Boo-hoo-hoo
There has been something of a brouhaha this past week over a new book by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage. Evidently some political science scholars in the field felt that it was unfair to the rural voters by characterizing them as feeling rage instead of righteous anger. We urban types are mean as always and need to be more understanding of some people’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny and fetishistic Trump worship because well … they’re unhappy.
Waldman and Schaller responded. Here are some extended excerpts. You can read the whole thing here and you should.
When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.
Pillorying Donald Trump is fine. Thundering against the MAGA movement is acceptable. Deep-dive analyses of the votes and voices of “downscale” whites? Sure. But if you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.
And so we have, in an article in Politico by Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist who co-authored his own book, The Rural Voter, that was released a few months before ours; and another in The Atlantic by Tyler Harper, an environmental studies professor who has made it a personal crusade to attack us and our book. These pieces illustrate some of the very pathologies so common in the way scholars and pundits alike treat rural whites.
In recent years, research from political scientists showing some disturbing patterns of opinion among rural voters, especially rural whites, has begun to accumulate. But there is a clear discomfort with the implications of that research, even among some of these researchers. For instance, consider this quote: “Clearly, though, even when we account for composition effects related to race [i.e., the fact that rural America is whiter than the rest of the country], we see that racial resentment is higher in rural than in urban America.” That appears not in our book. It’s found on page 296 of Jacobs’s The Rural Voter.
Soon after, Jacobs and his co-author write, “On a range of race-related questions, responses from rural residents veer from those of other Americans—and even from other Republicans—in significant ways.” As you might have guessed, “veer from” is the euphemism they deploy to say that rural whites express more racist attitudes. “And yet,” they go on, “for many rural residents, attitudes about races are intimately linked to perceptions of hard work, self-reliance, a disdain for government handouts, and the dangers of elites.” What they’re arguing, then, is that it’s not that many rural whites (to reiterate, not all, but many) are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
Right. They’re just a little bit resentful of all those lazy … ahem ... welfare queens who are living on the government teat. It has nothing to do with their color, nothing at all. If anything it’s racist to suggest it does.
Given the important place hard work holds in the rural ethos, we find that result to be troubling, and we believe it deserves further discussion. In fact, as Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, the most oft-cited book about rural politics of recent years, told us when we interviewed her, if she were to write her book over again, “I would have written more about how racism is present even when people aren’t talking about it.”
Here is another quote, from a journal article that appeared after our book was finished: “We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence [i.e., against fellow citizens] than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals—namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment—are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state.” The lead author of this piece is Kal Munis, another of our vocal critics. To our knowledge, nowhere outside this journal article has Munis mentioned this finding about rural support for violence against the state. With Donald Trump making clear once again that he will not accept an election he does not win, a position that led to a rather notable incident of violence against the state that took place on January 6, 2021, this seems highly relevant.
We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.
We wonder what would happen if rural politics scholars took to the online pages of places like Politico and The Atlantic to describe their more troubling findings. Actually, we don’t have to wonder: Their inboxes would be filled with the hateful and threatening emails we are receiving.
When it comes to rural resentments, again and again these scholars insist that if rural whites are mad, it’s only because they have good reason to be. We are hardly unaware of the sufferings of rural America, many of which are born from late-stage capitalism. In fact, we dedicate the second chapter of our book to the causes and consequences of declining economic opportunities, outmigration of ambitious young people, hospital and pharmacy closures, and other very serious problems that pervade rural American communities, white and nonwhite alike. In our reporting, we heard many moving stories about the challenges rural communities face.
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
And yet, the response to our book has been not just angry but personal at times. Harper delivered a torrent of abuse at us on social media, calling us “idiots” and “intellectual lightweights who wrote a dumb screed.” He also called us “soft-handed elites” and claimed that our book says that “white rural people are evil scum,” which of course it does not; that was one of many distortions of what we wrote that he sent out to his followers before penning his Atlantic article.
You are just not allowed, ever, to criticize Real Americans — and you know who I’m talking about. There will be hell to pay and not just from those people but from members of the left as well who immediately launch into paroxysms of self-righteous defensiveness on behalf of the poor downtrodden whiners.
The unwillingness to define and confront what’s going on in the nascent fascist movement in this country is downright shameful:
Most importantly, our critics refuse to seriously grapple with rural whites’ place in Trump’s movement as it grows increasingly authoritarian. In rising to the defense of their subjects, the scholars discount or ignore the disturbing beliefs many (though not all) rural whites hold and work hard to justify and validate their resentments. Not unlike how journalists trooped to “the heartland” after the 2016 election to give a respectful hearing to every Trump voter they could find, scholars of rural politics bend over backward to avoid saying anything that might reflect poorly on rural whites—even when it means downplaying their own research.
Rather than explore Trump’s rural white support, they offer facile explanations for it, preferring instead to blame liberals for rural resentments whose roots date back decades. They insist that Democrats must do more to cater to rural whites, while giving Republicans compliments for their political skill (“Republicans are the political party that has figured out how to speak to that rural identity effectively,” writes Jacobs). And they don’t acknowledge one of our core arguments: Republicans are winning rural votes but doing almost nothing to improve rural Americans’ lives.
[…]
What’s really going on here? Our critics claim they’re critiquing our methodology, but their real objection is to our message. We anticipated this defense of rural whites and their virtues, knowing that they are routinely described as more “real” than other citizens and therefore deserving of greater deference. In fact, Jacobs reports in The Rural Voter that 80 percent of rural citizens say they’re more likely to encounter the “real” America in rural spaces; so pervasive is this insult to other Americans that even 66 percent of suburban and urban dwellers say the same thing. To his credit, Jacobs agrees with us that no group of Americans is more “real” than any other. If only the conservative politicians and media figures who work so hard to stoke rural resentment concurred.
Our critics also say we “misrepresent” their work. We do not; we’re guilty only of assembling in one place a composite picture of rural white politics that shows worrying strains of opinion. Our critics want to believe—and worse, want others to believe—that sentiments in the places Trump enjoys his most overwhelming following have nothing to do with his racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and valorization of violence, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. The more charitable view is that our critics failed to pull back the lens to notice that larger picture; the less charitable view is that they’ve seen it but prefer to obscure it from public view.
And guess what? There are plenty of people of color who live in rural American and for some crazy reason that these critics are unable to explain, they don’t have the same attitudes. I wonder why?
Those nonwhite rural Americans are almost invisible in the national media, as well as in the work of many scholars. Because we thought their stories are important, we traveled to rural communities with large nonwhite populations, including in the Albemarle region of North Carolina and Arizona’s “Copper Corridor.” The experience of people in those places—who are mostly ignored and enjoy little of the deference and political power their white counterparts do—only highlights the privileging of the white rural experience.
We would ask rural scholars to confront this question: How is it that rural minorities, who by most measures face even greater challenges in health care access and economic opportunity than their white counterparts, do not express weakened commitments to our democracy, or the anti-urban, xenophobic, conspiracist, and violence-justifying attitudes so many rural whites do? The Rural Voter dedicates just five of the book’s 414 pages to examining rural minorities, and it spends most of that limited space comparing the attitudes of rural minorities with urban minorities, thereby avoiding any deep consideration of how rural whites and nonwhites differ in their views or their experiences.
Those who have risen to defend the honor of rural whites insist that they have good reason to feel resentful; Jacobs even elevates resentment to a kind of virtue (“Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience,” he writes). But if the rural experience justifies resentment, should not rural minorities be equally if not more resentful than rural whites? Why aren’t they threatening their local elected officials, or marinating in conspiracy theories, or supporting demagogues eager to tear down American democracy? Too few scholars of rural politics confront these questions.
They go on to recount some of the more hysterical claims in these critical articles. It might as well be the early 2000s without any reevaluation of that stale old trope, “economic anxiety.”
Since our book came out, we’ve had many conversations with rural Americans—journalists, activists, and ordinary people—who have told us that it accurately reflects what they see in their communities. Christopher Gibbs is a case in point. A Maplewood, Ohio, farmer who raises corn, soybeans, and alfalfa hay and supervises an 85-head cow/calf operation, Gibbs is the board president of Rural Voices USA. A former Shelby County Republican Party chair who, remarkably, is now the county’s Democratic Party chair, Gibbs interviewed us for his podcast. He doesn’t agree with everything we write, but he told us that he “lives this book every day” in his rural county. He concluded our interview by saying our book may not provide an easy foldout “road map” to revive rural America, but “it’s chock full of clues” for those interested in “helping rural folks get what they deserve in policy.”
As we confront a presidential election in which one of the candidates is counting on white rural support to return him to the Oval Office so he can begin dismantling our democratic system, we can’t turn away and say everything in rural politics is fine.
Personally, I think those who rush to the defense of these folks are the ones talking down to them. They’re all adults. They have agency and they know what they’re doing. Coddling those who are eagerly rushing headlong into fascism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
There are many rural whites who do not share these views but they are a minority. Donald Trump massively dominates among this cohort and they are his most ardent followers. We know what that means. I’ve ordered the book and will probably have more to say about it once I read it. This is an important subject and I trust these two people, whose work I’ve followed for years, more than any of those others to get it right. They understand the stakes.