Since the 2016 ascent of Donald Trump, politicos and the media have been warning that rural white America now poses an existential threat to democracy. So dangerous are what Joe Biden has called “semi-fascists” and “ultra-maga” reactionaries that they apparently must be stopped by extraordinary—and even extra-constitutional—means. As such, the Left’s implicit agenda is to destroy democracy as we knew it in order to save it. And one corollary is the easy projection of its own unprecedented attacks on constitutional norms—such as the seemingly endless attempts to keep Trump off the ballot or to convict him of various concocted offenses—onto the source of their paranoias.
In this larger context now appears White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, an often-incoherent polemic written by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.1 Be forewarned: the authors offer poorly written journalese, supported by selective and mostly suspect polls that are strained and stretched to yield convenient interpretations. They often misquote and misuse the rare research studies they cite. And their monotonous rant reads more like an extended op-ed than a serious book.
They make no attempt to hide their strong progressive biases. Nor does it worry them much that as urban, East Coast intellectuals they lack any sustained firsthand knowledge of “rural Whites” (strangely always to be capitalized)—the target of their sustained, book-length condemnation.
In a long praeteritio in their introduction, the two concede, as a way of discounting it, the reality that “Some will surely respond to this book by charging that as two coastal cosmopolitans, we have no right to offer this critique of White rural politics.” In truth, no one questions the authors’ “right,” but rather their competence to do so.
Lest anyone obviously connect the poverty of analysis in the book with the authors’ own parochialism and insularity, we are further assured at the outset that Schaller and Waldman are in fact longtime observers, albeit at a distance, of American rural life:
But we have set out on this project after years of thinking and talking with each other about how ordinary rural–urban tensions of the kind that have existed throughout the world for centuries have turned into something far more dangerous.
Had the authors seriously been “thinking and talking” about rural–urban tensions “throughout the world for centuries,” then they would have concluded from texts such as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Virgil’s Eclogues, Thomas Jefferson’s agricultural encomia, William Jennings Bryan’s populist writings, the Depression-era works of the Southern Agrarians, or Wendell Berry’s essays that rural distrust of city life often reflects legitimate grievances—and yet rarely manifests itself as a sustained, violent political agenda. Etymologically, to be “rustic” originally meant to live in the rus, or countryside, while “urbane” identified a resident of the urbs or city. Yet even in early Latin, the once-neutral words quickly became value-loaded, respectively pejorative and approbatory.
Schaller, a liberal political-science professor at the University of Maryland and the author of past books and articles offering advice to Democrats on how to win elections, and his coauthor, Paul Waldman—a former Washington Post columnist and the author of books about the purported lies of George W. Bush and the supposed soft treatment accorded John McCain by the media—seem rather sheltered. Their repetitive, 255-page indictment only confirms to the reader that the authors’ initial warnings about their own limitations were all too prescient.
The book itself is for the most part a rehash of Thomas Frank’s much better-researched and more closely argued, if equally unpersuasive, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004). The similar though more melodramatic thesis of Schaller and Waldman is simple enough. Frustrated by the growing inequalities that result from a globalized economy, left-behind rural white communities resent a transformed America that, we are told, is doing quite well as it separates itself from that reactionary and calcified rustic segment.
Moreover, immigration and urbanization have reduced the percentage of rural whites, and have thus—so the authors argue—led them to lash out at various bogeymen. White rustics became both baffled and “enraged” by the growing cultural and institutional power of bicoastal elites and the large, predominantly urban immigrant population—which is now, both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population, the largest in American history.
More specifically, the authors claim that various concerns of big-city progressives—such as radical approaches to climate change, an open border, identity politics, wokeness, dei, transgenderism, and various critical legal and racial theories—offend the static, 1950s sensibilities of chauvinistic provincials more than they actually threaten rural American lives and livelihoods. The authors refuse to acknowledge that these rapid and radical transformations in American life prompt legitimate worries, rather seeing them as harmless targets of rural whites’ irrational hysteria, fueled by ignorance, racism, and xenophobia.
In the background, there lurks throughout these pages the sinister presence of Donald Trump. As the book’s chief villain, he supposedly hyped and fused these once-disconnected fears, sloppy prejudices, and conspiracy theories into a cohesive but now dangerous maga political agenda that may lead again to the White House.
The authors seem to believe that black and Hispanic people in rural areas uniformly share urban liberals’ concerns. They assert that these more perceptive non-whites suffer even worse poverty and social pathologies and yet nobly refrain from supporting conservative policies. This speculation is vapid and fallacious. Rural California Latinos support building dams, for example, not the state’s efforts at blowing them up, and they want more storage of scarce water for agriculture, not massive releases to the sea to increase delta-smelt populations.
Along with rural whites—and much to the dismay of Democratic strategists—many rural minorities support Donald Trump. In the counties of Texas along the border with Mexico, opposition to illegal immigration is growing, as is support for Trump-style, no-nonsense enforcement of immigration laws. The all-knowing authors argue that rural communities should welcome “immigrants,” with no concern for what happens to rural healthcare, school advanced-placement programs, or growing numbers of violent gangs and drugs when thousands without audit swarm illegally across the border, settle in rural communities, and swamp already-strained social services.
Oddly, the blinkered authors never contemplate that, should a second Trump administration follow, it would have to be the result of sizable defections of Latinos and blacks from the traditional Democratic base. A supposedly racist Trump has already managed to redefine the Republican Party along shared class concerns transcending race, in a way that purportedly more moderate and tolerant Republicans such as the two Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney would or could not.
Of course, Schaller and Waldman believe they know the reasons why poorly educated or easily duped rural whites (and non-whites) supposedly vote against their own interests. In their quasi-Marxist paradigm, rural people are diagnosed as suffering from doctrinaire false consciousness. They are deluded by kooky QAnon superstitions, conspiracies, and biases, fed to them by manipulative right-wing media and monied interests. The result is that this naive and ignorant rural proletariat is utterly misled into forgetting who their real, left-wing economic saviors are—and who are the culpable right-wing “late capitalists” who did them in.
The authors seem to forget that false consciousness is now a tired talking point of the new Democratic Party, which puzzles over why its radical leftism does not always win adherents from groups it supposes are its natural beneficiaries. Here, the two rather remind one of Marx with his contempt for the “idiocy of rural life” and of subsequent Marxist disdain for the backwards peasantry. But such left-wing condescension is not always even directed at rural whites alone, as witnessed by Joe Biden’s curt dismissal of the black radio host known as Charlamagne tha God in a May 2020 interview. Four years ago, Charlamagne reminded the Democratic nominee that he needed to address more issues relevant to the black community. Biden snapped back, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Like sometimes-wavering blacks, rural whites, then, can be saved only by rejecting their maga-fueled fantasies and supporting left-wing Democratic or properly reformed Republican politicians. The authors argue that neo-socialist policies of economic hyper-regulation, the phasing out of internal combustion engines, the imposition of radical climate-change directives, and the fusion of government with the private sector through nebulous “infrastructure” projects would far better advance rustics’ occasionally legitimate claims that they are falling further behind most Americans.
For example, they apparently assume that Biden’s “rural high-speed internet initiative” is more than a boondoggle, while ignoring the entirely private Starlink system from Elon Musk, which has actually provided internet access to millions of rural residents, including this author. Most rural Central Valley residents detest the California high-speed-rail project that was dumped on the region when supportive coastal-urban interests balked at the imagined mess and inconvenience of construction. Over the last decade, not a foot of rail has been laid. Yet the project has destroyed historic virgin-oak landscapes in Kings County, fragmented farms, and shut down key rural highways for years through stagnant construction—while wasting tens of billions of dollars that might have gone to improve overcrowded and deadly state freeways.
The authors also lack any sense of irony. If any of their progressive agendas were actually embraced by rural Americans, the authors would likely despise in the concrete the manifestations they dream about in the abstract. They implicitly argue for something like the formation of European-style farmers’ activist groups, presumably with outreach offices in Washington and state capitals, that would engage in advocacy and demonstrations in the style of the environmental movement.
Yet the closest to this model that has emerged in North America in recent years has been the Canadian truckers’ well-organized populist demonstrations against Justin Trudeau’s covid restrictions. And such populists were met with a ruthless crackdown by the Canadian government. Europe is currently experiencing widespread rural protests against punitive government attacks on farming itself, coordinated by urban European Union technocrats. Such well-organized farmers are usually portrayed in the European media and viewed by the government as ignorant obstructionist yokels largely to be ignored, since, unlike their urban counterparts, they rarely resort to violence.
The authors concede that the deleterious results of deindustrialization, farm conglomeration, and free but unfair trade have fallen predominantly on the muscular classes in the nation’s interior. They admit further that rural white males are one of the few demographics who suffer from declining life expectancies and increased suicide rates: “The 100,000 annual fentanyl overdose deaths are disproportionally white, male, and rural.’’ Yet after cursorily reviewing some of these rural pathologies, it seems strange to read that such an endangered group—inordinately shrinking and increasingly non-college-bound, drug-addicted, and suicidal—nevertheless manages to pose an existential and violent danger to American democracy.
If we were to look to crime statistics for such a volatile demographic, for instance, we should expect it to be vastly overrepresented in committing violent acts. In truth, rural Americans are underrepresented when categorized as whites. Nor are whites in general inordinately guilty of hate crimes, but instead underrepresented as offenders. Nor, in cases of rare interracial crimes, are whites more apt to attack and injure minorities. In truth, blacks are responsible for about 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence involving blacks and whites. In terms of murder, whites are also vastly underrepresented as offenders, while blacks, as well as Latinos, are overrepresented.
There is currently an epidemic of anti-Semitism across American college campuses, at the more elite universities especially. Yet the perpetrators are mostly affluent white students, Islamic Americans, self-identified dei activists, or foreign students with generous stipends on student visas from the Middle East. In contrast, one does not hear much of right-wing vigilantes harassing Jews in Akron or Fresno as has happened at left-wing, diverse mit or the Cooper Union. The authors seem indifferent to a general truism that the perpetrators of current anti-Semitic assaults and violence tend to be educated or affluent, if they are white at all.
In the United States as in most countries, it is disaffected urban youth who pose the greatest danger of unrest, as the nation witnessed in the summer of 2020. Abroad too, urbanites led the revolution against Mubarak in Egypt and the Maidan uprising in Ukraine.
As for the authors’ contention that rural whites are becoming unpatriotic in their anti-government attitudes, they should look at fatality figures in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan wars. In both conflicts, white males accounted for nearly three-quarters of combat fatalities, twice their percentage of the population and far higher than other ethnic groups. Yet we would expect the very opposite of selflessly dying in godforsaken places in service to their country if we accepted the authors’ contentions that white rural males have become violent threats to their own country or, as they slur them, “conditional patriots.”
Supposedly, rural whites are so misled by the various right-wing opiates peddled to them by alleged charlatans and demagogues (e.g., Breitbart, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, bloggers, talk radio, and the other usual suspects) that, Schaller and Waldman warn us, this volatile demographic now poses to America four existential dangers—or what they call “The Fourfold Threat.”
First, their racism and xenophobia supposedly trap the ignorant into believing they can “be magically transported to some imaginary past.” And the natural result of their fantasies is that unhinged, recalcitrant white rural Americans are violent resisters of the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda and therefore responsible for “imperiling the nation’s transformation into a more pluralist and inclusive society.”
But how is the dei project being “imperiled”? In truth, never has the fad been more orthodox, as well as overweening and illiberal. McCarthyite dei oaths and statements of conscience often are a must for university admission and corporate hiring.
Schaller and Waldman also beg the question by never defining “diversity,” instead merely assuming that any polling showing doubt about the notion indicates that rural whites are racially biased:
For example, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, 46 percent of White rural citizens say they value diversity in their communities—the lowest share of any geographic-racial subgroup. By comparison, 71 percent of rural minorities value diversity, a twenty-five point difference.
This is one way to frame the fact that almost half of the rural white population, supposedly enraged at minorities, nevertheless claims to value “diversity.” More importantly, many Americans do not equate that much-misused and inexact word with the natural and welcomed ethnic, racial, and gender diversity that follows from legally guaranteed equality of opportunity.
Instead, “diversity” is often a code for the broadly unpopular policies of race-based affirmative-action quotas and of race- and gender-mandated equality of result, which often come at the expense of poorer rural whites, especially males. Furthermore, rural whites are now well-acquainted with how the main beneficiaries of such set-asides are well-connected, affluent, and virtue-signaling white elites and their upper-middle-class minority counterparts. If diversity were defined explicitly as a diversity of class, income, and thought, then the Pew poll might well have found different results.
The second of the alleged “fourfold threats,” we are told, is the supposed propensity of angry rural whites to embrace conspiracy-mongering. We read that they imbibe and spread dangerous lies such as Obama’s foreign birth, believe there is a secretive “deep state” that conspires to thwart their traditional lives, argue that the covid-19 virus was man-made in a Wuhan lab, or even, mirabile dictu, suspect that our very elections are no longer trustworthy.
Yet are these “conspiracy theories” as obviously absurd as the book assumes? Or are there legitimate causes for doubt and skepticism?
For example, what may have been responsible for the false “birther” narrative that Obama was not born an American citizen was not just some of his detractors’ undeniable racially inspired paranoia, but also his own literary agent, Miriam Goderich. She had mistakenly advanced an apparently useful myth in a promo booklet for his memoir Dreams from My Father (2004). In it, the pocket bio claimed, “Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
As far as conspiracies surrounding the origins of covid-19, it is now widely accepted that the virus was more likely a product of gain-of-function research gone awry in a Chinese virology lab. Speculation about that likelihood, of course, was initially suppressed by top federal health officials worried about the ramifications for their careers, given their own past knowledge of and involvement in such dangerous research.
In the case of election denialism (the authors’ real worry concerns the 2024 election), one can easily find reasons enough for doubt about the conduct of the 2020 election in the liberal essayist Molly Ball’s now-infamous 2021 Time essay. In triumphalist fashion, she records Democratic sources bragging about how the Left ran circles around the naive 2020 Trump campaign, in ways that seem unethical and at times illegal.
She describes how bicoastal elites and the Left, not rubes in Wyoming or Utah, formed what she herself called a “cabal” and “conspiracy,” a “paranoid fever dream” that focused on raising huge amounts of money to warp the campaign and election:
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. . . . There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes . . . an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans, of ceos, Silicon Valley billionaires, street protestors. . . . Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.
Most Americans do not recall a rural white America determined to question the results of the 2016 election in the manner of a large faction of a nearly unhinged Left. There was the surreal 2016 ensemble of loud Hollywood celebrities—Martin Sheen, Debra Messing, James Cromwell, B. D. Wong, Noah Wyle, Bob Odenkirk, Moby—who, night after night, aired commercials urging electors to reject their constitutional duties of voting consistently with their states’ popular votes. In insurrectionary fashion, such potentially “faithless” electors were asked to vote instead for Hillary Clinton, the loser in their respective states. In a fit of denialism, Hillary Clinton herself, the current House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and even Jimmy Carter all wrote off Donald Trump as an “illegitimate” president, one put in power by Russian “interference.” Is this all permissible election denialism, as opposed to the cruder denialism of rural whites?
The authors’ third existential threat is supposedly fueled by “right-wing money” that spurs rural whites into organizing into various authoritarian insurrectionary cliques threatening democracy. In their psychodramatic formulation, the authors allege that
U.S. democracy is in peril. Ballot blockers, wannabe authoritarians, White Christian nationalists, and constitutional sheriffs each pose existential and often overlapping threats to American constitutional government. Unfortunately, rural Whites form the tip of the spear for each of these movements.
No data is supplied to support such an “existential” threat, much less one originating in rural white America—other than polls that suggest about half the nation feels that America is a Christian nation. But why is this at all surprising? The Founders were either Christians or Christian-inspired Deists. And as a result, “God,” in a decidedly Christian sense, is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, on our currency, in the Pledge of Allegiance, and in most state constitutions. Is believing Easter should be officially acknowledged an incendiary notion, unlike recognizing Ramadan, or, more recently, Joe Biden’s announcement that Easter this year was also “Transgender Day of Visibility”?
Even to the extent that marginal right-wing extremist groups do exist, in comparison to America’s liberal and progressive institutions they have little access to power or influence. Yet strangely enough, the authors insist that rural Americans have disproportionate race-based political power. One may reasonably ask where this “privilege” is manifested—in what institutions? Not the media, certainly. The average combined viewership of the nightly news on abc, nbc, cbs, pbs, msnbc, and cnn is nearly 25 million viewers, about ten times the size of Fox News’s roughly 2.5 million average nightly news audience.
In private institutions? Liberal foundations have endowments one hundred times larger than their conservative counterparts. Over 90 percent of the faculties at most major universities are registered Democrats. There is no need to mention that American entertainment is overwhelmingly left-leaning. As we have seen with recent controversies at Disney, Anheuser Busch, United Airlines, and Target, many corporations are now decidedly progressive.
In government? State and federal employees, many of them unionized, consistently skew left of center. Even our once-apolitical institutions such as the doj, irs, and fbi have been ideologically captured.
In access to capital and fundraising? In the 2020 as in the 2016 campaign, the Trump side was vastly outspent by its Democratic opponents. Virtually all fundraising from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, the three largest sources of political funding, goes to Democrats. From all preliminary indications, Trump’s campaign fundraising will fall considerably short of Joe Biden’s in 2024. Silicon Valley, overwhelmingly left-wing, is generally assessed at some $9 trillion in market capitalization. Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Sam Bankman-Fried either individually or through their various political-action committees likely gave well over $1 billion to left-wing or Democratic causes in the 2020 election—more than all of white rural America put together.
The authors offer a lengthy excursus on the now trendy narrative of a supposedly unfair Senate. They complain that it privileges rural whites by selecting two senators per state regardless of population, rather than by the demographic criteria of the House. Inconveniently for the authors, the Democratic Party has controlled the Senate for eighteen of the twenty-four years of the twenty-first century, while the gop has had a majority in the House for sixteen years. So according to their power-imbalance argument, rural voters seem to have preferred Democrats to Republicans for the last twenty-four years, while urban voters have favored Republicans. In fact, the whole argument is infantile, as is their preposterous claim that gerrymandering—a bipartisan habit—has been monopolized by rural whites.
Drawing on some 2,500 years of Western bicameral constitutional history, the Founding Fathers envisioned the Senate as a necessary unifying agent for diverse states—large and small, urban and rural. A “united” states was sold to the former colonies on the promise of checking the abuse of monarch-like power. Thus a republican-inspired Senate that equalized the influence of diverse states was to balance the more radically democratic and populist House of Representatives. The Senate was to be a deliberately distinct institution, with unique rules about eligibility, representation, and length of service that might offer greater restraint and sobriety than its partner House.
Equally ignorantly, the authors write that “in the 20th century,” “unlike earlier periods,” larger states have been Democratic, while smaller states have been Republican. This is pure fantasy, given the thirty-two-year-long tenure of the California governors Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; or the present twenty-four-year span of Texan Republican governors, George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott; or James Thompson, Jim Edgar, George Ryan, and Bruce Rauner of Illinois, not to mention the administrations of Nelson Rockefeller and George Pataki in New York or the current quarter-century tenure of continuous Florida Republican governors.
As far as actual threats to American democratic institutions are concerned, one might legitimately ask whether it is the bicoastal Left or white rural America that has sought to eliminate institutions like the Electoral College. If we are to speak in such demographic generalities, which group more often advocates packing the Supreme Court? Who is calling for the elimination of the 160-year-old Senate filibuster, or who prefers bringing in two more states to ensure four additional allied senators?
Nor do we recall rural folk swarming the homes of Supreme Court justices without worry about legal penalties for such illegal mobbing. Did a rural red-state senator march at the head of radical whites to the very doors of the Supreme Court to scream warnings to the assembled justices inside, as did Senator Chuck Schumer (D–NY):
I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
So democracy is not so threatened by the disgruntled white rural residents, despite their earning a rich vocabulary of disparagement from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John McCain (clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, ultra-maga, hobbits, crazies, etc.). When we consider the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa Bank ping caper, and the Hunter Biden laptop fraud along with the fifty-one “former intelligence authorities” who chimed in to out themselves as disinformationists, we do not find rural ragers as the catalysts for manipulating democratic norms. Nor were white rural interests involved in the fbi’s contracting out Twitter censors to suppress news deemed unfavorable to the Biden campaign.
One wonders how the authors’ “imperiling” is defined, much less documented by data. Since Joe Biden was elected, ten million illegal aliens, with complete impunity, have crossed into the United States through a nonexistent border. Does not that Confederate-style nullification of federal immigration law constitute an insurrectionary effort to ensure a radical and rapid national “transformation”?
It was not a rural white spokesman who argued, as did the former Obama Pentagon lawyer Rosa Brooks in a Foreign Policy article (“3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020”) published less than two weeks after the 2017 inauguration, that Trump might be removed through impeachment, the Twenty-fifth Amendment, or even a military coup.
Nor do rural populists currently seek to remove Joe Biden’s name from red-state ballots on the grounds that he is corrupt and has abused his power by de facto destroying the southern border or by anchoring a family consortium that has leveraged over $25 million from foreign interests in quid pro quo money.
Nor are rural right-wing prosecutors in Arkansas or Oklahoma filing various indictments of Hunter and Joe Biden on allegations of fraud, corruption, or campaign violations in efforts to wage election-year lawfare against the Democratic nominee. Nor when Biden lost the House in 2022 to Republicans was he impeached twice on the urging of radical white rural legislators.
In truth, most of the recent efforts to undermine constitutional norms, hallowed traditions and customs, and the normal symmetrical application of the law have originated with bicoastal political, media, and academic elites. They are an increasingly self-righteous demographic, quite unrepresentative of America as a whole, but convinced they should enjoy certain extra-constitutional privileges and prerogatives necessary to save America.
The authors’ fourth “threat,” that rural whites are now intimidators, harassers, and violent, is the most slanderous of all:
Unfortunately, a shockingly high percentage of that essential rural White minority so fears losing their long-enjoyed privileged status that they are willing to embrace undemocratic ideas and reactionary or even violent leaders—so long as doing so perpetuates their outsized power.
Once again, Schaller and Waldman cite no credible evidence that rural whites pose such serious dangers to American democracy. Instead, as is their wont, they cite “polls” whose results hardly even support their own conclusions:
Where do these insurrectionist-minded citizens reside? Thirty percent of the 21 million Americans who say Biden’s win was illegitimate and the 27 percent who say Trump should be returned to power by force live in rural areas. Those percentages are significantly higher than the estimated rural population share of 20 percent.
In other words, because less than a third of the 6 percent of America that claims Biden’s win was illegitimate—denialism in the fashion of Hillary Clinton or Jimmy Carter on the 2016 election—lives in rural America, we are supposed to admit the existence of a dangerous insurrectionary movement.
As has been pointed out in a recent Reason review, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats report cited approvingly by the authors certainly does not demonstrate, as they allege, that “rural Americans are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” In fact, the analysis showed the very opposite—that rural counties were less likely than urban ones to send protestors to the January 6 demonstrations and less likely in general to approve of political violence. This fact would be apparent to anyone who has lived for any length of time in both coastal big cities and interior rural communities, or worked equally among both academics and small-town folk.
To prove their wild thesis, the authors must harp incessantly on the buffoonish January 6 riot as proof of the dangers posed by their white rural scapegoats. For instance, the authors approvingly cite the assertions of a University of Pennsylvania professor who claims that she “foresaw” the January 6 riot. Why and how? Because she knew that “Christians are very violent, and they like guns.” Yet the authors mention no study that identifies the religious affiliations of the January 6 protestors, let alone that their faith drove the violent actions of a minority. Moreover, no one was found with a firearm among those arrested in the Capitol.
Few deny that January 6 was a riot—mostly impromptu, slapdash, and thankfully short. Yet the more we learn about the event, the more it seems hardly to warrant the left-wing accusation of being an “insurrection.” President Trump was certainly reckless even to address such a large crowd on January 6. But true insurrectionists do not instruct unarmed protestors, as he did, with the following admonition: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Among recent protests, the single-day January 6 events were vastly overshadowed by the approximately 120 days of continuous urban looting, rioting, arson, violence, and death during spring and summer 2020. That mass urban and left-wing violence was sparked and coordinated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. The results were some thirty-five deaths, 1,500 injured police officers, and $2 billion in property damage, including the torching of a federal courthouse, a police precinct headquarters, and a historic church. Mobs attempted to break onto the White House grounds, sending the president into a secure underground bunker. And yet most of the 14,000 arrested were later released without being charged by sympathetic local and blue-state prosecutors.
As far as incendiary language goes, in June 2020 Senator Kamala Harris (D–CA), soon to be nominated as the Democratic candidate for vice president, recklessly egged on these protests, which she knew (contrary to the assessment of “fact checkers”) had already devolved into violence. Or as she warned in a nationally televised interview:
But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up—and they should not. And we should not.
The authors allege that the common instigator of the four existential threats posed by white rural ragers was, once again, Donald Trump: “Finally, readers surely noticed that we connected Donald Trump to all four threats. This was no accident, but neither was it a stretch.” They cite even the signature Trump call to “Make America Great Again” as a dog-whistle to racist white rural America. They are apparently unaware that maga was a slogan borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 campaign and was deemed a resonant enough refrain to be resurrected by Bill Clinton on the stump in 1992.
White Rural Rage is for the most part a compilation of misleading polls, left-wing news accounts, interviews with state and local Democratic politicos, and sloppy, cherry-picked references to and quotes from kindred academics that reinforce the authors’ preexisting belief in a vast rural white cabal of violent racists and conspiracists.
It is obvious that neither author made any real effort to visit largely white rural communities and interview their targets. Nor do they show any knowledge of the vast literature dealing with the long history of rural and urban tensions and the sources of legitimate rural discontent they describe. The authors demonstrate no familiarity with the scholarship on either agrarianism or the populist movements that originated in the countryside. Nor do they cite the current copious work of itinerant reporters such as Salena Zito who crisscross rural America to offer their urban readers insights into a foreign and often-forgotten world.
In the end, White Rural Rage is not so much a warning about a national, seething, rural white danger to democracy as it is a projection of the fears of elite white authors, conspiracy-minded as they often are themselves. They discuss at length the liberal Richard Hofstadter’s now-worn 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and its later 1970 follow-up book chapter to support their theories, as if Hofstadter’s term did not more accurately describe the nightly racist rantings of a disturbed Joy Reid, the crackpot Russia-collusion and laptop theories of Rachel Maddow on msnbc, or Joe Biden’s recent near-unhinged State of the Union, in which he yelled nonstop as he barked at a host of imagined enemies.
In regard to the authors’ unwarranted self-regard and cluelessness about the world beyond their comprehension, rarely has the poet Horace’s putdown in his Satires seemed more appropriate: Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur—“Why do you laugh? Change only the name, and the story applies to yourself.”
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman; Random House, 320 pages, $32. ↩
