White Rage? What White Rage? THERE'S NO WHITE RAGE!!!!
Goddamn liberals are attacking REAL Americans again by unfairly talking about how racist and shitty rural white Republicans are.
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I’ll be the first to admit that I do not have decades of experience in politics. I only started writing about this stuff in 2010 and, frankly, only really engaged with it in 2008. That being said, I have been wading into the cesspit of the right-wing since then and I’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what motivates them.
Hate. Lots and lots of hate. From the Civil War1 to the KKK to multiple race riots to Jim Crow to Reagan to Bush to the Tea Party to Trump to January 6th to now. Hate is the core of everything the right does.
The people most invested in denying that are the people most invested in enabling it. This brings us to a lengthy Politico piece by someone named Nicholas Jacobs who is very very upset that someone has dared to call out the hate white rural America spews on a daily basis in a book called “White Rural Rage”:
But don’t be misled. The publication and widespread celebration of White Rural Rage among progressive circles is doing something different than those post-2016 post-mortems. It is not an attempt to understand the needs and concerns of rural America. Instead, it’s an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.
Jacobs goes on to explain that it’s not rage, but resentment that fuels rural voters. Well, that’s all well and good but resentment of…what? Intellectuals. Academics. Immigrants. Feminism. Homosexuals. Anything and everything that might change how they live.
In other words, Jacobs is arguing that everyone is failing to understand the “resentment” of rural America. But…do we? I think we understand it quite well because we see it every single day. The screaming hate against teachers. The demands for mass deportation and genocide against Those People. The calls to make the entire LGBTQ community illegal. The laws passed to strip women of their rights.
Resentment sure does seem an awful lot like rage against those who challenge white male Christian power…
Jacobs naturally takes a detour into uncritical both-siderism as he tries to absolve rural America:
Bottom line: The “threats” to democracy just aren’t there. Our research found that just 27 percent of rural voters — including 23 percent of rural Trump voters — think that if the opposing candidate wins in November, “people will need to take drastic action in order to stop [Biden or Trump] from taking office.” That’s the exact same proportion — 27 percent — as voters in urban and suburban areas who hold the same view. Nor are rural voters more likely than urban voters to say that the opposing party is a “threat to the future of America;” while 38 percent of rural Trump voters strongly believe that about Democrats, 36 percent of nonrural Biden voters think that same thing about Republicans.
There’s a minor difference, of course. The right’s entire opposition to Biden is based on lies and, whether Jacobs wants to admit it or not, rage. Biden is not coming for their guns. He is not shipping thousands of migrants to their communities. No one is stealing their houses. Crime is not consuming the nation. Gay kids are not converting little Timmy. Trans kids are not beating up their school’s female swim team.
Joe Biden is not personally stealing their healthcare and pensions and Social Security and Medicare. That would be Republicans.
So when white rural voters talk about how they need to take up arms against a second Biden term, what the fuck are they talking about? It’s been over three years. When is this Democratic apocalypse supposed to start? During the eclipse? How about in August? October? Right after election day? Well, it’s probably almost certainly definitely maybe coming and we should be ready to murder every liberal we see just in case!
The flip side of that? Democrats who say Trump needs to be opposed by any means necessary? What do you suppose they are basing that on? The Nazis marching in the streets? The half million Covid deaths because of Trump? The open calls for literal concentration camps? The promises of Martial Law and mass murder? “I’ll be a dictator on day one?” The 900+ page Project 2025 and how it lays out in great detail the White Nationalist Christofascist destruction of democracy and the enslavement of the population?
Unlike the right’s made-up fears, these are all things that exist in the real world. They are happening right now. Republicans are saying them out loud right now. When Jacobs pretends there is no threat to democracy because “both sides” are threatening violence, he is fucking gaslighting you and being extremely insulting about it. As if you are too stupid to remember January 6th and the constant domestic terrorism of the right.
But that is the entire point of this article, to sanitize the right and the hate that drives everything they do:
What rural communities may desire are empowering strategies that allow them to shape their own future — support that bolsters local leadership, encourages community-driven initiatives and provides the tools and resources necessary for them to address their specific challenges in a manner consistent with their values. That isn’t rage, nor is it a threat to democracy.
But what are those values? Kind of skipped that part. Is it…universal healthcare? Nah. Clean air and water? No. Banning abortion, contraception, and gay sex seem to be unusually popular in these places that are not filled with rage. Also, they are the places with the most laws limiting who can vote. With the focus on reducing the electorate to be as white and male and older as possible. But, you know, they’re not a threat to democracy. Never think that!
Jacobs ends that bit with this:
I sometimes hope that progressives will realize that this fits in with their commitment to multiculturalism and local diversity.
Ah. The ever-popular, “The left is so intolerant!” card. But, really, he can fuck all the way off with that. There is no moral imperative to tolerate intolerance. This is not a matter of forcing small towns to adopt “big city values” like a Starbucks on every corner and 30 different kinds of international cuisine. If Tinytown, Nebraska doesn’t want a sushi restaurant, well, that’s for the free market to decide. It will either succeed or fail on its own merits.
What we’re talking about here is overwhelmingly white, Christian, heteronormative patriarchial communities condemning people to second-class citizenry based on nothing more than bigotry. But that’s not how we roll in this country. You don’t get to bully, intimidate, or oppress someone because they’re different from you. You certainly do not get to strip them of their rights.
The argument that we big-city liberals are depriving rural America of their rights? Eat a bag of dicks. The Constitution does not grant white people the right to perpetual dominance over people they feel are inferior. Being forced to treat people you hate as your equal is not oppression. Rural America is not losing any rights. They’re just being forced to stop stealing the rights of others.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
―Franklin Leonard
Yeah, my heart bleeds for the people who constantly call themselves “real” Americans and the rest of us “vermin.” But no such thing as rural rage, right, Jacobs?
I’m going to talk about one more part because, honestly, I could tear up every single paragraph of the Politico article and be here all day. But I have an eclipse to go watch with my kids2:
After portraying white rural America as an obstacle to democracy (and the Democratic Party), Schaller and Waldman call for a “ real rural movement” to “use the power they have, and start demanding something more concrete.”
What they miss is that a real rural movement is already here. It is the rural movement towards the Republican Party that has been building since the 1980s. It existed before Trump and will exist after Trump leaves politics. And it is baffling why these new, self-proclaimed saviors of rural America cannot see that their gross mischaracterization of rural life feeds into the resentments driving that movement.
Why is this baffling? Rural whites have been voting Republican for over half a century and Republicans have never once delivered on any of their promises. Except for more hate. Republican policies have devastated their communities. Left their schools in shambles. Closed their hospitals. Left them vulnerable to a drug epidemic.
But that hate? The sweet sweet hate that makes it all bearable? Republicans give rural whites all they could ever ask for. Don’t pay attention when we defund your hospitals, close your factories, and make college unaffordable. Don’t look at us as we crush your small community and leave you no future. Look at the undocumented migrants taking the jobs you won’t take anyway. Look at that gay kid threatening your precious masculinity with his pride pin. Look at the Muslim disrespecting Jesus just by existing. Look over there! A trans kid is in the bathroom!
Doesn’t that make you angry? Are you filled with rage? Vote Republican and we’ll make it all go away. We’ll bring back the America you think you grew up in3 where you were happy and free from threats! Vote for us and we’ll be your revenge on all of the people who make your life terrible and we’ll cut taxes on the rich and end all regulation on pollution, too. Don’t worry about that last part. Oh my god! A pretty white girl was raped by a Black man somewhere in America! Democrats are trying to destroy you and your family! Vote for us now another million babies will be aborted!
Jacobs knows this. He knows this is how Republicans have been manipulating rural white voters for over half a century. He’s watched them devolve from murderous racists in the 1950s into a stew of murderous white nationalist fascist conspiracy lunatics completely detached from reality today.4 He watched the Tea Party protests become more and more explicitly about violence. He watched that rage produce Trump who, in turn, told the GOP base that their rage was good. He watched Trump egg that rage on to the point where domestic terrorism is fully integrated into the party, both to keep Republicans in line and to break the public’s will.
Jacobs knows all of this but he’s more concerned about protecting the reputation of his precious rural white communities. Even at the expense of everything this country stands for.
The core issue here is that just talking about whiteness is a problem because whiteness only works when it’s invisible. Once we see whiteness and acknowledge the rage of rural white people, we start to talk about it and that means accountability. You may have noticed that the mere notion of accountability for just Donald Trump was enough for the right to stage a violent insurrection. Imagine what they’ll do as we slowly come to a cultural reckoning for millions of angry white rural people who will someday have to answer for generations of hate and the poison they have injected into this country.
It won’t be pretty but every spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum has to grow up eventually and we are about 160 years overdue.
There are 210 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
I do not give a shit if their party at the time was the Democrats. They were still the right wing. If that’s the extent of your rhetorical jujitsu, move along, you’re too fucking stupid to read the rest of this article. Go hump your Confederate flag or your sisterwife, you inbred fuckstick.
It was “only” 85% or so but it was awesome.
The one you remember from TV that never actually existed.
The John Birch Society was pushing the right into loony land back in the 50s and 60s but they never quite took root. They were the fringe and stayed there for decades. Now, they’re the mainstream and not believing in Jewish Space Lasers is the fringe.
There’s hope! The United Rural Democrats (https://www.unitedruraldemocrats.org/) is an organization I’ve donated to. “United Rural Democrats is an organization founded in 2020 with the mission of helping elect Democrats in small rural communities”.
White rural America, a key location of farming, is killing the country literally via toxins from animal waste entering the water table. ‘The Devil’s Element: Phosphorous and a world out of balance’ by Dan Egan explains how this impacts fishing along the Mississippi and red states. The party that is so about the outdoors and wildlife, seems to not care simultaneously that their GOP leaders continue to guarantee beaches/lakes/rivers are closed and fishing is banned.
The GOP is a group of sheep, you can get one to be a decent human on their own and process real facts. Then they return to their cult and forget everything.
It’s wrong when 20% of the nation makes up “white rural America” yet they have ‘43%’ of the House of Representatives….MTG, notably, is among these elected officials. That’s a big problem of misrepresentation, that has been secured via gerrymandering.