White Rural Rage Quotes

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The stores in your hometown are all shuttered? It must be because the Wall Street bank tweeted out an image of a Pride flag.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“So, like all right-wing parties that depend on rural voters, the Republican Party has an interest in maintaining, not alleviating, their struggles. Rural voters who are satisfied and optimistic might consider the entreaties of both parties, but the more dissatisfied and angrier they are, the more they'll stick with the GOP. Come Election Day, despair is a Republican candidate's chief asset, because that despair is easiest to convert into anger, and that anger into votes”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“These perversions of power will worsen in the decades ahead. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will reside in the fifteen most-populous states and choose thirty of the one hundred U.S. senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 per cent of senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators – past, present, and forever.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“In 2020, the age-adjusted gun death rate in rural communities was 40 percent higher than that for large metropolitan areas. The same year, the murder rate in rural America surged 25 percent. Donald Trump was still president in 2020, yet somehow the same media that blamed liberals and Joe Biden for urban crime never held Trump to account for the rural crime surge during his presidency,”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“So, what do rural Whites get in return for all they bestow on the GOP? Almost nothing. The benefits they receive are nearly all emotional, not material.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“It is fair, however, to blame him for making outlandish promises that neither he nor any other president could deliver.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“In rural America, the culture war vibrates with a particular intensity, as elite Republicans know well—and they use it to keep their voters in a state of constant agitation. They use it to divert attention from the places where their agenda is unpopular even among their own supporters. They use it to make sure that those supporters won’t even consider voting for a Democrat ever again.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The story that results is often a disheartening one. Though the various parts of rural America differ in important ways, as a whole, they are weighed down by their struggles: resource economies where powerful interests extracted wealth and left the people who toiled to remove it with little or nothing to show for their decades of labor; manufacturing jobs that fled overseas; inadequate healthcare and physical infrastructure; limited opportunities that push talented young people to leave; and much more. And all this exists within a landscape of political emptiness in which a lack of real competition leaves Democrats believing there’s no point in trying to win rural votes and Republicans knowing they can win those votes without even trying—and give the people who supply them nothing in return. We”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Those elites are giving the base what they think it wants, and while they’re usually not wrong, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that much of the GOP elite views its base as a bunch of easily manipulated rubes.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“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?”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“popular Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies, of which there seem to be hundreds churned out every year, often feature a young woman from the city who finds herself stuck in a small town through some accident of fortune, whereupon she learns the value of a simpler life and often dumps her no-good boyfriend back in the city in favor of the hunky small-town man she meets early in the movie.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Polls repeatedly confirm that many rural Whites believe federal policies favor minorities living in cities. This is a comforting delusion”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“If you've been persuaded that the greatest threat to your way of life is a trans girl on the other side of the state who wants to play on her middle school softball team, not only won't you ever consider voting for a Democrat, but you won't ask much of your Republican representatives, either. You won't hold them accountable for the condition of your streets or the lack of economic opportunities in your town.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Since Donald Trump's rise, the national media have devoted tremendous attention to the political grievances of rural White voters. Reporters and pundits routinely descend upon rural communities, sit down with locals at diners and sports bleachers, and listen earnestly to what downscale rural White voters have to say, but the same national media hardly notice that rural minorities exist or are aware that they have legitimate complaints of their own.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Millions of rural White voters seem undeterred or even thrilled by the former president's statements and actions. In fact, they are the only major geo-demographic cohort among whom Trump performed better in the 2020 presidential contest than he did four years earlier.

With clear eyes and full hearts, rural Whites recognized Trump's exclusionary, reality-defying, undemocratic, and violent tendencies – and then rallied behind him because of, not despite, his repeated disregard for America's most sacred democratic traditions.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Nor can economic anxiety explain why rural African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans – all of whom face even greater economic and health challenges than their White neighbors – exhibit stronger democratic commitments than do rural Whites. We offer a simple explanation for this racialized aspect of the patriotic paradox: Non-White rural citizens are not now nor have they ever been part of what we call America's essential minority.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Not every rural White American espouses xenophobic, conspiratorial, undemocratic, or violent attitudes. But rural Whites are overrepresented across all four of these threats.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Scientific skepticism proved especially lethal when rural Whites – the citizens most dubious of pandemic experts – refused safe COVID-19 vaccines at rates higher than urban and suburban citizens. That skepticism proved fatal for more rural Americans than would have died had heartland vaccination rates mirrored those nationwide percentages.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural than in urban areas.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The attitude of too many rural Whites may best be described as ‘I love my country but not our country.’ Their brand of exclusive patriotism appears conditioned upon maintaining or remaking the U.S. political system to their advantage at the expense of equality and opportunities for Americans different from them.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Rural White Americans assert a deep reverence for the Constitution and America’s democratic principles. Millions of them demonstrate this reverence daily. But the democratic commitments of too many rural Whites are weak, limited, or quickly abandoned. Poll after poll confirms that rural Whites are the vanguard for the xenophobic, reality-defying, undemocratic, and increasingly violent movements that currently threaten to undermine the world's oldest constitutional democracy and the pluralist society that democracy protects.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Even if Trump fails in 2024 and becomes nothing more than the laughable two-bit grifter he always has been at heart, his effect on the politics of rural America will be felt for a generation, if not more. He showed every Republican what rural Whites, and the GOP base more broadly, really want and how to give it to them. The result is a politics saturated in bitterness and bile, and a party whose most loyal voters don't expect their leaders to offer them anything but the ugliest kind of emotional satisfaction. Even when Trump is gone, in rural America he will still be king. And the rest of the country will suffer for it.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Even the common, and perfectly accurate, criticism that Trump doesn't practice what he preaches likely resonates in rural areas, where you often find a strong moral code that is regularly violated by many of the people who live there. The fact that rural areas have plenty of infidelity and teen parenthood (which occurs at significantly higher rates among rural Americans than city dwellers) doesn't necessarily make people reject traditional family values; it can make them cling to those values all the more fervently, as they consider them under constant, visible threat.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“For many years, it was assumed that successful racial appeals had to be offered subtly, to provide voters a kind of internal plausible deniability, so that they could tell themselves they weren't being racist when they responded to such appeals. By the time 2016 came around, this was no longer true. White identity had become important enough that Trump could succeed by wearing his bigotry on his sleeve.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“When one looks to the places where Trump’s support was most intense, again and again one arrives in majority-White rural areas.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“To understand Donald Trump, you have to start with Barack Obama. Trump’s successful candidacy would not have been possible in the wake of any other presidency; It was the backlash against America's first Black president that pushed Trump into the White House.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“This is what rural people mean when they say that Trump ‘speaks our language,’ something we were told more than once during our travels. It's not that he understands their culture in any substantive way; instead, it's more visceral. Trump stroked people’s darkest impulses and said: You deserve to feel this way. You have been wronged and cheated and mocked. Now I will be your wrath. Look at everyone you hate – those overeducated liberals and Hollywood elites and arrogant city people and social justice warriors trying to make you feel bad for being White and being a man and being American. They despise me just as much as they despise you. Let's show them who this country really belongs to.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Whether Trump succeeds in returning to the White House in 2024, his curious appeal to rural Americans is the most important rural political story in decades. Whatever the future holds for Trump, he has left an indelible mark on rural America and, in the process, revealed fundamental truths about the people who find him so compelling.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Denigrating cities and the people who live in them doesn't come just from Trump. The supposed depravity and danger of American cities is hammered home again and again on conservative media, frequently with the implication that the more Black people a city contains, the more dangerous that city must be.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy