Review: ‘White Rural Rage’ by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman – The Washington Post
Patient efforts to “understand” Donald Trump’s voters and their grievances have occupied frequent-flying journalists for almost a decade. The rules of those reporting trips, rarely violated, stipulate that the frayed vinyl booths in a thousand heartland diners in a thousand small towns are judgment-free zones.
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman are here with a corrective. These voters, Schaller and Waldman write in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” are complicit, and the authors are in no mood to condescend to them. Someone write a new elegy for the bilious hillbilly, because these authors went for his jugular.
It’s not that the authors discredit legitimate grievances. They dutifully document how the country — the modern world — has abandoned rural America. People who live there are demonstrably worse off than their urban and suburban cousins. Good health care, good jobs, good schools and even good WiFi are scarce; drug addiction, gun suicide and crime are plentiful (yes, Oklahoma does have a higher violent crime rate than New York or California). But what Schaller and Waldman also document, scrupulously, is how much outsize power rural White voters have but squander on “culture war trinkets.” Wyoming has two senators for not quite 600,000 people; California’s two serve around 39 million. The way our democracy is set up — not just its lopsided Senate but also its thumb-on-the-scale electoral college — rural Americans could be its biggest beneficiaries, if not its drivers. They are not. They are not even its biggest fans, in Schaller and Waldman’s telling.
Instead, by key measures, the authors write, rural White voters pose a quadruple threat to democracy: They are more likely than average Americans, or even average White Americans, to have racist and xenophobic tendencies; to accept violence in pursuit of their beliefs; to believe conspiracy theories; and to nurture antidemocratic ideas.
Not all rural White Americans hold these attitudes, Schaller and Waldman concede. But they “are overrepresented across all four of these threats,” and that’s what animates their status as what the authors call the “essential minority.”
Also, they vote Republican. This confounds the authors, because “there is no demographic group in America as loyal to one political party as rural Whites are to the GOP that gets less out of the deal.” By less, they mean policy prescriptions — stuff that might better their lives. What these voters do get from Republicans, the authors argue, is someone to stoke their rage — to fuel its flame from a bottomless stack of cultural kindling. Republicans long ago figured out that it is really the blue yonder that makes rural White voters see red. Exacerbate the villainy in that city-country divide and you have yourself some dependable voters.
Enter the Pied Piper of dark traits, “a walking repudiation of every value rural Americans claim to hold.” He’s a truth-challenged billionaire from Queens, true, but he’s got no truck with “shithole” countries, Mexican judges, traitorous generals, Soros-backed “animals” and radical left thugs that live like vermin. What’s not to like? Or better yet, this being a Christian nation, worship?
“Never before in American politics has a single syllable carried so much symbolic weight,” the authors write in a chapter they title “The Unlikely King of Rural America.” “‘TRUMP’ is thrust at liberals, chanted at high school games when the opposing team contains a lot of non-White kids, shouted in the air, and scrawled on the sidewalk, carrying boundless aggression in its percussive simplicity. It says I’m mad and We’re winning and Screw you all at the same time.”
How did it come to this?
Maybe it starts with the preferred status rural Americans have long enjoyed as the country’s “real” Americans. It’s not coastal elites who think they are better than everyone else, but heartlanders. And the funny thing is that coastal elites have always tended to agree with them. The authors quote Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”
There aren’t a lot of cultivators left in rural America, though. In Jefferson’s time, most Americans were farmers. By 2019, the authors write, only 7 percent of rural Americans were. Rural identity now is diffuse, and hard to pin down. The book has some weird digressions on this front. It devotes almost a whole chapter to the mythic qualities of the pickup truck in the rural imagination. You need an 8-foot bed to haul full sheets of plywood, but standard pickups now have 6.5-foot beds. You can project rural toughness even if you aren’t building a barn.
As for the “lasting bands” that tie these citizens to their country, Schaller and Waldman argue that rural Whites are “conditional patriots” and “their throaty, unmitigated defense of Donald Trump’s repeated assaults on American democracy” are the greatest proof of that.
The authors don’t ask skeptics to take their word for it; the book is “not intended to be mere polemic,” they say, so they stuff the chapters with empirical data, citing dozens of polls and studies.
But they don’t use a lot of lipstick, either. Next to their characterizations, “basket of deplorables” sounds almost quaint, and many readers may find guilty satisfaction in that.
The Threat to American Democracy
By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
Random House. 299 pp. $32
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