“White Rural Rage” with Tom Schaller

“White Rural Rage” with Tom Schaller”

Refuse Fascism Episode 199

Sun, Apr 28, 2024 12:51PM • 1:02:36

Tom Schaller 00:00

Rural white people in particular believe that they have been sidelined, ignored, disrespected, and they direct that anger particularly at urban elites, and especially minorities, because they believe that the government is tuned to towards cities and the minorities who live there — that their way of life is disappearing accordingly because of political decisions. It’s true that from a purely numerical standpoint that white Christian and male power is receding. But does that justify them removing the guardrails from democracy? Does that justify them saying the President should act unilaterally in direct defiance of the Constitution? Does that justify their incredible xenophobia toward immigrants? Does that justify their higher racial resentment scores? It does not.

Sam Goldman 01:00

Welcome to Episode 199. Wow! 199 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. I want to start by thanking everyone who rates and reviews this show like Lil Mama, who this past week over on Apple podcasts gave us five stars, being cute, titled their review, A must listen podcast, and wrote: “This podcast tells a no nonsense story of today’s USA, and what we need to look deeper into. Please pay attention, because once in power, fascism refuses to follow the rules, preventing traditional Democratic tools from unseating its oppressive power.”

So I’m asking for you to help reach more people during the year when refusing fascism is so needed. Needed more than ever. After you listen to the show, be sure to share it with others. Click the share button in your app to send this episode to a friend or 10. Or be like Lil Mama and let the world know why you listen by rating and reviewing on Apple podcast or your listening platform of choice.

Today we’re sharing an interview with Tom Schaller, co author of ‘White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” But first, it has been a week just full of evidence that this fascist threat is indeed advancing. If for some reason you thought that the Supreme Court of the United States had retained any legitimacy or was bound in any way by the rule of law, or if you somehow managed to minimize or laugh off the possibility that not only will trump never see a day in court for trying to overthrow the 2020 election, let alone face any accountability for his coup attempt, but that the Supreme Court will seriously entertain… yes, presidents do crimes with impunity, then this week must have been a shocker. Yes, my friends we are in the Bad Place — a very bad place. It’s called America 2024.

On Thursday, in the last oral arguments for their term, the Supreme Court heard Trump v. United States aka: Can trump be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election? or do presidents get to do all the crimes? Ian Millhiser for Vox summarized it this way: “It’s unclear if the court is going to go so far as to definitively rule that the President of the United States is allowed to do crimes, but they appear likely to make it impossible for the criminal justice system to actually do anything about Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election. At least before Trump could be elected president again.” Yes, just in time for him to do it again. But more effectively.

Madiba Dennie points out in her latest Balls and Strikes article, “In a way, the oral argument was much like the 2021 insurrection itself: Attorneys shamelessly aided Trump’s effort to reject the rules and processes everyone else must accept, effectively placing himself above the law. Disturbingly, this time around, those attorneys include justices on the Supreme Court.” Our friend, Paul Street has some pieces up on his Substack worth checking out on this topic. One so aptly titled Fash Supremes Helping Immunize America Against what’s Left of Democracy in Service to the Divine Right of Herr Trump, and his latest Substack, Supreme “Suprise: Let’s Stop Suspending Belief on the Fascist Shit Going Down.

In it, he builds on some of the themes that we on the pod have been addressing, and so I’m going to quote from it a bit, but go read it — see the show notes for the whole thing. “Nobody should have been surprised by January 6th and the broader rolling coup attempt of which it was the wild physical expression. I wasn’t. Donald “take down the metal detectors” Trump and other Trumpists had made it abundantly clear that his first presidency was a wild and fascist departure from the previous and long established bourgeois democratic norm, and that it would not accede to a peaceful transfer of power if it lost its first attempt at re election. But most Americans who cared to think about their nation’s politics to any serious degree couldn’t or wouldn’t process that wild reality. It was too far outside what they took for granted as normal political and presidential behavior in the U.S.; you lose an election and you accept defeat. Now we live in a time when political violence and intimately related big Hitlerian lie about a supposed stolen election have been normalized to the point where the vengeful fascist maniac and wannabe strong man for life, Trump, has a strong chance of returning to the most dangerous office on Earth, the U.S. imperial presidency. A presidency his new army of Republi-fascist policy wonks are scheming to make more powerful than ever. And yet, many of us still cling to the notion that the fascist creep will be properly checked and balanced, and that we’ll return to the old “normal.”

Paul goes on to say: “Surely many of us thought this wild and extreme immunity claim would elicit sharp repudiation from the U.S. Supreme Court. When the case came before the High Court, this disbelieving reasoning went: The only practical question would be, not whether the Supremes would rule against Herr Trump, but whether they would rule soon enough for the Federal January 6th trial to take place before the 2024 election. Think again. Because guess what, Trump’s fascist lawyer made the same fucking arch authoritarian argument before the Supreme Court two days ago, and the highest judicial body in the land seemed quite ready to take it seriously.”

Let’s get real, these fascists are still setting the terms, swinging the Supreme Court like a sledgehammer, planning their vengeance and preparing for a civil war with Trump poised to return to the White House. This is a time for truth, not delusion, for struggle, not complacency.

This past week, the U.S. supreme court also heard arguments in the emergency medical treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) case, aka cases consolidated into Moyle v. United States. The case sought to determine whether EMTALA, a federal law — do emergency abortions, save women — supersedes state law — abortions banned, kill women — for pregnant women in Idaho, in this case, with repercussions for pregnant women and others in red states cross country. EMTALA is a federal law that requires most U.S. hospitals to provide an abortion to patients experiencing a medical emergency if an abortion would be the correct medical treatment for that emergency. The law is clear cut. It applies even when the state that the patient seeks care in has abortion bans on the books that prohibit abortion, even when it’s necessary to save a patient’s life or protect their health.

Basically, the Biden administration brought the EMTALA case to the court because EMTALA says that a woman must be provided stabilizing emergency care before she is in the throes of death, meaning if she could lose an organ or be seriously harmed, she should be provided with abortion care. Idaho says: nah. The infuriating lunacy of Wednesday was captured well by Jessica Valenti in her tweet: “I don’t know how to raise my daughter in a country where the Supreme Court is debating how many organs are okay for women to lose before providing health care.”

Madiba Dennie writing for Balls and Strikes noted: “It used to be common knowledge among lawyers that state laws are preempted by federal laws, not to mention common knowledge among people with consciences that doctors are supposed to care for patients who are in medical crises. But the Supreme Court muddied the waters when it rescinded the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Today these common sense principles are now at risk of being hopelessly up ended by the court, which would allow states to deny patients federally protected care and lead to suffering or even death,” going on to say, “This disregard for the lives of women is central to abortion bans and the Court’s jurisprudence. If the court rules for Idaho it would rewrite EMTALA to carve pregnant people out from the Federal guarantee of emergency medical care, contributing further to the country’s maternal mortality crisis.”

On this pod, over and over, you have heard from guests, whether they be abortion rights advocates, doctors, medical professionals, or in the legal arena, that the movement to deny abortion care is not really driven by concern over the life of fetal tissue, but driven by their need to control women. As Moira Donegan, for the Guardian put it: “Idaho’s policy makes no sense if preserving fetal life is their goal. But the preservation of fetal life is not the anti-choice movement’s goal. Their goal is to inflict as much suffering on women as possible.” Out of the many outrageous things to note from oral arguments, one to highlight is Alito signaling his support to advance the batshit legal concept of fetal personhood.

While we won’t hear the decision until likely June, Ian Millhiser warned: “Realistically, it is highly unlikely that EMTALA will survive the court’s Moyle decision intact. The court already voted last January to temporarily allow the state of Idaho to enforce the strict abortion ban, despite EMTALA, while this case was pending before the justices, and Kavanaugh and Barrett have both taken extraordinary liberties with the law in the past when necessary to achieve an anti-abortion outcome.”

And I just gotta say it: It’s intolerable that people are told “Roe-vember” is coming to vote them out, when such suffering is happening now and continuing. No more capitulation. No more putting all one’s energy and resources into a losing tactic of relying on increasingly rigged elections, which has, best, slowed the impact for some women in some places, while leaving behind millions of women to be maimed, to suffer, and even die. We are faced with a fascist movement that is cruel, calculating, and I am sorry, they are winning and we are too complacent.

As Moira Donnegan stated: “What is at stake now — what was being debated in court on Wednesday — is how much women can be forced to suffer, how much danger they can be placed in. The anti-choice movement, and its allies on the bench, have shown once again, that there is no amount that will satisfy them.” If this goes down, it will be a leap in Christian theocracy and a major shredding of the rule of law and so we must be relentless in stating and fighting for: abortion on demand and without apology nationwide.

Talking about courts, but this time not the Supreme Court, this time moving to Arizona, also on Wednesday, an Arizona grand jury criminally charged 11 Arizona Republicans and seven former aides to former President Donald Trump, including Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, with falsely certifying that Trump won the state in 2020. Charges include conspiracy, fraud and forgery. This is the second state after Georgia to file criminal charges stemming from the months-long conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Even as the indictment shows the seriousness of the crimes, the timing and legal strategy tell a different story.

While there may be developments of consequence here, this is one of the innumerable court cases that Trump and his co conspirators face regarding their attempt to overthrow again the 2020 election that most likely will not be resolved by the time folks vote in the 2024 presidential election. If this is the extent of accountability that this system is capable of doling out to fascists, we must help people to see it as one more flashing neon sign that we cannot rely on this system to stop fascism, and that’s still up to us.

We couldn’t run today’s episode without saluting the righteous college and university students across the country, protesting, putting their bodies on the line to stop the U.S. backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians. These brave students are being met with vicious, illegitimate repression that makes a mockery of these institutions’ claims of “free speech.” We want to likewise salute the faculty that have showed up to join their students and defend them against attack. Many have faced arrest for doing just that. From Ivy League schools like Columbia and Yale to state schools like UT Austin and University of Michigan, students have been suspended, brutalized, slandered by administrations, the press and the President of the United States.

From campuses in Boston to Ohio, California to Arizona, Indiana to Atlanta, students banned from campus, kicked out of their housing, brutalized by police, expelled and more. These protests have been nonviolent, many taking the form of campus occupations with tents set up on lawns, protesting a war that has killed over 14,000 children. It’s extremely significant that in face of all this repression, students have not cowered. When their campuses were shut down, they resurrected again with more students joining. Instead of college students in other areas, putting their heads down, protests have instead grown and spread. And again, I am not sure if I’ve ever seen faculty act in the way they have, risking their careers and their own safety themselves to create barriers for their students who are walking out en masse and in protest.

For a snapshot of what’s actually happening at the campuses. Check out Julian Epp’s rundown in The Nation linked in the show notes. It’s inspiring to see these actions spreading, diversifying and becoming more bold and powerful, not relenting in their determination to see an end of the genocidal war on Gaza. And they must grow in size and scope to actually stop this genocide. Defending these protests in opposition to the genocidal war and opposing and defeating the attempts to suppress protest and punish participants is of utmost importance.

All of that said, these developments are not unrelated from the threat of 21st century American fascism. We recommend listening to our previous episodes devoted to this topic. What’s driving the U.S. ruling class towards fascism is not just bad ideas in some people’s heads, but intensifying spiraling and increasingly violent contradictions of the capitalist imperialist system. A number of these contradictions are coming to a head in Palestine itself as well as surrounding the domestic dissent against the genocide here. This has led to the coercive power of the state being unleashed against people in elite institutions for all the world to see. For the first time in a number of years, and for the first time in a much longer time, those people are not cowering and stepping back in line.

This dynamic has broken open space for people at all kinds of colleges and universities and beyond to collectively make a real impact. It’s creating a situation where putting one’s body on the line is able to go beyond taking a stand, as important as that can be, to effectively breaking the ideological holds that imperialist supported Israel has enjoyed for more than 70 years in the imperialist core, breaking through the manipulative equating of Zionism with Judaism, challenging vital U.S. interests. As Republi-fascists and big-D Democrats are battling for their respective vision of empire to win out November, they are uniting in attempts to crush this resistance and shut down any conversation about this topic.

And their attempts are being stymied by a significant chunk of a rising generation that has begun to prioritize justice above their personal positions and ambitions, and in fact, their own safety. This is some real hero shit. It’s a common refrain that one thing that sets the us apart is that you can criticize the government, but as we are seeing on campuses across the country, including the most elite ones, if you get anywhere close to actually challenging the state’s vital interests, such as strategic dominance in the Middle East, the mask comes off.

As fascists embrace and celebrate this violence, advocating open domination of anyone in their way, the champions of capitalist liberal democracy cannot escape the same compulsions towards violence and suppression in their efforts to maintain a dissolving status quo. To squarely defeat fascism, to make a future worth living in, we must get beyond these alternatives. So again, I encourage you, no matter your perspective, whether you agree with my personal opinion or not — that I just laid out, I forgot to say at the top that this is just me speaking personally — go and defend these protests and join them.

Okay, now to today’s conversation. Tom and I speak at length about the geographic divides that are shaping a number of crises in this moment and the mythologies that accompany them. Fast paced imperialism has moved jobs out of the U.S. into sweatshops across the globe, or into lower wage areas. It’s says Andy Zee, one of our co-initiators had put it in a program shortly after the election, “Hollowing out people’s lives and making them susceptible to appeals to fortify their white privilege and regain the status they once had. These are the foot soldiers, both of the Christian fascist and the militia movements, the shouters who fill the quasi lynch mob rallies of Donald Trump.”

I think it’s worthwhile to keep in mind while listening that, unlike the first Civil War, there are no clearly defined borders that demarcate the forces of fascism from the rest of us. At this moment, we can guarantee that there are Confederate flags flying in each of the 50 states. After all, Trump himself hails from New York City, a metropolis, who’s Wall Street has historically united exploiters of every stripe, as long as money is changing hands. The rural/urban divide is a real and significant, but it does not exist in a vacuum. The element of white rural rage plays a particularly powerful and dangerous role in a much wider struggle over the future.

Meanwhile, while rural white people are a coherent demographic worth analyzing, that does not mean they are a united block. There are power dynamics at play, including class dichotomies and regional differences largely shaped by dynamics beyond their locality. I want to draw particular attention to busting the widely held myth that Trump’s base is centered on the poorest white people and the poorest rural white people. This often feeds into the ideas discussed in the interview that his base is motivated by economic insecurity, and that his movement should be given consideration, due to their imagined dispossession or some perverse notion of the dignity of poverty. The evidence has shown this not to be the case since 2016. In this context, I’m excited to share this interview with you. Here is my chat with Tom Scheller.

Since the founding of Refuse Fascism, we’ve expressed that fascism represents an existential danger, a threat to all of humanity. So it only makes sense to examine not just the efforts of those who are trying to reseize power at the highest levers, or the way that they’re continuing to shape the lives of people right now, in this — can we even call it anymore slow? — civil war, but contend with the reality that there are tens of millions in this country that not only want this orange menace who plotted a coup and sought to overturn the election, they too want this xenophobia, this white supremacy, this misogyny, the retribution they’re promised, the vengeance that they know he will seek.

So today, I have the delight of talking to Tom Shaller about one component of the movement. Tom. along with Paul Waldman, authored White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy. Tom is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is a former columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and an author or co-author of four other books. Welcome, Tom. Thanks for coming on.

Tom Schaller 22:07

Good to be here, Sam. Thank you.

Sam Goldman 22:09

First off, who’s mad? Who are they mad at? And what exactly are they mad about?

Tom Schaller 22:17

Well, you don’t have to read our book. To find out the answers to those questions, you can read Katherine Kramer’s landmark book, ‘The Politics of Resentment’, a book that came out in 2016, which along with J.D. Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, struck at the exact moment, you know, perfect timing in the lead up to the Trump election and all that that meant for America generally, but also for rural communities, particularly rural whites. Katherine Kramer, who interviewed hundreds of rural white people in mostly, you know, the northern stretches of Wisconsin, found that rural resentment is driven, essentially by a few different factors.

One is a belief that rural people are either ignored or, when they’re recognized, they’re mis-recognized and disrespected, a belief that the government doesn’t pay much attention; that resources and decisions are centralized in, essentially, what she calls, the M&Ms — the two parts of the state: Madison, where the State University is where the state capitol is, and Milwaukee, which is the most diverse and densely populated county, Milwaukee County and home, of course, to Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. This is a pervasive belief.

Rural people, perhaps many rural minorities as well, but rural white people, in particular, believe that they have been sidelined, ignored, disrespected, or condescended to. They direct that anger, particularly at elites, particularly urban elites, and especially minorities, because they believe that the government is tuned to and paying attention to and funneling all its resources, or the vast majority, or a disproportionate share of them, at least, towards cities and the minorities who live there, that their way of life is disappearing accordingly, because of political decisions — even though what’s really ruining rural communities is late stage capitalism. But maybe we can talk about that later in the segment.

Sam Goldman 23:59

As the four factors compounding white rural rage, that that you indicate in your book, you list in the beginning, three are explicitly about whiteness, and the fourth implicitly, and I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what is the role of white supremacy in this resentment? in these grievances? And why do you think it’s particularly dangerous in this context?

Tom Schaller 24:22

First of all, whether it’s rage or grievance or anger or resentment, we’re talking about the same phenomenon. It’s not limited to white people in rural America, and it’s not limited to rural America, there are a lot of people who are angry at the political system and have a variety of grievances, and maybe we can circle back and we can talk about which of those grievances are “rational” and which are irrational, because I think some of the grievances are perfectly rational, actually. There’s a lot of reasons to be upset with our political system and our political economy.

But in terms of the four threats that we spell out in the book, which are just briefly: racism and xenophobia toward gays, toward minorities, towards cities, toward immigrants, that’s one; conspiracism, whether it’s Obama birtherism, or election denialism, or Q-Anon support; three: undemocratic, or anti democratic sentiments that conflate with a secular, plural constitutional democracy under our Constitution; and then lastly: a justification or excusing of violence.

You’re right. Whiteness is a thread common to most, if not all of these problems, in an era where it’s okay, apparently to talk about great replacement theory on TV all the time and complain about it. It’s interesting that we can’t talk about or criticize rural whites who perhaps feel that replacement more than anybody else, even though they live in the whitest part of the country. Rural America is about 76% white and shrinking. Minorities are now probably the last census they were at 24%, but they’re probably now a quarter of rural America and growing. So it’s the whitest part of the country. It’s also the most conservative and Republican part of the country. Those things are of course interrelated.

It’s true that from a purely numerical standpoint, white Christian and male power is receding; women are now a majority of college graduates, majority of law school graduates, their earnings are not identical to mens, but the gap has closed. A lot of women can now afford to live independently of a husband or a partner in ways that they couldn’t 30, or certainly 50 or 80 years ago. On race, of course, between either immigration or differential birth rates to share of the white population is down to about 61%. now, and in terms of Christianity, religious “nons” — atheist, agnostics, and unaffiliated — now outnumber both (not combined), outnumber white evangelicals, and Catholics, and they are the fastest growing segment of the population.

And particularly when you look at people under 30, they’re far more diverse, racially, they’re far more diverse, or religiously unaffiliated, than, say, my generation or my parent’s generation. They’re certainly more pluralistic on other dimensions as well. The historically dominant white Christian and or male hegemony is under threat, so to speak. It’s not a nefarious scheme, a la great replacement theory and the kind of pearl clutching and alarm sounding that you’ll hear from Tucker Carlson. But from a purely numerical standpoint, the demographic change, which everybody from Ezra Klein in his book, ‘Why We’re Polarized’, people like Yoni Applebaum in the Atlantic have all pointed out is the single biggest driver of our polarization, and the single biggest driver of the threats to our democracy.

Suzanne Mettler and Lieberman, in their book, also identify polarization and the racial components and fights over who belongs as sort of threatening the fabric of our constitutional democracy. So I think whether it’s white supremacy, or just whiteness in general from a numerical standpoint, and or white Christianity as an identity. Those identities, which have been the dominant identity, since the founding of the country, are now finding themselves in retreat, so to speak.

And some people are embracing of the new and newly secular and more pluralistic America on the horizon, and other people want to make the country great again, which means to say go backward. The unfortunate truth is that time only moves in one direction, and this pluralization of the country is only moving in one direction, so we either need to figure out a way for our constitutional system, as it has done in the past to digest these changes, or we’re going to tear ourselves apart.

Sam Goldman 28:22

Perhaps the second spot to loop back to what you were saying about where their their resentment is in line with reality, and where it’s diverging, in terms of matching what has transformed. As you were talking about the population shifting, the world has changed. Donald Trump did not create those divisions, but it is also true that he amplified, in my opinion, a lot of these preexisting oppressions and sharp divides, and normalized being unabashed in vicious racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. The world has seen that gives rise to a base that is so thirsty for the democracy. But as it pertains to rural people, in particular, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Tom Schaller 29:10

Well, it’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I think the perceptions of the problems are perfectly rational are pretty darn close to what is wrong. I think it’s the causality and who is to blame where the irrationality enters. Let me explain that argument in two parts. When people look around their communities in rural America and they see mom and pop shops [get] replaced by retail outlets like Dollar General and Family Dollar, when they look around and they see that their hospitals and their health care clinics and their pharmacies and their drug and alcohol treatment facilities are closing down, and they have to drive farther and farther to get treatment; when they look around and they see that the family farmer is a dinosaur and that those crop circles we all see when we’re flying across the country are basically giant agribusiness run by Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, and when they look around, and they see that poverty is rising in rural America, and homelessness is rising in rural America and drug abuse is rising, and deaths of despair from opioids and suicides are rising, that’s an objective and perfectly rational diagnostic of what is going on and what is going wrong in many, though not all parts of rural America, including for rural minorities.

The problem is, and I think you alluded to it and your question is: How did this happen? Why did this happen? Who is to blame? How do we fix it? That’s where it’s easy to offer up to people, and often for many people to swallow, simplified explanations; it’s some outgroup, it’s some them, it’s somebody somewhere else in the country, it’s somebody in the state capitol or the national capitol, or it’s the liberals or it’s the minorities or it’s the immigrants or it’s the Democrats. It’s some demonized group that is trying to take from you and trying to ruin your life and lifestyle and way of life in some systematic and nefarious way, rather than looking at the more obvious and clear causes.

Late stage capitalism is the reason that dollar stores are crowding out mom and pops, it’s not socialism. Profit margins are what are closing rural hospitals and pharmacies, and the ones that stay open are usually part of regional networks, where the rural hospital is operating at a loss, but the hospitals elsewhere in the network are keeping it alive because they’re operating at a profit. Even things like highway deaths, car and road accident deaths, 20% of Americans are rural, but they account for 50% of road accidents.

Why does that happen? There’s essentially some factors that are beyond their control, like highway roads are curvy, and they often don’t have guardrails, and they don’t have lights, and so it’s easier to get in an accident. And when you’re in a remote area, you might have limited cell phone reception, and before the cell phone, that didn’t matter anyway, and you might have to wait for the next car to come by to find you. Then, at that point, have emergency calls made and the ambulance has to travel farther than it would in a suburban/urban area to get you, and then to the hospital. That extra 45 minutes or an hour, an hour and a half is the difference oftentimes between life and death.

There’s also evidence to show that rural people are less likely to wear their seatbelt, so there’s the behavioral component in there, but even if we took that away, there’d still be higher road deaths in rural areas than than urban and suburban areas, and there’s a perfectly logical explanation for which nobody is to blame. And if anybody is to blame it’s rural people for wearing their seatbelts at lower rates. So this ability, or this desire, I guess, to victim blame, and to shift blame away, particularly to politicians and citizens in faraway places, as opposed to holding accountable your local politicians, I think is a big part of the problem. But the country is changing, and some people, as I said, are embracing those changes, and other people are refusing those changes. So I think there’s a lot of rationality in the diagnostics, and I think there is an unnecessarily high degree of irrationality in how to solve it.

Sam Goldman 33:01

There’s a lot of mythology about rural America; the real ‘merica, if you will. I was wondering if you wanted to say anything about the evidence points that you rely on in this book to debunk some of those myths? And as part of that, if you want to say what you think are the biggest myths that need that debunking?

Tom Schaller 33:21

We, very clearly, have stated that this myth that some Americans are more real than others, this starting point, debunking that myth, and removing it from our public discourse. It’s a very dangerous myth. If it was the reverse, if we were somehow saying that rural Americans were less real than people who live in cities and suburbs, there will be fury and outrage, much like the fear and outrage that we’ve gotten in response to this book for daring to even criticize rural white America. But if we were running around in our book, which we do not, and saying they’re hayseeds and morons and dupes and rubes and hillbillies, and rednecks, and they’re somehow lesser than, we would be rightly and roundly criticized for that. We don’t say those things.

When you say some Americans are more real than other Americans, it implies that other people are lesser than, even if you don’t state it and aver it outwardly. And that needs to stop. The funny thing about this is that two of our prominent critics who have a very fantastic book, ‘The Rural Voter’, Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea of Colby College — we respect them and we respect their work. Even in their own book, in their poll, they found that 80% of rural Americans, when asked where you find the real America, they identify rural places and spaces as the place where the real America exists. But 66% of people in the suburbs and cities agree. It’s such a deeply pervasive and frankly, offensive, myth that it’s inculcated into the minds of people who aren’t from rural America.

So when you say some people are more real than other people, and 66% of suburbanites and urbanites agree, they’ve inculcated this notion that there’s something more venerable, there’s something to valorize and there’s something to lionize about rural small town culture in a way that it’s not necessarily worse, but it’s not necessarily better. Paul wrote a piece in the Washington Post, where he said: Hey, there’s something to be said for city values: You have to live in a polyglot, often crowded, people are rushing to get to work. You’re in crowded buses and subways and trains and living in big buildings full of people. And those people come from different parts of the state and the city, and maybe the world. They speak different languages and pray to different gods. There’s a skill set to navigate in the city.

Doug Burgum, who was running still for president and the Republican primary said: See, they hate you. Paul didn’t say rural values are worse. He said, we always just say rural and small town values are better. It’s absurd and has to stop. Let me give you two examples that have happened in just the last two weeks of how rural values is implicitly better. Tim Sheehy, who was the Republican running against John Tester in Montana, faked his biography and claimed he grew up on a farm when he didn’t. He claimed he grew up in a rural community, and the reporters in Montana looked at his biography, and it turns out he didn’t; he grew up in the suburbs. The point of which is that he assumed correctly that there’s extra validation to be gained from being in a small town. He didn’t fake his resume by saying I grew up in the city and moved here to the suburbs, he faked it in the other direction.

And then Dave McCormick, who was running in Pennsylvania, in the Senate race against Casey there, did the exact same thing — he claimed his family had a farm, but it turns out, his dad was a college chancellor and he grew up in a university town and they own like a country area, but didn’t have an operational farm. They just own some land in a rural area. Again, faking his identity to try to prove his rural credibility. It implies that there is something to be gained from being from small towns and rural parts of the country, that is to be lost, if you dare to claim you’re a city slicker.

This is offensive to everybody who doesn’t live in rural America, and if we’re going to bridge this rural/urban divide, and we’re going to get lectured about stereotyping rural people, that door needs to swing both ways. This rural veneration, as somehow better, more holy, more patriotic, more caring of their neighbors — some of which is true, right, rural people do have to look out after each other in ways that city people do not, and that’s fine — some of those myths, like all myths have a kernel or elements of truth in it — but this valorization of rural people above all else is a dangerous and pernicious myth, and it must stop.

Sam Goldman 37:06

Related to, I think, this mythology, why it has such traction, why these lies get made, why it actually does make a difference to say that you’re from a rural area, has to do with power. The white rural MAGA land is not contained to rural land, or purely to whiteness, although it is, overwhelmingly. They, as a group, are not the primary population that consists of a Trump voter, they are everywhere. They are people who would be part of the MAGA movement in the suburbs, in the cities. Clearly, this rural, with the clarifier of white rural, communities, are not going to take over the U.S. I was hoping you could contextualize this phenomenon a little bit. In particular, why is it worth focusing on the danger that white rural rage poses?

Tom Schaller 38:04

I should have said in my previous answers: The reason I think that the rurality is venerated is because it’s a legacy, just like the country is historically dominated by whites historically dominated by men, our country was majority rural until 1920. So the default, the legacy position of power and identity in this country, is both white and Christian and male and rural, historically, even though on all four of those criteria, the country is becoming less so — obviously, the male female split numerically is the same, but the power of women has increased, the number of non whites has increased, the number of non Christians has increased, and the number of people outside rural America has dramatically increased.

We went from a 50% rural country in 1920 to a 20% rural country 100 years later. You’re right, rural America is about 20% — there’s different definitions and classifications, but we use a back of the envelope 20% — and 5% of that 20 or 1/4 is non-white. So we’re really only talking about white rural Americans being 15% of the population. You might say, with cause, Sam: Like, that’s one out of seven Americans, how influential can they be? But as we know, in chapter three, and nobody really disputes this, even our critics, white rural people are over represented in our political electoral system, thanks to the mal-apportionment of the Senate.

The Electoral College, which assigns more electoral votes to smaller and whiter and more rural states, generally speaking. As we show in the book, the House is tilted toward rural districts, or rural suburban mixed influence districts. So rural white people and rural people more broadly, of course, have an inflated vote in the selection of our national officials, and that means everybody else has a slightly discounted or diluted vote by definition. Is it as inflated or as large as it used to be? No. And is it declining? Yes, it is.

But without the Electoral College, there is no President George W. Bush in 2000, and there is no President Donald Trump. The Republicans have entered office, in their last two presidencies despite the popular vote, and that is based on an electoral college design, the legacy of which was there to appease the southern states, the slave states. And of course we know so was Senate mal-apportionment and the three-fifths rule and what have you.

So these legacies that were designed to minimize the not-counted-as-human slaves at that time, and to obviously disenfranchise completely Black people in colonial America, is to this day still discounting their votes, given that they vote overwhelmingly Democratic and produce national majorities or pluralities in these elections, and still lose them. The Democrats have won the popular vote, as we all know, seven of the last eight presidential elections, but have only won five of those because they lost two in the Electoral College. And then the Republicans served, therefore, 12 years out of those last eight, and the Democrats, by the time Biden finishes, will have served 20 years (32 is four times eight).

There were five Supreme Court appointees for Republicans in that period, two for Bush and three for Trump, and five for the Democrats. So the Democrats have won seven eighths, 87% of the last eight popular votes, and they got five Supreme Court appointments and the Republicans got five. That is a disparity that, if the shoe was on the other foot, you would have a nonstop complaint, and the Heritage Foundation and Hudson, and Americans for Prosperity and every other well funded conservative think tank in the country would be railing incessantly about how minorities have disproportionate power in our system. They believe that right now, but they don’t.

Whites have disproportionate power, which is why they very quietly support the electoral college. And they very quietly want to keep mal-apportionment — sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, because they know it benefits them. That’s why wealthy donors, many of them white, pour money into organizations like Save our States, which is fighting to protect the Electoral College from the National Popular Vote movement. So rural whites, you can say: Yeah, they’re only 15% of country, and many of them are Democrats and liberals, there are a lot of hippie rural people.

You can say: How much damage can they do? Well, in an evenly divided country where everything is decided by small margins, they can do quite a bit. They can flip two presidencies, and that’s eight years of governing and five Supreme Court appointments, at least three of which, and maybe four of which would have gone the other way. Dobbs is not the law of the land without the Electoral College, for example. And many of the deregulations and the tax cuts and other things, most of which aren’t helping rural America, by the way, wouldn’t be the law of the land, either, if we had a national popular vote, and if we had a Senate that either didn’t exist, or was it based at least somewhat on a one person, one vote principle as the house is.

Sam Goldman 42:19

We were talking about legacy and the past, and I think that’s an important component, even how the past dictates the power that this demographic has now is significant. Rural America isn’t just stuck in the past, as it’s sometimes put. There are historical roots to today’s rage. I’m wondering if there’s any more that you wanted to say about how this is connected to the history of Bull Connor and antebellum plantations or anything on those?

Tom Schaller 42:51

Our critics have said this is stereotyping, we misunderstand, and rural whites aren’t this threat, but if that were true, we wouldn’t be seeing similar phenomenon in Europe right now. We’re seeing these ethno-populist movements rising in Europe and who’s leading them? White rural people there too. The problem, as we certainly feel it is, it goes back to this sort of legacy problems about what white rural dominance meant. It meant systemic subjugation, not just of their non white rural neighbors, but of city folk, too.

Remember, before the 1960s, if you want to talk about that period, we used to have mal-apportionment in state legislatures. We didn’t have one person, one vote until the three Supreme Court rulings in Westbury, Baker and Reynolds versus Sims, between 1962 and 1964, which ended mal-apportionment, where Fulton County in Georgia would have two state senators and 500,000 people and little Plains County, where Jimmy Carter was, would have 2,000 people and they’d have one state senator. So there was perverse mal-apportionment, where rural whites dominated state legislatures from the founding until the 1960s, until the Supreme Court finally got rid of that. So fortunately, that’s been gone now, what 60 years, but there’s remnants of that that are still felt today.

Sam Goldman 44:00

I appreciate that. I wanted to return to something that we spoke about earlier in the conversation, where we were talking about the danger posed by this demographic, and how it connects to this movement — I’ll use the word fascist, you don’t use that word, and that’s okay — that if they consolidated power would seek to do away with democratic norms. I think we can agree on that. Can you tell us more about, is this more of a: Oh, liberals think this about rural communities and it’s not right. Is this a material reality?

Tom Schaller 44:36

Let’s just start with some basic facts. People are allowed to criticize Trump. People are allowed to criticize MAGA. People are allowed to criticize downscale non-college-educated whites, but as soon as you say ‘rural’, you’re gonna get a ferocious backlash, as we learned. This is ironic because we know that Trump does better among white people than non-white people, and he does best in rural places. So, therefore, at the intersection, where does he get his strongest support among geo-demographic cohorts. He gets a higher percentage among white evangelicals, regardless of space, about 82%, but in the last election 71% support among white rural Americans. He only did 62% in 2016 against Hillary Clinton — he increased his share nine points. Some of that was, you know, third party votes falling out, but he did nine points better.

That means rural white Americans, after watching Trump for four years, not saying: Oh, let’s give this guy a chance; maybe we need a businessman in there; oh, he’s he talks differently, and I’m sick of the Clintons, and maybe a woman isn’t capable of being President and all those other things — but you didn’t really have a chance to see how he would perform. After four years of Trump’s performance, they moved closer to him when the rest of the country moved about three points away from him. That’s a 12 point difference in terms of the response of the 15% of the country that’s rural and white, and the response of the 85% of the country, that’s neither of those things.

It’s hard not to say that they aren’t the tip of the spear of the MAGA movement. We argue that they are we argue that they are the leading edge — that they’re the base of the base — and they are numerically speaking, that’s really not in dispute. So how is it we can criticize MAGA as a threat to our democracy? How is that we can criticize Trump and Trumpism, but exempt the people who are the Trumpiest Americans? It’d be like criticizing celebrities who engage in anti-semitism and saying but you can’t talk about Mel Gibson.

I’m not comparing white real people to antisemites, but my point is, like, you’re exempting the people who are at the leading edge because they’re somehow untouchable. I think this connects back to our very first set of conversations about how the white rural mystique gives a certain kid glove treatment to, and a certain pass to allowing politically transgressive attitudes and behaviors to be justified in a way that they would not be allowed among minorities, even in rural America, and certainly not in urban America.

So this is part of the problem of this reflexive veneration of rural whites, where, again, we’re not saying they’re not any less real, but this notion that they’re more real, I think that provides a political cover that says: Okay, these political transgressions — and we hear it all the time, you say: Well, but they’re really struggling. Okay, they are really struggling, but does that justify them removing the guardrails from democracy? Does that justify them saying the President should act unilaterally indirect defiance of the Constitution? Does that justify their incredible xenophobia toward immigrants? Does that justify their higher racial resentment scores? It does not.

In fact, we wrote an entire chapter in the book, as you probably know, Sam, Chapter Seven, about the 24% of rural America that’s not white. We did that for a sincere reason and a strategic reason. The sincere reason is that 24%, they need to be discussed, and they’re mostly ( ). One of our critics, as you know, Jacobs and Shea who I mentioned earlier, they wrote a 414 page book called ‘The Rural Voter’, not the rural white voter, The Rural Voter. They dedicate five pages to minorities, 1%, even though they’re 24% of rural America. They manage, like a magic trick, to erase one quarter of rural America in five pages, and blame us with academic malpractice. That’s a pretty clever sleight of hand trick.

In any case, I’m not trying to litigate a beef with Jacobs and Shea here, but the fact of the matter is the sincere reason we wrote that chapter, and the sincere reason we went to places like majority Black rural counties in the Albemarle region of North Carolina and the so-called copper corridor, which is Latino dominated, in the mining area northeast of Phoenix about 90 miles, is because we thought their voices deserve at least one chapter, which is only one out of eight. We short-shrifted them to me if we’re being honest, only one chapter out of eight. We talk about the minority experience throughout the other seven chapters, and especially in the conclusion.

The strategic reason we did it is we knew that our critics were to say: Oh, wait, we’re all resentment is justified because they’re struggling, and their hospitals are closing and they’re getting mom and pop shops replaced with dollar stores and all the other things that we talked about earlier. But on almost every single measure, Sam, with the exception of opioid abuse and deaths and gun deaths, either accidental or suicides in a country where 61% of people are white 91% of gun suicides are white, and the rural suicide rates are higher than elsewhere, because of the gun possession rates there.

With the exception of opioids and gun deaths, and almost every other economic measure: poverty, income, high school graduation, college graduation, net wealth, income level, and on almost every health measure in terms of mortality rates, mothers who die at birth, infant mortality rates, sickness, disability rates, rural minorities are doing worse than — as bad as it may be for the rural whites — rural minorities are doing worse. So if it’s just about the rural experience, and resentment is justified by that rural experience, then Black and brown, rural Americans should be just as resentful and just as angry and just as likely to call for something to destroy our democracy as their white neighbors, if not more so, but they aren’t.

That’s a paradox that our critics don’t want to talk about, especially our critics who reflexively move to defend and complain and whine in a victimized way about the stereotyping of white rural Americans. They don’t even want to talk about minorities, because as soon as you talk about rural minorities, you see that only one group of people in rural America Is railing against our constitutional democracy. And it’s the white people.

Sam Goldman 50:05

Yet the journalists don’t rush there to talk about their suffering their grievances. It’s not just an academic conversation, it’s a larger one where one group is elevated, their grievances are justified and others are not.

Tom Schaller 50:20

It’s a clear privileging, Sam. We have a line in the book where we talk about how when Trump ran for president, it was like reporters trying to climb over each other like puppies to get out of a cardboard box to interview the next ten red-hat-wearing, Trump loving supporters in rural Southwest Ohio or rural Northeast Missouri or rural Central Arkansas. But the next time, national reporters with a TV camera crew in tow sits down at a salon or a barber shop or at a pool hall to talk to ten Latinos from rural America, or ten African Americans from rural America about what their economic anxieties and what their grievances are and what their worries about the future are, will probably be the first such interview because nobody cares about them.

To be fair, white voters are more up for grabs, they’re more evenly divided between the two parties, where minorities vote more lopsidedly democratic. So you could say that we’re minorities are less pivotal to the outcome in the statewide election or even local elections than are rural whites or whites, regardless of place in statewide elections, let’s say. So that’s fine, but no coverage? Or next to no coverage? That seems to be a glaring oversight and a glaring failure on the part of the national media, which mostly covers Trump’s white base.

Sam Goldman 51:36

And it also elevates and amplifies this mythology that all of this is driven by economic anxieties, and totally dismisses — if you want to say undemocratic, however you want to put it, I would say fascist — tendencies amongst the people. That is really dangerous, because when you do that repeatedly over and over again, it becomes normal. This is okay for people to think XYZ and we can package it and call it grievances and be okay with it.

Tom Schaller 52:06

The other thing is — we didn’t really delve into this in the book, but Paul and I had extensive conversations about this, and we actually took some parts out of the book proposal about this, because we didn’t want to really racialize it as much as we could have, but — 50 years ago, when jobs were moving and factories were closing down in the big cities, and when there was a opioid addiction in the form of heroin, and when there was family breakdown in the black communities, we had the Moynihan Report, which basically blamed black family values for the decline of Black communities.

But 50 years later, when we see jobs moving out of rural America, and we see rural Americans getting addicted to opioids in the form of you know, Oxycontin and fentanyl, and we see out of wedlock births and divorce rates go up, and bank foreclosures and economic decay happening in white rural America, the whole country has to stop and show a sympathetic eye and be actively engaged and certainly never victim blaming. I’m not saying we should victim blame in the second case, I’m saying it’s too late now to go back in history and say to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Hey, did you consider that there might be resentments driven by the fact that all these urban Black jobs were moved out of the country or out into the suburbs, or into different parts of the country, and the deindustrialization of the rust belt from say Boston to Detroit had a severe and a negative effect on Black communities and the working class, blue collar Black men, mostly, and women who worked in making cars and steel and tires and textiles from Lowell, Massachusetts to Akron, Ohio, to Sandusky, Ohio to the outskirts of Detroit and Flint.

People have written about that, academics have written about it, but there’s a lot of victim-blaming. Here, you’re not allowed to victim blame at all. You write a book that says white rural rage, and it’s like, people are sending us emails calling us the racists. We’re not blaming white rural Americas for the consolidation in late stage capitalism and the monopolization of the potato commodities and beef and pork and corn. We know 20 years ago in Fast Food Nation. Eric Schlosser warned about all this, he said: Look, we are consolidating the agribusiness into a handful of three, four or five companies that are controlling 75 to 95% of all these commodities, and we’re driving the small town farmers out.

So we shouldn’t be surprised. We can blame late stage capitalism and corporate greed and the lack of the Republican Party pushing back, and the Democrats too, monopolization and oligopalization but the people who are usually complaining about oligopolies, and monopolies are usually the Democrats. They’re the much better antitrust party today — it used to be, of course, the Republicans back and Teddy Roosevelt’s day, but — Republicans are happy to turn a blind eye and let media companies buy each other out and to let agricultural companies buy each other out and tech companies buy each other out. Ted Cruz and all these Republicans.

They complain about rural broadband, but they support Verizon and Comcast and they are not supporting the local rural broadband providers because they’re all in the pockets of the tech companies. So you can complain about socialism all you want, but capitalism was what is destroyed rural America, moving its jobs into the cities or the suburbs, overseas, or simply consolidating the work of agriculture and mining into a handful of companies that require less labor and can do it cheaper, and so therefore pay less in wages and compensation.

Sam Goldman 55:10

Absolutely. As we start to close out the conversation, I wanted to just share our reflection and in terms of the backlash your book has received, we’ve gotten, as you can imagine, a lot of pushback, and one of the many things that we’ve gotten pushed back on the show for is about talking about Christian fascism. The overall fascist movement in this country could not be holding or gaining so much power without the centrality of this theocratic element, a force of millions of Christians organized and mobilized to dominate political power through their cruel vision of biblical teachings, literal interpretations, largely developed and wielded by powerful forces in the U.S. ruling class.

To me, exposing this and recognizing this doesn’t mean all Christians are fascist. It doesn’t mean that all of Christianity is consumed by this. It doesn’t mean that only Christians are fascists, or that the whole fascist movement can be reduced to that. It doesn’t mean that Christians, or even the Christian fascists are subhuman and beyond talking to. To conflate all these things is either, quite honestly, dumb, or in bad faith, and yet many well meaning people seem to pretend this connection between white American Christianity and fascism is non existent, because things would be easier if that link didn’t exist. There’s a lot of parallels to the backlash against your book that follows similar logic. I just want to extend that reflection for whatever it’s worth. If there’s things that resonate, good, if not, I get that too.

Tom Schaller 56:42

Well, we know that rural America has the highest share of white evangelicals, and we know that about 60% of white evangelicals self-identify as Christian nationalist, or in surveys when they’re asked to like, you know, should the Bible supersede secular law? and: Is America a Christian nation? or: Can you only be truly American if you’re white and Christian? About 60% of white evangelicals are essentially Christian nationalists.

First of all, we have a secular state and white Christian nationalism is inimical to our constitutional basic promises. The problem is that, particularly when you feel this threat, this in group out group threat, this legacy threat, and you believe that America is chosen by God to be this divine and divinely Christian nation, and you see accurately that the share of Christians are dropping — Catholics are dropping, white Protestants are dropping, and evangelical Protestants are all losing share year after year. Gallup has been asking people: Do you go to church? or: Do you identify with a membership? since 1940, and it held at about 70% of America, and for the first time in 2020, fell below 50%.

So Americans do not identify — they may be spiritual still, they may have a faith they may believe in a god or gods, but church attendance is down, people identifying with specific denominations are down, and agnostic, atheist, unaffiliated, and the broader package of religious nones are rising. That’s not in dispute, and so you can see why great replacement theory or Christian white replacement theory is coming into vogue now because there is this belief of a siege mentality. There’s some truth to the fact that they are just shrinking in numbers, even if they’re not under siege.

I think this goes back to our victimization. The good news, though, is I think people are starting to pay more attention to it. Robert Jones at the Public Religion Research Institute writes a lot about white Christian nationalism and polls on it, and there’s an merging platoon of writers, Sarah Posner [SG: We have episodes with her.], Catherine Stewart, Philip Gorski [SG: We have an episode with him.], Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry, [SG: Sam Perry, we got to interview, we have an episode with him.], and others, Tim Alberta, who just wrote his new book that went to the bestseller list about white Christian nationalism, and he grew up in a white Christian family. T

here is a small platoon of writers who are writing similar treatments on the same topic, different takes and different approaches, some are more poll driven, some are more interview driven, some are more personal testimony, Alberta’s is a little bit of all of that. Some are academic, some are more journalists like Alberta, but whatever their point of orientation or point of departure, they’re basically all saying the same thing. I would encourage people to read some or all of these books, which I’ve read, at least in part, all of them, because they’re warning about the potential dangers of this uniquely powerful legacy group, which is white Christian nationalists.

Sam Goldman 59:26

Well, I want to thank you so much for coming and chatting with me and sharing your expertise, your experience, your time, your book with us. We are going to link to the book, of course, in the show notes. Where else can people connect with you and read more from you?

Tom Schaller 59:43

We have WhiteRuralRage.com, is our website. There’s lots of links, and when you send me this, I will upload it to our website so people can if they missed it, they can watch it whenever time, and other articles and book reviews are there, and our TV appearances and so forth, and there’s a Contact page if anybody wants to write to us there. Then I would encourage people of course to please support us by buying a copy of the book, or just ordered for your local library. It’s only $20 on Amazon. Even if you don’t want to spend, go to the local library and fill out the card, if they don’t have a copy, and say: Will you please order this for the collection? Then you can check it out whenever you want, and so can the other people in your community. That’s the smallest ask that we make.

Sam Goldman 1:00:16

Thanks so much.

Tom Schaller 1:00:17

Thanks, Sam. Nice to meet you.

Sam Goldman 1:00:19

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