White Rural Trump Supporters Are a Threat to Democracy
White Rural Trump Supporters Are a Threat to Democracy
A new book shows how many supposed “elitist stereotypes” of rural MAGA voters are true—and backed by hard data.
In the popular imagination of many Americans, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum, the typical MAGA supporter is a rural resident who hates Black and Brown people, loathes liberals, loves gods and guns, believes in myriad conspiracy theories, has little faith in democracy, and is willing to use violence to achieve their goals, as thousands did on Jan. 6.
According to a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
The electorial college is a threat to democracy.
But neither political party wants to hand that control over to voters.
We need a critical mass of progressive politicians in office before we can fix the system, which is why they're everyone else's biggest political enemy
The funny thing is the electoral college was designed to counter exactly this event. In the case an absolute tyrant is going to get voted in, the electoral college is supposed to be the last chance to challenge it. But with the way the GOP is going, ain't no one gonna challenge anything.
As they say, the devil will come bearing a cross wrapped in the American flag.
The GOP has shown, and proven, they will use any and all means necessary, including violence, to gain power. This isn't theoretical anymore.
I'm so tired of my family members and other people that identify as "centralist" saying that both sides are bad.
No....only one side has used violence to overthrow an election. And that side's political leadership said it was "normal political discourse".
If both sides are the same, then you should be upset that "both sides" are violent.
That was the story, but the real reason was the existing tyrants didn't want to be overthrown either.
You have to have a realistic view of what we started out with to understand why 99% of the people in politics don't want to change it.
At the end of the day, America has never really been a democracy. And the people who can change that just don't want to.
It's just easiest to hold onto that power when we think change is just an election away. It's a lot of elections away, we can't just win one and go home. It's a war not a battle.
Right?? Seems like gerrymandering is the bigger threat to democracy here.
The electorial college is a threat to democracy.
This is correct and the actual point of the story.
I read the MSNBC article about this book last week and came away with “Wyoming’s 600,000 residents hold the same influence as California’s 39 million.”
Rural America is mostly a wasteland. It's either where people of means deliberately choose to live away from society, or it's people who are too ignorant, poor and/or drug-addled to have much choice. Neither group is going to be left-leaning... and that's why when you look at electoral maps, you see all that red.
Pick a highway, any will do, travel along it and tell me what you see. I already know. One little failed town after another. They might have a dive bar or ancient gas station, but most commercial buildings will be long abandoned. If you need anything, you'll have to find a decent city with a generic walmart, dollar general, mcdonalds, etc. Long gone are the mom-and-pop grocers, general stores, etc.
The irony is these are solid red Republican districts. Cities have major problems too, but they are full of action; plans, projects, hopes of a better future. There is no future for the average rural American.
They are frustrated and angry, as well they should be. Too bad they can't see the forest through the trees.
So true.
As a resident of one of these towns, another issue is that many people who are knowledgeable or capable are simply trapped. Several years ago in the area I live we use to have an economic development council that sponsored some proposals on alternatives to the anchor industry here (coal fired power generation), I shit you not, one of the remarks made by the workshops was a reference to a 2017 WSJ article that stated "rural is the new ‘inner city.’”
Rural areas have, and I'm quoting someone who presented at a workshop "lower economic status, lower education levels, higher wage gap, poorer health, higher rates of teen birth, and greater impacts from the opioid epidemic."
The largest obstacle facing the trapped knowledgeable and educated people in rural areas is the obscene fucking cost of housing and the double-negative we're facing on having little equity and cheap housing, where we want to move somewhere desirable and progressive having housing that's beyond our lifetime earnings potential.
For the ignorant, this feeds into the anger cycle of wanting to just burn the whole thing down, and for the reds they look at every way they can fuck things up for the rest of us as a middle finger back at the country for the squalor they're stuck with. They'd rather burn the forest down than try to fix anything, because they're also lazy. Lazy in the sense of not wanting or accepting change. They'll work hard at what they know, but learning new concepts is pushed against.
That doesn't make it right, and I agree with you on all counts. Unity would get them a hell of a lot farther than the same tired old Reagan rhetoric they peddle. I'm just extremely fortunate in threading the needle through economic transition and getting to stay at my house without worrying about having to move, and I don't like the city after having grown up in the Bay Area California. What you said still resonates with me as I can tell you understand it. We have no action plan and no hope because these towns are full of people who would just rather be angry than change.
One thing you can be sure of is that they all have a dollar store.
Yeah I know they’re facts. I spend far too much time as a semi-passing trans woman in rural America. I think a lot of people overestimate the proportions of these people, I’ve met so many thoughtful, kind, and progressive hicks, hillbillies, and other rural sorts.
But the fact is I’ve never seen passive aggressive Bible verses on mailboxes in cities. I’ve never heard an educated urban coworker rant and rave about how blm protesters are funded by George soros. I’ve never seen city folk wear a mask that says “government control device” on it or carry a Bible with them onto a factory floor or put newsmax on the company share point.
And the armed city folk I know are far more likely to be responsible gun owners and not have a couch gun. Jesus fucking shit so many people talk about their fucking couch gun and they always act like it’s reasonable and normal and every gun owner has one instead of the reality that that’s not a safe place to have a gun. They also don’t realize that you shouldn’t advertise owning the only thing that gets more valuable when stolen, especially not by putting a bumper sticker saying one is in the fucking car.
I'm sorry... couch gun??? Like they just shove a gun into the couch cushions? What the hell kind of purpose would that serve? Opening a beer can or turning on the tv? Or are they all just living in constant paranoia of someone kicking their door in and trying to kill them?
Or turning around in their driveways apparently
I couldn’t tell you. It boggles the mind in fact. This is so normal to these people that no explanation is necessary
I’m sorry… couch gun??? Like they just shove a gun into the couch cushions?
Usually this means one accessible while sitting on the couch. Not necessarily in the couch cushions.
What the hell kind of purpose would that serve?
Home invasion. Exceedingly unlikely but some folks are paranoid. Same basic logic as having a gun in a bedside table, but for when you aren't in bed.
The funny part is if one ever did want to attack these rural folks, the logical method would be use literal fire. A drone would prevent having to risk their weapons. Then let their ammo hoards do the work. Use the drone against anyone who flees.
They seem to think people want to break in and rape and pillage but they're so over invested in fire power there is nothing much to steal and rape is more their thing than the left's.
They are not ready for a real apocalypse scenario or an invading force because as you've noted, we all assume they are heavily armed and their defense begins and ends with their gun fantasies.
Then let their ammo hoards do the work.
Minor correction to your relatively insane post, but rounds that cook off generally don't have enough velocity to really do any significant damage, especially when they're not exposed out in the open.
I have these stereotypes, because I've met these people. I used to live among them. So many Confederate flags in northern Michigan
Our style of government is the largest threat to democracy.
We need to eliminate the electoral college, primaries, the Senate, President restricted to 1 term, perhaps 6 years, term limits for the House, All elections publicly funded, No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied. No party affiliation on any campaign documents, signs, advertisements, no straight ticket voting.
I support this entirely, but good fucking luck
The US can't even figure out giving IDs to its citizens, what makes you think they can make a cryptographically secure voting app? Not to mention that all forms of electronic voting opens up new attack vectors, which will definitely be exploited.
Just make election day a public holiday, make mail-in voting easier and assign enough polling stations with sufficient personnel to prevent long queues.
You know, the deriders of this bring up some good points, but I'd also like to bring up the point that digitally secured voting doesn't really need to be a super great solution. It would be great if it was, sure, but it doesn't need to be great, it just needs to be better than the alternative, which is pretty easy, I think. Voting analog is not necessarily a very secure way to vote either, as many people who remember the "hanging chads" issue will be quick to point out. It's also a pretty massive inconvenience for some people, which shouldn't really be discounted as a thing that prevents people from voting. "Oh but if they can't spare the time we don't want their votes anyways", but then you gotta keep in mind that in some places the wait times are gonna be multiple hours upon hours, and maybe days.
In any case, if you still wanted analog voting for any particular reason, you could still keep it open as a backup, which might not be a bad idea generally.
The 17th should be reverted and Senators should be elected by the state legislatures, not abolished altogether. It should serve it's intended purpose as the voice of the States. The Electoral College also still serves a purpose, but all states should be proportional delegate instead of winner take all. Ranked Choice or something similar is also needed, because FPTP always results in 2 shitty parties and is a root cause of many of our issues.
The House definitely need to be unlocked and proportional to population. Term limits are needed in both House and Senate, and money definitely needs to be removed from politics. Government provided war chests and that's all you get, hard agree on that. Hard agree on no ads, no PACs, etc. Get your message out in debates and town halls in an actual real campaign.
We should also get rid of the two party system by introducing a party chartered to only support or oppose things that multiple 3rd party polls find over one standard deviation from the norm support.
It's insane that given a political distribution that's normal for most topics we arbitrarily divide it into two halves rather than focusing on the center.
Even as someone who would fall to the left of the first standard deviation, I'd much rather live in a world where there was consistent stability around the norms as I fought to move the social norms in my preferred direction over time than live in a world where there's a 50% chance of Nazis being a thing again.
A significant majority of the county agrees on a surprisingly broad number of major topics, and yet we're divided into two camps currently being driven more and more by outspoken fringes that represent less and less of the general population, with everyone else falling in line out of a greater fear of the "other team."
No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied.
You are seriously underestimating just how many people don't have smartphones (22.5 million eligible voters in the US). A number of your other suggestions are good, but the idea of all digital voting needs at least some form of backup option for people who either have hardware access issues or digital competency issues.
Get fucked. These people are products of poverty and the system that is designed to fail them.
This is just Democrat/Liberal PMC propaganda to help them feel better about their abandonment of the working class people of America for the benefit of their donor class.
Then they have a shocked Pikachu face when the people they left to stagnate and rot, turn out to be the shitty products of their environment aka the neoliberal hellscape of modern day America.
And now that they are shitty people, we can just forget all about how we got here, and put all the blame on them.
the people they left to stagnate and rot,
Part of the problem is that they continue to vote against their own interests, making it impossible for the left to help them, as they continue to vote Republican.
They have been voting against their own interests for decades.
Their grandparents filled in local swimming pools with concrete because they would rather do that then share with the colored folks.
I fully agree with you here that we're not having a conversation about what produces these people. I have parents that are quite terrible people, but I can see what made them that way. They've watched their savings and pensions evaporate and their job opportunities dwindle. They feel strongly that the government doesn't support their interests and share the feeling that most Americans have that the system isn't working. They don't feel represented.
Supporting Trump and other ridiculous conservative positions is their way of lashing out. It's not a productive response, but I feel that this disenfranchisement is a major driver that creates these people. They are Americans too, and we should be asking what we can do to build unity and improve America for everyone.
Yes, they are still responsible for their actions. However, I think that it's equally bad to ignore the factors that are producing these people in mass. I prefer to view these people as misinformed children who rather hurt others than fix problems.
Except that they're not misbehaving children, they're fully grown adults with agency to make their own decisions. An asshole with shitty parents is still an asshole.
What I can do for rural Americans is vote for Democrats that will raise my taxes and use them to fund these poor states. Then they pull shit like this. Their local GOP parties and the voters that agree with them are evil to do that to kids. Rince and repeat for expanding Medicaid, etc
Then they have a shocked Pikachu face when the people they left to stagnate and rot, turn out to be the shitty products of their environment aka the neoliberal hellscape of modern day America.
I mean, the Democrats didn't really leave these people to rot, they've largely been prevented from doing anything to help them since rural areas vote so overwhelmingly Republican. What do you really expect the Democrats to have done when it's the other party these folks keep electing to represent them? They effectively say they want the policies that have left them so exposed and disadvantage, then they have a shocked Pikachu face that "those darn liberals haven't done anything to help us." Heck, even in broad terms, their voting habits have screwed all of us by preventing broadly popular things like universal health care or drug reform from going forward because of the disproportionate power the self-destructive votes they cast wield at the national level. My sympathy for them is extremely limited, and my patience at their insistence in making everyone else suffer for their god-awful politics has long since run out.
Private military contractor?
Professional-managerial Class
The US election system that gives these people completely disproportionate political influence is a threat to democracy.
I think the best solution to this issue is to change the calculus of representation. The article mentions that rural areas have out-sized representation, but it only discusses the senate. The house, as well, has out-sized representation for rural areas. For example, California has approximately one Representative for every 749,000 people, while Montana has one Representative for every 560,000 people.
I think that to truly honor the idea of "one person, one vote", 3 steps need to be taken:
- Abolish the electoral college
- Dissolve the Senate, leaving the House as the only Legislative body
- Dramatically scale up the number of representatives in the House, and tie representative count directly to population.
I'd love to see, for example, 1 representative for every 250,000 people, or something similar. That would push us from the current 435 to about 1,340 representatives, which would definitely require a new chamber for sessions. But it would also mean that demographic groups would be much better represented, and it would be much more difficult for batshit insane people like Marjorie Taylor Green to get or remain elected. If you're representing fewer people, those people have more incentive to vote.
And it's not like growing the House is a far-fetched idea. In fact, it is baked into the constitution. Article I, Section 2 says that the number of representatives should be directly tied to the population, with each representative representing no more than 30,000 people, and that adjustments to the size of the House should occur after every 10 year census:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.
And this is what happened, with the size of the House growing every 10 years up until, in 1929, they decided to keep it constant based on the figures from the 1930 survey. Having a cap on the number of representatives harms democracy. We can see the results in the decaying towns of rural America, and the batshit insane cultists who want to overthrow our government and install a fascistic theocracy.
You misread the passage. It doesn't say
each representative representing no more than 30,000 people
It says
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand
That means the opposite of what you said: each representative should represent no less than 30,000 people.
Whoops, my bad. You are absolutely correct, of course.
The house, as well, has out-sized representation for rural areas. For example, California has approximately one Representative for every 749,000 people, while Montana has one Representative for every 560,000 people.
This is a direct consequence of the House being a fixed size. The method used minimizes the average difference in people/representative for any two states. You literally can't make it any better so long as the House is a set number of people, and increasing the size of the House to be one Rep per X people creates practical and logistical issues as regards meetings and floor debate and the like.
The reality is you have a couple of tiny states that get outsized representation by having the minimum one representative, and you have California that is just so much higher population than any other state that it blows the scale on the other end. For the rest of the states, it actually works pretty well. I've joked before that we don't really **need ** two Dakotas and Montoming would be a perfectly good name for another merged state. Or chop California into several pieces.
My friend's in-laws in rural Missouri are cutting holes into the walls to store guns in for whatever version of the apocalypse they believe is coming.
They are just more empathetic than you realize. They just put themselves in the shoes of the black/brown people and were like:
If I were them, I would have definitely shot me by now.
For what!?!
What the hell did some stupid farmer in the bumbfuck middle of nowhere do to warrant being shot in their home by people of a different skin color?
Some racist asshole living in a rural inbred community where everyone looks the same because their family tree has the same roots of people who never left their own poverty stricken hellhole didn't actually do shit to anyone outside of voting the way they were themselves indoctrinated.
There's definitely a lot of far right idiots being worked up into a frenzy of normalized violence that's very concerning.
But in one of the rare instances of legit "both sides-ism" I'm starting to see a very concerning trend of the far left giving in more and more to the language of normalized violence too.
I have a feeling both sides of this are useful idiots with the same hand pulling the strings, but c'mon dude - use your critical thinking skills before regurgitating rhetoric like that mindlessly.
I know someone whose grandmother died some years ago and when they were cleaning out her house and doing some reno to it, they kept finding hatchets stored in places that would be accessible in case something went down, including several concealed inside walls. Apparently if things turned bad, granny was going to go down axe in hand. This feels like the same energy, just with more money to hide more expensive weapons.
Ok but that is a tiny bit funny, the mental image of it.
Headlines like this are problematic. I think we can all agree that Trump has done a lot of damage to democracy in the US, but are rural Trump supporters really more dangerous than urban Trump supporters? That claim is suspect, and the article provides no evidence to support it (it provides evidence that most Trump supporters are rural, which is a totally different claim.)
And saying that white rural Trump supporters are worse than non-white rural Trump supporters is an even more serious claim. It's racially discriminatory, and seems totally baseless in this article.
The article has no evidence of these claims, and seems to indicate that the book doesn't even make the claims of the headline.
(I'm not objecting to the claims that Trump supporters are mostly rural and mostly white. That is common knowledge.)
65% of rural America voted for Trump in 2020 nearly half 47% believe the election was stolen that's half of all rurals not half of rural Republicans. Support for political violence is high with 1 in 3 Republicans nationwide and higher yet in rural America. It is easier for violence to take root where their is monocultural acceptance of the false premises used to justify it.
these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
Listen, I'm as blue as my balls on prom night, but we'd have a huge problem if the right said some shit like this.
I think I'll withhold judgement until reading the book. Partly due to my own confirmation bias, but also partly:
And Schaller and Waldman bring receipts.
In a book filled with reams of data to back up their arguments, Schaller and Waldman show that rural whites “are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion” and are far less likely to believe that diversity makes America stronger.
loves gods and guns
Ok, I was well aware of the gun fetishism, but I gotta say that the polytheism is very surprising!
I think it's funny that they call themselves monotheistic and then do these verbal gymnasics to keep that true (like calling other deities 'saints' or claiming that Jesus is god's son but also 100% the same entity as god - oh yeah and that holy spirit thing too).
You mean you're NOT your own dad, and also a disembodied spirit? I thought everyone was!
The most generous interpretation of Christianity is that it's monotheish. The Doctrine of the Trinity is like crypto: you can't understand it unless you believe in it.
Maybe they mean the sometimes not so subtle differences in worship by various sects of Christianity?
I've always just imagined they're more susceptible to manipulation. Primarily getting news by word of mouth, the TV, or radio.
That’s definitely probably part of it, but I think the biggest issue is homogeneity. Racism is hard when you can chat with black and brown people regularly. You aren’t hating some perceived immigrants but an actual human being that you know. Especially in places like the rural north and Midwest there was no mass movement of black people there. Similarly people will hate on Muslims in rural Kentucky but not in Dearborn Michigan.
And it’s not just racism. Queer people have always existed everywhere. But rural queer people are often much less open about it and often move away including before coming out. So people in bumfuck nowhere either dont have any queer people anymore, or their queer people are closeted or invisible.
Educated people also tend to prefer urban or suburban areas. Yeah maybe you’ve got a few lawyers or people who went to a local Christian college, and if you have a factory it has some engineers for sure. And you definitely have people who went to agricultural college. But you don’t have professors or scientists or people with humanities degrees. And notice those degrees I mentioned are overwhelmingly white and male programs. You can get them and not make black or brown or queer or even female acquaintances in school.
By and large more rural areas got affordable or accessible internet access much later so they are more succeptable to scams as well.
It's weird because the leaked Parler account maps showed the density of membership was in red parts of cities. Less in rural.
Is that maybe just because there's more people in cities? Rather than a higher concentration of parker users compared to the general population
Yes. People in rural areas aren't using parler, they're on Facebook like all the other boomers.
It's fact. I live in KY. Many are stupider than you think.
I visited the bourbon trail area. Everyone was lovely to talk with but that was as long as things stayed superficial..
And what is the consequence from this observation?
you can remember that you hate your parents some more
these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
As demonstrated by this book written by elitists, Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post,
Point made. Depending on where exactly Waldman currently resides they might both be 3/3.
persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
We looked at some data and sources intending specifically to justify our prejudices and found that our prejudices were in fact justified! Who knew!
Is this irony?
If they didn't do solid fieldwork, I'd be skeptical. Material conditions partly explain why people are the way they are, can't see liberals changing that.
Until rural Americans demand more from their elected leaders, i.e., Republicans, their plight will only get worse. In Schaller’s view, this doesn’t necessarily mean electing Democrats—but, rather, better Republicans.
-Michael Cohen, Author of OP Article
Because if everything is really the fault of politicians, where are all the bright, honest, intelligent Americans who are ready to step in and replace them? Where are these people hiding? The truth is, we don’t have people like that.
-George Carlin
Kill all the natives and take their land. Manifest Destiny