White rural Americans are a “racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay” authoritarian fifth column that poses an existential risk to our republic.
Unless they’re really a downtrodden individuals who rightly resent the condescension of liberal elites and want for little extra than “to preserve a sense of agency over their future and a continuity of their community’s values and social structures.”
These are the dual poles of blue America’s present debate over why rural white of us vote the best way they do.
This argument is as previous because the urban-rural divide itself. But the most recent spherical was triggered by White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, a bestselling e-book from the political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman.
Schaller and Waldman argue that rural white voters are exceptionally reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. In their telling, these retrograde impulses flip this group into straightforward prey for a Republican Party that shutters rural hospitals, denies employees’ medical health insurance, erodes labor rights — after which says, in so many phrases, allow them to eat hate.
Many commentators and political scientists have taken exception to this argument. The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper argues that White Rural Rage “illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits.”
In his account, the true risk to American democracy “is not white rural rage, but white urban and suburban rage” — a reality that might be plain to Waldman and Schaller, Harper says, in the event that they’d solely paid extra cautious consideration to the research their e-book cites.
Colby College political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, in the meantime, insists that White Rural Rage’s “simplistic” and inaccurate thesis quantities to little greater than “an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.”
In my view, this debate has gotten a bit muddled, with both sides dancing round inconvenient details. The argument between White Rural Rage’s champions and its critics would generate extra mild (and maybe much less warmth) if all concerned grappled with 5 vital truths:
1) Rural white persons are extra supportive of right-wing authoritarianism than are city or suburban ones
Harper’s central declare — that rural white folks really pose much less of a risk to American democracy than city and suburban ones — rests on defective reasoning.
His case will be boiled down into three factors:
- A 2021 paper in Journal of Democracy discovered that “political violence” within the US “has been greatest in suburbs where Asian American and Hispanic American immigration has been growing fastest.”
- Several high-profile right-wing extremists, together with the “pizzagate” gunman, got here from areas that aren’t rural, at the very least by sure definitions of that time period.
- The overwhelming majority of Americans who imagine that the 2020 election was stolen — and that Trump would subsequently be justified in reclaiming the presidency by pressure — stay in city areas.
These details set up that white rural Americans aren’t uniquely right-wing or authoritarian; supporters of Trump and the January 6 Capitol riot will be present in almost each class of municipality. Harper is correct to object to the singling out of white rural voters writ giant, when the issue is intolerant reactionaries in each a part of the nation.
Nonetheless, his proof doesn’t contradict the premise that rural white persons are unusually supportive of Donald Trump and January 6.
This is a deadly downside for his argument, since Trump is the elemental risk to American democracy right this moment. All political violence is lamentable, however particular person militants can not undermine the independence of federal regulation enforcement, the integrity of the electoral course of, or the peaceable switch of energy; an insurrectionary president plausibly can.
And there isn’t any query that white voters from low-density areas help Trump by a lot bigger margins than their counterparts in high-density locations.
In the 2020 election, rural white voters backed Trump over Biden by 42 factors, whereas suburban white voters favored him by simply 7, based on the Democratic information agency Catalist. Urban white voters, in the meantime, supported Biden over Trump by a 32-point margin.
If rural white Americans voted the identical means that suburban white Americans do, then Trump would by no means have been elected president and his model of authoritarianism wouldn’t be aggressive in nationwide elections. If all white Americans voted like those that stay in cities, in the meantime, then Trump’s social gathering would have negligible affect over the federal authorities.
What’s extra, Harper acknowledges that rural white Americans are “overrepresented” amongst those that help restoring Trump to energy by pressure.
Given these details, it’s foolish to argue that city and suburban white persons are doing extra to imperil American democracy than their rural counterparts. Harper’s solely actual counter is that extra supporters of January 6 stay in cities than in rural areas. But it is a trivial level: Roughly 80 p.c of Americans stay in non-rural areas. Name any ideological group underneath the solar and also you’re virtually sure to search out {that a} majority of that group lives in high-population municipalities, slightly than in locations that, by definition, have few folks.
2) Millions of rural white Americans help the Democratic Party
All this mentioned, rural white voters aren’t a monolith. In reality, such voters had been an indispensable a part of Biden’s 2020 coalition.
Yes, the president received solely 28 p.c of that voting bloc, however that provides as much as greater than 9 million votes. In 2020, Biden received nationally by roughly 7 million ballots and took many swing states by tiny margins. Subtract all rural white Democrats from Biden’s column and Trump virtually definitely would have received reelection.
Waldman and Schaller’s rhetoric does a disservice to this small however vital phase of the general public, which has held the road in opposition to Trumpism in locations the place doing so entails vital social penalties and dangers.
More importantly — as Harper and Jacobs emphasize — demonizing white rural voters is a luxurious that city liberals can scarcely afford. Yes, the median white voter in rural America isn’t going to help Biden. But rural white swing voters exist. And in a detailed election, even a small discount or enhance in Biden’s share of that bloc may show decisive.
3) Rural white Republicans aren’t New Deal Democrats who received confused
Liberals and leftists have lengthy debated the basis causes of rural America’s help for the Republican Party. Some level to the truth that rural white Americans supported the New Deal and conclude that many within the demographic would again Democrats once more right this moment if solely the social gathering supplied extra formidable financial reforms. Others argue that rural white persons are just too racist to help a minimally progressive political social gathering.
By my lights, it’s unwise to base your idea of American political conduct in 2024 on voting patterns in 1932. Loads has occurred within the final 92 years. When FDR was first elected,
- 43 p.c of Americans lived in rural areas
- your entire South was managed by a white supremacist faction that was briefly, improbably tethered to a coalition with northern liberals
- the unemployment charge was caught above 20 p.c
- private revenue per capita within the US was roughly one-seventh as excessive as it’s right this moment
- the sexual revolution had not but occurred
- conservative mass media barely existed, and
- there was, roughly, no federal welfare state.
There isn’t any purpose in precept to imagine that rural voters’ political priorities and inclinations haven’t modified together with their nation.
As Schaller and Waldman reveal, the argument that many rural white persons are motivated by racial resentments is considerably extra strong.
But, as Nicholas Jacobs suggests, it’s virtually definitely true that not all white rural Republicans are motivated by racism. Yet Jacobs’s essay for Politico dances across the different main rationalization for rural white help for Trump: They merely have many conservative beliefs and coverage preferences.
After all, rural voters are extra conservative than city ones in nearly each developed nation, together with these the place race performs a smaller function in politics than it does in America.
You don’t have to be racist to imagine a fetus is an individual. And rural Americans are disproportionately supportive of abortion restrictions, which doubtless influences their partisan preferences. Many rural areas additionally rely on extractive, carbon-intensive industries for financial development. Likely because of this, rural Americans are much less supportive of local weather motion than city or suburban ones, even when controlling for partisanship and demographics.
Jacobs means that rural Americans’ opposition to liberal immigration insurance policies is rooted much less in racism than a want to protect their sense of “place.” This premise is debatable, at greatest. Yet Jacobs doesn’t merely want to argue that rural Americans’ want for group preservation has little to do with racism but additionally that it has little to do with conservatism:
Taken as a complete, rural voters aren’t merely reacting in opposition to change — be it demographic or financial. They are actively looking for to protect a way of company over their future and a continuity of their group’s values and social constructions. Some would possibly name this conservatism, however I feel it’s the identical factor motivating fears of gentrification in city areas, or the will to “keep Portland weird.”
It is true that rural Americans aren’t the one ones who attempt to shield their communities from outsiders and cultural change. Urban and suburban liberals do that via housing insurance policies that make their municipalities much less inexpensive for newcomers, whereas rural conservatives do it by supporting anti-immigration politicians. In each circumstances, the political impulse driving voter conduct is a conservative one: Prizing stasis over change and insiders over outsiders is, roughly, the antithesis of progressivism, correctly understood.
4) The financial challenges going through many rural areas are inherently tough to unravel.
Both sides within the White Rural Rage debate agree that Democrats have executed extra to assist rural America materially than Republicans have. In addition to saving many rural hospitals with Medicaid enlargement, Democrats have additionally directed a disproportionate share of federal job creation {dollars} towards low-density areas.
But Jacobs emphasizes that these are insufficient to deal with rural areas’ issues. Such communities usually undergo from restricted employment alternatives, fiscal shortfalls, and instructor shortages — all of that are partly a perform of falling populations.
Yet the causes of rural America’s depopulation are structural. High-population areas inherently provide larger alternatives for employees to specialize and complement one another’s labor. This interprets into increased productiveness, which typically interprets into increased wages. It would take an unlimited quantity of social engineering to cease formidable younger folks born into declining rural areas from migrating to cities and suburbs. Making rural life sufficiently interesting to retain round 20 p.c of the US inhabitants already requires large subsidization of inefficient rural infrastructure and well being care programs.
Given that rural methods of life are additionally extra carbon intensive than high-density residing, trying to engineer a rise within the rural inhabitants via social coverage appears ill-advised. Meanwhile, many vital coverage initiatives — reminiscent of rising housing abundance in thriving metro facilities — would doubtless have the aspect impact of accelerating rural depopulation.
One measure that plausibly may arrest the decline of many economically depressed rural communities can be place-based immigration insurance policies, which provide visas to immigrants prepared to work in low-density areas. But that is the precise reverse of what rural white voters are demanding from their representatives.
There is much more that Democrats can do to assist working-class folks writ giant. But the social gathering lacks a terrific, politically viable reply for reviving shrinking rural communities as a result of there isn’t one.
5) Most folks inherit the politics of their households and communities
Finally, nevertheless one interprets the politics of white rural America, I feel it’s a mistake to deal with strange Trump voters with contempt or as dangerous human beings by definition. (I don’t suppose Waldman and Schaller essentially do that, however some on their aspect of the argument do.)
In Salon, Amanda Marcotte applauds White Rural Rage for treating its topics as “functioning adults who have agency” and never “the childlike ciphers of Fox News.” This is an comprehensible sentiment. Marcotte is herself a product of white rural America who rejected the reactionary politics of her dad and mom. Her impatience with apologias for Trump supporters in “the Heartland” — which frequently attribute their lamentable voting conduct to all the pieces however their very own failures of fine citizenship — is well-founded.
At the identical time, Marcotte is an exception from the final rule: Most voters inherit the politics of the households and communities they had been born into. According to a 2023 Pew survey, greater than 80 p.c of American teenagers help the identical political social gathering as their dad and mom.
I imagine that my politics are extra ethical than these of a Trump voter, however I don’t suppose that claims a lot about my ethical character. I used to be born to liberal dad and mom in a left-leaning suburb of a blue state. If I’d grown up in a rural city the place everybody I knew and beloved believed that Democrats had been the Godless servants of corrupt elites and shiftless poor folks, then I’d most likely have voted for Trump; the info admits no different conclusion.
Awareness of how totally accidents of beginning and expertise form our selves and life outcomes ought to make us extra supportive of revenue redistribution and extra against retributive prison justice insurance policies. But it also needs to make us a bit extra affected person with Trump voters.
This doesn’t imply that liberals shouldn’t harshly criticize reactionary beliefs or candidates. But we must always hate the vote, not the voter. Rage is never probably the most politically productive emotion — whether or not it’s of the “white rural” or city liberal selection.
