Those Poor Whites

“I’ve been trying to understand what happened to Ohio,” Paul Krugman wrote in a recent op-ed, “and what it can teach us about America’s future.”¹ But what happened to Ohio, at least as Krugman understands it, is hardly a mystery. The answer was already presumed in the leading question that served as the column’s title: “What’s the Matter With Ohio?” Despite its allusion to Thomas Frank’s influential 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Krugman’s op-ed was not a serious attempt at investigating regional misfortune. Sure, he admitted, Ohioans have found themselves on the “losing side” of an economic divergence, one marked by the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs and the collapse of unions, but why can’t these workers see what’s best for them? As he wrote:

You might expect Ohio voters to support politicians whose policies would help reverse this relative decline. But there’s a striking disconnect between who voters, especially working-class white voters, perceive as being on their side and politicians’ actual policies. For that matter … there’s a striking disconnect between voters’ views of what is happening with the economy and their personal experiences. It’s vibes all the way down.²

As evidence of just how deluded these working-class voters really are, Krugman cites their support for Trump’s trade war and its tariffs on manufactured imports. Sacre bleu, the Nobel laureate surely muttered to himself. Trump’s trade war failed, and Krugman can prove this using data from a recent fifty-two-page paper that reveals just how little it did to provide “economic help to the US heartland.”³ If only the working class in Ohio could stop vibing and find the time to read such educational material, they might realize the error of their ways. “What’s the matter with Ohio?” in other words, is a question better asked with a tone of disgust, the way you might respond to someone you’re not trying to understand at all: “What’s the matter with you?”

If ever the cliché “first as tragedy, second as farce” applied, it’s in the growing response of professional pundits to the 2024 US presidential election cycle and their enduring aversion to “the poor whites.” In the lead-up to the 2016 election, and especially in its aftermath, the villain du jour in American electoral politics was the “white working class,” which nearly every media outlet declared an imminent threat to democracy. That class’ presumed support for Donald Trump—and for some, the more egregious sin of backing Bernie Sanders over an “electable” progressive like Hillary Clinton—had so frightened the delicate sensibilities of middle-class professionals they turned to Roseanne reruns and Hannah Arendt in search for some explanation. Nate Cohn’s post-election takeaway for the New York Times, titled simply “Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites,” might well summarize the sincerity of their attempts to figure out what went wrong. Ultimately, everyone decided, these wretched souls were simply too stupid, and especially too racist, to make an informed decision.

These days, the phrase “white working class” is less marketable, and taking its place is some version of “rural whites,” a catch-all phrase that makes use of what I describe as “inbred family resemblances.” Calling someone “rural” is, for most liberals reading (or writing) a book on the topic, rarely a complement, and tends to imply the distinct yet overlapping predicates “poor,” “uneducated,” and especially “backwards.” Like its predecessor, the term “rural whites” is useful in its generality, a descriptor that is paradoxically self-evident and yet so vague as to afford little insight.

Indeed, it is precisely the slipperiness of the term that allows Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman to open their new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (2024), with a prologue that includes this confident, apocalyptic assertion: “Name a force or impulse that threatens the stability of the American political system—distrust in the fairness of elections, conspiracy theorizing, the embrace of authoritarianism—and it is almost always more prevalent among rural Whites than among those living elsewhere.”⁴ Setting aside the fact that distrusting election fairness is perhaps a reasonable response to the laughable system we currently have—one which regularly features two unpopular candidates with few differences in substantive policy competing for the support of wealthy donors—Schaller and Waldman use the terms “rural Whites” and “those living elsewhere” as if they meaningfully point to something in the real world. Rural America comprises the majority of the United States, and “elsewhere” includes both liberal cities and more conservative suburbs.

White Rural Rage claims to have receipts to back up its views, but many of the book’s claims are so stupid it seems possible Schaller and Waldman are referring to actual receipts from the grocery store. In their discussion of COVID-19, for example, they argue that increased death rates among rural Americans are, no surprise, their own fault: “The most lethal co-morbidity—one never reported on a single death certificate—was the refusal to get a free, safe vaccine. The stubborn, conspiratorial-minded rejection of vaccine science was not confined to rural White communities, but it was most prevalent there.”⁵ These deaths, they go on, should actually be considered “suicides by scientific skepticism,” because after all there is much more room to social distance in the country. Rural Americans, they conclude paternalistically, “squandered their geographic advantage.”⁶

It’s true that vaccination rates were lower in rural America. Framing this as a “rural white” phenomenon, however, overlooks a number of fairly obvious details, not least of which is that in a majority of states—even some predominantly rural states—vaccination rates were lowest among Black residents. This is not because Black voters were “conspiratorially-minded,” although certainly some had suspicions, but because rates of poverty and inadequate health care are extremely high in Black communities—just as they are in much of white, rural America. Remarkably, just ten pages prior to claiming rural whites basically offed themselves by not receiving a vaccine, Schaller and Waldman calmly note: “Healthcare facilities are disappearing from rural communities.”⁷ In the decade leading up to the pandemic, they point out, 136 rural hospitals either shut down or stopped providing inpatient care, and that “Because they serve older, sicker, and poorer populations that often lack insurance coverage, rural hospitals are less profitable, more fiscally vulnerable, and therefore at greater risk of closure.”⁸ Rural pharmacies, likewise, are disappearing, and all of this is due to “capitalism, not some nefarious socialist boogeyman.”⁹

Where, one might ask, did people go to receive COVID-19 vaccines? It may sound strange, but pharmacies and hospitals were at the top of a fairly short list. This is especially true if, say, you don’t have a primary care physician, either because you lack insurance or because the closest family practice is a lengthy drive away. Geographic advantage, indeed—as if space was a substitute for access to essential resources.

COVID-19 skepticism was, and remains, very real. But Schaller and Waldman are not interested in examining why its prevalence is greater in rural America, and more importantly whether this trend says much about the people who live there. They certainly don’t question whether there might be “non-conspiratorial” reasons for vaccine hesitancy in communities still struggling with the aftermath of an opioid epidemic caused in part by doctors overprescribing Oxycontin. Indeed, given the current state of American health care, which routinely saddles patients with exorbitant debt and leaves them wondering if they’ve been hoodwinked into unnecessary treatment, it’s hardly surprising that many wonder if medical professionals have their best interests in mind. The addition of a completely novel virus, a fast-tracked vaccine, and rapidly changing media coverage could only heighten this baseline suspicion.

Schaller and Waldman do touch on the opioid epidemic but fail to engage with it meaningfully. Their handful of platitudes sympathizing with the lives it destroyed are undercut by the remark that “college professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids into rural communities,” which appears in an especially scolding paragraph arguing rural voters need to acknowledge they’ve been “blaming the wrong people for their problems.”¹⁰ Failing to connect this tragedy with an illness that swept through rural communities only a few years later may be an astonishing oversight, but it’s hardly a surprising one. While they conclude their discussion of COVID-19 by conceding that “some might be tempted to say this grim picture is entirely the fault of the people who live in these places, but the truth is far more complex,”¹¹ it’s obvious that this “truth” is beside the point. Such sympathizing, I should add, does little to add nuance to a book dedicated to painting a portrait of rural Americans as brain-washed savages. It’s one thing to tell people they’ve killed themselves with bad choices, but it’s especially ghoulish to then pat them on the back and add “reality is so very complex indeed.”

White Rural Rage is filled with this kind of hedging, as though by admitting the existence of structural inequality and political alienation its authors have fulfilled their journalistic duties. Yes, they admit, rural people “haven’t been offered meaningful paths to political engagement beyond giving their votes to the same candidates they’ve been supporting for years,”¹² but nevertheless their support for populist candidates can only really be explained by their rage, their entitlement, and their lack of gratitude for being “overrepresented” in Congress. The most audacious of these remarks occurs at the end of the book, when Schaller and Waldman write:

Unable, but also mostly unwilling, to cure what ails their constituents, strategic politicians concerned with their own power divert their constituents’ attention away from their suffering by ginning up grievance-fueled culture war distractions. Because those wars are never won, and because the material miseries are left unaddressed, rural folks become increasingly disillusioned.¹³

What is especially ridiculous about this passage, which might as well be lifted from the much better work of Thomas Frank, is the implication that White Rural Rage itself is not a “grievance-fueled culture war distraction” (chapter four, aptly titled “Cultures at War,” features an entire section dedicated to examining the psychology of truck ownership). Despite the authors’ repeated use of “folks” to sound generous, which is as annoying as it is paternalistic, there isn’t an air freshener available that can mask the stench of condescension that wafts from the book’s pages. Pointing to data under the guise of objectivity does nothing to contextualize their analysis, especially when the data in question rarely supports their weak, culture-war generalities.

One of the authors whose research the book cites, Nicholas Jacobs, wrote a response for Politico detailing the shoddy reporting that bolsters the main claims in White Rural Rage. Schaller and Waldman, he correctly notes, frequently rely on the fallacy of composition, or attributing group characteristics to individuals. “For example,” Jacobs writes, “they suggest that since authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, and rural residents support Trump, rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian.”¹⁴ In fact, rural Americans are no more provably authoritarian than those in urban or suburban areas, and may actually be less likely to support political violence. The same poor reasoning appears in claims that white rural voters express greater support for Christian nationalism and conspiracy theories about the deep state. Ultimately, Jacobs concludes, “only two surveys in the entire book conform to basic standards of survey research and even attempt to try and present an accurate picture of rural America.”¹⁵

Using and correctly interpreting reliable data might seem like a low bar for a work seeking to understand political reality, but it’s hardly a requirement for a book that would rather rest its laurels on sensational claims like, “We stand at what may be the most dangerous moment for American democracy since the Civil War.”¹⁶ While I may not agree with many of the beliefs and attitudes presented as threats in the book, it is hard to find them more dangerous than, say, the creation of the atom bomb, or for that matter the staggering inequality and demoralizing exploitation that has been naturalized in the name of “economic growth.” As one recent study found, chronic poverty is associated with nearly 300,000 deaths each year.¹⁷ An outrage, yes, but hardly as destructive as all those scary thoughts people are having.

White Rural Rage, to be fair, is not so much a work of political scholarship as it is light entertainment, an embarrassing but likely profitable bit of fart-sniffing self-importance designed to sell copies. This is certainly why the book is not titled White Rural Resentment, because rage is scarier than resentment and, as Jacobs points out, implies the sort of irrational psychology for which there is no reasonable solution. While this may seem unfair to its authors, it is difficult to seriously engage with claims that are either insincere provocations or, worse, sincere but poor attempts at analysis. Its ostensible takedown of rural America never once meaningfully engages with the reality that every “threat” it identifies with rural America exists in suburban and, yes, urban areas as well. Apparently, saying rural voters are “more likely” to hold a particular belief is hard proof—of what, exactly, it’s never made clear, outside of the self-evident fact that they live in rural communities. This, it seems, is bad enough.

Put another way, White Rural Rage says much more about its authors than about its subjects. As Steven Conn writes, “Many of us see what we want to see when we bother to look at rural America. Those places have become blank screens onto which we project any number of our own fantasies,”¹⁸ or, in the case of Schaller and Waldman, our dystopian nightmares. Conn’s own book on rural America, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America For What It is—And Isn’t (2023), is a far better resource for thinking about the politics of rural America and the resentment that many liberals interpret as rage. His main claim is that rural America is neither some strange landscape forever teetering on the precipice of crisis nor an agricultural Eden populated by authentic yeomen. It is, he writes, shaped by four major forces, “to the same extent as they have formed the rest of the country, and especially since World War II: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization.”¹⁹ While there exist problems that often present as unique to rural America, these arise from historically developing economic and social relations that extend beyond it, and in fact often require rural spaces for their reproduction.

Much of the rural landscape, especially to those who romanticize its wilderness, appears untouched by human engineering. The Lies of the Land does an excellent job at dissecting the many ways rural America is, much like its urban and suburban counterparts, organized to a remarkable degree. Anyone who has flown over the middle of the country and peered down at the mathematical grid of pavement and farmland has witnessed this. Our massive network of interstate highways that connect Alabama to Iowa to Nebraska, for a start, are a direct product of Cold War paranoia and military planning. Moreover, tucked between those highways, amongst the cornfields and farms and forests, are a large number of military bases that take advantage of rural America’s geography. While the exact number is difficult to pinpoint, Conn reports in Lies of the Land that more than one thousand bases are located in the continental United States—about 25 million acres worth, or 2.5 percent of the country’s land mass.²⁰

The Lies of the Land begins with these military bases, and for good reason. Their presence has been enormously influential on rural America, economically and politically. As Conn notes, the mid-century expansion of the military into rural communities often displaced local residents whose land was occupied and transformed into training sites. Some were offered buyouts, while others, especially renters, were given nothing. At the same time, the military’s growing presence created a local economy that remaining residents came to depend upon for survival. Unsurprisingly, rural America developed a complicated, symbiotic relationship with the military and the government it represents. In addition to the strategic resource of open land, the military was attracted to the “small-town values” of rural communities, which were viewed as an antidote to the corrupting influence of urban civilization and its many temptations. Likewise, Conn points out, “large parts of rural America had their identity shaped by the presence of the military.”²¹ For many rural communities, the military was the employer, and later a part of their family, figuratively and often literally, as many went to work for it.

The relationship between the military and rural America found its perhaps most literal expression during the Cold War, when the Pentagon buried its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles beneath the Great Plains. As Conn describes it, “Underneath the cattle ranches and grain fields—so evocative of the nation’s pioneering, homesteading mythologies—lay some of the most sophisticated technology on the planet and certainly the most destructive.”²² In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at the K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, weapons were flown in and out of a once-thriving iron community, pumping in tens of millions of dollars into the local economy and providing thousands of jobs. In the process, “Sawyer turned this played-out mining area into a centerpiece of the Cold War and those who lived nearby into inadvertent Cold Warriors.”²³ The presence of the military, and the values it reflected, became inseparable from everyday life.

As the Cold War came to an end, Sawyer, like many other bases, was eventually shut down—from rural America’s perspective, the fault of politicians. In its absence, the local population declined dramatically. Those who remained faced staggering rates of unemployment and poverty that Conn describes as “rural blight.” Typically, he notes, “blight” is associated with urban poverty in deindustrialized cities like nearby Detroit, and it carries with it a specific racial connotation that invokes terms like “welfare.” “Nonetheless,” he adds, “the people of Marquette county, like those in all rural areas with a large military installation, depended on federal money, and its withdrawal has only amplified the poverty there.”²⁴ So while it may be obvious how neoliberal austerity and trade policy have ravaged industrial cities, it is often less obvious how the fluctuations in governmental spending contribute to rural poverty. As Conn continues, “Many Americans—not just rural ones, to be sure—have decided military spending isn’t government spending at all.”

Rural and urban poverty are not distinct, despite the ways they are often framed in racial or cultural terms. The same post-war military spending that buoyed the American economy during its thirty-year run of “stability,” largely by creating consumer demand and regulating the business cycle, was responsible for the relative prosperity of rural communities. The difference is that this spending took different forms, often as a consequence of geography, and allowed any number of more visible factors—again, race and culture—to step in with explanatory power. This, to be sure, has contributed greatly to the rural-urban divide that pundits like Schaller and Waldman treat with almost religious reverence (whatever they may insist otherwise).

The military is an obvious player in the urban-rural divide. Just look at the demographics of military recruitment, which skew toward rural America. In the aftermath of September 11 especially, Conn notes, “military recruits have come increasingly from families of military members and from counties adjacent to military bases.” This increase stems as much from economic need as from cultural familiarity. While working-class kids from all communities can be attracted to the potential social mobility offered by military ranks, to say nothing of its generous benefits, those in rural communities already have a more intimate relationship with the armed forces. Many have grown up with it, and likely have family and friends already enlisted. Their support for the military, which many read as authoritarian-leaning and jingoistic, is in this sense far more complicated than mere ideology. One of the more memorable passages in Lies of the Land comes in the postscript to the section on the military, and is worth quoting in full:

Still, rural people live in proximity with the military, are familiar with it, and depend on it for their livelihoods to an extent that isn’t true for most of the rest of us. And they have had to live with its worst consequences more than the rest of us too. According to a report early in 2007 by the Associated Press, roughly half of the Americans killed in Iraq came from towns of under 25,000 people, 20 percent from towns smaller than 5,000. These are small-town kids, many of them poor—almost 75 percent of those killed to that point came from towns with per capita incomes below the national average. Rural states—the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana—suffered the highest death rates in Iraq.²⁵

These numbers are both a sobering reality and an indictment of the military’s exploitation of the working-class. Nevertheless, many people in these same rural areas don’t see it this way, regardless of whether or not we can understand this, or whether we agree with beliefs that help make sense of it. For Conn, it is this contradictory, emotional relationship to the military that helps explain rural support for Donald Trump, a contradictory figure himself who has channeled their anger and embitterment “toward an establishment that sent their children off to be blown up for no good reason and without any positive result.”²⁶

Trump’s appeal among rural Americans is more complicated than just this, but Conn is less interested in interrogating the psychology of voter behavior than he is in mapping out the ways industries—the automotive industry and retail chains, among others—have shaped the economic fortunes, and misfortunes, of these rural citizens. In Anna, Ohio, for example, rural farmland was a strategic choice for building a Honda factory, in part, it is said, because the company believed it would be more difficult for workers there to form a union (small-town workers, they (like the military) believed, had better values). But Anna also offered convenient access to I-75, the highway that runs north into the deindustrialized cities of Toledo and Detroit. In a remarkable bit of symbolism, these two sites, one rural and one urban, embody the larger economic shift away from unionized manufacturing in centralized hubs to the distant, decentralized production that has replaced it.

But though rural areas like Anna may benefit now, they are nearly guaranteed to collapse when industry flees, as it often does. “Much like the experience of areas that lost military installations,” Conn writes, “rural industrial sites are not likely to have a broader, more diversified economy to soften the blow of a plant closure. Nor is there often much left with which to rebuild the economic infrastructure or to replace the lost jobs and revenue.”²⁷ What often fills the vacuum left behind? Big box stores and chains like Walmart and Dollar General, which have developed a similarly symbiotic relationship with rural America: always in search of a precarious, desperate pool of labor to continue suppressing wages, the chains find this in communities with little to no viable opportunities, communities that may not love a shit paycheck but frankly are grateful everything inside their place of employment is cheap enough to afford. Dollar General’s 18,000 locations, Conn writes, “map rural poverty to an exacting degree.”²⁸ Many of these locations are as temporary as the factories and military sites, with stores open long enough to extract what profit they can and move on to somewhere else.

During the 2016 election, I wrote about rural America as a “non-place,” one defined less by what it is than by what it lacks.²⁹ Conn’s history, which traces the use of rural landscapes as primarily a temporary space for capital and its institutions, gets at something similar, and in much greater depth. One of the other memorable passages in the book articulates this nicely, and does more to articulate rural resentment than most who have written about the topic:

Cars have played a large and thoroughly ironic role in the abandonment of rural places and in the increasing alienation many Americans have from those places. Before the creation of the highway system, roads took drivers into towns, and even the roadside space between towns facilitated the interaction between out-of-town drivers and locals. The big new roads, however, have made such interactions virtually impossible. Limited-access, high-speed freeways amount to corridors through rural space, and they reduce that space to an almost cinematic backdrop for those whizzing through them at 70 mph. Stops only come off the exit ramps; social interactions, maybe, only at gas stations, mini-marts, and chain hotels. Meanwhile, many of the towns bypassed by those big roads have shriveled, largely unseen and ignored by a national policy designed for drivers eager to get from point A to point B as fast as possible.³⁰

Rural America, in short, is a place many people pass through to get somewhere better. Even the institutions that define rural America, and on which rural Americans depend, often find somewhere better—and it certainly isn’t always in America. Many rural Americans agree that “elsewhere” might offer a better living: as Jacobs points out in his critique of White Rural Rage, “rural Americans are the most likely to say that if given the chance, they would never want to leave their community, while at the same time they are the most likely to say that children growing up in their specific community will have to leave in order to live productive lives. Could any single policy solve that dilemma?”³¹ The answer, obviously, is no, and no amount of literature that proves they are voting against their economic interests will convince them otherwise.

For Schaller and Waldman, these sorts of questions are too complicated. The solution, they argue, is actually quite simple: rural Americans need to organize and form a political movement, which would certainly be courted by both parties (because politicians are beloved for actually enacting policies voters support). They leave to the reader’s imagination how such organization would actually be formed, and seem to assume that rural Americans all want the same things. More importantly, they assume that rural Americans would even want to be represented by either party in the first place, at least as they exist now—namely, as the liberal and conservative wings of finance capital. True, many currently support Donald Trump, which after all is precisely the problem so many liberals are trying to solve. I doubt they will ever find a solution, and certainly won’t find one in a middle-class screed like White Rural Rage. Their problem, of course, is that they don’t know how to do anything else.

If all else fails, they might consider this, from a retired Ohio postal worker shortly after Trump’s victory in 2016: “He is Ronald Reagan on steroids. I haven’t felt this good about a politician in years, because he is not a politician.”³²

1. Paul Krugman, “What’s the Matter With Ohio?” The New York Times. March 21, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/opinion/trump-biden-economy-ohio.html
2. Krugman
3. Autor, D, A Beck, D Dorn and G Hanson (2024), “Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 18202. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp18202
4. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (New York: Random House 2024), pg. 5
5. White Rural Rage, 58
6. White Rural Rage, 59
7. White Rural Rage, 47
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. White Rural Rage, 244
11. White Rural Rage, 60
12. White Rural Rage, 125
13. White Rural Rage, 240
14. Nicholas Jacobs, “What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything.” Politico. April 5, 2024. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/05/white-rural-rage-myth-00150395
15. Ibid.
16. White Rural Rage, 4
17. Brady D, Kohler U, Zheng H. Novel Estimates of Mortality Associated With Poverty in the US. JAMA Intern Med. 2023;183(6):618–619. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.0276
18. Conn, Steve. The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America For What It is—And Isn’t. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 17
19. Ibid, 1
20. Lies of the Land, 52.
21. Lies of the Land, 54.
22. Lies of the Land, 57.
23. Lies of the Land, 58.
24. Lies of the Land, 68
25. Lies of the Land, 74
26. Lies of the Land, 75
27. Lies of the Land, 132
28. Lies of the Land, 191
29. Adam Theron-Lee Rensch, “White, Rural, and Poor: On the Politics of Non-Identity.” The Brooklyn Rail, July 2016. https://brooklynrail.org/2016/07/field-notes/white-rural-and-poor
30. Lies of the Land, 130
31. Jacobs.
32. Ken Stern, “Inside How Trump Won the White Working Class.” Vanity Fair, January 5, 2017. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/how-trump-won-the-white-working-class