Democrats Demonize Rural Voters at Their Peril

[Geee]

The Free Press

 

A new study of ‘White Rural Rage’ is built on shoddy data—and is typical of progressive contempt for the ‘bigoted’ and ‘undemocratic’ countryside.

 

The Democratic Party was born in the late 1820s when small-time farmers and urban workers began demanding a greater say in political affairs. These demands horrified conservative elites. To them, “power naturally and necessarily follows property,” as the nineteenth-century statesman Daniel Webster declared. A sound regime, in this telling, limited decision-making to the wealthy, those who possessed the means and the motivation to uphold republican “liberty.”

Otherwise, government would be overrun by “men with no property to assess and no character to lose,” in the words of the banker Nicholas Biddle. Yet such rhetoric only inflamed the insurgent Democrats who crowded Washington in those days, vowing to smash down the “moneyed aristocracy” and to empower the angry and excluded backcountry.

All this is a dim memory in today’s Democratic Party. Many leading Democrats echo the likes of Webster and Biddle in addressing the backcountry: they’re haughty, unsympathetic, fearful of the ruddy-faced yokels with whom they are tragically fated to share a country. It doesn’t bode well for the party’s electoral prospects, never mind national cohesion.

Consider the Washington book du jour, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman. The “threat” in the subtitle concerns the outsize influence rural whites supposedly wield over the political process. This, even though they also harbor “undemocratic, sometimes violent impulses,” according to Schaller and Waldman. Rural folk are, they say, bigoted, conspiratorial, antidemocratic—just appalling.

The authors insist they have the “receipts” to substantiate these charges. But their data is shoddy. A typical procedure is to examine polls gauging respondents’ agreement with progressive opinions on various issues that divide reasonable Americans. If rural whites disagree, it proves they are hateful or authoritarian (rather than merely nonprogressive).