The book ‘White Rural Rage’ sparks controversy among the academics it references

Academics have a bone to pick with the authors of “White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy,” a best-selling book that argues rural voters — many of whom have rallied behind former President Donald Trump — pose a danger to the United States.

Journalist Paul Waldman and professor Tom Schaller are being accused of negligence by some of the very same researchers they cited in their book, which publisher Penguin Random House says is about how “rural Whites” have become the “most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions” with the encouragement of GOP politicians and conservative media.

Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist from Colby College, said in an op-ed published by POLITICO Magazine on Friday that his research and the work of others are “being misinterpreted and misunderstood.” The authors made “two persistent types of errors” when examining the data on rural Americans, he explained.

The first, Jacobs said, is they “routinely fall victim to the logical fallacy of composition when they attribute group characteristics to individuals.” He cited as examples attempts to suggest rural voters who support Trump are more likely to be authoritarian, claim their communities are beset by Christian nationalism, and ignore the smaller numbers who back Democrats.

The second “persistent error,” Jacobs said, is the authors “cite polling data with little attention to issues of quality, which less sloppy scholars would question to make sure their conclusions were valid,” including on race and immigration as well as the “birther” claim regarding former President Barack Obama and whether he was born in the United States.

“This shoddy analysis and faux expertise does real damage,” Jacobs wrote, dismissing the central focus of the book. “It is clear that the overwhelming portrayal of rural America as angry and irrational feeds into and amplifies the divisions between rural and urban Americans, overshadowing the shared challenges and aspirations that cut across these geographic lines.”

Jacobs also joined with B. Kal Munis to write in a post published on Reason.com, saying they were two of the scholars whose work the authors of “White Rural Rage” got wrong, going as far as to accuse Waldman and Schaller of “academic malpractice” in their book.

“Schaller and Waldman favorably cite our research showing that there is a modest correlation between rural resentment and racial resentment, a commonly used attitudinal measure of negative racial stereotyping,” the pair said in their op-ed from March. “What they fail to note is the only statistically and intellectually sound conclusion that could be drawn from our data: While this slight correlation exists, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.”

In response to the criticism, Schaller and Waldman spoke with The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky in a recent interview and touched on the veracity of their work. The book “is right, right now,” said Schaller, who then quipped about hoping that in 10 to 15 years they will have to “retract a lot of it because white, rural Americans” will have returned to their roots and support a “secular, pluralist constitutional democracy.”

Waldman said they have “taken a lot of criticism even from people who say, ‘This book is why rural people are resentful.’ That it’s the … condescension of the snooty Eastern elitists and that’s the end of the story and you don’t have to interrogate really where that belief comes form, but we’ve also heard from a lot of people in rural American of all kinds just ordinary people — journalists, activists — … who have said, ‘This is an accurate reflection of what’s going on in my community. This is a real problem and we have to address it.’”

The criticism, however, keeps coming.

Kristen Luna Trujillo, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California wrote for Newsweek that the authors cited but did not misrepresent her work, yet she chastises them for how 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.”

Another assistant professor, Tyler Austin Harper of Bates College, wrote for The Atlantic that he spoke with 20 scholars in the “tight-knit rural-studies community” and most of whom are cited in “White Rural Rage” or thanked in the acknowledgments. He said these academics “left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.”

Harper said he found a pattern after fact-checking many of the book’s claims and citations that showed most of “the problems occur in sections of the book that try to prove that white rural Americans are especially likely to commit or express support for political violence.”

Claiming the authors are “bending the facts to fit their chosen scapegoat,” Harper wrote they “mislead the public about the all-too-real threats to our democracy today. As serious scholarship has shown—including some of the very scholarship Schaller and Waldman cite, only to contort it — the right-wing rage we need to worry about is not coming from deep-red rural areas. It is coming from cities and suburbs.”

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases