White rural rage The threat to American democracy

Thomas F. Schaller

Book - 2024

"It's an open secret that voters in smaller, less populous states have more electoral power than their urban counterparts, so why are these same voters the most eager to leave behind democratic principles? In this book, political scientists Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why, with all of this extra influence, these same voters fail to see real benefits, for instance suffering worse health and education outcomes than larger states, and why they are the most likely to rage against the democratic project the moment elections stop going their way. This is the patriotic paradox of rural America: The rural citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are least likely to defend core American principles, even when the system... itself is set up in their favor. If the commitment to American democracy of this exalted minority crumbles, can the US itself survive? Thanks to the extra weight smaller states enjoy, the past two Republican presidents entered the White House despite losing the popular vote. Senate malapportionment is even worse. By 2040, just 30 percent of the population, concentrated in smaller and more rural states, will elect 70 senators. This skewed dynamic is already changing policy outcomes--scuttling nationally popular bills in the Senate and distorting the balance of the courts--but there's a puzzling contradiction inherent in this rural privilege. Voters there believe the nation has failed them, and to some degree, they're right. With on-the-ground reporting from five very different rural counties spread across the country, this book offers unique insights into how the struggles and resentments of rural people ripple out to determine the kind of country we all live in. Schaller and Waldman critique the structures in place that have led to this imbalance, but they also provocatively criticize rural voters and states themselves for the choices they've made on behalf of themselves and the country. And, they point the way toward a political reimagining that would not only offer a better future for rural people, but make it possible for rural America to stop dragging the rest of the country down"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2024]
Language
English
Main Author
Thomas F. Schaller (author)
Other Authors
Paul Waldman (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
299 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-285) and index.
ISBN
9780593729144
  • Prologue: Small Towns, Big Trouble
  • 1. Essential Minority, Existential Threat
  • 2. Rural Ruin
  • 3. The Greatest Political Hand Ever Dealt
  • 4. Cultures at War
  • 5. The Unlikely King of Rural America
  • 6. Conditional Patriots
  • 7. Race and Rurality
  • 8. Despair, Distraction, Disillusionment, and Democratic Decline
  • Authors' Note
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Acknowledging the real and worrisome state of political disaffection in America, Schaller and Waldman outline why and how rural voter disaffection is especially problematic. Four factors have led to what the authors call white rural rage: despair over a lost past and little hope for a better future, outsized representation that skews self sense of power, xenophobia, and media triggering. These factors transmogrify into the threats of racism, xenophobia, anti-urban disdain, and anti-immigrant sentiment, all of which create a stew of anti-democratic discontent that often manifests in violence. So, while white rural voters often fly American flags, as a demographic they are also prone to taking matters into their own hands rather than adhere to the constitution. The authors are especially deft at pointing out the important differences between rural whites and rural people of color. The only way out of the morass, they write, is to bring all rural folks together, leaven the discontent, disconnect from media that feed conspiracy theories, and form a political movement. The only hope is to replace rage with action.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A view of rural America as a font of white privilege--and of resentment that the privileges aren't greater. Political scientist Schaller and journalist Waldman open with an example taken straight from the headlines: the uproar over Jason Aldean's song "Try That in a Small Town," with its implied promises of retribution in a "fantasy of vigilante violence meted out against urbanites supposedly ready to bring their criminal mayhem to the idyll of rural America." While it's true that rural America has been suffering, rural Americans haven't exactly helped themselves. "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," write the authors, showing how this situation arose because no rural political organization exists to make the vast region an object of true interest for either Republicans or Democrats. Schaller and Waldman come close to blaming the victim in that analysis, but, as they painstakingly document, rural white Americans actually enjoy outsize influence in such things as electoral votes, to say nothing of the increasing rightward radicalization of the GOP. It's no coincidence, they note, that nearly 75% of the votes opposing the certification of Joe Biden for president came from rural congressional districts. There's a certain vicious circularity at work: With few news sources reaching out to rural audiences, radio is king, and radio is almost invariably hard right in orientation, eager to fuel the resentment that comes from the sense that the "real America" is disappearing in the face of demographic change. So it is that while white rural America is getting poorer, sicker, and more isolated, it's also getting angrier--and that anger is poisoning the rest of the nation. A book of broad explanatory power that's not likely to help mend any fences. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Small Towns, Big Trouble "Friend, Jason Aldean recorded a song praising small-town values, and the Radical Left has canceled him for it. Why? Because they want every small town in America to look like the socialist disasters in California and New York." This was the beginning of a fundraising email from the National Republican Congressional Committee in July 2023, responding to the controversy over "Try That in a Small Town," the single that country star Aldean had recently released. The song's lyrics present a list of alleged liberal urban horrors--people spitting in cops' faces, robbing liquor stores, burning American flags--as well as the specter of gun confiscation, and they issue a challenge: "Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road." Aldean, whose oeuvre is heavy with well-worn tributes to rural life, was not "canceled." In fact, his fantasy of vigilante violence meted out against urbanites supposedly ready to bring their criminal mayhem to the idyll of rural America became his greatest success. Conservative media defended him, Republican politicians praised him, and "Try That in a Small Town" became Aldean's biggest crossover hit, shooting to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Had Aldean released his ode to resentment and vigilantism a decade earlier, it might not have made the news, let alone become the controversy it did. But coming out when it did, with hostility between rural and urban America intensifying as the country headed into a presidential election that promised an even more profound division between the two, the song was bound to produce a fiery reaction. For Republicans, it was a gift, yet another implement they could use to convince their rural supporters that blue America was a "socialist disaster" to be feared and hated. The criticism the song received from liberals only reinforced this point. The undercurrents that produced this controversy are the reason we wrote this book. We stand at what may be the most dangerous moment for American democracy since the Civil War. A great deal of attention has been bestowed upon rural Whites since Donald Trump's ascension in 2016, yet that discussion has overlooked a vital political truth this book hopes to illuminate: The democratic attachments of rural White Americans are faltering. Rural America has suffered greatly in recent decades. Layered atop cultural resentments that are nearly as old as our country, this suffering has produced powerful antipathies that are aimed not just at certain groups of Americans, but often at the American democratic system itself. Were rural White Americans as disempowered as they believe themselves to be, their anger would be impotent. They would mutter "Try that in a small town" to themselves, indulging in meaningless fantasies of revenge against the liberals and urbanites they despise. But they are not disempowered. In fact, in critical ways, they have more power than any other large demographic group in America. This power has already distorted the outcomes our system produces, leaving us in an age of minority rule in which--to take just one example-- the party that won fewer votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections managed to assemble an activist 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, one that is now busy remaking the laws all of us live under to conform to a right-wing policy vision that overwhelming majorities of the public do not share. This minority rule is a consequence of the disproportionate power wielded by rural Whites, power that is often justified on the right by the insistence that these are the worthiest Americans, the ones most possessed of virtue and "values," and that, therefore, it is only proper that their votes count for more. The fact that their votes do count for more is why Donald Trump became president in the first place, and if he should regain the White House, it will be rural Whites who return him there. Yet even as the threat to American democracy Trump represents has become the subject of enormous concern and debate, few have connected that threat to its essential source: rural White America. Name a force or impulse that threatens the stability of the American political system--distrust in the fairness of elections, conspiracy theorizing, the embrace of authoritarianism--and it is almost always more prevalent among rural Whites than among those living elsewhere. Even as they are in some ways the greatest beneficiaries of democracy's distribution of influence, rural Whites are the least committed to our system. While at various times in American history some extraordinarily creative and progressive movements began in rural areas, today most of rural America is gripped by a right-wing politics that is angry when it should be constructive and passive when it should be engaged. To many of the most cynical and malevolent characters in the political world, this is all part of the plan: Keep rural Americans bitter, and they'll be an easily manipulated force of destruction when democracy doesn't produce the proper results. The worse rural Americans feel, the better this plan works. The devastating force of late-stage capitalism has inflicted enormous damage on rural Americans. But we are more concerned with how the political system responded and, specifically, why so few rural Americans have noticed that they've been exploited and lied to by the conservative politicians they elect. Their own leaders deploy a sophisticated propaganda system meant to ensure that every problem rural America faces will be blamed on faraway forces and people who have little if any actual influence on rural Americans' lives. It's the best way to stoke the voters' seething--that and telling them the solution to their problems will always be to elect more conservative Republicans, who will continue to spend more effort in ratcheting up rural anger than in addressing the problems confronting rural communities. So, when urban America suffers from a spike in unemployment or violent crime, the right-wing noise machine quickly points its collective finger at liberals, minorities, and Democrats who dominate cities. Cities, they are told, are both nightmares of depravity and a threat to rural Americans. But when rural America suffers from precisely these same problems, who gets blamed? Those same liberals, minorities, and Democrats from faraway, scary cities. Almost daily--hourly on talk radio stations from Maine to Maui--those constituents hear Republican politicians and their conservative allies in the media redirect rural fury toward the boogeyman of the moment: immigrant caravans this month, critical race theorists next month, woke professors the month after that. Though most rural citizens are represented at all levels of government by conservative Republicans, those officials somehow bear no responsibility for their constituents' problems. But Hollywood didn't kill the family farm and send manufacturing jobs overseas. College professors didn't pour mountains of opioids into rural communities. Immigrants didn't shutter rural hospitals and let rural infrastructure decay. The outsiders and liberals at whom so many rural Whites point their anger are not the ones who have held them back--and as long as they keep believing that they are, rural people won't be able to find their way to an effective form of politics. This book is not intended to be mere polemic or a broadside critique of rural Americans or White rural citizens specifically. Rather, it is a warning about a growing problem that politicians and the media are reluctant to discuss. Rural voters--especially the White rural voters on whom Donald Trump heaps praise and upon whom he built his Make America Great Again movement--pose a growing threat to the world's oldest constitutional democracy. Rural discontent and grievances are hardly new. But more than at any point in modern history, the survival of the United States as a modern, stable, multi-ethnic democracy is threatened by a White rural minority that wields outsize electoral power. In order to be complete, this story must be told from multiple vantage points, some high enough to view the entire country and decades of history and some directly on the ground. So, we have woven together data on economic and physical well-being and voting trends, and from public opinion surveys, with our own on-the-ground reporting from rural counties spread across the country, to describe the political reality of rural America today and what it portends for the rest of us. We examine not only what happens at the ballot box but also the underpinnings of rural culture and rural ideology. We journey from the Electoral College to West Virginia coal country, from the Affordable Care Act to the Arizona desert, and many places in between. The story that results is often a disheartening one. Though the various parts of rural America differ in important ways, as a whole, they are weighed down by their struggles: resource economies where powerful interests extracted wealth and left the people who toiled to remove it with little or nothing to show for their decades of labor; manufacturing jobs that fled overseas; inadequate healthcare and physical infrastructure; limited opportunities that push talented young people to leave; and much more. Excerpted from White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller, Paul Waldman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.