White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

Random House

320 pp., $32.00

I stumbled across an astonishing book the other day. It is a long and unapologetically bigoted denunciation of an entire class of Americans, defined by their race and region. It is purported by some to be a scholarly effort, and it was published by a press that is widely considered respectable. The authors, a college professor of political science and an op-ed columnist, rant for hundreds of pages about the hateful ideology, low intelligence, and social backwardness of the values of this criminal and anti-American group of American citizens. They claim that its members are markedly more prone than all others to violence and to believe in conspiracies unrooted in reality. 

All of this makes the group a tremendous threat to social order that must be met by real Americans—such as the authors of the book in question—if it is to be prevented from destroying everything morally upstanding Americans hold dear. 

As I read this book, I was certainly impressed, even taken aback by the level of unhinged, ferocious hatred… of the book’s authors. The book is devoid of evidence to support their hysterical and venomous claims about the vile depravity of the group in question. By the time I had finished it, nothing could have been clearer to me than that the authors themselves are far more filled with potentially violent antipathy for this racial group they so viciously target in the book than that group itself is. 

The title of the book? Black Urban Rage.

I trust you’ve gotten my joke by now. You must know that such a book could never be published by a mainstream press, and if it were written and the identities of the authors became known, their lives would, in short order, be wholly disrupted by the ensuing cancellation crusade.

But a book that precisely parallels the fictional book I just described, maniacally attacking a different group, does exist. Its authors, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, assert many things about rural whites that are demonstrably false. “Since Donald Trump’s rise,” they moan, “the national media have devoted tremendous attention to the political grievances of rural White voters.” They believe that reporters are flocking to rural America to sympathetically gather and disseminate what “downscale rural White voters have to say, but the same national media hardly notice that rural minorities exist.”

The truth is that national media have as little interest in an objective understanding of the situation of rural whites as these authors do. And it is a strange thing for Schaller and Waldman to imagine those media sources are paying significant attention to rural minorities. Just prior to making this claim, they admit that rural nonwhites are a tiny, tiny minority of an already small nonurban demographic. Rural whites are a mere 15 percent of the American population. More than three-quarters of rural Americans are white, with one-third of rural counties more than 90 percent white and another third at least 75 percent white. 

But that only a minuscule portion of America is made up of rural whites does not prevent this timorous pair from being scared half to death by the threat they allegedly pose.

Rural whites, you see, are deeply and aggressively racist. A reasonable reader might ask how that quality in them is being defined and measured. By way of an answer, we read that rural whites are more likely than other populations to disagree with the statement “white Americans benefit from advantages blacks do not have.” They also support Black Lives Matter at comparatively low levels. Nowhere do the authors argue for their belief that only racists could doubt that whites have advantages as a group over other races or withhold support from the organization responsible for the George Floyd riots of 2020.

Significant numbers of rural whites also believe that blacks are more likely than whites to commit crimes and see cities as more dangerous than the rural towns in which they live. No matter that crime statistics back up both of these beliefs. To believe such truths is to be a racist. The authors admit it is “difficult to precisely determine when rural resentments are based in race,” yet they assert with utter certainty that criticism of the welfare state’s massive growth and the demographic shift brought by post-’60s immigration must be racist.

Rural whites, they assert, are more likely than any other group to hold beliefs threatening to the stability of American politics, for example, distrust in the fairness of elections, conspiracy theories, and the embrace of authoritarianism.

Yet, the nonexisting authors of our fictional analogue book Black Urban Rage might take empirical issue with this claim. Blacks are the group most likely to believe the unfounded conspiracy theory that there is a systematic effort to prevent eligible voters from voting. A very large majority of blacks also believe the fact-free conspiracy theory that basic institutions in today’s America—the courts, the political system, the economy—are explicitly designed to hold blacks down. Schaller and Waldman deplore the “anti-intellectualism” of rural whites, but there isarguably more compelling evidence of unreason among urban blacks. 

Schaller and Waldman assert that rural whites want to “turn back the clock on history,” and they “imperil … the nation’s transformation.” They do not tell us why America needs to be transformed. Their unquestioned assumption is simply that the America of the mid-20th century was a very bad thing in desperate need of radical remaking. It follows that anyone critical of this idea is, by definition, a problem. In the end, the worldview of rural whites is too traditional, too nostalgic, too communal, and too tied up in a form of American identity—religious, patriotic, centered on the traditional family—that the authors hate. Everyone must become an enthusiastically pro-LGBTQ urban multiculturalist. This is the only way.

Yet they admit that the single biggest driver of polarization in the contemporary U.S. is the demographic transformation they concede has been “rapid.” It is self-evident to Schaller and Waldman that those who challenge this transformation are at fault, not those engineering and cheering it. The MAGA slogan is bad mostly because of the final “A.” To want to return to the America that was is an unthinkable heresy. We must embrace “inexorable progress…[and] becoming better all the time,” they write. They are silent on the questions of who will be measuring “better” and what rubric they will be using. They dismiss conservatism as “at its heart … about the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” But this is undeniably a deep aspect of all human nature. Ignoring their leftist caricature of conservatism for now, who actively pursues his own loss of power and is happy about that loss?

They admit that research shows that throughout Western democracies, once the foreign-born portion of the population reaches about 20 percent, more than half of the population converts to a form of “right-wing populism.” This reveals that a desire to maintain demography and culture is a natural feature of human societies. No known society is indifferent to maintaining stability and tradition.

Rural whites are a unique threat to all that is good, yet many of their beliefs are surprisingly widespread. The authors are horrified that 60 percent of them want to build the wall at the Mexican border. They pass without comment over the fact that half of suburbanites and even a third of those who live in cities also want the wall. Nearly half of Americans support the idea that the U.S. should be a Christian nation, they shudder. They insinuate this idea has a profoundly rural white character, but remember that rural whites make up only 15 percent of America. Even if all of them are “Christian nationalists,” another third of the population of the country is, too.

The examples Schaller and Waldman provide to prove their case are sometimes ludicrously self-refuting. In the midst of an attack on Fox News and its rural white audience, they figuratively roll their eyes at the level of delusion involved. The populist media deliver this crazed message: “Those liberals … hate you and everything you stand for. They call you a racist and a redneck.” Who could believe such nonsense about the left?! And the backward Bubbas, with their irrational fear of their moral betters, swallow it whole! Good thing few of them will read this, a book dedicated to making just the name-calling case it claims no one on the left is making. 

In the midst of a thoroughly inane and unfounded rant, the authors present one fact worth considering, albeit from outside their blinkered perspective. They cheer the fact that 2020 Trump voters, who make up more than 80 percent of America’s counties, contribute only a third of America’s gross domestic product. But they must know that some of us do not share their belief that GDP is the only or even the most important way to define a country’s success. And in any event, a third of U.S. GDP would still rank right-wing populist America as the third richest country in the world. It would stand behind only woke America and China, with about twice the GDP of Japan, Germany, India, and the UK and nearly three times that of France. 

In the event of a national separation, then, white rural America would do just fine in economic terms and would be able to preserve its culture. This might well be the most productive way forward, given the splenetic hostility for their countrymen of condescending elitists like the authors of White Rural Rage.