Noah Berlatsky on to the corporate media slam vs. Democrats as condescending to rural voters:
"People talk as if Democrats have some constitutional difficulty winning rural voters, even though it’s clear that Democrats just have trouble winning white rural voters. And they lose with white rural voters becasue (again) the GOP is the party of white supremacy, and white supremacy appeals disproportionately, and powerfully, to white people."
When Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman published White Rural Rage, I knew that we were in for a storm after I posted some excerpts from it on social media, and outraged folks embedded in the hard right trolled the hell out of the excerpts.
That kind of trolling, often organized and done as pack hunting, tells me a book or article has made a point that really deserves a hearing.
As Paul Waldman writes in the article I just linked, he and Schaller also knew their book would inflame the hard right – but it's been a surprise to see some "centrist" hot-shot young scholars side with the hard right and attack the book savagely, with claims it's unfair and unsympathetic to rural whites and the plight that facilitates their voting against their self-interest – over and over, deepening their immiseration.
This is especially a surprise because these same scholars are willing to criticize all sorts of OTHER groups – but want to maintain the fiction that right-wing rural white voters are somehow off-limits and should be above criticism. It's also a surprise because Schaller and Waldman are crystal clear about their sympathy for rural white voters and the plight neoliberal economics has left them in.
As Paul Waldman writes, the ferocity with which these young scholars are insisting that people like Waldman and Schaller should keep their hands off the white rural voter question only proves a central point of the book: that white rural voters have been accorded an iconic, untouchable status in our culture accorded to no other groups.
"Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history."
I say, let the hot-shot young scholars willing to play complicit games with the hard right play those games and see how far this gets them in the long run.
I'm not impressed with folks willing to hop into bed with the hard right, whether they're academic or corporate media types. Opportunism never has held much attraction for me. Show me whom you're willing to hop into bed with, and you show me just who you are.
One reason I stop my ears when these folks talk is that I know Schaller and Waldman have a good fix on rural white voters, because my own roots lie in that very demographic.
And I know that what Schaller and Waldman are reporting about rural white voters is right on target.
I grew up in the very rural, deep-red state of Arkansas, a state dominated to the hilt by white evangelical culture – and I grew up in that white evangelical culture as a Southern Baptist. I still live in Arkansas.
My four grandparents all grew up on farms in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
My father's parents farmed in northwest Louisiana into his boyhood, and my mother's family lived in a small town in south central Arkansas. I know from rural and small-town white Southern culture – so don't even think about preaching to me, young hot-shot scholars who live in much more privileged and insulated places, about how you understand rural white voters and I don't. Or Schaller and Waldman don't.
"Rural white voters have long enjoyed outsize power in American politics. They have inflated voting power in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House and the Electoral College. …
The unfortunate fact is that polls suggest many rural white people’s commitment to the American political system is eroding."
"With the 2024 election fast approaching, the views of rural white people are once again of vital importance because they and the members of Congress who represent them disproportionately believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump by Joe Biden. A Pew Research Center study found 71% of rural white voters voted for Trump in 2020, so their preference in November will be key to who returns to the White House for a second term."
"I want to focus on an aspect of that story that makes the United States unique: Only here are rural citizens given such outsized political power. That power is built into the design of our political system, but it also has to be continually renewed by the Republicans who depend on rural voters to maintain their control of political institutions."
"Unfortunately, while rural Americans could use the power they possess to improve their lives, they almost never do. That power is used only to maintain Republican control and stymie liberal policy advancement, even when liberal policy goals would directly help rural people themselves. …
In fact, as the rural population shrinks, their extraordinary leverage becomes even more stark."
"Whenever questions are raised about the political inequity these arrangements create, Republicans will either imply or simply state that rural voters (or more specifically rural White voters; rural minority populations are largely ignored, a topic Schaller and I address at length in our book) simply deserve that power more than the rest of us do. They’re heartlanders, real Americans, honest hardworking folk who should enjoy a special status."