From The Atlantic:
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.
. . . .
It has also kindled an academic controversy. In the weeks since its publication, a trio of reviews by political scientists have accused Schaller and Waldman of committing what amounts to academic malpractice, alleging that the authors used shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations about white rural Americans. I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.
White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans. As someone who is from the kind of place the authors demonize—a place that is “rural” in the pejorative, rather than literal, sense—I find White Rural Rage personally offensive. I was so frustrated by its indulgence of familiar stereotypes that I aired several intemperate critiques of the book and its authors on social media. But when I dug deeper, I found that the problems with White Rural Rage extend beyond its anti-rural prejudice. As an academic and a writer, I find Schaller and Waldman’s misuse of other scholars’ research indefensible.
After fact-checking many of the book’s claims and citations, I found a pattern: Most of the problems occur in sections of the book that try to prove that white rural Americans are especially likely to commit or express support for political violence. By bending the facts to fit their chosen scapegoat, Schaller and Waldman not only trade on long-standing stereotypes about dangerous rural people. They mislead the public about the all-too-real threats to our democracy today. As serious scholarship has shown—including some of the very scholarship Schaller and Waldman cite, only to contort it—the right-wing rage we need to worry about is not coming from deep-red rural areas. It is coming from cities and suburbs.
The most obvious problem with White Rural Rage is its refusal to define rural. In a note in the back of the book, the authors write, “What constitutes ‘rural’ and who qualifies as a rural American … depends on who you ask.” Fair enough. The rural-studies scholars I spoke with agreed that there are a variety of competing definitions. But rather than tell us what definition they used, Schaller and Waldman confess that they settled on no definition at all: “We remained agnostic throughout our research and writing by merely reporting the categories and definitions that each pollster, scholar, or researcher used.” In other words, they relied on studies that used different definitions of rural, a decision that conveniently lets them pick and choose whatever research fits their narrative. This is what the scholars I interviewed objected to—they emphasized that the existence of multiple definitions of rural is not an excuse to decline to pick one. “This book amounts to a poor amalgamation of disparate literatures designed to fit a preordained narrative,” Cameron Wimpy, a political scientist at Arkansas State University, told me. It would be like undertaking a book-length study demonizing Irish people, refusing to define what you mean by Irish, and then drawing on studies of native Irish in Ireland, non-Irish immigrants to Ireland, Irish Americans, people who took a 23andMe DNA test that showed Irish ancestry, and Bostonians who get drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day to build your argument about the singular danger of “the Irish.” It’s preposterous.
The authors write that they were “at the mercy of the choices made by the researchers who collected, sorted, classified, and tabulated their results.” But reading between the lines, the authors’ working definition of rural often seems to be “a not-so-nice place where white people live,” irrespective of whether that place is a tiny hamlet or a small city. Some of the most jaw-dropping instances of this come when the authors discuss what they would have you believe is rural America’s bigoted assault on local libraries. “The American Library Association tracked 1,269 efforts to ban books in libraries in 2022,” Schaller and Waldman note. “Many of these efforts occurred in rural areas, where libraries have become a target of controversy over books with LGBTQ+ themes or discussions of racism.” The authors detail attacks on a number of libraries: in Llano, Texas; Ashtabula County, Ohio; Craighead County, Arkansas; Maury County, Tennessee; Boundary County, Idaho; and Jamestown, Michigan.
But half of these locations—Craighead County, Maury County, and Jamestown—do not seem to qualify as rural. What the authors call “rural Jamestown, Michigan,” scores a 1 out of 10 on one of the most popular metrics, the RUCA, used to measure rurality (1 being most urban), and is a quick commute away from the city of Grand Rapids.
That Schaller and Waldman so artfully dodged defining what they mean by rural is a shame for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that the question of who is rural is complex and fascinating. Scholars in rural studies make a distinction between subjective rural identity and objective rural residence—in other words, seeing yourself as rural versus living in a place that is geographically rural according to metrics like RUCA. The thing is, rural identity and rural residence are very, very different. Though Schaller and Waldman mention this distinction briefly in their authors’ note, they do not meaningfully explore it. One political scientist I spoke with, Utah Valley University’s Zoe Nemerever, recently co-authored a paper comparing rural self-identification to residence and found a stunning result: “A minority of respondents who described their neighborhood as rural actually live in an area considered rural.” Her study found that 72 percent of people—at minimum—who saw themselves as living in a rural place did not live in a rural place at all.
It turns out I am one of those people. I grew up in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, an 88 percent white enclave in the southward center of the state. Eighteen minutes and nine miles to the east, you hit the capital city of Harrisburg, which has the best used bookstore in the tristate area. Nineteen minutes and 13 miles away to the west, you hit the game lands, where I spent my teenage years playing hooky and hunting in thick, hard-green mountains. Mechanicsburg feels urban, suburban, and rural all at once. There are strip malls and car dealerships. There are trailer parks and farms with beat-to-hell farmhouses. There are nice suburban neighborhoods with McMansions. My high school had a Future Farmers of America chapter and gave us the first day of deer season off. The final week of my senior year, a kid unballed his fist in the parking lot to show me a bag of heroin. Another wore bow ties and ended up at Harvard.
What do you call a place like that? It was both nice and not-nice. Somewhere and nowhere. Once in college, a professor made a wry joke: Describing a fictional town in a story, he quipped, “It’s the kind of place you see a sign for on the highway, but no one is actually from there.” He paused, racking his brain for an example. “Like Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.”
I tend to think of myself as having a comparatively “rural” identity for a variety of reasons: because Mechanicsburg was more rural when I was growing up. Because both sides of my family are from deeply rural places: Mathias, West Virginia (where 100 percent of the county population is rural), and Huntingdon, Pennsylvania (74 percent rural). Because, since the age of 10, I have spent nearly all my free time hunting or fishing, mostly in unambiguously rural areas that are a short drive from where I live. Because people like that professor tend to view my hometown as a place that is so irrelevant, it barely exists. So when Nemerever looked up data on Mechanicsburg and told me it had a RUCA score of 1 and was considered metropolitan—like Schaller and Waldman’s erroneous library examples—I was genuinely surprised. I’d made the same mistake about my own hometown that Schaller and Waldman had about Jamestown, Michigan.
Scholars who study rural identity say that common misperceptions like this are why defining rural is so important. “Researchers should be highly conscious of what ‘rural’ means when they want to measure relevant social, psychological, and political correlates,” a study of “non-rural rural identifiers” by Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a political-science professor at the University of South Carolina, warns. “Rurality can be a social identity that includes a broad group categorization, even including people who do not currently live in a rural area.”
Schaller and Waldman might have understood these nuances—and not repeatedly misidentified rural areas—if they’d meaningfully consulted members of the rural-studies community. In a portion of their acknowledgments section, the authors thank researchers and journalists in the field who “directed our attention to findings of relevance for our inquiry.” I contacted all 10 of these people, hoping to better understand what kind of input Schaller and Waldman sought from subject-matter experts. One said he was satisfied with the way his work had been acknowledged, and another did not respond to my message. Seven reported only a few cursory email exchanges with the authors about the subject of the book and were surprised to find that they had been thanked at all.
Although it is not unusual for authors to thank people they do not know or corresponded with only briefly, it is quite telling that not a single person I spoke with in rural studies—with the exception of the Wilmington College rural historian Keith Orejel, who said he was disappointed that his feedback did not seem to influence the book—said these men sought out their expertise in a serious way, circulated drafts of the book, or simply ran its controversial argument by them in detail.
. . . .
Arlie Hochschild, a celebrated sociologist and the author of Strangers in Their Own Land and a forthcoming book on Appalachia, struck a plaintive note in an email to me about White Rural Rage: “When I think of those I’ve come to know in Pike County, Kentucky—part of the nation’s whitest and second poorest congressional district—I imagine that many would not see themselves in this portrait.” She added that these Kentuckians would no doubt “feel stereotyped by books that talk of ‘rural white rage,’ by people who otherwise claim to honor ‘diversity.’”
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
PG grew up in rural and very rural areas. (He remembers the name of every student in his class in grades 1-6 and can recite them on demand. [No, he was not home-schooled.] He was the valedictorian of his high school graduating class of 22. Out of those 22, only two graduated from college.
PG was happy to move to a close-in suburb of Chicago to go to college. He used some of his leisure time to ride public transportation to explore all different sorts of neighborhoods in the city, including one in which all the signs were in Polish and another in which the signs were in Greek. After he graduated, he worked in Chicago for several years. During this period of time, Chicago was the largest Polish city in the world—more Poles lived in Chicago than in Warsaw.
As far as White Rural Rage is concerned, PG remembered that he was required to read a book titled How to Lie with Statistics because his first job out of college involved analyzing a lot of numbers.
From the reading PG did to understand White Rural Rage, it sounded like the authors of the book cherry-picked their statistics to fit their desired conclusions—opinions first, numbers later. And, of course, the book’s publisher was Random House, most of whose management regard New Jersey as terra incognita.
I’m just catching up on the interesting comments to this post.
Regarding the comment about urban America subsidising rural America, it has been one of the decades-long pillars of the policies of Department of Agriculture that food prices in the country should remain low relative to income. Hence the ongoing flow of money into rural America.
I took a dive into the Economic Research Service, part of the US Department of Agriculture – https://www.ers.usda.gov/.
A few takeaways:
1. Overall, poverty is more widespread in rural areas than in urban/suburban areas. As a group, children raised in rural areas are less likely to complete high school, less likely to go to college, etc.
2. Rural population has been in long-term decline over the past 40-50 years. One of the main drivers in this has been rural children moving to urban areas after they grow up.
3. Most middle-class families spend 8-15% of their household income on food. This is significantly less than the percentage spent by comprable first-world nations and any nation that is not first-world.
Basically, if urban areas are subsidising rural areas, the subsidies aren’t doing any good. Unfortunately, there is a long-term pattern of children raised in farm homes not returning to rural areas after they complete their college educations.
Try this, PG:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-much-each-country-spends-on-food/#:~:text=Nigeria%20spends%20over%20half%20of%20household%20income%20on,43.0%25%3B%20Philippines%2041.9%25%3B%20Pakistan%2040.9%25%3B%20and%20Azerbaijan%2040.1%25.
Also, if rural spending doesn’t improve the situation in rural areas but it results in the cheapest, most reliable and abundant food supply on Earth, then maybe the goal of the policy just might be the latter and not the former.
Just sayin’.
I read this twice and I can’t quite understand what the fuss is about (on a factual level, as opposed to a feeling level).
The two concrete critiques Hochschild put forth are that 1) the authors of the book didn’t define ‘rural’ and 2) the authors stated their own opinions in the book, rather than bringing in the opinions of the people whose research they used.
I agree, in spirit, that a definition would have been helpful, but I haven’t read the book, so I can’t assume the authors left this as open as the writer is claiming. I also don’t know that a narrower, more concrete definition would have changed the major points the authors made.
I can understand why some of the researchers who have more tolerant (or apologetic) views of rural Americans wouldn’t like their research being used without all the asterisks they attach to it, but…are the main theses of the book wrong?
This piece, as with the one in Politico, doesn’t address the baseline facts that rural Americans are generally subsidized by urban Americans, that they choose to stay where the jobs no longer are, that they vote for a party that does nothing concrete for them economically out of resentments rooted in outdated prejudices, that these voting trends contributed to an insurrection on January 6 and threaten American democracy going forward.
I’m reading all of the pieces for and against this book, but the ‘against’ people just aren’t bringing solid facts in that contradict the paragraph above. Where’s the beef?
Your next to last paragraph is a farrago of lies by omission and commission–for example, while it is true that urban Americans “subsidize” rural Americans, said subsidies also mean that said urban Americans eat considerably cheaper than they would otherwise–and therefore justifies dismissing the rest of this critique of the critique.
On that front, with globalization ending and the reindustralization of the country, it is flyover country that will be providing the “stuff” that makes urban metropoli possible. Not just food, but water, energy, clothing, gadgets…
(Just try running the northeast megapolis on solar and see how far you get. Even California runs woefully short on all counts.)
Too many people out of and especially *inside* the beltway have no idea how the economy actually works or where their standard of living comes from. The so-called subsidies to the interior exist to prevent full cost pricing of the necesities the “urbanites” would have to bear without them.
Going back to food; without “subsidies”, production would be lower, more erratic, seasonal, and waayyy more expensive, especially in those places that can’t grow any of their own.
The great hope of the coastal urbanites, vertical farming, is proving to be too energy dependent, too expensive, and too limited…for now… And for a few more decades at least. As it now exists it only works in an age of cheap capital and cheap energy…or extremely high food prices.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90824702/vertical-farming-failing-profitable-appharvest-aerofarms-bowery
Civilization doesn’t end at the hudson or the potomac, it *starts* there.
I have occasionally asked the “gas should be $20-a-gallon” crowd if they believe food spontaneously generates in the grocery store. “You do understand that a truck delivers the food to the store, right? And if the gas costs as much as you’d like it too, the price of the food will go up, right? You do get this, don’t you? Don’t you?”
Spoiler: they do not.
Apparently, everyone along the supply chain should just eat the increased costs, and not dare pass it along to the customers.
They also don’t get the concept of the minimum wage. What’s happening now in California with all those businesses closing is a severe case of “I told you so,” because I bloody well told them so. The extremely foreseeable, extremely predictable consequences of a $20 minimum wage are going to get so ugly, and it’s hard to tell if the people who agitated so loudly for it weren’t simply evil. No one can be that stupid.
No, I’ve met these folks. The leadership might be evil; their subordinates, however, are usually just utterly clueless about how the world works, because they’ve never read any history that wasn’t predigested for them into a school textbook or a magazine article.
That’s true … but when you break it down in good faith “explain it like I’m 5” (but not condescendingly) and they respond with vitriol and insistence that you want to keep people poor, it does make one wonder. I can accept they are not evil, but clinging to a fantasy, and refusing all possible opportunities to get off the on-ramp to dystopia-ville.
As Blade would say, some people always have to ice skate uphill. It’s just in this case, you can’t isolate the damage to those people.
Deluded fits to a Tee-shirt.
“We don’t need fossil fuel. We can go electric.”
“OK. Where do you get energy for your car?”
“Just plug it in.”
“Where does the electricity come from?”
“Uh, …..”
“How’s your Latte?”
With a bit of convoluted thinking, we can say the $20 minimum wage is a subsidy for robotics and AI.
Sure they can.
And are.
Useful idiots isn’t an insult but an accurate description.
As a rule they don’t bother with the basics of economics, nuance, or “the other guy”. Their ideology and dreams are more important than the actual needs of everybody else.
And above all, they are oblivious to the law of unintemded consequences; they never bother to think things through.
The biggest problem with minimum wage laws is they invariable become the maximum wage. Especially when and where they exceed the prevailing wage in a business sector.
Best example is indeed California where the law included a carve-out for a big friend of the party/donor that, technically, allowed his business (cough*PANERA*cough) to keep on paying the old $16 an hour rate. Only problem being that if everybody in the sector is at $20 and he isn’t, workers will defect so the carve-out only served to expose the government hijinks. He still had to go to $20. And on the flip side, businesses that were marginal at $16 needed to cut costs so they took measures ranging from firing folks ($0 an hour) to cutting staff numbers/hours, automation, or just closing shops.
On top of that, they raised prices when open. $25 burger meals at MickeyDee’s.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of folks forgot money doesn’t grow on trees but is, instead, a reflection of productivity. You can’t just throw money around willy nilly without consequence. Sad thing is, they won’t learn.
No need to call them evil.
Stupid and banal sufices.
The same folks are now not only floating a wealth tax (taxing illiquid assests and/or unrealized gains) but also a multi-year exit tax that would create a category of “tax resident” for expatriates.
This
…is what comes of muddy self righteous thinking.
Or, as Forest Gump said: “Stupid is as stupid does” and what they do is truly stupid. Ergo…
Exactly, the true minimum wage is $0/hr.
Indeed.
As further proof that they didn’t think things over, the $20 minimum wage is only supposed to apply to fast food storrs in chains with over 40 stores. (Why 40? Some friend of the party only has 40 perchance?) “Let’s stick it to the big chains!”
One “minor” problem: why would a dishwasher or server at a restaurant settle for the old wage when quitting and going to a fast food place gets them an instant 20% raise? (If they can find an opening. If they can’t, wouldn’t “quiet quitting” until they do be the expected reaction at getting “shorted”?)
That “fast-food only” law actually jacked up the costs for everybody. And while the national chains can afford the capital cost to automate or raise prices 25%, restaurants, bookstores, and other businesses relying on entry level workers can’t.
As FALLOUT’s Maximus said, ” Ooops!”.
(BTW, FALLOUT the video series is as good TV as the source is at gaming. Excellent workby the “other” Nolan.”)
Stupid is as stupid does.
Do you mean Jonathan Nolan? “Person of Interest” is a lesson on how to do slick flashbacks, and I was so impressed I looked him up. Apparently non-linear storytelling is his trademark. I was assuming Amazon would mess up “Fallout,” but if Nolan is at the helm I’ll give it a go.
Yes.
Mr and Mrs J. Nolan. Both.
And it works fine for gamers (moi) and non-gamers (my mom).
The Nolan name carries weight.
It is a new original story, canon to the game universe, that draws from the mythos and expands it in ways the games can’t.
(Expect dark humor, weirdness, 50’s style movie SF, and actual practical effects. They built the actual power armor, pipboy, etc. And instead of green screening it, they filmed in Namibia’s dessert and Utah. Great production values.)
Tomatoes run 90+ critics, 86+ viewers.
The show’s emerging meme/catch phrase is “okey dokey”. Here’s copilot:
“The phrase “okey dokey” is associated with the character Lucy, played by Ella Purnell, in the show. Her chipper attitude and the use of the phrase “Okie Dokie!” even in the face of insane situations have been highlighted as a defining trait of her character. The show has been described as brightly colored, cartoonishly violent, and darkly witty, capturing the essence of the popular video game. If you’re a fan of the series or just looking for some flippin’ fun, this adaptation seems to be well-received!”
Needless to say, I’m (ahem) Primed for season 2. Especially after the last scene.
Oooh, I hadn’t even heard about the carve-outs. But I can’t feel sorry for the Panera chiefs; they should have agitated loudly against the new law instead. Because the consequences they’re experiencing were also foreseeable.
No, they CAN be that stupid. Never underestimate the ability of The Urban/Suburban Elite to “other” those living outside of their culture. There is also a Huge difference between the working poor and the large landowners in rural areas. The former value education that leads to a trade set of skills; the latter aim their children at Elite colleges, yet are surprised they don’t want to return home after graduation.
The fact that rural folks are getting money out of the urbanites proves the rurals have higher IQs. Not only do the urbans burden themselves with high taxes to subsidize urbans, they vote for a party that gives their money to rurals and does nothing concrete for them economically.
Do they give that money *only* to the rurals?
Do they give the money beause they are rural?
If so, why?
If it doesn’t help, why do it?
And, in the end, does it matter?
Neither can survive without the other and both are stuck in the dysfunctional relationship.
It’s all done simply because the rurals are smarter. Consider the guy in Tennessee who pays no state income tax. The urbans in New York pay high state income taxes, and then they subsidize the guy in Tennessee. Rurals in Tennessee obviously have a higher IQ than urbans in Manhattan. Perhaps Thomas Frank will write a book titled, “What’s the Matter With Manhattan.”
Why should I? After all, all you’ve done is make assertions without evidence, then make an isolated demand for rigor when you got called on it. Not playing that game.
And no, what I did by using the lies in your next to last paragraph to dismiss the rest of your argument was not a logical fallacy. It’s a pretty well recognized legal principle. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
(And, by the way, saying that your last paragraph is a farrago of lies is not an example of the ad hominem fallacy, because it speaks to whether you can be trusted to tell the truth. If I had said we can dismiss your argument because you are a liberal, that would be an example of the ad hominem fallacy.)
Anytime a book has a subtitle that either states or implies that a political, religious, economic, or ethnic subgroup is the reason for a bad thing, you can safely assume that the writers were more interested in furthering their ideological goals than in discovering the truth.
Generally true, but the converse sometimes is not: A political, religious, economic, or ethnic subgroup can be the reason for perpetuating a bad thing that has become established for darned near any reason at all (often by others). Transferrance of rationale for solidarity purposes is all too common.
Consider the somewhat eyebrow-raising example of car sales at dealers, which could not occur on Sundays in many states (including the purported secular paradise in which I live) until earlier this century.† That’s a significant additional barrier for Orthodox Jews, who can do no business from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday — and then can’t use the first days of their weeks to replace that old clunker because Sunday is “the” Sabbath. (Let’s not get in to Islam, or Seventh-Day Adventists, or…) It’s one thing to mandate that vehicle dealerships must be closed for at least one full day a week; it’s another thing entirely to mandate, state-wide, that that day must be Sunday. Would it surprise you to know that even in this state, white evangelical-Christian church leaders rallied their congregations into “keep the Sabbath” campaigns and lobbying every time the issue was raised from the mid-1970s on, despite the influx of non-aligned “boat people” from Southeast Asia? Even though both the dealers and the unions for their workers wanted to open on Sundays, and the out-of-state auto finance companies stood ready to do so too?
This is purposely a somewhat hyperbolic, low-stakes example — but apply it to restricted pharmacy hours on Sundays, especially in areas that require a half-hour-or-more drive to get to the only pharmacy in the region…
† The vehicle-titling system here still pretends Sundays don’t exist. I somehow suspect that the computers themselves don’t particularly care, as ethnically-IBM mainframes seem to get along just fine with ethnically-HP-rack-server networks and storage systems.
All you really needed to understand the reality of “rural rage” (which, from my understanding, bears only a passing resemblance to what is described in the book reviewed in the OP) was to attend Boys’ State prior to the end of the Carter Administration.† Of course, the attendees from the rural areas would no doubt respond that any rural rage was less dangerous than city condescension —
And to at least some extent they’d have a point. The foolishness of tribalism flows all directions, without much regard to the nature of the tribes (just take a look at anything within 1500km of 31.8°N 35.2°E).
† I have no reason to believe things have changed, but also have no data. That “documentary” of a couple years ago doesn’t count: It was in Texas.