An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America

White Rural Rage has become a best-seller—and kindled an academic controversy.

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

White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans. As someone who is from the kind of place the authors demonize—a place that is “rural” in the pejorative, rather than literal, sense—I find White Rural Rage personally offensive. I was so frustrated by its indulgence of familiar stereotypes that I aired several intemperate critiques of the book and its authors on social media. But when I dug deeper, I found that the problems with White Rural Rage extend beyond its anti-rural prejudice. As an academic and a writer, I find Schaller and Waldman’s misuse of other scholars’ research indefensible.

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

He directed me to the slide in his report cited by Schaller and Waldman to back up their claims. Schaller and Waldman rely on the slide to point out, correctly, that 27 percent of Americans with insurrectionist views are rural and that these views are slightly overrepresented among rural people. However, they ignore what Pape explicitly described, in big bold letters, as the report’s “#1 key finding”: that there are approximately 21 million potential insurrectionists in the United States—people who believe both that the 2020 election was stolen and that restoring Trump to the presidency by force is justified—and they are “mainly urban.” The authors fail to explain why we should be more worried about the 5.67 million hypothetical rural insurrectionists than the 15.33 million who live in urban and suburban areas, have more resources, made up the bulk of January 6 participants, and are the primary danger, according to Pape’s report.