PicoBlog

Much has been written and said about White Rural Rage, a book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman that argues (with more than a little American Exceptionalism) that “rural voters…pose a growing threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

On one side, critics, including academics whose work is cited in the book, have said that their work is misrepresented. I have no reason to doubt them, and you can read their many critiques online; they are much more capable than I am to talk about their work. On the other side, many writers who focus on the threat of the far-right, some of whom tout bona fide rural street cred, say that the book’s essential thesis is correct.

As I begin to launch into my own comments about White Rural Rage – particularly how it relates to so-called “constitutional sheriffs” – I first want to say that some of the analysis in the book is correct. For example, the authors have a chapter on how the Senate, House, and state legislatures are tilted toward the over-representation of non-urban voters. As anyone who has contemplated Congress or the Electoral College can say, this is just true. Because voting districts are determined by geography – imagine a world where voting isn’t delineated by land mass – electoral maps showing counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 do jump out as a lot of red. It is true that around 80% of counties voted for Trump in the last presidential election. It is also true that those 80% of counties account for around 20% of the population; in terms of numbers of Trump voters, more people in urban areas voted for Trump.

The book’s title announces that it is not here to be subtle, but rather to court controversy. As a result, even though the book cites its sources extremely diligently, it can feel a little quick and dirty. It’s here to make a point, and you are either here for it or not. For my taste, the text has a lot of italics and an occassional mansplaining tone that reiterates countless times, in case readers didn’t know, that people who vote for Trump are stupid, bad, and racist. While this may be true, the problem is that those same voters don’t think they are those things. In fact, I think it is pretty clear these people believe they are super-citizens, even more patriotic and dedicated to the history of the “real” America than the rest of us. (Cue, “republic, not a democracy.”) So, who, exactly, are Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman trying to persuade?

Rural doesn’t have a very stable definition to begin with. According to the U.S. Department of the Census, “rural areas comprise open country and settlements with fewer than 2,000 housing units and 5,000 residents.” In other words, rural is just the opposite of urban as seen from the air in terms of housing density. The United States Department of Agriculture uses a different definition (from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget) based on county or region population plus employment data. Basically, all of this official data reiterates that rural isn’t urban, but it isn’t really anything else either.

As a result, it’s hard to fault the authors for using an “agnostic” definition of rural. The common-sense definition of rural is a bit broader than both official government definitions. Most counties have some sort of urban core with exurban or rural areas around it. So, few counties will be purely rural, and those that are often include features like national parks, where no one lives, or federally-owned land. (Some are also extremely wealthy because they consist of vacation homes and environmental easements.) Rural areas are not the same in terms of access to opportunity – a rural region five hours from the nearest city is substantively different from one that is 45 minutes outside of a major metropolis.

Because the actual definition of rural is so slippery as to be almost useless, I think a more useful way to look at the political/ economic/ cultural issues that authors want to address is rural nostalgia – in other words, it’s not what actual rural America looks like, but rather what most Americans think it is. This is so common as to go almost unnoticed; in fact, the founding myth of the U.S.A. is about its frontier and bounty of land, that producers are better than consumers, that limited government is a right. While the authors do point out certain types of rural nostalgia – there’s a long section on pickup trucks, for example – there is less critical analysis of how nostalgia works to inspire positive feelings and conceal unsightly truths about how America came to be a nation as well as how it generates such cognitive dissonance when nostalgia fails to match lived reality.

This is where I think we get to the unacknowledged crux of the book. It isn’t really demographic at all. It’s about vibes. Vibes seem to make these authors uncomfortable, however, because they trouble their overall point – that a very small percent of voters are deeply radicalized against liberal democracy. If only that were true.

White Rural Rage even opens with the perfect example of vibes: Jason Aldean singing “Try That in a Small Town” which the authors call “an ode to resentment and vigilantism.” Aldean lives and owns multiple businesses in Nashville, which is distinctly urban. But that misses the point, I think. His song is about the America you might see if you took a lot of acid and watched 24-hour news. It’s obvious when you watch the video, which overlays a dizzying mélange of urban chaos pulled from Fox News (protestors, Molotov cocktails, smash-and-grabs) alongside military-grade policing (cops in riot gear, cops on horseback). The final minute of the video is tradwife Instagram content – kids playing, men hunting, lots of American flags. None of it is “real” in any sense of the word, just a sort of mood board of Things Aldean Likes. Most of the fans listening aren’t rural either – they are from Tennessee, especially the suburbs around Nashville where anti-woke sentiment is growing even as Nashville itself becomes more cosmopolitan.

When you look at white rural America (to the extent it exists) through this lens, you can see both the political problem as well as the ways in which the book wholly misses the point. The GOP harnesses rural nostalgia the same way militias, the Sagebrush Rebellion, and the television show Yellowstone do – it’s a way to point both to something that is lost (Make America Great AGAIN) as well as something that never existed in the first place (the myth that white frontier settlers are original claimants to the land that is the U.S.A.). It's powerful because so many non-rural people believe it, too. And, I would argue, a lot of centrists and Democrats.

The relative experience of living in rural America is somewhat irrelevant. There is no such place, I would argue, at least not in the way anyone wants to describe it. (Indeed, actual “rural America” is probably more Hillbilly Elegy than Try That in a Small Town.)  To me, this is evident in the number of people who make claims of being from “rural America.” Can we really say Appalachia, Nevada, Alabama, Washington State, and Michigan are the same places? Of course not. But do these places – alongside suburban and exurban regions all across the country – traffic in the myth of rural America? Absolutely.

This is not to say that there aren’t differences between rural and urban communities in terms of norms, economics, or politics. The “rural-urban divide” is the most salient division in national politics. I cannot claim to make broad claims about this because it is above my station, but I do think any analysis of this division must take into account realities on the ground (lack of healthcare, high incarceration rates, domestic violence, unemployment) as well as the imagined realities that national GOP politicians, the sellers of pickup trucks, and mass media use when they generate images of “rural America.”

But let’s get back to more of my expertise. The book uses the existence of so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to make the point that rural white Americans are more dangerous and less democratic.

The authors have some point. Far-right sheriffs, to the extent one can count them, are more common in rural areas by most metrics, even though they represent fewer people. If we rely on lists of sheriffs who sign on to CSPOA letters, like the one in 2014, most of the them are in rural or semi-rural counties. Such sheriffs receive disproportionate representation because of the county model – most counties aren’t urban, so most sheriffs aren’t either. In my book, some, but not all, of the sheriffs I write about are what most people would consider rural, or at least not urban.

But, the issue with sheriffs is not that rural white counties elect conservative white sheriffs. They obviously do. The problem is that non-rural, non-white counties still elect conservative white sheriffs. And, in all cases, those sheriffs are plainly more far-right than other similarly elected local officials chosen by the same electorate. (In my book I make more explicit arguments about why county-wide elections are a problem.)

The section in the book on “constitutional sheriffs” unquestionably over-generalizes (Then again, I am more invested in the topic than the average person, so I have some bias.) The main academic citations are to the work of political scientists Emily Farris and Mirya Holman, who did a survey of around 500 sheriffs that was published by The Marshall Project. Using questions intended to measure “right-wing extremism” and political ideology, they found that sheriffs scored relatively high on RWE and this coincided with some policy choices, like public statements on mask-wearing during COVID. If anything, their work tends to show that sheriffs across the board – at least the sheriffs who respond to academic questionnaires they get mailed - are more to the right of their communities and other elected officials.

Farris and Holman also argue that sheriffs’ personal views impact their policies, a claim Schaller and Waldman repeat in their book. I have some quibbles with this since I am not sure how you can see into the hearts of sheriffs in any study. In my experience, most sheriffs repeat what they hear and are heavily influenced by a variety of sources: political views in their county, political donors, professional organizations (not just “constitutional sheriff” organizations, but also the National Sheriffs Association and other more regional groups), and the increasing far-right nature of the GOP itself. It is undeniably true, as I have written, that sheriffs as a group resist reform, but this transcends political alignment. It is also true that there appears to be little difference on the ground when it comes to how sheriffs arrest, evict, and jail people, which is their primary function. People in Democrat-run jails die at about the same rates (as much as we can tell) as those in “constitutional sheriff” jails.

So, does this prove the authors’ thesis? I don’t know. I assume they included this section because of the threat to democracy part; namely, that far-right sheriffs have been publicly vocal about “voter fraud investigations” and supporting far-right vigilantes who seek to police, i.e., intimidate, voters. Holman and Harris don’t address this in their survey. Far-right sheriffs have indeed jumped on this bandwagon, largely because sheriffs are politicians who can say what they want.

The problem the authors have is that their examples don’t quite prove their point. They use Calvin Hayden, the sheriff of Johnson County as an example. But Johnson County is distinctly not rural; it’s the most populous county in Kansas and pretty blue. (In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper says that the authors told him they made a mistake.)

They also point to Barry County, Michigan, Sheriff Dar Leaf. Barry County is technically rural from what I can tell. Even there, there’s dissonance the authors don’t tease out. Leaf, despite winning elections, does not have the support of his county in these election investigations. Only a small minority agree with his quest, and, according to my reporting, vastly more people are dissatisfied and increasingly irritated. Yet, they have not been able to successfully vote him out nor force him to stop wasting resources. That’s the real problem.

Finally, we get to the Claremont Institute sheriffs. First, I have to say I appreciated that the authors credited me for my reporting. Some people don’t do that. In terms of the demographics of the sheriffs, some are rural, many are not. Most depend on how you define “rural,” and some of the most infamous Claremont Sheriffs are people like Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County and Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, neither of whom is a rural sheriff. (Although both counties have regions that could be considered rural because they are so large. So confusing.)

The Claremont sheriffs actually prove my point about the role of nostalgia. The Claremont Institute has specifically made nostalgia for a settler-colonial version of the U.S.A. a tenet of their organizational principles. In fact, the evidence I have collected suggests that admiration for frontier nostalgia is one of the main reasons the current President of the Claremont Institute Ryan Williams started its sheriff fellowship in the first place. Claremont is less interested in harnessing the power of rural voters – they are just a small part of the electorate, as the White Rural Rage authors point out – than they are in harnessing the nostalgic power of rural white America. That power reaches and influences a lot of people. It’s even some people who consider themselves centrists or even (gasp) liberal.

Carcerality

Because I am who I am, I need to make a tiny note about the central role carcerality plays in the author’s vision of what rural America is like and what to do about it.

I’ve written about and done substantial research on the criminal legal system in rural America. It is, unsurprisingly, grossly underfunded in terms of access to lawyers and services. People wait in really disgusting jails for a long time before seeing a judge. They are less likely to be released on bail pending trial. And they are, for the most part, very poor.  The public defender services they must then rely on are appallingly under-resourced if they even care to provide much opposition. 

But rural America is awash in jails and prisons. As sociologist John Eason wrote in his magnificent book, rural prisons are one of the primary employers in many rural areas. Rural jails are also experiencing an explosion in terms of population. Government entities like the USDA fund jails and prisons as forms of rural development. Rural sheriffs promise to make a profit by renting out space to ICE and the state. In Louisiana, about half of all people serving state prison sentences live in county jails. County jail growth in unquestionably one of the biggest problems facing rural America – and we can trace a lot of it to sheriffs regardless of political orientation.

The authors fail to question any of this and instead take it as a given. You might even say they suffer from nostalgia themselves. In the first chapter, they visit a West Virginia defense attorney (who was also the local Democratic chair) who, they say, describes his “obviously guilty clients.” They even step inside an old-timely jail cell to boot. What exactly is the point of this scene, I wondered, except to say that there is something charming about ye olde-timey jails?

Williamson, West Virginia, is the sort of dying coal town that J.D. Vance would write a book about. The Mingo County jail is intended to hold about 85 people but appears to have more than that daily. In 2016, according to Vera, the jail had the second-highest admission rate in the state. (The county is 26 out of 52 in terms of population.) The incarceration problem in West Virginia is bad and getting worse. It’s so bad that Mingo County officials plan to use settlement money from the opioid lawsuit to fund the jail.

All of this figures nowhere in Schaller and Waldman’s analysis. The book says nothing about police, prisons, prosecutors, jails, etc. Instead, the authors snap a photo inside a fake jail cell and move on, distracted by their own nostalgia for a time when Democrats ran the carceral state in town. And this is their point. If the Democrats controlled the carceral apparatus, they might be able to arrest more right-wing extremists who live in rural America. Because this is really the only solution many people seem interested in pursuing, or even talking about.

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