White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

by Tom Schaller

Though most rural citizens are represented at all levels of government by conservative Republicans, those officials somehow bear no responsibility for their constituents’ problems.

But Hollywood didn’t kill the family farm and send manufacturing jobs overseas. College professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids into rural communities. Immigrants didn’t shutter rural hospitals and let rural infrastructure decay. The outsiders and liberals at whom so many rural Whites point their anger are not the ones who have held them back—and as long as they keep believing that they are, rural people won’t be able to find their way to an effective form of politics.

the decline of so many rural communities has caused many rural Whites to question whether the U.S. political system properly and sufficiently serves them.

“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,” warns political scientist Steven Levitsky,

Today, rural White Americans receive a special kind of deference, not necessarily from the legal system but from the political and cultural systems, one enjoyed by no one else.