Hatred Of The Working Class Behind Attack On White Rural Americans

Batya Ungar-Sargon's "Second Class" is the antidote to Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman's "White Rural Rage"

Rural whites seethe with race-based resentment and harbor attitudes dangerous to democracy, argue the authors of a new book, White Rural Rage. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman claim rural whites are “uniquely hostile,” with heightened fears of immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and urbanites. Where 54% of city people support Black Lives Matter (BLM), just 30% of rural residents do, they note. These racist rural whites have too much political power and are enabling Donald Trump’s existential threat to our democracy.

But racist white rural rage does not describe my experience of raising black children in a white and rural area. The closest we’ve come to having a cross burned on our lawn is the kids’ bonfires with their church group. As for BLM, the authors apparently didn’t consider that rural disapproval of BLM might have more to do with rioting and corruption than racism.

According to Schaller and Waldman, rural whites “venerate white culture and values.” The latter might surprise my black daughter, who recently observed that if you’re black in the country, the content of your character matters more than it does in the city.

Schaller and Waldman express a visceral dislike of everything about rural culture. “Pickups symbolize a particular kind of masculinity rooted in the work rural people are supposed to do,” they write.”The trucks communicate physical strength, ruggedness, capability, competence, and an indifference to people who might get in your way.”

But rural people need trucks for work more than urbanites and suburbanites who go to the mall in heavy, expensive, and luxury four-wheel drive and electric vehicles.

Schaller and Waldman argue that rural whites are uniquely violent. They claim that rural whites constitute a “fourfold threat” to “American democracy” and that the threat is growing. As proof, they cite the Chicago Project on Security and Threats to claim that "rural Americans are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies." But the actual report had the opposite conclusion: "The more rural the county, the lower the county rate of sending insurrectionists" to the January 6 Capitol riot.

Paul Waldman (left) and Tom Schaller (right)

Schaller and Waldman make the same error more than once. They cite a paper, “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States,” to support their contention that the risk of political violence is highest in rural America. But the article’s author, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said, “Political violence in the United States has been greatest in suburbs where Asian American and Hispanic American immigration has been growing fastest.”

And other research finds the same thing: rural people are less likely than other groups to view politically motivated violence as ever justified.