Posted on 04/14/2024 12:28:27 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Rural white people, as a group, now pose four interconnected threats to the fate of the United States’ pluralist, constitutional democracy.
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.
Although there is no uniform definition of “rural,” and even federal agencies cannot agree on a single standard, roughly 20% of Americans live in rural communities, according to the Census Bureau’s definition. And three-quarters of them – or approximately 15% of the U.S. population – are white.
Since the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the expansion of the vote to all white men in the late 1820s, however, the support of rural white people has been vital to the governing power of almost every major party coalition. Which is why my co-author Paul Waldman and I describe rural white people as America’s “essential minority” in our book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.”
As a political scientist, I’ve written or co-written five books addressing issues of racial politics at some level of government or part of the country. My latest, “White Rural Rage,” seeks to understand the complex intersections of race, place and opinion and the implications they hold for our political system.
The unfortunate fact is that polls suggest many rural white people’s commitment to the American political system is eroding. Even when they are not members of militant organizations, rural white people, as a group, now pose four interconnected threats to the fate of the United States’ pluralist, constitutional democracy.
Although these do not apply to all rural white people, nor exclusively to them in general, when compared with other Americans, rural white people:
– Express the most racist, least inclusive, most xenophobic, most anti-LGBTQ+ and most anti-immigrant sentiments.
– Subscribe at the highest rates to conspiracy theories about QAnon, the 2020 presidential election, Barack Obama’s citizenship and COVID-19 vaccines.
– Support a variety of antidemocratic and unconstitutional positions and exhibit strong attachments to white nationalist and white Christian nationalist movements inimical to secular, constitutional governance.
– Are most likely to justify, if not call for, force or violence as acceptable alternatives to deliberative, peaceful democracy.
Let’s examine a few data points.
XENOPHOBIA fewer rural residents hold inclusive views on social issues - Bucks County Beacon - Why 'White Rural Rage' Is a Threat to American Democracy In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2018, 46% of white rural Americans said it is important to live in a diverse community. That’s a lower proportion than urban and suburban dwellers and even nonwhite rural residents.
And in rural areas, fewer than half the people said white people have advantages Black people do not, approve of the legalization of same-sex marriage, and say immigrants make American society stronger.
In addition, Cornell researchers found that rural whites reported feeling less comfortable with gay and lesbian people than urban whites do. And 49% of rural LGBTQ+ people between the ages of 10 and 24 called their own towns “unaccepting” of LGBTQ+ people – nearly twice the rate of suburban and urban LGBTQ+ young people who said the same about their communities.
CONSPIRACISM rural dwellers are more likely to believe conspiracy theories - Bucks County Beacon - Why 'White Rural Rage' Is a Threat to American Democracy Polls in 2020 and 2021 indicated that QAnon supporters are 1.5 times more likely to live in rural areas than urban ones, and 49% of rural residents – 10 points higher than the national average – believe a “deep state” undermines Trump.
Rural residents are also more likely than urban and suburban residents to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, according to 2021 polling by the Public Religion Research Institute.
And people who live in rural areas are also less confident as a whole than those who live in urban areas that votes will be counted accurately and fairly in their state or across the country, according to a 2022 poll from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
In addition, by our analysis, of the 139 U.S. House members who voted to reject the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election just hours after a violent mob of Trump supporters rampaged through the Capitol, 103 – 74% – represented either “purely rural” or “rural/suburban” districts, as categorized by Bloomberg’s CityLab project.
ANTIDEMOCRATIC BELIEFS more rural residents hold antidemocratic views - Bucks County Beacon - Why 'White Rural Rage' Is a Threat to American Democracy A scholarly analysis of multiyear data from the American National Election Studies project finds that rural citizens are “much more likely (than urban residents) to favor restrictions on the press” and to say it would be “helpful if the president could unilaterally work” without regard to Congress or the courts.
In addition, more than half of rural residents surveyed by the Public Religion Research Institute said being a Christian is important to “being truly American” – 10 percentage points more than in surburban or urban areas.
This is one of several signals that rural residents are disproportionately likely to support white Christian nationalism, an ideology that reaches beyond Christian ideas of faith and morality and into government. Its followers want the United States to base its laws on Christian values rather than maintain the centuries-old separation of church and state the founders saw as fundamental to a secular democracy.
JUSTIFICATION OF VIOLENCE rural americans more likely to support political violence - Bucks County Beacon - Why 'White Rural Rage' Is a Threat to American Democracy Rural residents are more likely than urban or suburban residents to say the political situation in the country is heading to a point where violence may be necessary to preserve the nation, according to polls from the Public Religion Research Institute in 2021 and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics in 2022.
Of the estimated 21 million Americans who in late 2021 said Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win was “illegitimate,” according to the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, 30% lived in rural areas. And 27% of Americans who say Trump should be returned to office even if “by force” are rural residents. Those are minority views, but both proportions are significantly higher than the rural proportion of the overall population.
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.
Thomas F. Schaller is Professor of Political Science at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Maybe if they quit attacking whites they wouldn’t get the push back. What exactly do they expect? Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated by these clowns and their bs.
According to FBI crimes stats for 2019 (last year available) by region type: Rural areas had a 0.1871% violent crime rate (50,778 violent crimes in a population of 27,139,436 people).
Metro areas had a 0.3861% violent crime rate (1,090,149 violent crimes in a population of 282,364,364). In other words, twice the crime rate as rural folks.
That shows the "rural" part of the rage is a bunch of hogwash.
So let's look at the "white" rage. I couldn't find stats by race for all violent crimes, but here's murders by race. Let's look at the numbers.
3,299 murders committed by whites, which had a population of 235,400,000 (2020 census). A murder rate of 0.0014%.
2,906 murders committed by blacks, which had a population of 5,800,000. Murder rate of 0.0501%. (36 times higher than whites)
The rhetoric of the political class is always far from the truth.
He author has an outsized opinion of the importance of LGBTQ issues. The bigger threat to the US is the LGBTQ activists who seek to impose their puny little community’s manufactured culture on everyone else.
Yeah, we should let the atheist faggoty plundering plutocrat Dickheadz on the East Coast decide everything for the entire breadth of the country.
Ever notice so-called red state America -never- dictates to the so-called blue states how to live? But the blue states cannot stop screwing with everybody else.
ANTIDEMOCRATIC BELIEFS = have not memorized the communist manifesto and das kapital
No, Leftist lawlessness is the greatest threat to our republic.
Whites just need to sit down, shut up, pay taxes, while the democrat party destroys their lives and imports third world trash to live at their expense.
Yes...the author is launching an attack on the electoral college.
He would be all for the EC if the rural folks were mostly gay.
When I read crap like this I use the computer to replace every word with “black “ and send it right back to the editor daring them to publish it. They never have.
I value my brain...I refuse to read even one word of this corrosive article apparently written by woke smooth brain nitwits.
Avoid rural areas...pilgrim. Big democrat cities are so much nicer for your kind of filth.😎
😂😂😂😂. Oh, Otay then!
I grew up in a city raised by country parents then moved out of the city to a rural town. I fit in here much better.
“As a political scientist, I’ve written or co-written five books addressing issues of racial politics at some level of government or part of the country. My latest, “White Rural Rage,” seeks to understand the complex intersections of race, place and opinion and the implications they hold for our political system.”
Question, “Professor,” do you believe there are more than two genders?
There is no such thing as “Political Science…” I have a degree in it, I know first hand..
Sounds like this coward might be a bit skeert!
Alternate headline: Rural Voters More Sensible Than American Average
Get a room.
Forgive Tom, he’s still attached to the UMBC
AND ANOTHER THING!!!! “QAnon.” That makes his whole loggahreic argument stupid and silly.
Good idea!😉👌
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