#whiteruralrage — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #whiteruralrage, aggregated by home.social.
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“If you've been persuaded that the greatest threat to your way of life is a trans girl on the other side of the state who wants to play on her middle school softball team, not only won't you ever consider voting for a Democrat, but you won't ask much of your Republican representatives, either. You won't hold them accountable for the condition of your streets or the lack of economic opportunities in your town.”
Ibid., p. 239
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #Republicans
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"Come Election Day, despair is a Republican candidate's chief asset, because that despair is easiest to convert into anger, and that anger into votes. ...
The stores in your hometown are all shuttered? It must be because the Wall Street bank tweeted out an image of a Pride flag.”
~ Ibid., pp. 237, 239
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #Republicans
/60 -
“So, like all right-wing parties that depend on rural voters, the Republican Party has an interest in maintaining, not alleviating, their struggles. Rural voters who are satisfied and optimistic might consider the entreaties of both parties, but the more dissatisfied and angrier they are, the more they'll stick with the GOP."
~ Ibid., pp. 236-7
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #Republicans
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“Since Donald Trump's rise, the national media have devoted tremendous attention to the political grievances of rural White voters. Reporters and pundits routinely descend upon rural communities, sit down with locals at diners and sports bleachers, and listen earnestly to what downscale rural White voters have to say, but the same national media hardly notice that rural minorities exist or are aware that they have legitimate complaints of their own."
~ Ibid., p. 201
#WhiteRuralRage
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"With clear eyes and full hearts, rural Whites recognized Trump's exclusionary, reality-defying, undemocratic, and violent tendencies – and then rallied behind him because of, not despite, his repeated disregard for America's most sacred democratic traditions."
~ Ibid.,
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“Millions of rural White voters seem undeterred or even thrilled by the former president's statements and actions. In fact, they are the only major geo-demographic cohort among whom Trump performed better in the 2020 presidential contest than he did four years earlier."
~ Ibid., p. 195
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“Nor can economic anxiety explain why rural African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans – all of whom face even greater economic and health challenges than their White neighbors – exhibit stronger democratic commitments than do rural Whites. We offer a simple explanation for this racialized aspect of the patriotic paradox: Non-White rural citizens are not now nor have they ever been part of what we call America's essential minority”.
~ Ibid., p. 194
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"That skepticism proved fatal for more rural Americans than would have died had heartland vaccination rates mirrored those nationwide percentages.
Not every rural White American espouses xenophobic, conspiratorial, undemocratic, or violent attitudes. But rural Whites are overrepresented across all four of these threats.”
~ Ibid., pp. 173-4, 194
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #ConspiracyTheories #VaccineRefusal #COVID #ScienceSkepticism #xenophobia #violence
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“QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural than in urban areas. ...
Scientific skepticism proved especially lethal when rural Whites – the citizens most dubious of pandemic experts – refused safe COVID-19 vaccines at rates higher than urban and suburban citizens."
~ Ibid., pp. 173, 194
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #QAnon #ConspiracyTheories #VaccineRefusal #COVID #ScienceSkepticism
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“The attitude of too many rural Whites may best be described as ‘I love my country but not our country.’ Their brand of exclusive patriotism appears conditioned upon maintaining or remaking the U.S. political system to their advantage at the expense of equality and opportunities for Americans different from them."
~ Ibid.
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #Constitution
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"Poll after poll confirms that rural Whites are the vanguard for the xenophobic, reality-defying, undemocratic, and increasingly violent movements that currently threaten to undermine the world's oldest constitutional democracy and the pluralist society that democracy protects."
~ Ibid.
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #Constitution
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“Rural White Americans assert a deep reverence for the Constitution and America’s democratic principles. Millions of them demonstrate this reverence daily. But the democratic commitments of too many rural Whites are weak, limited, or quickly abandoned."
~ Ibid., p. 160
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #Constitution
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"Third, rural White citizens are less supportive of democratic principles like free speech, a free press, the separation of church and state, and the value of constitutional checks and balances. …
Fourth and finally, rural Whites are more inclined to justify the use of force, even violence, as an appropriate means for solving political disputes.”
~ Ibid.
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“Specifically, rural Whites pose four interconnected threats to the republic:
First, in a nation experiencing rapid demographic change, rural Whites are uniquely xenophobic towards Americans who look, speak, act, or pray differently from them. …
Second, the views of rural white citizens are least tethered to reality."
~ Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, pp. 158-9
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy
/48https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734507/white-rural-rage-by-tom-schaller-and-paul-waldman/
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"The result is a politics saturated in bitterness and bile, and a party whose most loyal voters don't expect their leaders to offer them anything but the ugliest kind of emotional satisfaction. Even when Trump is gone, in rural America he will still be king. And the rest of the country will suffer for it.”
~ Ibid.
Trump's hook: He promises white rural voters "restored dignity through dominance” (p. 140).
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“Even if Trump fails in 2024 and becomes nothing more than the laughable two-bit grifter he always has been at heart, his effect on the politics of rural America will be felt for a generation, if not more. He showed every Republican what rural Whites, and the GOP base more broadly, really want and how to give it to them."
~ Ibid., p. 155
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"The fact that rural areas have plenty of infidelity and teen parenthood (which occurs at significantly higher rates among rural Americans than city dwellers) doesn't necessarily make people reject traditional family values; it can make them cling to those values all the more fervently, as they consider them under constant, visible threat.”
~ Ibid.
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #morality #FamilyValues #TraditionalFamily
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“Even the common, and perfectly accurate, criticism that Trump doesn't practice what he preaches likely resonates in rural areas, where you often find a strong moral code that is regularly violated by many of the people who live there."
~ Ibid., pp. 149-150
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy #morality #FamilyValues #TraditionalFamily
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"For many years, it was assumed that successful racial appeals had to be offered subtly, to provide voters a kind of internal plausible deniability, so that they could tell themselves they weren't being racist when they responded to such appeals. By the time 2016 came around, this was no longer true. White identity had become important enough that Trump could succeed by wearing his bigotry on his sleeve.”
~ Ibid., p. 145
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“To understand Donald Trump, you have to start with Barack Obama. Trump’s successful candidacy would not have been possible in the wake of any other presidency; It was the backlash against America's first Black president that pushed Trump into the White House.”
“When one looks to the places where Trump’s support was most intense, again and again one arrives in majority-White rural areas.”
~ Ibid., pp. 134, 137
#Trump #rural #white #WhiteRuralRage #democracy
/42https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734507/white-rural-rage-by-tom-schaller-and-paul-waldman/
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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.
Because I'm not listening.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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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.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
/7 -
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.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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"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.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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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.
Waldman writes,
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
/4 -
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.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
/3 -
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.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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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.
#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
/1https://newrepublic.com/article/180570/trump-rural-white-resentment-honest-assessment
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"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."
~ Thomas Schaller
#WhiteRuralVoters #WhiteRuralRage #ElectoralCollege #Senate #MinorityRule
/1https://theconversation.com/why-rural-white-americans-resentment-is-a-threat-to-democracy-224346
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'"Now I will be your wrath. Look at everyone you hate – those overeducated liberals and Hollywood elites and arrogant city people and social justice warriors trying to make you feel bad for being White and being a man and being American. They despise me just as much as they despise you. Let's show them who this country really belongs to.'”
~ Ibid.