White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

by Tom Schaller

In rural Ebony, Virginia, a coalition of White and Black residents is fighting its town board’s narrow 3–2 vote to approve a new Dollar General franchise in its town that opponents say will destroy locally owned proprietors and blight the bucolic landscape.[51]

“We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” Never mind that, unemployed and disabled, Trevor almost certainly drained more from public coffers than he ever contributed in state or federal taxes. Nor would any of his tax dollars be spent on Mexicans.

How did millions of people come to hate a law despite approving nearly every major provision in it? The short answer is that Republican politicians railed against Obamacare, vowing repeatedly to “repeal and replace” it.

James Earl Carter won.

“The 1962 campaign marked a turning point—the first real defeat for the old system on its own turf—that helped to end the legalized system of White supremacy, rural domination of government, and deprivation of civil rights among our neighbors.”[2]

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, anti-terrorism funds were spent on states and areas regardless of threat assessment, which is why rural Wyoming received per capita funding seven times that of New York State, home to New York City’s toppled Twin Towers.[12] Meanwhile, Congress has never hesitated to pass policies that directly benefit rural areas, including farm subsidies, rural postal services, and the Essential Air Service that subsidizes flights from rural airports.

“No state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

When North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a billionaire software magnate, launched his presidential campaign with a video proclaiming his “small-town values,” one of us (Paul) wrote a column for The Washington Post suggesting that the things one learns growing up in a city—dealing with many different kinds of people, handling constant change—might be even more valuable to the presidency than what one learns in a small town.

The raw physicality of the pickup truck—its size, the power in its engine, the ridiculous amount of gas it requires—lies at the heart of its attraction, particularly for men who are uncertain about their place in a changing world.

Many of those men are also targeted by right-wing political opportunists claiming that they face a “crisis of manhood,” one in which the fact that most jobs no longer require a great deal of upper-body strength has left them wondering how long they’ll stay atop society’s hierarchy.

“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?”

“Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”[13]

“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” he said. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”[15]

As he revised his own history, Vance cast off the critiques he had made of his own people.

“This issue is personal: I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.” But in his book, Vance says his mother was addicted to prescription narcotics, which don’t come over the border.[16]

Vance understands this history, because he worked for a law firm whose lobbying arm was paid to defend Purdue Pharma.[17] That’s right: Indirectly, Vance profited from the miseries wrought upon rural Americans by the now-bankrupt and discredited drugmaker.[18]

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”[19]

The insult White trash might sound contemporary, but it first became common in the 1850s.[24] The contempt between rural and urban people may have always been mutual, but the economic and cultural power enjoyed by urbanites meant that those on the rural side would wind up feeling insulted and resentful.

Nashville, the heart of country music that supplies endless encomia to the superiority of rural life, is a blue enclave in a sea of red.

Fox News is headquartered in New York, from where it pumps out a steady stream of horror stories about urban decay and condescending liberal “elites” who want nothing more than to destroy all the things rural people value.

The message is clear: Those liberals are coming for you and your family. Though you are the truest Americans, they hate you and everything you stand for. They call you a racist and a redneck. They want to force their perverted ideas about sex and family on you. And the best way to fight back is to vote Republican—and forget about those democratic principles you learned in school. This is a war, and there’s no time to play fair.

Anthony Nadler noted after conducting extensive conversations with conservatives, “Some talked about personal experiences of feeling slighted or castigated by liberals—especially on social media. But even more frequently, and often more passionately, they told me about stories demonstrating liberals’ disdain for conservatives that they had encountered through conservative news.”[28]

It may seem strange to think that a person in rural Nebraska or Oklahoma could be instructed by a pundit from Washington, D.C., on a TV network owned by an Australian media magnate, on how to understand their own identity.

Political reporters are forever explaining how out-of-touch Democrats can’t possibly relate to the good folks of the heartland, who can supposedly see right through their phony personas and insincere appeals.

In its repetition (especially at campaign time), this double standard reinforces the disturbing conclusions about rural White power we have been exploring. If a small-town, blue-collar man is the most authentic American, then the fact that his vote counts for more than that of a Black urban lawyer or a Latino suburban government worker won’t arouse the outrage and demand for change that it might were he not so valorized.

“Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.”

‘Oh, they’re trying to ban books, and it’s a bunch of Christians.’ That’s what people said here in town, making fun of us,” one woman who had spoken at town meetings about the books told us.[30] They didn’t want the books banned, she said, just moved to where little kids couldn’t see them.

“It’s the beginning of the end for Ohio libraries if that bill gets passed,” Zappitello told us.

“There’s no help. There’s no coordinated effort. All I got was ‘Where’s your people, Kathy, we need you to go knock on doors.’ It’s like, where are your people, Democratic Party? I need you to go knock on doors.” She wound up losing by over twenty points.

“I had so many people that whispered to me and held my hand real quick and tight and said, ‘Oh my god, thank you,’ and whispered and kept walking.” She choked up as she described going to meetings that were pleasant enough “until you talk to the woman who is asking you for help and doesn’t know what to do, who’s in a horrible situation and saw that there’s a political meet-and-greet and decided to come and seek help because her son had just committed suicide, and [she] didn’t know where else to go. And now she’s standing in front of me, and I have her name, and I have her phone number, for what? How am I ever going to help her? What am I going to tell these neighbors in Geauga County, the county below Ashtabula, who came up to me in a parking lot and said, ‘Kathy, I can’t take one of your signs, because I’m so afraid of my neighbors. I can’t even talk to anybody, but you have my one vote, and I promise you that.’ ”

Conservative media may not have created the culture war grievances like those driving book-banning efforts out of whole cloth, but they are the engine that drives such efforts forward, elevating certain issues at certain times and telling people what they should be angry about: immigration one day, critical race theory the next, trans kids playing sports the day after that—all contextualized within a broader cultural conflict.

In a remarkable moment during a televised debate, Stitt literally scoffed when his opponent, Democratic nominee Joy Hofmeister, pointed out that the Sooner State’s violent crime rate is higher than New York’s or California’s. Stitt peered out at the in-person audience, laughed, and said with a huge grin, as if he couldn’t believe his opponent was so dumb, “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California? That’s what she just said!” But Hofmeister was right: According to the CDC, the homicide rate in Oklahoma at the time was 9 per 100,000 people, while in California it was 6.1, and in New York it was 4.7. And Oklahoma’s violent crime rate has been higher than either New York or California for two decades.[51]

How do we explain how a man from Queens with soft hands, one whose greatest life ambition was to be accepted by elite Manhattan society, became the hero of rural America?

Donald Trump did none of those things.

How much credit did she get for it? Zilch. “A lot of us in rural areas, our ears are tuned to intonation,” said Dee Davis, founder of the Center for Rural Strategies. “We think people are talking down to us. What ends up happening is that we don’t focus on the policy—we focus on the tones, the references, the culture.”[5] This becomes an all-purpose excuse that has almost nothing to do with reality; Clinton could have gotten down on her knees to beg, and they still would have accused her of having the wrong “tone.” But Trump, who couldn’t tell a combine from a corn dog? Does anyone actually think he’s tuned in to “the references, the culture”? Of course not.

The only thing rural folks say they put ahead of country and even family is God; asked on TV to name his favorite Bible passage, Trump couldn’t come up with one.[6]

American society is rigged against you by people who aren’t like you and who wish you ill.

But she did not grow up there: Willsboro is where her parents bought their summer home. Stefanik grew up in the suburbs of Albany, where she attended elite Albany Academy prep school. From there, she went to Harvard, the crown jewel of the Ivy League and a place conservatives and Republicans routinely mock as a breeding ground for out-of-touch elitists.

A liberal Democrat with Stefanik’s bio who ran for her seat would have been pilloried as a privileged, inauthentic, carpetbagging poseur.

Stefanik quickly seemed to realize she did not fully understand or even recognize the dark underbelly of her own constituency.

If that’s what they wanted, then Stefanik was ready to give it to them, and by the end of Trump’s term, her transformation was complete.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2017, Trump was “the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president,”[12] and no successful presidential candidate had made Whiteness so central to their campaign.

It is puzzling to see these kinds of places vote for the nation’s first Black president and then turn around and vote for someone running a nakedly bigoted campaign in the way Donald Trump did.

Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the enemy of White southerners for a century, which meant that in many places in the South, every White voter was a Democrat, whether they were liberal or conservative. For decades, the Democratic Party suppressed its more liberal impulses on race in order to keep together a coalition that included southern segregationists, but the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s changed that for good. Southern conservative Whites began fleeing to the Republican Party; many of the most prominent archconservatives of later years, including such figures as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, had started their careers as Democrats.

This process, which political scientists call “realignment,” took a few decades to play out completely, and in some places, particularly where union membership had been strong, it took longer than in others. It can be seen most vividly in West Virginia, which is politically unique in many ways; like much of the South, it retained an affection for the Democratic Party as a legacy of the Civil War era, but unlike other southern states, it is almost entirely White and native born.

The long hold of the Democratic Party in West Virginia is also a function of its (formerly) high union representation.

And it helped that as much as there was racist rhetoric swirling through the political ether in 2008 and 2012, both McCain and Romney took pains to keep it at arm’s length, making it difficult for anyone to see them as the vehicle for a reassertion of White identity. Trump did just the opposite.

The largest is Cullman County, Alabama (population 88,000), whose county seat was a notorious “sundown town” during Jim Crow, where Blacks were not allowed to linger after sundown lest they risk being lynched.

By most traditional measures, Donald Trump is not a smart man. (People who are actually smart don’t go around saying, “I have a very good brain.”[19]) But he does have an instinct for marketing, and like any good comedian or performer, he spent a good deal of time trying out material on his audiences, which helped him understand what appealed to them. And when he hit upon the slogan “Make America Great Again,” he struck gold, especially with a certain kind of voter.

Trump didn’t just promise to build a wall, he promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.