White rural Americans are a “racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay” authoritarian fifth column that poses an existential threat to our republic.

Unless they are actually a downtrodden people who rightly resent the condescension of liberal elites and wish for little more than “to preserve a sense of agency over their future and a continuity of their community’s values and social structures.”

These are the twin poles of blue America’s current debate over why rural white folks vote the way they do.

This argument is as old as the urban-rural divide itself. But the latest round was triggered by White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, a bestselling book from the political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman.

Schaller and Waldman argue that rural white voters are exceptionally reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. In their telling, these retrograde impulses turn this group into easy prey for a Republican Party that shutters rural hospitals, denies workers’ health insurance, erodes labor rights — and then says, in so many words, let them eat hate.

Many commentators and political scientists have taken exception to this argument. The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper argues that White Rural Rage “illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits.”

In his account, the real threat to American democracy “is not white rural rage, but white urban and suburban rage” — a fact that would be plain to Waldman and Schaller, Harper says, if they’d only paid more careful attention to the studies their book cites.

Colby College political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, meanwhile, insists that White Rural Rage’s “simplistic” and inaccurate thesis amounts to little more than “an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.”

In my view, this debate has gotten a bit muddled, with each side dancing around inconvenient facts. The argument between White Rural Rage’s champions and its critics would generate more light (and perhaps less heat) if all involved grappled with five important truths:

1) Rural white people are more supportive of right-wing authoritarianism than are urban or suburban ones

Harper’s central claim — that rural white people actually pose less of a threat to American democracy than urban and suburban ones — rests on faulty reasoning.

His case can be boiled down into three points:

• A 2021 paper in Journal of Democracy found that “political violence” in the US “has been greatest in suburbs where Asian American and Hispanic American immigration has been growing fastest.”
• Several high-profile right-wing extremists, including the “pizzagate” gunman, came from areas that aren’t rural, at least by certain definitions of that term.
• The vast majority of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen — and that Trump would therefore be justified in reclaiming the presidency by force — live in urban areas.

These facts establish that white rural Americans are not uniquely right-wing or authoritarian; supporters of Trump and the January 6 Capitol riot can be found in nearly every category of municipality. Harper is right to object to the singling out of white rural voters writ........

© Vox