particular about Trump’s appeal in rural America and that demographics alone do not explain it. In rural America, women are more likely to vote for Trump; so are young people; so are poor as well as rich. Place matters.
But ruralness is not reducible to rage. And to say so is to overlook the nuanced ways in which rural Americans engage in politics. They are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect. This, as I have recently argued in a new book, is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” that is expressed as a belief in self-reliance, rooted in local community and concerned that rural ways of living will soon be forced to disappear.
In recent years, that rural political identity has morphed into resentment — a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals and the political party that seeks to empower them, Democrats.
Yes, such resentment is a real phenomenon in rural areas. But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.
This comports very much with my own understanding of what’s happening—indeed, going well before the rise of Trump. There’s a longstanding view, that we saw at least as far back as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in 1992, that “real Americans” and their values are being increasingly marginalized.
This is, in one sense, a combination of sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. But those labels are too dismissive and, indeed, compound the problem. The society is changing at a rapid pace, highlighted and exacerbated by modern communications technology.
Research both by me and by others has illuminated how resentment is driven by the complex rural identity that, while occasionally intersecting with national political currents, is rooted in the unique context of rural life. Rage, both as a soundbite and as presented in the book, oversimplifies and misrepresents these debates. And so does the assumption that all the holders of these views are white, and that this rage is motivated by racism. Racism exists in all parts of the country and is embedded in American politics. But what the research shows is that while there are deep and persistent racial resentments in rural communities, despite a slight correlation between the two, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.
The link is to a September 2022 article in Political Research Quarterly Jacobs co-authored with B. Kal Munis titled “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide.” I don’t have time to dissect it but the Abstract says this:
Drawing on a unique battery of questions fielded on the 2018 CCES and in two separate surveys—one in 2019 and the other during the 2020 election—we study the extent to which Americans feel animus toward communities that are geographically distinct from their own and whether these feelings explain Americans’ attitudes toward the two major political parties and self-reported vote choice. We report results on how place-based resentment predicted vote choice in the 2018 midterm and 2020 general elections and how those feelings relate to other widely studied facets of political behavior such as partisanship and racial resentment. Rural resentment is a powerful predictor of vote choice in both election years examined.
A January 2023 review essay by NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall (“The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs“) cites that article and several others:
In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters, saying, “It had three elements: (1) a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, (2) a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources and (3) a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”
David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, described how the urban-rural partisan divide was driven by a conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s in his book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”
[…]
In retrospect it is clear, Hopkins goes on to say, that “the 1992 presidential election began to signal the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”
Hopkins compares voter trends in large metro areas, small metro areas and rural areas. Through the three elections from 1980 to 1988, the urban, suburban and rural regions differed in their vote by a relatively modest five points. That begins to change in 1992, when the urban-rural difference grows to roughly 8 percentage points and then keeps growing to reach nearly 24 points in 2016.
“For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party now draws most of its popular support from the suburbs,” Hopkins writes in a 2019 paper, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018.” Democratic suburban growth, he continues, “has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”
[…]
Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University whose research — presented in “The White Working Class” and “Majority Minority” — focuses on cultural and class tensions, has a different but complementary take, writing by email that the rising salience of cultural conflicts “was accelerated when the Clinton administration embraced corporate neoliberalism, free trade and moved Democrats toward the economic center. Many differences persisted, but the so-called third way made it harder to distinguish between the economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans.”
[…]
One of the dangers for Democrats, Gest continued, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”
Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists at Colby College and Utah Valley University, argue that mounting rural resentment over marginalization from the mainstream and urban disparagement are driving forces in the growing strength of the Republican Party in sparsely populated regions of America.
In their 2022 paper “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Jacobs and Munis contend that an analysis of voting in 2018 and 2020 shows that while “place-based resentment” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, it “was only consistently predictive of vote choice for rural voters.”
In this respect, conditions in rural areas have worsened, with an exodus of jobs and educated young people, which in turn increases the vulnerability of the communities to adverse, negative resentment.
[…]
In their 2022 paper “Symbolic Versus Material Concerns of Rural Consciousness in the United States,” Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Zack Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, sought to determine the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.
Trujillo and Crowley conclude that “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” Stands on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”
While rural America has moved to the right, Trujillo and Crowley point out that there is considerable variation: “poorer and/or farming-dependent communities voted more conservative, while amenity- or recreation-based rural economies voted more liberal in 2012 and 2016,” and the “local economies of Republican-leaning districts are declining in terms of income and gross domestic product, while Democratic-leaning districts are improving.”
The Trujillo-Crowley analysis suggests that Democratic efforts to regain support in rural communities face the task of somehow ameliorating conflicts over values, religion and family structure, which is far more difficult than lessening economic tensions that can be addressed through legislation.
[…]
A May 2018 Pew Research Center report, “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” found large differences in the views and partisanship in these three constituencies. Urban voters, according to Pew, were, for example, 62 percent Democratic and 31 percent Republican — the opposite of rural voters, 54 percent Republican and 38 percent Democratic. Fifty-three percent of those living in urban areas said rural residents have “different values,” and 58 percent of those living in rural communities said urban residents do not share their values. Sixty-one percent of those living in rural communities said they have “a neighbor they would trust with a set of keys to their home” compared with 48 percent in urban areas.
[…]
Those whom [Saint Joseph’s University sociologist Maria] Kefalas and [her late husband Patrick J.] Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa, etc. (states where the public university is just exporting its professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare. It’s more like apartheid.”
Urban-rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.
Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the calcification of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded in the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.
That’s a long way of saying that Jabobs makes a strong point here: the scholarly literature presents a picture of something that 1) long predates Trump, 2) is way more complicated than rage, racism, or the like, and 3) is rooted in real grievances.
Back to Jacobs’s POLITICO essay:
I sympathize with the idea that, as Schaller and Waldman and many other commentators have pointed out, in terms of policies, Democrats arguably do more for rural areas and rural residents than Republicans do. After Democrats passed Obamacare, rural residents stood to gain the most in states that expanded Medicaid, but two-thirds of uninsured rural residents missed out because they lived in states that refused to expand coverage — and those states were almost exclusively governed by Republicans. Paul Krugman is often quick to point out that “ because rural America is poorer than urban America, it pays much less per person in federal taxes, so in practice major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside.” And it is true that the Biden administration is currently overseeing billions in new federal spending that is disproportionately going to rural communities across America.
So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics. And Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.
That would be a massive mistake, one that does truly threaten democracy. Democrats have an opportunity to do better in rural America. We need them to do better, not because Democrats’ policy fixes are always the solution, but because our political system only works when competitive elections hold officials accountable. One-party dominance throws the system off-center, misrepresents interests, sows distrust.
So, this is frustrating, right? Democrats are objectively offering up and even passing programs that are trying to address the grievances rural Americans have and are being thwarted by Republican politicians whose interests are served by stoking the grievances. And it’s Democrats who need to change?!
Given that these folks may well hold the key to the swing states, probably so.
The first step for Democrats is to start thinking — and talking — about rural America right.
Reading White Rural Rage won’t help with that. The authors have no expertise in rural issues and conducted no original research for the book. They approached the topic as journalists and committed the same errors countless reporters have made when they share with the outside world what they saw from a few days traversing some small town in “ flyover country” — an occurrence all the more routine as local newspapers in rural America shutter.
So, we have some resentment of a different sort here. Which, like the other, is understandable: painstakingly-researched university press books by scholars presenting original data tend to get less public traction than those written by media hacks.* The Rural Voter, at 488 pages and doubtless replete with hundreds of footnotes and complicated data presentations, is likely a less scintillating read than a popular press (Random House) book written by professional storytellers weaving together a narrative from secondary sources. And, of course, being a columnist for the Washington Post is a hell of better platform for promoting a book than an assistant professorship at a liberal arts college. Especially when the book plays to the prejudices of other columnists and talk show hosts.
The authors of White Rural Rage make two persistent types of error in analyzing the data on rural Americans.
First, they routinely fall victim to the logical fallacy of composition when they attribute group characteristics to individuals. For example, they suggest that since authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, and rural residents support Trump, rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian. (That’s like concluding that because Massachusetts tends to vote Democratic, and Massachusetts is a wealthy state, wealthy people must vote Democratic … but the opposite is true.)
As it happens, the opposite seems to be true in this case as well; leading authoritarian experts find no geographic dimension to growing authoritarianism in the U.S., and the study the authors cite early in the book to “prove” that rural residents are “more likely to favor violence over democratic deliberation” says nothing about violence, or deliberation or authoritarianism. Work by scholars they cite actually shows the opposite, too: Rural residents are less, not more, likely to support political violence.
I must admit, that’s a result I find highly counterintuitive. Rural areas, certainly in the Deep South, have long been associated with “honor cultures,” which tend toward violence to defend against perceived disrespect.
This same logical fallacy comes into play when they weave together a string of facts about Christian nationalists: Because white evangelicals are most likely to support Christian nationalist beliefs, and because 43 percent of rural residents identify as evangelical, they assert that the hotbed of Christian nationalism is in rural communities. The same goes for their assertions about QAnon. Perhaps the worst guilt-by-association error is found right in the title; even in the reddest of rural counties, 20 to 30 percent of voters — still largely white — routinely support Democrats. One might ask why, given all the supposed rage, are some rural Americans still voting for Democrats, election after election? You wouldn’t know it from the title or press tour, but Schaller and Waldman must frequently hedge their bets in the text, acknowledging that just a minority of rural residents often believe the most headline-grabbing factoid.
I’m not sure I understand this objection. Is anyone arguing that all rural Whites are enraged and voting Republican?
The second persistent error is that they cite polling data with little attention to issues of quality, which less sloppy scholars would question to make sure their conclusions were valid. For instance, some of the most salacious data points on race and immigration are taken from polls with just a few dozen rural residents; anyone trained in statistics would recognize that is too small a sample size to consider the result representative or reliable. The “birther” claim they like to throw about — that rural residents are more likely to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States — comes from a “study” by a polling firm called Public Policy Polling, a firm with dubious credentials that not only seems to exist primarily to lampoon conservative voters, but that also, in this case, drew results about “rural America” from just two states.
And I’m not cherry-picking examples. I’ve reviewed every publicly available survey and poll the authors use, have published my concerns on each one here, and have concluded that only two surveys in the entire book conform to basic standards of survey research and even attempt to try and present an accurate picture of rural America.
So, this is damning. One presumes this is a function of 1) the authors having a preconceived thesis and 2) the dearth of high-quality polling on the matter. Since the available low-quality polls mostly supported their thesis, they were obviously right.
What’s more, the rage thesis conflicts with findings from more rigorous research. As recently as January of this year, my colleague Dan Shea and I searched for exactly these types of attitudes. Interested in whether President Joe Biden’s campaign message about democracy being on the line would resonate with rural voters, we tested the hypothesis, drawing on a representative sample of rural voters.
Bottom line: The “threats” to democracy just aren’t there. Our research found that just 27 percent of rural voters — including 23 percent of rural Trump voters — think that if the opposing candidate wins in November, “people will need to take drastic action in order to stop [Biden or Trump] from taking office.” That’s the exact same proportion — 27 percent — as voters in urban and suburban areas who hold the same view. Nor are rural voters more likely than urban voters to say that the opposing party is a “threat to the future of America;” while 38 percent of rural Trump voters strongly believe that about Democrats, 36 percent of nonrural Biden voters think that same thing about Republicans.
To be sure, 27 percent isn’t a negligible number of people in a country of 330 million. But the threats to democracy that lurk in America are not specific to rural areas. Importantly, and often overlooked by the rage peddlers, is the flip side of those numbers — that more than 60 percent of both sets of voters, a strong majority of Americans, both rural and urban, do not hold those attitudes.
This shoddy analysis and faux expertise does real damage. It is clear that the overwhelming portrayal of rural America as angry and irrational feeds into and amplifies the divisions between rural and urban Americans, overshadowing the shared challenges and aspirations that cut across these geographic lines.
So, on the one hand, this is a fair criticism. In a vacuum, it makes no sense to say rural American rage is a danger to democracy when we find exactly the same proportion of folks living in urban and suburban areas saying the same thing. On the other hand, we have rather considerable evidence, with the Capitol Riots as the most obvious example, of MAGA types engaging in actual politically-motivated violence.
Here’s some of what the research, properly understood, does tell us about rural America.
Rural communities, much like disadvantaged neighborhoods in urban areas, are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions, a challenge compounded by the closure of local hospitals and a shortage of health care providers. Rural economies often struggle with limited employment opportunities and infrastructure deficits, issues that should resonate with many post-industrial urban areas facing similar challenges. Additionally, educational disparities persist across the U.S., with rural schools facing funding shortfalls and teacher shortages that parallel urban struggles to provide equitable educational opportunities.
And it is this divide I find particularly troubling — that so many rural and urban areas suffer from similar ailments but remain politically divided. It is not one solved by the new rage peddlers.
I don’t think Waldman and Schaller claim they’re solving a problem, merely pointing one out. Still, to the extent they’re misrepresenting the problem, they’re pointing us in the wrong direction for solutions.
I can anticipate the frustrated Democratic response: “We tried to give them what they want, and they continue to vote against their interests.” Waldman said as much in 2022: “One thing you absolutely cannot say is that Democrats don’t try to help rural America. In fact, they probably work harder at it than Republicans do.”
I agree, to a point. Rural voters do not give Democrats credit for much good. And rural voters may indeed support policies and politicians that seem, from an outside perspective, to undermine their own economic interests.
However, that is exactly what a focus on resentment helps us to understand. This is not rage against the people trying to help. Nor is it an excuse. Resentment, instead, asks us to consider how rural voters’ choices are frequently rooted in values and place-based identities that place a strong emphasis on self-reliance, local control and a profound sense of injustice regarding the lack of recognition for rural contributions to society.
There is no “mystery” to it. Rural Americans often prioritize their way of life over immediate economic gains that are often promised (and not always delivered) by policy solutions. My research suggests that their perceived resistance to certain policies, and especially a political party that advocates for a multitude of governmental correctives, is a complex reaction stemming from years of economic transition, dislocation and yes, harm from policies they were told would help.
Again, my amateur understanding of the problem is roughly the same as Jacobs’ expert analysis. While I’m decidedly not like these people in so many ways—as evidenced by having moved far away to find better professional opportunities—I’ve been around enough of them to understand their deep sense of place, interspersed with family ties, cultural values, and the like.
Those values are absolutely under assault and have been for a very long time. But I don’t see how Democrats—who hold different values—can fix that problem. Sure, avoiding blunt talk about “deplorables” and “clinging to God and guns” would be helpful at the margins. But, if the core values of the party are about diversity, equity, and inclusion then they are diametrically opposed to rural values, which are inherently about, well, clinging to a vision of America rooted in an increasingly distant past.
Pushing for full equality for LGBTQ folks can certainly be done in a way that doesn’t insult traditionally-minded folks. Calling them bigots and homophobes is simply going to make them defensive. But, at the end of the day, pushing for full equality for LGBTQ folks inherently clashes with the deeply-held values of rural America. There’s just no way around that.
Sure, “Hollywood didn’t kill the family farm and send jobs overseas. … College professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids in rural communities,” as Schaller and Waldman write. But rural people do know that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by Democrats and Republicans did destroy many rural economies. Rural people do know that liberal elites stood by as rural students became one of the least likely groups to attend college, and one of the most likely to drop out. So they benefit from Obamacare and vote against it; can rural people contain multitudes, too?
But liberal elites have been the ones pushing the “everybody needs to go to college” mantra since, what, 1945? The problem, aside from going to college generally requiring leaving the rural areas and being increasingly expensive, is that higher education is increasingly at odds with rural values. It’s always been the case that education pushes toward modernization and away from traditional thinking. But, as rural and urban/suburban values diverge, that pressure is exacerbated.
Taken as a whole, rural voters are not merely reacting against change — be it demographic or economic. They are actively seeking to preserve a sense of agency over their future and a continuity of their community’s values and social structures. Some might call this conservatism, but I think it is the same thing motivating fears of gentrification in urban areas, or the desire to “keep Portland weird.” Place matters for a whole bunch of people — but especially for rural folks.
Sure. But all of these efforts tend to fail. People with money will be able to buy up older downtown buildings and renovate them, pushing up property values and pushing out those who can’t afford the taxes. As places like Portland and Austin become more desirable, folks with money will move there from around the country and they will homogenize. Rural areas are likely more resistant to change but, as noted earlier, that tends to result in a brain drain wherein those with the most talent move to where they can actually get ahead.
There’s a great lyric in Blackberry Smoke’s “One Horse Town”
In the tiny town where I come from
You grew up doing what your daddy does
And you don’t ask questions you do it just because
You don’t climb too high or dream too much
With a whole lot of work and a little bit of luck
You can wind up right back where your daddy was
Those who want more have to saddle up their pony and leave.
Consider the fact, as I discuss in my book, that rural Americans are the most likely to say that if given the chance, they would never want to leave their community, while at the same time they are the most likely to say that children growing up in their specific community will have to leave in order to live productive lives. Could any single policy solve that dilemma?
Nope.
Instead of a politics that seeks to understand and represent these contradictions, the left wants to simplify ruralness into something it’s not. In the immediate aftermath of 2016, blaming rural people was a way to make sense of the surprise of Trump’s election.
But this, of course, goes both ways. When Republicans lose, they blame California. Indeed, they do it even when they win. In 2016, they responded to people pointing out that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by some 3 million votes by saying, “Yeah, but that’s just because of California,” as if residents of our most populous state don’t count.
There is a general tendency among the readers of the New York Times and viewers of MSNBC to think about politics in purely transactional terms: We give you these benefits, you give us your votes. And rural voters, as Waldman is right to note, aren’t living up to that supposed bargain.
But this flies in the face of what research on resentment actually tells us. For many rural residents, the solutions they seek may not always come neatly packaged as government policies, white papers or policy briefs pumped out of a campaign war room. I’ve found that resentments exist because self-reliance and local problem-solving is intrinsic to rural identity, and self-reliance is something by nature resistant to government policies emanating from Washington, D.C.
While I, again, sympathize with this assessment of the situation the fact of the matter is that these people actually aren’t self-reliant. By definition, being self-reliant means not needing to be propped up by support from the taxpayer.
What rural communities may desire are empowering strategies that allow them to shape their own future — support that bolsters local leadership, encourages community-driven initiatives and provides the tools and resources necessary for them to address their specific challenges in a manner consistent with their values. That isn’t rage, nor is it a threat to democracy.
Sure. But nobody is claiming that these desires (however they might be met) are a threat to democracy. They’re worried that the attitude that those who don’t share their values aren’t real Americans and that their votes therefore shouldn’t count is a threat to democracy. And, again, there’s a hell of a lot of evidence for that position.
Shockingly, there’s still a whooooole lot more to the feature. But I think you get the idea.
While Jacobs is persuasive that “White Rural Rage” is a misdiagnosis of the problem, I’m more than a wee bit skeptical that the Democratic Party can somehow effectively respond to the grievances of rural America without abandoning the core values of their own base. The gap between the two is a canyon, not a fissure.
UPDATE: Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper has a related piece in The Atlantic titled “An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America.”
White Rural Rage is a screed lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on Morning Joe, the book inspired an approving column from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The book has become a New York Times best seller.
It has also kindled an academic controversy. In the weeks since its publication, a trio of reviews by political scientists have accused Schaller and Waldman of committing what amounts to academic malpractice, alleging that the authors used shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations about white rural Americans. I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.
White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans.
Ouch.
UPDATE II: See also my December 2009 post “Ressentiment Creep,” a reaction to a coinage by Julian Sanchez. The phenomenon in question is decidedly not new.
*Which, incidentally, is grossly unfair to Schaller. While he’s probably best known for his time as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun (2007-2016), he earned his PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina in 1997 and has been a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1998. His major scholarship is on partisanship and is certainly pro-Democrat.
