Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina, writes in Newsweek today under the headline, "'White Rural Rage' Cites my Research. It Gets Everything about Rural America Wrong." Here's an excerpt:
Rural Americans' identity is much more about positive emotions they feel toward rural areas and much less about negative emotions toward others. The idea that white rural Americans in general experience unhinged levels of rage is laughable. If you want to see how ridiculous white rural Americans find the idea that they are enraged, they have been posting about their supposed rage on X with pictures of benign, disarming, or exaggerated images, with the ironic caption: "How do you express your #whiteruralrage?"
The thing is, political anger isn't restricted to white rural America. It's something that's actually a shared experience across different walks of life in the U.S.: Most Americans when prompted to think about politics become angry, hateful, and afraid of the struggles of contemporary America, our current political climate, and people we perceive to be politically dissimilar. Partisan polarization based on strong negative emotions has become a harmful force in society that erodes democracy, and it's found in spades on the Right and the Left, and experts and intellectuals are no exception.
As political scientists and commentators in particular, we should be the most self-aware of this, not the ones who fall prey to it or make it worse. Yet because of White Rural Rage's lack of rigorous evidence that white rural Americans writ large are the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, the book starts to feel less like a carefully considered set of conclusions and more like an attack on a group of people who are the partisan other.
On that note, the authors of White Rural Rage cite my own work examining how people who feel that being rural is a strong part of their identity have a heightened distrust of experts and intellectuals. Why is this the case? There's a myriad of reasons, but White Rural Rage is a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing a group of people who are already disproportionately shut out from science, higher education, and similar opportunities.
Although the authors don't misrepresent my work, they do criticize rural Americans for their anti-intellectualism, building on tired tropes of rural people being backward, dumb, violent, and ignorant, while pushing a narrative that worsens such distrust in the first place.
Nick Jacobs, a political scientist whose work is also cited in the Schaller and Waldman book, made similar points last week on the Daily Yonder about how the authors of White Rural Rage misrepresent his empirical research.
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