White rural voters: A threat to democracy?

White rural Americans really are deplorable, resentment-filled bigots whose rage “poses a threat to democracy,” said Michael A. Cohen in The Daily Beast. That’s the crux of a new book by former Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage. The authors “persuasively argue” that liberal stereotypes about rural Americans “are actually true.” Polls have found that relatively large percentages of rural whites fear immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQ people, and “endorse white Christian nationalist views.” An alarming number say that citizens may soon need “to take up arms against the government.” Rural whites—only 15 percent of the population—hold outsize political influence because our political system grants “disproportionate power to sparsely populated states.” But that power never “translates into tangible benefits.” That’s because they vote for Republicans like Donald Trump, “who tell them lies they want to hear,” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. The GOP has done nothing to replace the jobs in manufacturing, mining, and agriculture that were lost to technology and globalization.

This book is based on “academic malpractice,” said Nicholas F. Jacobs and B. Kal Munis in Reason. Waldman and Schaller cherry-pick polls and studies to indict a broad swath of the country, ignoring evidence that the same views they condemn can be found in suburban and urban areas—sometimes at higher percentages. In their eagerness to buttress their stereotypes of rural whites as backward bigots who threaten democracy, the authors distort previous studies, and ignore the economic and social realities behind rural rage: “years of neglect, abandonment, and scorn” by people like Waldman and Schaller.

“Rural America deserves better than sneering,” said Anthony Flaccavento in Newsweek. Millions of Americans “are pissed off, fed up with a system they believe to be rigged” against working-class people of all races who are trapped in low-wage, dead-end jobs. They’re not all rural, and not all white. “In 2020, 8 out of 10 Trump voters were in cities or suburbs. Eighty percent!” If Democrats want these abandoned Americans to ever vote for them again, they need to make a priority of efforts “to rebuild rural and small-town America” through public and private investments that create real economic opportunity. The alternative is

“to continue writing off tens of millions of rural Americans as deplorable racists.”