Book review & commentary: White Rural Rage

An interesting NYT opinion by Paul Krugman ponders the information and analysis from the 2024 book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller (political science professor) and Paul Waldman (op-ed columnist). The book argues that rural white rage poses an existential threat to American democracy because those voters are increasingly inclined to embrace extremist ideologies, racist beliefs, conspiracy theories, and anti-democratic belief and behavior. Krugman writes (opinion not behind paywall): 

This process [creative destruction in rural areas] and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result, there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia. 

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town.”

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime-working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy but because the jobs just aren’t there. (The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because the jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in health care.)  

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.  

Draw attention to some of these realities, and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist. I’m sure responses to this column will be … interesting.

The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes and rural America as the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.

At this point you’re probably expecting a solution to this ugly political situation. Schaller and Waldman do offer some suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.

If that analysis is mostly accurate, it accords with other research that indicates that rural dissatisfaction and a sense of threat from minorities and non-heterosexuals, and urban disrespect were significant factors in support for DJT in 2016 and 2020. 

 

One commenter commented: 

All those gadgets, devices, things that we have, large and small, in vast numbers, more than ever [....] still have to be manufactured! And they are ……. in factories offshored by big business in ever country in Asia, and across the border in Mexico. And aided and abetted by the US Government. Wonder where the jobs are? The jobs are there, the tradesmen, the supervisor, the manager, the services………..all there for example, on the eastern seaboard of Thailand - the Detroit of Asia. Cheaper, lower labor and environmental standards, protective barriers, low taxes…. That’s globalism. And that is the decline hollowing out of America and Japan too.

Krugman responded:

I actually did acknowledge the role of imports. But I’ve actually done the math: even if we completely eliminated our trade deficits, manufacturing would still be a much smaller employer than it used to be, and agriculture wouldn’t gain at all. We can’t recreate the economy of the 1960s, no matter how hard we try.

Another commenter commented (incoherently, IMO): 

If you need to grow up in poverty and ignorance to see the problem, then maybe I can help. The democratic party assures these people and other people that they will ameliorate their plight. Their pitch is that it could get a whole lot worse but they are here to take care of you. Trump tells them it could get a whole lot better. He's right it can be a whole lot better and it is time to for the democratic party to say the same. People want to thrive and not just survive. Communities can and should be nurturing. [what does nurturing mean, insulting and slandering urban people, while voting for DJT?]

Krugman responded:

But the reality is that Biden is making a serious effort to revitalize rural communities with his industrial policies, but gets no credit, while Trump did nothing for them and will get something like 80 percent of their votes.