White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

by Tom Schaller

Making Mexico pay for the wall was not about money; we have far more money than Mexico does. It was about domination, like Michael Corleone in Godfather II telling Senator Geary he expected him to pay the fee for the Corleones’ gaming license personally.

And humiliation was precisely the point: By forcing them to submit, we would regain our own dignity.

Just after taking office, Trump had a phone conversation with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in which he begged Peña Nieto not to say publicly that Mexico would never pay for the wall. “You cannot say anymore that the United States is going to pay for the wall. I am just going to say that we are working it out,” Trump said, to which Peña Nieto replied, “This is an issue related to the dignity of Mexico and goes to the national pride of my country.” Which, of course, was precisely the point.[22]

Asked why it seemed to happen so much in rural areas, election law expert Richard Hasen of UCLA told us, “Because this is where these folks can have the most impact. They live there and can pressure and in some cases vote out of office these officials. They can show up and dominate local meetings.”[54] A lot of devoted public servants in rural areas are left wondering whether safeguarding democracy is worth the aggravation.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the sovereign citizen movement is “based on a decades-old conspiracy theory…that the American government set up by the founding fathers, under a common-law legal system, was secretly replaced” with a shadow government based on admiralty law, either after the Civil War or in 1933, when the United States abandoned the gold standard.

The perpetrators of these crimes are often White men, some but surely not all of whom hail from small towns or who organize in remote, rural locales. Often, their victims are non-Whites, non-Christians, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, or agents of the state or federal government whom the perpetrators believe are acting on behalf of these out-groups.[5] During the Trump presidency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued similar reports that identified White supremacist groups as America’s biggest domestic terrorist threat.[6]

First, in a nation experiencing rapid demographic change, rural Whites are uniquely xenophobic toward Americans who look, speak, act, or pray differently from them.

Second, the views of rural White citizens are least tethered to reality.

Third, rural White citizens are less supportive of democratic principles like free speech, a free press, the separation of church and state, and the value of constitutional checks and balances.

Fourth and finally, rural Whites are more inclined to justify the use of force, even violence, as an appropriate means for solving political disputes.

The attitude of too many rural Whites may best be described as “I love my country, but not our country.”

Because rural Whites often brag about how much they love the United States, we call this phenomenon the patriotic paradox of rural America.

American Violence: A Documentary History.

An arresting fact about American violence, and one of the keys to understanding its history, is that very little has been insurrectionary. Most of our violence has taken the form of action by one group of citizens against another group, rather than by citizens against the state…. One is impressed that most American violence—and this also illuminates its relationship to state power—has been initiated with a “conservative” bias. It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.[109]

Christian survivalist group formed in 2011 by James Wesley Rawles, Redoubters encourage likeminded Christians to move to sparsely populated areas in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, or the eastern part of Oregon or Washington to create off-the-grid and well-armed Christian communities. “In effect, we’re becoming pistol-packing Amish,” Rawles quipped.[117]

All but three of the 21 “nays” had also voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election, and most were among the 20 votes opposing Kevin McCarthy’s House Speaker bid two years later, including Arizona’s Paul Gosar, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, Georgia’s Andrew Clyde, Maryland’s Andy Harris, Montana’s Matt Rosendale, South Carolina’s Ralph Norman, Texas’s Louie Gohmert, and Virginia’s Bob Good. Eighteen of the twenty-one House holdouts represent either “purely rural” or “rural-suburban” districts. Apparently, “backing the blue” is a conditional sentiment for some of the United States’ most rural House members.[120]

From White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to Arizona state house Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, many of these victims had either supported Trump’s presidential campaigns or worked in the Trump administration.[121]

“it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.” The differences were slight, but rural Americans were most likely to agree, at 35 percent, compared with 29 percent of city dwellers and 25 percent of suburbanites.[122]

the tens of thousands who descended upon Washington on January 6 demanding that Donald Trump be reinstated for a second presidential term were not alone. CPOST found that 25 percent of American adults—roughly 67 million total—believe the “2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Nine percent agree that the “use of force is justified” to restore Trump to the presidency.

Overall, 8 percent agree with both statements. CPOST estimated that this 8 percent translates to roughly 21 million Americans who believe Trump should be restored to office, even if by force.[123]

But Robinson does not fit the traditional image of the small-town, rural southern mayoral candidate that likely comes to mind. He is African American. And Enfield, the state’s poorest city and the nation’s eighth poorest,[1] is majority Black and located in Halifax County, a majority-Black rural county in North Carolina’s Albemarle region.

On May 17, 2022, Mondale Robinson was elected Enfield’s new mayor, capturing 76 percent of the vote. And he did so by promoting a progressive agenda of self-empowerment on issues including livable wages, universal healthcare, and racial equity.

Race and rurality in the United States intertwine in strange ways. At 76 percent, White residents constitute a clear majority of rural citizens. One-third of rural counties is more than 90 percent White, and another third is between 75 percent and 90 percent White.[4] Rural America remains the Whitest part of the country.

But the 24 percent minority share of the rural U.S. population is growing.

The next time you see a reporter from a national newspaper or television network plop down at a local diner to interview a dozen rural African Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos about their fears and aspirations, it may actually be the first time.

[Non-White] rural America receives even lower pay and fewer protections for its labor than does rural white America. And, as my own research shows, this rural America attends very different schools than rural white America, schools that receive far less funding and other resources. In fact, the relationship between rural white communities and rural communities of color is much like the relationship between urban white communities and urban communities of color: separate and unequal.[15]

The bad news is that the share of rural African American, Latino, and Native American–owned businesses is far lower than their national population shares.[24] Led by Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine and Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has twice introduced the Reaching America’s Rural Minority Businesses bill, which would authorize the Department of Commerce to establish small-business training centers at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) designed specifically to stimulate small-business development among rural minorities.[25] Unfortunately, the bill hasn’t come anywhere near a floor vote.

There is a final, asymmetrical challenge rural minorities face: racism itself. There’s no reason to suspect that rural White citizens who score high on what pollsters call “hostile racism” indicators somehow reserve these sentiments for outsiders. When rural schools in minority areas are most likely to be segregated, when rural hospitals that serve mostly minority patients are more likely to close, and when rural poverty is more persistent in minority areas, it is hard not to see implicit or even explicit racism at work in the heartland.

As one local Democratic activist in Gillespie County told us when we asked about politicians staging repeated photo ops in which they don khaki shirts and gaze determinedly across the Rio Grande, Roy “probably spends more time at the border than in his district.”[4] (Roy’s district does not border Mexico.)

In many places, there is scant Democratic presence; the party has little or no organization, and if there is a Democrat at all on the ballot in many races, they may just be a placeholder, someone who agreed to have their name entered but doesn’t do much campaigning.