The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman: White Rural Rage

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Rural white voters wield outsized power in our democracy, yet they are also more likely to support violence as a political tool—and to hold antidemocratic views. Meanwhile, rural whites enjoy the perk of being seen as the "real" Americans. Waldman and Schaller join Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes: Tom and Paul's book Tim’s Playlist

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I am here today with a couple of gentlemen who have a new book, White World Rage, The Threat to American Democracy.

It is Tom Schaller, Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, a former columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and Paul Waldman, journalist and opinion writer. He's a former columnist at the Washington Post. The Washington Post misses you, Paul. You had some good stuff over there. How's everything going, gentlemen? Great, thank you. Great. First off, for folks who have not heard you on your podcast tour, give us the premise of the book, what went into it, white world rage, and a top line takeaway.

Maybe, Tom, you can kick us off. Yeah. So Paul and I have known each other for 20 years. And as we were researching around and thinking about the Trump era and the MAGA movement, we started to look at some polls. And we kept finding this pattern. And let me just preface this because I kind of came out hot on MSNBC with Mika Brzezinski and say that what we find

doesn't apply to every rural white American. And it doesn't apply exclusively to rural white Americans in terms of the threats that we discussed. But what we found, and we use very careful and superlative language that on many things, not everything, rural whites are sort of the tip of the spear. They're the most core of the coalition of the Trump MAGA coalition, which, of course, Trump gets a majority of white votes by substantial difference from his share of the black vote. And he finds his greatest support in rural corners of America. So why wouldn't he get his strongest support from rural white Americans as a geodemographic group. They voted for him 62% in 2016 and moved nine points toward him to 71% by 2020. And what we found as we started to look at polls,

and it wasn't every issue, it wasn't abortion, for example, but on issue after issue in terms of racist attitudes, xenophobic attitudes, conspiracism, anti or undemocratic attitudes, white nationalism, white Christian nationalism, and justifying violence against the state, usually, that white rural Americans were the highest or lowest or, you know, most likely or least likely to agree with various principles, like, you know, immigrants improve the life of the country, least likely to agree, anti-gay sentiments, anti-immigrant sentiments, the belief that the president should act unilaterally without checks from Congress, their subscription to white nationalism and white Christian nationalist principles, which are a threat to our secular constitutional

democracy. And so we said, geez, it's okay to criticize Trump and the MAGA movement broadly, but do we want to put a name, a face, a race, and a place to who that movement is? Not exclusively and not exhaustively, but the fact of the matter is that the leading edge of the MAGA Trump movement is both white and rural, and a substantial literature by our fellow political scientists and sociologists backs that up. And so we made the case, we knew it would be a controversial argument, we knew there would be hate mail and death threats, which there have been. But at a moment of existential crisis, and with the US democracy, the oldest constitutional democracy facing what could be our last free and fair election, we thought it was important to come forward with

this argument, critics be damned. And so here we are. You know, Paul, there have been a lot of efforts to talk to worldwide Americans by the mainstream media, you know, that maybe have been somewhat illuminating and other times maybe made things more opaque. When you talk about all the diner stories that you see from the New York Times, etc., talk about like how you view those efforts and what went into what you guys did. I mean, I saw you all in Arizona. How do you see the diner tourism, the jungle safari to white world America? Yeah, it's become really just a cliche that, you know, a reporter goes to a diner, talks to some red hat wearing Trump fans about why they still love Trump. And the assumption is that their views and their complaints are kind of

inherently legitimate and need to be listened to, and we all need to pay attention. Unfortunately, it never really gets below that surface, especially not to investigate the political context of those places where those people live. And, you know, I think most people are familiar with the fact that rural America tends to be overrepresented. We all know about the electoral college and how small states get more representation in the Senate, you know, that Wyoming's 600,000 residents get the same amount of representation as California's 39 million. People are familiar with that. It's actually worse than that, actually. The House dramatically overrepresents rural districts. And within states, there's a lot of ways in which

rural votes kind of get leveraged into greater power. But one of the things that becomes clear and became clear to us as we went around the country to different kinds of places talking to people about not only about the situations of their lives, what's going on in their communities, what are they concerned about, where have they felt like they've been left behind, and often they have legitimate reasons to believe that. But what does politics look like in a lot of these places? And even though rural people tend to have this greater influence on the ballot box, oftentimes there's a real kind of hollowness to politics in rural places. You know, Democrats always get told, you know, you abandoned rural America and you need to

go back there. And that's largely true. But the flip side of the story that people don't tell as much is that Republicans have abandoned rural America too. They're the ones getting elected at all levels. In a lot of rural places, especially white rural places, every single person who represents the people there from US Senator all the way down to dog catcher is going to be a conservative Republican. But what you don't find is any kind of active political engagement. Those votes are just taken for Republican. But what you don't find is any kind of active political engagement. Those votes are just taken for granted. And so Democrats aren't going there because they think they're not going to win. And Republicans aren't going there because they think

they don't have to do anything to win. And they're right. And so all that happens is that, you know, come election time, the Republican candidates can just come and say, don't you hate people who live in cities? Don't you? Aren't you mad that there's a trans girl 200 miles away who wants to play on our middle school softball team? Aren't you mad about the border that's a thousand miles away? And everyone nods and says yes. And then they just keep voting Republican and nothing in the deep and profound problems in their community ever gets addressed. And so there's this extraordinary lack of accountability for the politicians that rural Americans keep electing. And that's one of the things that we found as we went around is this really kind of this sort of political vacuum

that is of great benefit to Republicans because they don't have to do anything. That's a part of the story that really doesn't get told as much. I want to get into what the Democrats should do and what Republican politicians do do. But before we do, talk about the sentiments, a clear-eyed view of what the sentiments are of white rural America broadly and how you get into that in the book. Because I think that, caveat granted of you, Tom, at the start, my in-laws are white rural Americans, and they're very lovely people that vote for Democrats. And there are plenty of white rural Americans also that vote for Republicans that are lovely people and kind hearted people. But so, so we acknowledge

that we're painting this with a broad brush, like what were the trends and the sentiments that you saw when you're looking into this? For full disclosure, I mean, my parents are white evangelicals and Trump supporters and conservatives. And, you know, so are a wide number of people I went to high school and college with that I stay in touch through Facebook and what have you. So, you know, there are Trump people in my life and in Paul's life, just as there are in your life. And yeah, they're good people in some cases whom I love and have spent, you know, years and decades knowing as friends or family members and so forth. So the prototypical or stereotypical depiction in the media of white rural Americans is that they love their country, they love their family, they leave their doors

open, they help their neighbors. There's certainly a lot of truth to that. Even though the Cooperative Election Study shows that urban Americans, 58% of them go to church seldom or never, sort of twice a year Catholics. And the same percentages for rural Americans, 57%. It's basically identical within the margin of error. So some of these things are a bit of a myth. Yeah, I mean, Sarah Malott of the Daily Yonder online web publication has a piece about that. This is not our data. This is other people reporting this. So, you know, some of these are border on myths, but some of them are true. I don't think that rural people are less friendly. They might even be more friendly or more helpful to their neighbors because they do know each other. I've lived in DC for 23 years. And, you know, I previously lived in a building with nine stories

and 140 units. And I lived there for eight years. And by the time I left, I probably only knew six people by first and last name. And there was a rotating set of professionals coming in and out of the building who worked in politics or the media or, you know, the arts community or in the restaurant industry. And there were maybe 10 kids in our entire building. So there is truth to the sort of anonymity of the city versus the more interconnected life of rural America. I make a joke that I'm a big 30 Rock fan. And a big point that we make in the book is that, you know, Tina Fey, my television girlfriend, you know, says that nobody's more real than anybody else. And we have to stop with this pathology of saying that there's something inherently more real and more virtuous about rural Americans and rural white Americans, specifically, a 65 year old grandfather who worked in agriculture his whole life, who is a

white evangelical and veteran who lives in Northwest Iowa, is no more real than a single 22-year-old Afro-Latina who's working on her art history master's degree and waiting tables and Ubering on the nights and weekends to provide for herself in Brooklyn. Everybody is equally real, and as Tina Fey would say, they just want to have a sandwich and a diet Sprite and be left alone for lunch. The sandwiches may differ. It might be a po' boy down in New Orleans, and it might be a hoagie or a grinder or a hero somewhere else, Tim. But the fact is, nobody is more real. And the privileging of white rural Americans and saying that they're more real or their values are more American is very dangerous business. And Paul wrote a piece in the Washington Post about how we never talk about city values and getting along with

diverse sets of people and dealing with unique complications of an urban life. And he got attacked for that. He got attacked by Doug Burgum saying, see, they hate you. And there's all this cultural outrage. And we're not picking on white rural Americans specifically. We're just saying they're no better, but no worse. I would even go a little further than that. And I'd be interested in Paul's take on this. In a lot of ways, white rural America hates America. Donald Trump hates America. Like Donald Trump complains about America more than anybody since like 1980s Cold War leftists. Like nobody complains about America more than Donald Trump and certainly America how it is. You know, I think that maybe for whatever reason, a lot of younger liberals, progressives feel they don't want to get yelled at by their more woke counterpart or whatever.

So they won't say that they like America. But the people that appreciate America for how it actually is in the real world, in our culture and our values, like now tend to be more like Joe Biden supporters, more suburban or urban Americans. And that's my kind of assessment of who actually loves America as it exists, not as they wish it did. I don't know, Paul, what you think about that? That's true. I think conservatives have long gotten kind of a pass on saying that, you know, our country is terrible. It's going down the tubes. Everything is awful. You know, the cultural trends, the demographic trends all make this a terrible place. Liberals have always gotten excoriated for the, even a hint of saying that there's something problematic with America, but conservatives have kind of gotten a pass and Trump himself is the apotheosis of that. You know, he literally says like, this is a terrible country. Everything is

bad. And somehow that doesn't seem to be something that a lot of people want to criticize. And what we say in the book, you know, a lot of rural Americans are proud of their patriotism. And they say, you know, we send more people to the military, which is true. And they say, we fly American flags on our front Porsches. But in a lot of cases, the way we put it is that they love their country, but not our country. It's not the collective. And they have a very kind of visible sort of performative patriotism, which is fine. But when it comes to looking at what's actually the nature of the country, oftentimes they're deeply uncomfortable with it. And you know,

I should say about the different kinds of people who live in these places, there are a lot of liberals who live in rural America, too. And I think that shouldn't be ignored. There are also a lot of non-white people who live in rural America. We have a whole chapter about non-white people. They make up about 24% of rural Americans, according to the census. 71% of white Americans in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, voted for Donald Trump. That means that 29% voted for Joe Biden. And that's a lot of people. But one of the things we found, as we went around to a lot of places, is that especially the liberals, and some conservatives too, but especially the liberals will tell us that politics in the Trump era has just gotten meaner in their communities. That they used to be able to get along with their neighbors. And,

you know, yes, they didn't agree about politics, but that was okay. And one of the things that we heard again and again, people saying that it just has taken on this really hard edge. And you have conflicts over things like what books are going to be in the library that have really set people against each other. And I think that that is one of the consequences of the Trump era. And one of the consequences of the messages people receive from the media that they consume, and from the Republican politicians who are constantly telling people, you should be resentful, you should be angry, you should hate those people who are not like you. And in a country that is increasingly diverse and gets more diverse every year, and that is not going to stop, for a lot of people, that gives them a deep discomfort with what America is becoming. What do you guys think

undergirds it? I guess if we're just going to accept the statement, which I think is pretty unimpeachable at this point, that there is an increase in rage, that there is an increase in whatever the opposite of comity is, hostility, you know, political hostility, resentment in these communities. What's your view on what is the, you know, sort of source of that? Because I can look at it and see some things that are legitimate grievances, the ways that those communities have been let down. Other things I look at and say, wow, it's pretty, it's not at all legitimate, and it's being exacerbated. How do you guys kind of assess the factors? First of all, and we've pled

guiltiness in public appearances already, the title is a bit provocative. We use the word rage, but we're really talking about the academic and scholarly construct resentment. But white world resentment is a lot of syllables and doesn't really fit neatly vertically. And as you know, publishers want, you know, one word, blink, Malcolm Gladwell kind of titles. We couldn't get it down to one or even two words, but we got it down to three words and four syllables. And so we're really talking about resentment. And if you do a search on the galleys of the book, as we've done, the word rage actually appears in the actual texts a handful of times. But we're talking about real resentment. And you're right, Tim, there are some legitimate

reasons for that resentment, which we discuss at length in chapter two, declining health metrics, economic collapse, declining populations, 53% of American counties in the last decade between 2010 and 2020 were smaller at the end of the decade lost population, we believe that's the first time in American history that a majority of counties shrunk. And 67% of rural counties lost population, there's a massive brain drain as young people are being told. 60% of rural adults tell their own children to leave and not come back. So these patterns are disemboweling rural America. And some of it's not their fault. It's late stage capitalism that replaces coal miners who used to be sent down holes with pickaxes and shovels to dig coal out a pound at a time. Now we have mountaintop removal that blows the top off of a coal mine and removes it tons at a time with a shovel. You can't go to Congress, you could

vote against globalization and tell China and other countries not to hire, you know, children for pennies on the hour and no environmental protections to outcompete us, but they're not going to do that. And Trump, who said trade wars are easy to win, found out the hard way when he imposed tariffs on China that they would engage in retaliatory tariffs and had to pass a $23 billion bailout for farmers. And, you know, the suicide rates in dairy farmers in northern Wisconsin and other parts skyrocketed during the Trump administration because his, you know, policies backfired. So there are some things that are beyond the control of rural America's white or otherwise

to try to stand their communities back up because of just the natural movement away from rural farming and extractive economies into the technological age of education and healthcare and information age economies. That being said, if it were just the disemboweling of rural communities that drove rage, then we would see, as Paul pointed out, that rage would be uniform across both rural whites and non-whites, but it is not. Why is it that rural non-whites, rural minorities, who, by the way, with the exception of gun deaths and opioid deaths, suffer economically worse than their white neighbors and experience worse health maladies than their neighbors? Why is it they're not as rageful and resentful? Why is it they're not storming state capitals? Why is it they're not justifying and excusing the people who attacked the country and the Capitol on January 6th? This is a paradox that a lot of white rural scholars and many

pundits do not want to engage in, because what they're going to find at the end of that inquiry is that this rage is bifurcated between white rural Americans who have been, as we call them, the essential minority since the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Part of every governing coalition, whether it was the Lincoln party era system from 1860 to 1896 to the McKinley system up until the New Deal in 1932, and certainly part of the rural Southern New Deal coalition, have now seen their power slip away. They don't like it. And so we subscribe to the Ezra Klein belief that what really undergirds this is demographic change. And that demographic change is, to be fair, numerically moving away

from them, right? The country is becoming less white, it is becoming less rural, and they feel their power slipping away and their potency as the rural essential minority dissipating. That's true. And so, I think it's a revanchist sort of rearguard action to defend territory and political power in a way that they see slipping away. Maybe these things are kind of related in a way, and obviously there's a strain of racism that is involved in a lot of this. I don't know. Well, I look at this and the word that comes to my mind is that what drives it is entitlement. You know, that they feel entitled to the country in a way that maybe some of these other groups don't.

Because I look at it and it's like, why? For all of the legitimate concerns that folks have in rural America, like there isn't an equivalent, right? Like urban blight, people that went through urban blight and you know black folks that went through you know having their rights stripped away we're not then going out and nominating and endorsing somebody that wants to you know overthrow the government you know though there were some extreme strains obviously in the civil rights movement

like you don't you don't see an equivalent and And to me, it's like, well, they feel entitled to the country that is being taken from them. And so maybe there's a racial element to it. But there is also just the sense of feeling like they can do whatever they want. Yeah. And I think that Trump in particular tells them that they can do whatever they want. And that's what he offers in a lot of ways, is kind of a personal expression of that, that the rules don't apply to me me and they shouldn't apply to me. And that was one of the things I think that was thrilling about him to so many of his supporters. And this is true in, you know, suburbs and cities too, but I think it's true, especially

in rural areas, is that he was telling them, you know, be whoever you want, be your worst self, and you can just unleash that. But yes, you know, the changing nature of the country with, you know, it becoming less white all the time is something that feels very kind of disorienting to people. Places where the number of immigrants have increased is often where you find the biggest backlash, not where there's a lot of immigrants and not where there are a few immigrants, but places where the numbers are increasing. And the white proportion of the population is in a county, say, is going down. That's where you see the most intense backlash. And so there is this idea that something is being taken from us just by the fact of these changes.

And then you also have a political context where people in small towns and rural areas are constantly told that they are the best of us. They are the truest Americans. They're the real Americans. Their places are the ones that are kind of the the best of us. They are the truest Americans. They're the real Americans. Their places are the ones that are kind of the storehouses of virtue. And this is a political message that you hear all the time. And so I think that serves to convince people that yes, there is something wrong when they feel disempowered or when they look around and see that there isn't a lot of economic opportunities, that those things are slipping away. And their country is becoming something that they don't recognize, that they hear people

speaking Spanish all the time. And they watch TV and there are, again, you can't disentangle race from this for a lot of people, that there is one ad after another with interracial couples. And the America that they understood from, especially from their childhood, if you're talking about older people, is no longer the America that they see around them. And then someone like Trump comes along and he says, we will make America great again. And the key word is again, we're going to bring it back to what it was. And of course, he can't do that. And he didn't do it. There are no fewer immigrants today than there were when he came into office after the 2016 election. America is still changing. America is still getting younger

and more diverse all the time. He didn't arrest that, but he gave them a kind of emotional satisfaction to say to them, you're right, you are the realist Americans, and you can be as angry as you want. And if politics is not a place where you can actually affect change and do something about the things that you aren't happy about in your community, well, at the very least, you can give a big middle finger to all the people you hate and that I will do that for you and we'll do it together. And that was Trump's message. Nobody has criticized our chapter three, where we talk about the inflated electoral and political power of rural whites, because it's not in dispute. It's a numerical fact. So I have had reporters literally doubt me and then go and where we talk about the inflated electoral and political power of rural whites because it's not

in dispute it's a numerical fact so i have had reporters literally doubt me and then go and double check and say hey you were right when i point out that los angeles county and it's 10 million people which has to share two senators with the other 29 million californians is larger than any of the 40 40 small states combined which have 80 senators among them, right? LA exit. LA exit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, let's get them two more senators.

Let's get them two more senators. I mean, I'm for a system, we'll never get rid of the Senate. It's the only surviving provision that Article 5, the amendment process, which I wrote my dissertation about, specifically exempts from amendment. You'd have to amend the amendment process and then amend it. That's literally true. Anyway, the Republicans sometimes say the quiet part out loud. So Save Our States, which is a coalition funded by the Bradley Foundation, a conservative husband and wife team. Their executive director is a guy named Trent England. He published a piece in the USA Today saying,

if we get rid of the electoral college, the cities will treat rural Americans, this is his language, serfs, Russian serfs, like peasants, because we make all the food and the energy and where are you going to, we, I get emails all the time from people like every time you eat or gas up your car, you can thank rural America as if no technologies or inventions are ever created in the cities, right? Like, where did you get your iPhone from? Where did you get your MRI done today at the university and the major city? Like, you don't hear urban people saying, hey, congratulations on your CAT scan today. You should thank urban America for that and the doctors who were schooled there and live

there and work there and so forth. You don't see this resentment, but because the food is made and the energy is dug up in rural America, there's a sense of entitlement. But sometimes they say the quiet part out loud, and this is what's really fascinating. Wisconsin has been so gerrymandered until recently that in the state elections, for example, Republicans got 46% of the statewide vote in state houses, but they control 64% of seats, not just a majority, but almost a super majority. And here is the Republican Speaker of the House, Robin Voss, after Evers finally defeated Scott Walker after his three terms. This Madison and Milwaukee phenomenon, the M&Ms, as Catherine Kramer, who wrote the

definitive book in 2016, The Politics of Resentment About Wisconsin, she talks about white rural resentment toward Madison, Dane, the state university and the state capitol, and Milwaukee, the blackest jurisdiction in the state. Quote, if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority. We would have all five constitutional officers, and we would probably have many more seats in the legislature. Also, they'd have both U.S. senators and 10 electoral votes for whoever the Republican nominee is. Imagine we said in our book, imagine Chuck Schumer said, imagine any liberal or Democrat said, well, if we just eliminated the votes of all counties in Wisconsin with fewer than 20,000 people, the Democrats would have all five constitutional

officers. They would have the governor and every statewide officer, U.S. senator. They would have the 10 electoral votes for Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. Imagine the outrage of discounting people in small counties, but they say it openly, and so did the majority leader of the Senate. Citizens from every corner of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch that stands on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison. That is hyperbolic language, and that is essentially erasing people. And you're allowed to do that if you're conservative and Republican, and especially if you're white and rural. But you're not allowed to do that if you're a minority or from the cities, because then you're disrespecting and you're discounting white rural Americans. We don't call for their votes to be erased, but we call for them to stop

advocating the erasure of people who just happen to look, think, act, or pray differently from them and maybe live in cities. Despite the fact that these white role Americans have disproportionate political power, another, I think, thing that's contributing to their resentment and rage is that they're being convinced by the people that they trust, their political influencers and media influencers, that they've lost all the power and that the power is actually in the place of the deep state. And I want to play one clip from this week from my friend, Pizzagate Jack Posobiec, who is at Mar-a-Lago discussing Peter Navarro being jailed for not testifying after a subpoena.

So let's listen to Pizzagate Jack. Peter Navarro was locked up because he refused to submit. He refused to surrender because he kept the faith, because he kept the courage of his convictions. And when the January 6th show trial of a committee, which broke every rule under the sun, which broke every law under the sun, which deleted evidence, which deleted communications, which didn't even offer witnesses the chance of a cross-examination, when they called him in, he said, no, I refuse. That is the energy we need as catholics as christians and americans the demonic works i forgot we had that one at the end. Here's the thing that I always felt about the January 6th crowd.

Their actions were the natural reaction that you would expect from people who had been convinced by assholes like Pizzagate Jack that the country is being taken away from them, that they are subverting the rules, that they're subverting the law in order to silence them, that they're the real majority. Eventually, if you feel like some shadowy cabal has stolen your rights and your country from you, your natural reaction is going to be resist, fight, attack. As much of this as some of it is happening within these communities, they are being radicalized by these media figures and politicians. Don't you think, Paul? Yeah, if you actually believed the things that Donald Trump and, you know, figures like Jack Posobiec and conservative talk radio hosts and Republican politicians, if you actually believed what they were telling people, then violence and overthrowing the government would seem like the natural, like a perfectly logical response because of the horror of what's actually going on. And so these are messages that people get all the time that there are dark forces out there that are trying to literally destroy you

and everything that you value and turn America into a kind of hellish nightmare where you will be, you know, possibly literally rounded up into concentration camps or something like that. Churches will be closed. Exactly. And so, there are a lot of different communities that have a kind of a narrative of victimhood that's very important to them. And I think that's always been part of Christian theology, frankly, going back a long, long way, the idea that we are a small group of people who know the truth and are hounded and oppressed because we believe the truth.

And so there are a lot of different communities today that have victimhood as kind of part of their self-conception. And that is especially true for conservatives who think that this culture is not only opposed to their values, but is trying to bring about their literal destruction. And it's particularly true in rural areas. And there are a lot of, there's been a lot of political science research about the idea of victimhood and how that plays in. I know there's at least one study that found that people who consider themselves to be victims, that that was a predictor of support for Donald Trump over and above whether you were a Republican, that people who thought they had been victimized unfairly were particularly

drawn to him. And after all, nobody complains about being a victim more than Donald Trump himself. I mean, here you have a guy who his entire life has been spent acting like the rules didn't apply to him and getting special treatment, and he craps on a gold toilet, and there's nobody who complains more often that he's being treated unfairly. And for people who think that they have been treated unfairly, sometimes with reason, that can be very attractive. And so he can be a vehicle for just complaining that the world is doing you wrong. And I think that that does have particular force in rural places, especially places that have declined in a lot of ways. You know, you look around and you see in your community, maybe even if you are doing okay,

but you see a community that has lost people and that doesn't have a lot of opportunity. And you feel like the world is not being fair, especially when at the same time you're being told that you're the truest Americans. And so you can become very attracted to a politician who says, yes, you have been done wrong. There is a system that is rigged against you, and I'm going to unrig it. And we could talk more about Trump, but this is one of the remarkable things about, especially about his appeal in real America, that he didn't do the kind of practical things that he said. He didn't turn it into a paradise. He said he was going to bring back all the coal jobs. Coal jobs were lower when he left office than when he came into office. He made all these practical promises, and it's kind of hard to know whether people believed them in the first place, or they just thought it was kind of hard to know whether people believed them in

the first place, or they just thought it was kind of what they wanted to hear. And they liked it. But one of the things we saw is that as the country was moving away between 2016 and 2020, away from Trump, rural America moved toward him. We looked at his 100 strongest counties in 2016, almost all of them are rural, places where he got 80, 85, even 90% of the vote. And in 91 of those 100 counties, he did better in 2020 than he had in 2016, despite the fact that he did not turn rural America into a paradise. Apparently, people didn't care. It was enough to get the kind of emotional satisfaction of him validating their resentments, their anger, and saying that he was going to join them in kind

of this campaign of hate against the people who they loathe, and that that was more than enough for them. Yeah, Tom, I want to get to what Democrats can do last, but just one more thing on this. Pizzagate Jack was at, I don't know if it was at the event that we saw each other at in Arizona. He was, yeah. Yeah, he was at the event in Queens Creek as well. I got to tell you, when people think about rural America, I'm sympathetic to, you know, I worked on a campaign in Waverly, Iowa. And like, Waverly has just been brutalized by globalization and, you know, by the changing economy that you talked about.

And I'm sympathetic to people that are upset about leadership that live in those kinds of communities. But rural America is also ex-urban Phoenix. And I got to tell you, the place that I went that was the most, where I felt the most unsafe, and I've been to a lot of MAGA events, was at some events that were maybe an hour outside of Phoenix. There were a lot of people that were transplants you know this was not a factory town where that had been where the factory had shut

down it was people that had made a cultural choice that they wanted to escape their communities and move somewhere else with more like-minded people like just it's talking about like when you guys were looking at this kind of how you assess that and you're also in Arizona and what your kind of experiences. Well, again, it's not limited to white rural Americans. And there are many MAGA supporters who are equally devout and equally vitriolic, perhaps that live in the suburbs and other places, whether they grew up there the whole time, or as you pointed out, their transplants to the New South or what have you. We don't focus as much on them. The book is focused, sort of laser focused on rural white Americans. But to your point about Posobiec and the

anti-intellectualism, you know, there's a fine young, newly minted political scientist named Kristen Lundstuhl at the University of South Carolina. I read her dissertation, which she wrote about rural white Americans at the University of Minnesota, and she finds that there's higher anti-intellectualism among rural white Americans. And it's not a perfect direct through line to the kind of conspiracism and the disinformation that we see that is used by people like Posobiec who want to convince us that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are kidnapping, raping, and then drinking the blood after killing children in a basement of a pizza shop that doesn't have a basement. Also wearing the baby's skin on their face as a mask. That's right.

With the adrenochrome, you can't forget that. The mask, the baby skin face mask. If you want to live forever, you do have to wear the baby mask, of course. I'm sorry, I forgot that. But you can't have a democratic discourse in a democracy, right? You can't have true discourse unless there's at least some shared information set and there's at least some logic and rationality. As I always joke to my students, in a democracy, the great blessing is everybody can vote and the great curse is that everybody can vote. And I'm not saying my vote should count more because I'm a political scientist, but if we were building a bridge, we wouldn't have political scientists and history majors and

violinists contributing. We would have engineers and painters and structure, right? And unfortunately, in a democracy, a person who is trafficking conspiracies and believes things like Posobiec is peddling, their vote counts one and my vote counts one. And so does yours. And so does Bill Kristol's, right? People are paying attention to politics. And that's the unfortunate downside of democracy is that people with little to no information can be very dangerous. And because, as Paul is more of our media expert, because of the disemboweling of local media and the replacement with national controversies, where we interviewed a bunch of town supervisors and their Adirondacks, and they're like, we don't want to talk about critical race theory. We don't want to talk about Black Lives Matter. We want to talk about regulating the Airbnbs because people come from out of town and we want the money, but they trash the places and they're too loud and so forth. We want to keep the Lake Placid

24-hour emergency room that they want to close for eight hours overnight open so that people who are in car accidents or have heart attacks don't have to go to Plattsburgh or across the Lake Champlain to Burlington because all the hospitals are owned by the Vermont system in the Adirondacks, the Champlain Valley Regional Hospital. That's what we're worried about. We don't want to talk about library book bans. This is the nationalization of local politics. And so when you remove the local media, and you nationalize the politics, and people are shouting at town meetings about critical race theory, we've lost something. And the conversations become more coarse, and the discourses become more devoid of real substance and facts. And that's how

with a heavy dollop of social media, that's how you lose your democracy, frankly. And it's not a explicitly rural white phenomena. It's a broader cultural and media phenomena. And I think it's very dangerous. And I think, you know, even if rural whites, as we argue, are the tip of the spear of this movement of the MAGA movement, They're not alone in that fact. And we have serious problems with public discourse and a functional democracy that depends on voters being at least minimally informed and engaged. Here's my final topic. And boy, I'm worried the answer to this one is going to be the most depressing, which is, is there anything that can be done to reach these people? And, you know, I've been very critical sometimes of the Democrats who just have written this group off, instead of trying to care about how you can improve on the

margins. There's some exceptions to that. I want to shout out Heidi Heitkamp has a group called One Country that's working on this. I hear often from Rob Sand in Iowa and other Democrats, the actually the chief of staff of the DNC right now used to be the rural political director. So it sounds like there aren't some people that are thinking about this, there are. But to me, it's always like the premise of that effort is always based on, okay, these people are culturally aggrieved. And so our response to that is we're going to reach some of them by meeting their economic needs, basically, as a shorthand, right? Or their practical needs, we're going to bring rural broadband, you know, we're going to build more factories back home.

And I just wonder, is that powerful enough? Can that compete? Can having faster Wi Fi compete with believing that the country is being stolen from you by elites and Mexicans, etc? Maybe not. And as you know, Tim, because you're an experienced political professional, all politics is identity politics. And the advice that Democrats always get is, you know, you need to go back into rural America that you've left and be respectful and listen and show people that you understand their lives and show people that you are like them, and then they will be open to your arguments. And there are a lot of Democrats who have followed that advice and still lost because it's necessary, but not sufficient. And, you know, we don't have a silver bullet for Democrats, but one of the

things that we do say that they have to do is to start also talking more in, frankly, negative terms about Republicans, to sort of open up the space for people to think not just about those cultural issues, but also about the conditions of their lives. Because politicians should be able to connect with you on kind of an identity basis, but they also should be able to address the problems that you're facing. The big problem is that Republicans have been excused from addressing any of the problems in rural America. And that is something that I think Democrats could do something about. You know, it's great when the Biden administration spends tens of billions of dollars to extend

broadband to rural places. And that's something that some people dismiss, but it's actually really important. It's important for education. It's important for economic development. It's important just for the quality of people's lives. So that's great. He doesn't get enough credit for it. But I think that Democrats also have to go into these places and encourage people to start holding the Republicans who represent them accountable. To say, okay, you know, yeah, you're mad that there isn't enough economic opportunity for your kids here. You're mad that the hospital closed down. There have been almost 200 rural hospitals that have closed in the last 20 years. You know, you're mad about those things. You

should be mad. But you know who you should be talking to? You should be talking to the Republicans you keep electing and demanding that they come and do something for you. And so that's got to be part of the argument Democrats make. It's not just like, I'm going to give you some good stuff, but to actually tell people that they have to start holding their Republican office holders accountable. And if you actually did that, you could begin to open up a space where Democrats could make a compelling argument. And we also say in the book that there ought to be a broad rural movement. And this is one of the things that is so striking. Every part of both parties coalition, like if you look at the

Republican coalition, you can kind of rattle off who's on that list. It's the gun rights people and evangelicals and business interests. When a Republican takes office, gets the White House, all those people are at the table and they've got a list of demands. And they say, these are the things that we want. And if you don't at least make some progress on all this stuff, then maybe we won't help you four years from now. And the Democrats have their coalition with all their pieces, unions and African-Americans, environmentalists, et cetera. And they say the same thing, but there is no rural movement with a list of demands. And if you could form one, and again, there are progressives who are trying to do this. It's very difficult work. But if you could form one that actually said, like, these are the things that rural America needs,

and we're going to demand that you begin to make progress on them, then you would begin to open up that space. And both Democrats and Republicans would have to satisfy those demands, or at least explain to people why they weren't. But right now, even though white rural people are one of the absolute foundations of Republican power, when those people win office, rural people aren't at the table. They're not even there. And the Republicans know they can just count on those votes. They don't have to do anything for them. And that is something that really ought to change. What I'm hearing is we need a famous person that's coded as a redneck evangelical to start dunking on how much the Republicans have failed. So is that where you're going, Tom? person that's coded as a redneck evangelical to start dunking on how much the

Republicans have failed. So is that is that where you're going, Tom? Because that's where my head's going. I mean, there's a great comedian named Trey Crowder. We did his show Weekly Skews. He's the liberal redneck. We love that guy. And his show, they told us, his producer told us, got twice the amount of views and even had a spillover next week when we weren't on there. So there are liberals out there in rural America who are saying it sometimes tongue in cheek and in a funny way, which I think is very effective. But I wanted to add one little piece on race to what Paul just said. You know, in cities, white people vote more Republican than their black and brown neighbors. But because urban whites are more liberal, the gap, the racial gap in voting Democratic or Republican is smaller than it is

in rural America, where rural white Americans, in some cases, were voting 80, 90% for Trump, and their minority neighbors are voting 70 to 80% Democratic. And we call for a pan-racial rural agenda, because if our critics who say this isn't about race, it's about the rural experience and the depredations and the economic hardships and the post, you know, late stage capitalism decline and the brain drain, then they in theory, rural whites should be able to easily build a coalition with their black and brown neighbors to create a pan racial, uniform voice that as Paul said, would bring both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to its knees to satisfy them if you had a unified rural America. And yet the gap in voting and the

gap ideologically is wider in rural America than it is in urban or suburban America. And I think that raises important questions and questions that many of our critics and many scholars do not want to ask because they don't want to know the answer. I think I know the answer. I appreciate you guys very much for working on this. Tom Schaller, Paul Waldman. The book is White Rural Rage, The Threat to American Democracy. We'll be talking again soon. Appreciate you guys very much. Thanks so much, Tim. Thanks, Tim.

We will see you all back here on Monday. We've got some great guests lined up for next week. And thanks for listening to the Bull Lord Podcast. Peace, y'all. She said it's none of my business but it breaks my heart I dropped a dozen cheap roses in my shopping cart Made it out to the truck without breaking down Everybody knows you in a speed trap town

Well, it's a Thursday night but there's a high school game Sneak a bottle up the bleachers and forget my name These five-eyed bastards run a shallow cross It's a boy's last dream and a man's first loss And it never did occur to me to leave till tonight And there's no one left to ask if I'm alright I'll sleep until I'm straight enough to drive then decide if there's anything that can't be left behind the road got blurry when the sun came up, so I slept a couple hours in the pickup truck. man a thousand miles away from that speed trap

a thousand miles away from that speed trap the bulwark podcast is produced by katie cooper with audio engineering and editing by jason brown