White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, Penguin Random House, 320 pages, $32
A new book, White rural rage, paints rural white Americans, a small and dwindling minority in the country, as the greatest threat to American democracy. The authors, the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman, try to support this thesis by citing academic publications. We are two of the scholars whose work they cite and we cry scandal.
The general argument of White rural rage is that rurality can be equated with racism, xenophobia, conspiracism and anti-democratic beliefs. But rigorous studies show that rural identity is Not reducible to these beliefs, which are far more numerous outside rural communities than within them. To reach a conclusion so at odds with the scholarly consensus, Schaller and Waldman repeatedly commit academic malpractice.
Consider the “ecological fallacy” of political geography, on which some of the most salacious arguments are based White rural rage to depend. Most people know that it is not possible to discuss something about individuals because of the way the groups to which that individual belongs behave. The most famous example of this poor reasoning is thinking that because the wealthier states of Massachusetts and California vote Democrat, rich people everywhere vote Democrat. The opposite is true.
But Schaller and Waldman rely on this well-known fallacy to support their most provocative claims. Because authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary, and because rural residents tend to support Trump, they argue that rural residents are more likely to be authoritarian. Because white evangelicals are more likely to support Christian nationalist beliefs, and because 43 percent of rural residents identify as evangelical, they say the hotbed of Christian nationalism is in rural communities. Perhaps the most egregious form of guilt by association occurs in a weakly sourced analysis of those who support “constitutional sheriffs”: not a single study on rural attitudes is cited in that section of the book.
The situation is getting worse. In several cases, authors misinterpret what the academic research they cite says. For example, they use a report from the Chicago Project on Security and Threats to argue that “rural Americans are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” But the current report concludes just the opposite: “The more rural the county, the lower the rate of dispatch of insurrectionists” into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Also, when a peer-reviewed article in the journal Political behavior By comparing rural and non-rural beliefs about whether politically motivated violence is a valid means of pursuing political change, it was found that rural Americans are actually less in favor of political violence.
Another example comes when the authors rely on a Public Religion Research Institute report on QAnon conspiracy theories. The report has its fundamental problems, including a suspect measure of QAnon support in the first place, but what Schaller and Waldman do with this data is even more egregious. First, the authors don’t even interpret the model results correctly, writing that the results mean that “QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural areas than urban ones.” But the report presents probability ratios, meaning that living in a rural area increases the probability by only 30%. Inaccurate interpretation aside, if they were more statistically literate they would see that it’s probably not a noteworthy pattern. On the exact same page, model results suggest that, compared to white Americans, being black increases the likelihood of believing in QAnon by 90%! Strange results like this are red flags that should make us ask questions, not confirm our precedents.
Beyond issues of sparse and selective citations, the book misrepresents the findings of numerous scholars who have built careers conducting research on rural politics and identity.
The authors characterize the academic concept of rural resentment (the less catchy academic term that Schaller and Waldman have apparently renamed “anger”) necessarily includes racial resentment as a constituent component. But academic work on rural identity has overwhelmingly demonstrated that these two aspects are distinguishable. They are different concepts.
Indeed, as we have painstakingly demonstrated in our work, rural resentment involves perceptions of geographic inequality. Many rural populations see inequality in how politicians pay attention, which communities receive resources and which do not, and how different types of communities are represented in the media. This is not racial prejudice by any other name.
Schaller and Waldman favorably cite our research showing that there is a modest correlation between rural resentment and racial resentment, a commonly used attitudinal measure of negative racial stereotypes. What they fail to notice is the only statistically and intellectually valid conclusion one could draw from our data: While this slight correlation exists, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.
In another peer-reviewed publication miscited by Schaller and Waldman, we found that rural resentment strongly explains rural preferences and behavior even when controlling, statistically, for a number of factors, including racial resentment, which Schaller , Waldman and others get confused. It. The value of our academic work has been to clarify the local dynamics of American politics, to say that there is much more than anger and rebellion in the heart of the country. It is distressing to see a book cite our work to make misleading arguments.
At a time when trust in experts is declining across America, faulty analyzes like ideas in White rural rage could pose a greater threat to American democracy than anything from the countryside. It’s popular these days to say “follow the science.” Well, science shows there is no mystery behind rural anger: Years of neglect, neglect and contempt have led rural America to view “experts” like Schaller and Waldman as the enemy.