“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 always more prevalent among rural Whites than among those living elsewhere."
~ Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (New York: Random House, 2024), p. 5
"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."
“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."
“If you look at where Trump got his most overwhelming support, the places are invariably rural and White."
“So, what do rural Whites get in return for all they bestow on the GOP? Almost nothing. The benefits they receive are nearly all emotional, not material."
“Since the rise of Donald Trump, few groups of citizens have received more fawning attention from hand-wringing journalists and pundits than rural Americans, especially disgruntled rural White voters."
"Over the same period, political observers began openly fretting over the fate and even the survival of American democracy. Somehow, almost nobody has noticed that these two phenomena are connected."
"And they are connected. As we argue, the serious problems now plaguing rural White Americans are causing too many of them to lose faith in the American project, to the point where some are abandoning or even threatening the vital norms, traditions, and institutions that undergird the world's oldest constitutional democracy."
Schaller and Waldman identify a fourfold threat white rural America poses to US democracy at present:
“First, rural Whites are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion in a United States currently experiencing rapid demographic change. Rural whites are uniquely hostile toward racial and religious minorities, recent immigrants, and urban residents generally."
“Second, rural Whites are the most conspiratorial cohort in the nation, and their refusal to accept basic facts or scientific knowledge prevents the nation from having rational, informed discourse on a variety of issues. Rural whites exhibit the highest support for election denialism, anti-science COVID-19 and vaccine resistance, Obama birtherism conspiracies, and unhinged QAnon claims.”
“Third, polls and studies confirm that rural Whites express the lowest levels of support for long-standing and essential democratic principles. They are least likely to endorse the twin constitutional principles of separated powers and checks and balances between the branches of government; are least supportive of basic voting rights and ballot access; and routinely reject established governing principles like state-level authority and national supremacy help.”
“Finally, no group of Americans boasts a higher degree of support for, or justification of, violence as an appropriate means of public expression and decision making. From their defense of the domestic terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to their calls for Trump to be restored to the White House by undemocratic means, rural Whites are more likely to excuse and even applaud the use of political violence.”
“Thanks to their twinned powers — their mathematically inflated electoral power and the mythology-based political deference they enjoy — rural White citizens are equipped to undermine our constitutional democracy, or at least wreak serious havoc on long-standing and widely accepted democratic norms and traditions.”
“Rarely mentioned after the 2020 presidential election is that, in defeat, Donald Trump lost ground with almost every demographic subgroup since his 2016 election victory except rural Whites, among whom his support grew during the intervening four years. Trump's rural-based, authoritarian challenge to the constitutional order is nothing less than an existential threat to the state and fate of American democracy.”
“In the years following the Obamacare debate, multiple studies showed that racial resentments drove opposition to the ACA even when factors like party identification and political ideology are held constant. White voters’ knee-jerk opposition to Obamacare was always more about the ‘Obama’ part than the ‘care’ part.”
“Rejecting the ACA's Medicaid provision offers yet another example of rural White conservatives voting against their own material interests. Rural Whites, after all, are uninsured at higher rates than their urban White counterparts. ...
Rural opposition to Obamacare and Medicaid expansion was the third and final act of a self-destructive political-electoral drama."
"First, rural Whites voted for national and state politicians who sided with the corporate interests that decimated their industries and healthcare infrastructure. Next, they rewarded those same politicians for opposing life-saving and life-changing healthcare reforms. In the final and fatal act, many got sick, and some even died from lack of care or coverage.”
“In 2020, the age-adjusted gun death rate in rural communities was 40 percent higher than that for large metropolitan areas. The same year, the murder rate in rural America surged 25 percent. Donald Trump was still president in 2020, yet somehow the same media that blamed liberals and Joe Biden for urban crime never held Trump to account for the rural crime surge during his presidency.”
“The excess coronavirus deaths in rural counties should be classified as suicides by scientific skepticism. By rejecting proven vaccines, conspiracy-addled rural Americans, though living in communities where social distancing was easier than in densely populated cities, squandered their geographic advantage."
"All told, premature deaths from reduced healthcare access and facility closures, healthcare ignorance and scientific skepticism, and a fatal devotion to guns and drugs are killing rural white Americans—especially downscale rural whites.”
“Because it violates the ‘one person, one vote’ standard, malapportionment in the Electoral College and especially the U.S. Senate is the primary means by which White voters—and rural Whites most of all—retain electoral advantages at the national level. ...
No group was ever dealt a better electoral hand than rural White Americans."
"The inflated power of rural White voters confers upon them an unusual ability to force state and national governments to cater to their preferences and grievances. Herein lies the danger: precisely because they wield inflated power, rural Whites’ increasingly tenuous commitments to democratic norms and traditions are magnified across the U.S. political system in many of the same ways their preferences have been for two centuries.”
“The malapportioned Senate assigns more power to smaller, more rural states, and this small-state tilt of malapportionment is greater now than when the U.S. constitution was ratified. ...
Los Angeles County has more people than any of the forty smallest states, but its 10 million residents must share two senators with nearly 30 million other Californians."
"There are a remarkable 120 U.S. counties that have more people than the entire state of Wyoming. Yet the Cowboy State’s 581,000 citizens enjoy the same two votes in the Senate as the other forty-states do. ...
These perversions of power will worsen in the decades ahead. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will reside in the fifteen most-populous states and choose thirty of the one hundred U.S. senators. "
"Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 per cent of senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators – past, present, and forever.”
“The Republican Party and its rural White voter base also enjoy a pivotal advantage in presidential elections, which are decided by the Electoral College rather than by a national popular vote as is used in every other democracy in the world. Thanks to the inflated power that smaller states enjoy in the Electoral College, the past two Republican presidents entered the White House despite having lost the popular vote."
It's not just possible but likely that yet another Republican in the near future will win the White House despite receiving fewer votes than their opponent. ...
Although Democrats support a national popular vote at higher rates than Republicans, the share of Republicans who prefer a national popular vote rule grew steadily from 40 percent in 2000 to a 54 percent majority by 2016."
"Then Donald Trump was elected. What happened next? On cue, Republican support for electing presidents based on the national popular vote dropped by half, from 54 percent to 27 percent.”
“Rural voters are overrepresented in the United States. They always have been and – barring the highly unlikely termination of the US Senate – always will be. For suburban and urban voters, the diluting of their votes is bad enough. Far worse are the apologists who try to gaslight the rest of the nation into believing that the inflated voting power of rural voters, especially rural Whites, is justified."
Schaller and Waldman point to a dialogue Elaine Godfrey had with Theda Skocpol in 2022 (“‘Stop the Steal’ Is a Metaphor,” The Atlantic [12 August 2022]).
Skocpol says,
"[T]he turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.”
Elaine Godfrey asks, "The turning point toward what?"
Theda Skocpol replies, “Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, Trumpist version of America.”
“If a small-town, blue-collar man is the most authentic American, then the fact that his vote counts for more than that of a Black urban lawyer or a Latino suburban government worker won't arouse the outrage and demand for change that it might were he not so valorized.”
"If you look around the world there are tensions between rural and urban people everywhere. You often find that right-wing populist movements find their greatest support in rural areas.The difference in the US is that rural people, especially rural White people, are given political leverage that they can then use to change the way the system works. But the truth is that they're not using it so much as they are being used."
“When people realize that they'll continue to get older, that America will continue to get more diverse, that ‘traditional’ values on sexuality will continue to evolve, and that the people they hate will not disappear, what will happen?" (see continuation in /31)
~ Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (New York: Random House, 2024), p. 117
"There is no easy way to predict, but authoritarian and radical right-wing movements have always found many of their adherents among those who felt they once had power and status and were losing it."
“‘Try to see America through their eyes,’ read a November 2022 Associated Press report about people in rural Wisconsin who are increasingly convinced that dark conspiracies are bent on destroying everything they believe in and are gathering weapons in case a civil war comes."
"This instruction – you, reader, must make an effort to understand the perspective not just of people in rural areas but of the most politically radical and the most disconnected from reality among them – is one that news consumers have been given for years. We're encouraged to sympathize with even extremely dangerous people who are literally stockpiling weapons, but only if they come from the places where the ‘essential minority’ resides."
"There are no articles about radical Black nationalists preparing for civil war that begin, ‘Try to see America through their eyes.’ But rural Whites are given greater moral latitude. Their excesses may not quite be excused, but were called upon to understand these people – the implication being that whatever dangers they may present, it's only because the rest of us haven't given them the consideration they deserve.”
“The increase in geographic polarization between the parties has become a regular topic for national news outlets, yet stories about Republicans’ inability to win in cities are far rarer than stories about Democratic struggles among rural voters."
"There is an implicit judgment at work, one that says that Democrats’ failure to win over rural voters is a kind of moral failing, one that can only be bred of insensitivity or contempt. Republicans’ struggles in cities, however, are seldom examined and less often judged; it's just how things are."
"This double standard is reinforced by the fact that journalists are always ready to amplify those few cases in which a Democrat says something dismissive about rural areas and the people who live there."
“Denigrating cities and the people who live in them doesn't come just from Trump. The supposed depravity and danger of American cities is hammered home again and again on conservative media, frequently with the implication that the more Black people a city contains, the more dangerous that city must be."
“Whether Trump succeeds in returning to the White House in 2024, his curious appeal to rural Americans is the most important rural political story in decades. Whatever the future holds for Trump, he has left an indelible mark on rural America and, in the process, revealed fundamental truths about the people who find him so compelling.”
“This is what rural people mean when they say that Trump ‘speaks our language,’ something we were told more than once during our travels. It's not that he understands their culture in any substantive way; instead, it's more visceral. Trump stroked people’s darkest impulses and said: 'You deserve to feel this way. You have been wronged and cheated and mocked.'"
'"Now I will be your wrath. Look at everyone you hate – those overeducated liberals and Hollywood elites and arrogant city people and social justice warriors trying to make you feel bad for being White and being a man and being American. They despise me just as much as they despise you. Let's show them who this country really belongs to.'”
“To understand Donald Trump, you have to start with Barack Obama. Trump’s successful candidacy would not have been possible in the wake of any other presidency; It was the backlash against America's first Black president that pushed Trump into the White House.”
“When one looks to the places where Trump’s support was most intense, again and again one arrives in majority-White rural areas.”
"For many years, it was assumed that successful racial appeals had to be offered subtly, to provide voters a kind of internal plausible deniability, so that they could tell themselves they weren't being racist when they responded to such appeals. By the time 2016 came around, this was no longer true. White identity had become important enough that Trump could succeed by wearing his bigotry on his sleeve.”
“Even the common, and perfectly accurate, criticism that Trump doesn't practice what he preaches likely resonates in rural areas, where you often find a strong moral code that is regularly violated by many of the people who live there."
"The fact that rural areas have plenty of infidelity and teen parenthood (which occurs at significantly higher rates among rural Americans than city dwellers) doesn't necessarily make people reject traditional family values; it can make them cling to those values all the more fervently, as they consider them under constant, visible threat.”
“Even if Trump fails in 2024 and becomes nothing more than the laughable two-bit grifter he always has been at heart, his effect on the politics of rural America will be felt for a generation, if not more. He showed every Republican what rural Whites, and the GOP base more broadly, really want and how to give it to them."
"The result is a politics saturated in bitterness and bile, and a party whose most loyal voters don't expect their leaders to offer them anything but the ugliest kind of emotional satisfaction. Even when Trump is gone, in rural America he will still be king. And the rest of the country will suffer for it.”
~ Ibid.
Trump's hook: He promises white rural voters "restored dignity through dominance” (p. 140).
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