A searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens -- who are also the least likely to defend its core principles White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In Schaller and Waldman show how vulnerable U.S. democracy has become to rural Whites who, despite legitimate grievances, are increasingly inclined to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs, to believe in conspiracy theories, to accept violence as a legitimate course of political action, and to exhibit antidemocratic tendencies. Rural White Americans’ attitude might best be described as “I love Schaller and Waldman provocatively critique both the structures that permit rural Whites’ disproportionate influence over American governance and the prospects for creating a pluralist, inclusive democracy that delivers policy solutions that benefit rural communities. They conclude with a political reimagining that offers a better future for both rural people and the rest of America....

Autorentext

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

Klappentext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens—who are also the least likely to defend its core principles

“This is an important book that ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand politics in the perilous Age of Trump.”—David Corn, New York Times bestselling author of American Psychosis

White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States.

Schaller and Waldman show how vulnerable U.S. democracy has become to rural Whites who, despite legitimate grievances, are increasingly inclined to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs, to believe in conspiracy theories, to accept violence as a legitimate course of political action, and to exhibit antidemocratic tendencies. Rural White Americans’ attitude might best be described as “I love my country, but not our country,” Schaller and Waldman argue. This phenomenon is the patriot paradox of rural America: The citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are also the least likely to defend core American principles. And by stoking rural Whites’ anger rather than addressing the hard problems they face, conservative politicians and talking heads create a feedback loop of resentments that are undermining American democracy.

Schaller and Waldman provocatively critique both the structures that permit rural Whites’ disproportionate influence over American governance and the prospects for creating a pluralist, inclusive democracy that delivers policy solutions that benefit rural communities. They conclude with a political reimagining that offers a better future for both rural people and the rest of America.

Leseprobe
Small Towns, Big Trouble

“Friend, Jason Aldean recorded a song praising small-town values, and the Radical Left has canceled him for it. Why? Because they want every small town in America to look like the socialist disasters in California and New York.”

This was the beginning of a fundraising email from the National Republican Congressional Committee in July 2023, responding to the controversy over “Try That in a Small Town,” the single that country star Aldean had recently released. The song’s lyrics present a list of alleged liberal urban horrors—people spitting in cops’ faces, robbing liquor stores, burning American flags—as well as the specter of gun confiscation, and they issue a challenge: “Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road.”

Aldean, whose oeuvre is heavy with well-worn tributes to rural life, was not “canceled.” In fact, his fantasy of vigilante violence meted out against urbanites supposedly ready to bring their criminal mayhem to the idyll of rural America became his greatest success. Conservative media defended him, Republican politicians praised him, and “Try That in a Small Town” became Aldean’s biggest crossover hit, shooting to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Had Aldean released his ode to resentment and vigilantism a decade earlier, it might not have made the news, let alone become the controversy it did. But coming out when it did, with hostility between rural and urban America intensifying as the country headed into a presidential election that promised an even more profound division between the two, the song was bound to produce a fiery reaction. For Republicans, it was a gift, yet another implement they could use to convince their rural supporters that blue America was a “socialist disaster” to be feared and hated. The criticism the song received from liberals only reinforced this point.

The undercurrents that produced this controversy are the reason we wrote this book. We stand at what may be the most dangerous moment for American democracy since the Civil War. A great deal of attention has been bestowed upon rural Whites since Donald Trump’s ascension in 2016, yet that discussion has overlooked a vital political truth this book hopes to illuminate: The democratic attachments of rural White Americans are faltering.

Rural America has suffered greatly in recent decades. Layered atop cultural resentments that are nearly as old as our country, this suffering has produced powerful antipathies that are aimed not just at certain groups of Americans, but often at the American democratic system itself. Were rural White Americans as disempowered as they believe themselves to be, their anger would be impotent. They would mutter “Try that in a small town” to themselves, indulging in meaningless fantasies of revenge against the liberals and urbanites they despise. But they are not disempowered. In fact, in critical ways, they have more power than any other large demographic group in America.

This power has already distorted the outcomes our system produces, leaving us in an age of minority rule in which—to take just one example— the party that won fewer votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections managed to assemble an activist 6–3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, one that is now busy remaking the laws all of us live under to conform to a right-wing policy vision that overwhelming majorities of the public do not share. This minority rule is a consequence of the disproportionate power wielded by rural Whites, power that is often justified on the right by the insistence that these are the worthiest Americans, the ones most possessed of virtue and “values,” and that, therefore, it is only proper that their votes count for more.

The fact that their votes do count for more is why Donald Trump became president in the first place, and if he should regain the White House, it will be rural Whites who return him there. Yet even as the threat to American democracy Trump represents has become the subject of enormous concern…