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AN UTTERLY MISLEADING BOOK ABOUT RURAL AMERICA  
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Tyler Austin Harper
April 4, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ White Rural Rage has become a best-seller—and kindled an academic
controversy. _

, Joseph Rushmore

 

Rage is the subject of a new book by the political scientist Tom
Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman. _White Rural Rage_,
specifically. In 255 pages, the authors chart the racism, homophobia,
xenophobia, violent predilections, and vulnerability to
authoritarianism that they claim make white rural voters a unique
“threat to American democracy.” _White Rural Rage_ is a screed
lobbed at a familiar target of elite liberal ire. Despite this, or
perhaps because of it, the authors appeared on _Morning Joe_, the book
inspired an approving column from _The New York Times_’ Paul Krugman
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and its thesis has been a topic of discussion on podcasts from
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and the right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk. The
book has become a _New York Times _best seller.

It has also kindled an academic controversy. In the weeks since its
publication, a trio of reviews
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by political scientists have accused
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Schaller and Waldman of committing what amounts to academic
malpractice
[[link removed].],
alleging that the authors used shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted
data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations about
white rural Americans. I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the
tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in _White Rural
Rage _or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced
that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.

_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. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto
the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant
errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white
rural Americans. As someone who is from the kind of place the authors
demonize—a place that is “rural” in the pejorative, rather than
literal, sense—I find _White Rural Rage_ personally offensive. I was
so frustrated by its indulgence of familiar stereotypes that I aired
several intemperate critiques of the book and its authors on social
media. But when I dug deeper, I found that the problems with _White
Rural Rage_ extend beyond its anti-rural prejudice. As an academic and
a writer, I find Schaller and Waldman’s misuse of other scholars’
research indefensible.

After fact-checking many of the book’s claims and citations, I found
a pattern: Most of the problems occur in sections of the book that try
to prove that white rural Americans are especially likely to commit or
express support for political violence. By bending the facts to fit
their chosen scapegoat, Schaller and Waldman not only trade on
long-standing stereotypes about dangerous rural people. They mislead
the public about the all-too-real threats to our democracy today. As
serious scholarship has shown—including some of the very scholarship
Schaller and Waldman cite, only to contort it—the right-wing rage we
need to worry about is not coming from deep-red rural areas. It is
coming from cities and suburbs.

The most obvious problem with _White Rural Rage_ is its refusal to
define _rural_. In a note in the back of the book, the authors write,
“What constitutes ‘rural’ and who qualifies as a rural American
… depends on who you ask.” Fair enough. The rural-studies scholars
I spoke with agreed that there are a variety of competing definitions.
But rather than tell us what definition _they_ used, Schaller and
Waldman confess that they settled on _no definition at all_: “We
remained agnostic throughout our research and writing by merely
reporting the categories and definitions that each pollster, scholar,
or researcher used.” In other words, they relied on studies that
used different definitions of _rural_, a decision that conveniently
lets them pick and choose whatever research fits their narrative. This
is what the scholars I interviewed objected to—they emphasized that
the existence of multiple definitions of _rural_ is not an excuse to
decline to pick one. “This book amounts to a poor amalgamation of
disparate literatures designed to fit a preordained narrative,”
Cameron Wimpy, a political scientist at Arkansas State University,
told me. It would be like undertaking a book-length study demonizing
Irish people, refusing to define what you mean by _Irish_, and then
drawing on studies of native Irish in Ireland, non-Irish immigrants to
Ireland, Irish Americans, people who took a 23andMe DNA test that
showed Irish ancestry, and Bostonians who get drunk on Saint
Patrick’s Day to build your argument about the singular danger of
“the Irish.” It’s preposterous.

The authors write that they were “at the mercy of the choices made
by the researchers who collected, sorted, classified, and tabulated
their results.” But reading between the lines, the authors’
working definition of _rural_ often seems to be “a not-so-nice place
where white people live,” irrespective of whether that place is a
tiny hamlet or a small city. Some of the most jaw-dropping instances
of this come when the authors discuss what they would have you believe
is rural America’s bigoted assault on local libraries. “The
American Library Association tracked 1,269 efforts to ban books in
libraries in 2022,” Schaller and Waldman note. “Many of these
efforts occurred in rural areas, where libraries have become a target
of controversy over books with LGBTQ+ themes or discussions of
racism.” The authors detail attacks on a number of libraries: in
Llano, Texas; Ashtabula County, Ohio; Craighead County, Arkansas;
Maury County, Tennessee; Boundary County, Idaho; and Jamestown,
Michigan.

But half of these locations—Craighead County, Maury County, and
Jamestown—do not seem to qualify as rural. What the authors call
“rural Jamestown, Michigan
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scores a 1 out of 10 on one of the most popular metrics, the RUCA
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used to measure rurality (1 being most urban), and is a quick commute
away from the city of Grand Rapids.

That Schaller and Waldman so artfully dodged defining what they mean
by _rural_ is a shame for a host of reasons, not the least of which is
that the question of who is rural is complex and fascinating. Scholars
in rural studies make a distinction between subjective rural identity
and objective rural residence—in other words, seeing yourself as
rural versus living in a place that is geographically rural according
to metrics like RUCA. The thing is, rural identity and rural residence
are very, _very_ different. Though Schaller and Waldman mention this
distinction briefly in their authors’ note, they do not meaningfully
explore it. One political scientist I spoke with, Utah Valley
University’s Zoe Nemerever, recently co-authored a paper comparing
rural self-identification to residence and found a stunning result:
“A minority of respondents who described their neighborhood as rural
actually live in an area considered rural.” Her study found that _72
percent _of people—at minimum—who saw themselves as living in a
rural place did not live in a rural place at all.

It turns out I am one of those people. I grew up in Mechanicsburg,
Pennsylvania, an 88 percent white enclave in the southward center of
the state. Eighteen minutes and nine miles to the east, you hit the
capital city of Harrisburg, which has the best used bookstore in the
tristate area. Nineteen minutes and 13 miles away to the west, you hit
the game lands, where I spent my teenage years playing hooky and
hunting in thick, hard-green mountains. Mechanicsburg feels urban,
suburban, and rural all at once. There are strip malls and car
dealerships. There are trailer parks and farms with beat-to-hell
farmhouses. There are nice suburban neighborhoods with McMansions. My
high school had a Future Farmers of America chapter and gave us the
first day of deer season off. The final week of my senior year, a kid
unballed his fist in the parking lot to show me a bag of heroin.
Another wore bow ties and ended up at Harvard.

What do you call a place like that? It was both nice and not-nice.
Somewhere and nowhere. Once in college, a professor made a wry joke:
Describing a fictional town in a story, he quipped, “It’s the kind
of place you see a sign for on the highway, but no one is _actually_
from there.” He paused, racking his brain for an example. “Like
Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.”

I tend to think of myself as having a comparatively “rural”
identity for a variety of reasons: because Mechanicsburg was more
rural when I was growing up. Because both sides of my family are from
deeply rural places: Mathias, West Virginia (where 100 percent of the
county population is rural), and Huntingdon, Pennsylvania (74 percent
rural). Because, since the age of 10, I have spent nearly all my free
time hunting or fishing, mostly in unambiguously rural areas that are
a short drive from where I live. Because people like that professor
tend to view my hometown as a place that is so irrelevant, it barely
exists. So when Nemerever looked up data on Mechanicsburg and told me
it had a RUCA score of 1 and was considered metropolitan—like
Schaller and Waldman’s erroneous library examples—I was genuinely
surprised. I’d made the same mistake about my own hometown that
Schaller and Waldman had about Jamestown, Michigan.

Scholars who study rural identity say that common misperceptions like
this are why defining _rural_ is so important. “Researchers should
be highly conscious of what ‘rural’ means when they want to
measure relevant social, psychological, and political correlates,” a
study of “non-rural rural identifiers” by Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a
political-science professor at the University of South Carolina,
warns. “Rurality can be a social identity that includes a broad
group categorization, even including people who do not currently live
in a rural area.”

Schaller and Waldman might have understood these nuances—and not
repeatedly misidentified rural areas—if they’d meaningfully
consulted members of the rural-studies community. In a portion of
their acknowledgments section, the authors thank researchers and
journalists in the field who “directed our attention to findings of
relevance for our inquiry.” I contacted all 10 of these people,
hoping to better understand what kind of input Schaller and Waldman
sought from subject-matter experts. One said he was satisfied with the
way his work had been acknowledged, and another did not respond to my
message. Seven reported only a few cursory email exchanges with the
authors about the subject of the book and were surprised to find that
they had been thanked at all.

Although it is not unusual for authors to thank people they do not
know or corresponded with only briefly, it is quite telling that not a
single person I spoke with in rural studies—with the exception of
the Wilmington College rural historian Keith Orejel, who said he was
disappointed that his feedback did not seem to influence the
book—said these men sought out their expertise in a serious way,
circulated drafts of the book, or simply ran its controversial
argument by them in detail.

The more significant problem with _White Rural Rage _is its analysis
of the threat of political violence. A core claim of the book is that
rural Americans are disproportionately likely to support or
potentially commit violence that threatens American democracy.
“Violent or not, anti-democratic sentiments and behaviors come in
many forms and emerge from all over the nation,” Schaller and
Waldman claim. “But rural Whites pose a unique threat.” The
sections where the authors attempt to defend this assertion, however,
contain glaring mistakes.

Schaller and Waldman describe the supposed threat to democracy posed
by “constitutional sheriffs”—members of a right-wing sheriffs
organization
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rural counties. But the authors offer no proof that these sheriffs are
more likely to work in rural places. They cite an article about
“rogue sheriffs elected in rural counties” that is not about rural
sheriffs. And, in what Nemerever described to me as “an egregious
misrepresentation and professional malpractice,” Schaller and
Waldman cite two articles about “constitutional sheriffs” that do
not contain the words _constitutional sheriff_. Schaller and Waldman
also share an anecdote about the antidemocratic adventures of “the
sheriff of rural Johnson County, Kansas” as proof of the
organization’s dangerous influence. They neglect to mention that
Johnson County is thoroughly metropolitan and a short drive from
Kansas City. Per the 2020 census, it is not simply Kansas’s most
populous county; it is the least rural county in the entire state_
_and one of the least rural in the entire country. It also flipped to
Joe Biden in 2020
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after Trump won it
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in 2016. (Schaller and Waldman acknowledged this mistake in an email
to _The Atlantic_; they said they had looked up the information for
Johnson County, Arkansas, which is rural. They said they will correct
the error in future editions of the book.)

The authors cite an article titled “The Rise of Political Violence
in the United States”
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to support their claim that the threat of political violence is
particularly acute in rural America. However, that article _directly
contradicts_ that claim. “Political violence in the United States
has been greatest in suburbs where Asian American and Hispanic
American immigration has been growing fastest, particularly in heavily
Democratic metropoles surrounded by Republican-dominated rural
areas,” the author, Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes. “These areas,
where white flight from the 1960s is meeting demographic change, are
areas of social contestation. They are also politically contested
swing districts.” Schaller and Waller claim, too, that “rural
residents are more likely to favor violence over democratic
deliberation to solve political disputes,” but the article
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they cite as evidence discusses neither political violence nor
democratic deliberation.

This pattern continues when the authors rattle off a list of violent
extremists—including the Pizzagate gunman
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and a pair of men who plotted to capture Michigan Governor Gretchen
Whitmer—implying that these instances are proof of the unique
dangers of “rural” people. But these men are not rural. They’re
all from metropolitan areas with RUCA scores of 1 or 2, situated in
counties that are also metropolitan. Time and time again, Schaller and
Waldman warp the evidence to deflect blame away from metro areas, onto
rural ones.

Nowhere is this shifting of blame more apparent than in Schaller and
Waldman’s assertion that rural Americans “are overrepresented
among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” As one review
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of the book notes, Schaller and Waldman marshal a report
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by the political scientist Robert Pape
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as evidence of this claim. But they completely misunderstand the point
of Pape’s study. When I contacted Pape to ask whether he thought
that his research had been misused, he was unequivocal.

He directed me to the slide in his report cited by Schaller and
Waldman to back up their claims. Schaller and Waldman rely on the
slide to point out, correctly, that 27 percent of Americans with
insurrectionist views are rural and that these views are slightly
overrepresented among rural people. However, they ignore what Pape
explicitly described, in big bold letters, as the report’s “#1 key
finding”: that there are approximately 21 million potential
insurrectionists in the United States—people who believe both that
the 2020 election was stolen _and_ that restoring Trump to the
presidency by force is justified—and they are “mainly urban.”
The authors fail to explain why we should be more worried about the
5.67 million hypothetical rural insurrectionists than the _15.33
million_ who live in urban and suburban areas, have more resources,
made up the bulk of January 6 participants, and are the primary
danger, according to Pape’s report.

“They are giving the strong impression that our study is supporting
their conclusion, when this is false,” Pape told me. He added that
this isn’t a matter of subjective interpretation. The political
scientist stretched his arms so that his right and left hands were in
opposite corners of the Zoom screen: “Here is their argument. Here
is their data. And there’s a gulf in between.”

Pape told me that he had been worried about this book from the moment
he saw the authors discussing it on _Morning Joe _and describing what
they call “the fourfold, interconnected threat that white rural
voters pose to the country.” “This is a tragedy for the
country,” Pape said, “because they’re grossly underestimating
the threat to our democracy.” He went on to say that “the real
tragedy would be if the DHS, the FBI, political leaders took this book
seriously,” because law enforcement and government officials would
be focusing their limited resources on the wrong areas. Even as
Schaller and Waldman accuse the media of not paying enough attention
to the antidemocratic dangers of the far right, the authors are the
ones who are not taking this threat seriously. By shining a spotlight
on a small part of the insurrectionist movement, _White Rural Rage_
risks distracting the public from the bigger dangers.

Arlie Hochschild, a celebrated sociologist and the author of
_Strangers in Their Own Land_ and a forthcoming book
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plaintive note in an email to me about _White Rural Rage_: “When I
think of those I’ve come to know in Pike County, Kentucky—part of
the nation’s whitest and second poorest congressional district—I
imagine that many would not see themselves in this portrait.” She
added that these Kentuckians would no doubt “feel stereotyped by
books that talk of ‘rural white rage,’ by people who otherwise
claim to honor ‘diversity.’”

Kathy Cramer, author of _The Politics of Resentment_, a key work in
the field that is cited by Schaller and Waldman, told me simply:
“The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what
is wrong with our systems—our government, our economy, our modes of
communication—that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard,
and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do,
constructively, about that?” It is a good question. _ _The authors
of _White Rural Rage _might have written a fine book had they taken it
seriously.

“The scholars who have criticized us aren’t bothered by our
methods; they’re disturbed by our message,” Schaller and Waldman
wrote in a statement to _The Atlantic_. “One of our critics, Kristin
Lunz Trujillo, said
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response to our book, ‘we need to be careful as scholars to not
stereotype or condescend to white rural America in a way that erodes
trust and widens divisions.’ Though we would insist in the strongest
possible terms that we engage in neither stereotyping nor
condescension, we nevertheless find that a revealing comment: Rather
than a statement about what the facts are or the scholarship reveals,
it’s a declaration of a political and professional agenda.”

Schaller and Waldman also took issue with my criticism of the book on
social media and in this article. “Like many of our critics,” they
wrote, I “would apparently rather apologize for the revanchist
attitudes among many white rural Americans than speak honestly about
the serious threats facing our secular, pluralist, constitutional
democracy.”

This book will only further erode American confidence in the media and
academia at a moment when faith
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in these institutions is already at an all-time low
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And it will likely pour gasoline on rural Americans’ smoldering
resentment, a resentment that is in no small part driven by the
conviction that liberal elites both misunderstand and despise them.
_White Rural Rage_ provides a rather substantial piece of evidence to
that score, and shows that rural folks’ suspicions are anything but
“fake news.” However, this is only part of the story. And it is
not the most important part.

Schaller and Waldman are right: There _are_ real threats to American
democracy, and we _should_ be worried about political violence. But by
erroneously pinning the blame on white rural Americans, they’ve
distracted the public from the real danger. The threat we must contend
with today is not white rural rage, but white _urban and suburban_
rage
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Instead of reckoning with the ugly fact that a threat to our democracy
is emerging from right-wing extremists in suburban and urban areas,
the authors of _White Rural Rage_ contorted studies and called
unambiguously metro areas “rural” so that they could tell an
all-too-familiar story about scary hillbillies. Perhaps this was
easier than confronting the truth: that the call is coming from inside
the house. It is not primarily the rural poor, but often successful
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white metropolitan men who imperil our republic.

 

Tyler Austin Harper
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assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a
contributing writer at _The Atlantic_.
 

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