White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens—who are also the least likely to defend its core principles

“This is an important book that ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand politics in the perilous Age of Trump.”—David Corn, New York Times bestselling author of American Psychosis

White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States.

Schaller and Waldman show how vulnerable U.S. democracy has become to rural Whites who, despite legitimate grievances, are increasingly inclined to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs, to believe in conspiracy theories, to accept violence as a legitimate course of political action, and to exhibit antidemocratic tendencies. Rural White Americans’ attitude might best be described as “I love my country, but not our country,” Schaller and Waldman argue. This phenomenon is the patriot paradox of rural America: The citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are also the least likely to defend core American principles. And by stoking rural Whites’ anger rather than addressing the hard problems they face, conservative politicians and talking heads create a feedback loop of resentments that are undermining American democracy.

Schaller and Waldman provocatively critique both the structures that permit rural Whites’ disproportionate influence over American governance and the prospects for creating a pluralist, inclusive democracy that delivers policy solutions that benefit rural communities. They conclude with a political reimagining that offers a better future for both rural people and the rest of America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593729151

Book preview

Cover for White Rural Rage

Praise for

White Rural Rage

Someone write a new elegy for the bilious hillbilly, because these authors went for his jugular…. Next to their characterizations, ‘basket of deplorables’ sounds almost quaint, and many readers may find guilty satisfaction in that.

—The Washington Post

[Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman] persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true. They do not mince words about what this means for the future of democracy in America…. And Schaller and Waldman bring receipts.

—Daily Beast

America’s seemingly most patriotic citizens—rural Americans—are losing their faith in democracy because both the Democratic and Republican parties have long ignored their needs. This important book argues that the survival of our democracy depends on our willingness to strengthen the heartland economically, rather than exploit its fears.

—Barbara F. Walter, New York Times bestselling author of How Civil Wars Start

"With White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have the guts to ask a crucial question: Why do so many rural white Americans fall for the authoritarian demagoguery now being peddled by the GOP? Moreover, how does this threaten the entire nation? Deploying a deft combination of data analysis and reporting from the heartland, they chronicle the decline of rural America and the rise of grievances that are exploited and weaponized by Republicans to serve a far-right agenda that undermines Middle America and elsewhere. Schaller and Waldman illuminate a critical truth: The main problem with Trumpism is not Donald Trump but Trump voters. This is an important book that ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand politics in the perilous Age of Trump."

—David Corn, New York Times bestselling author of American Psychosis

"White Rural Rage is a superb treatment of the regional and political divide that is shaping American politics, governance and society. It represents the best of what journalism and political science can do—cogent analysis, backed by data, written in an accessible fashion by authors who got out in the country and met with real people."

—Norman J. Ornstein, New York Times bestselling co-author of One Nation After Trump

Also by Tom Schaller

Common Enemies

The Stronghold

Whistling Past Dixie

Devolution and Black State Legislators (co-author)

Also by Paul Waldman

Being Right Is Not Enough

Fraud

Free Ride (co-author)

The Press Effect (co-author)

Book Title, White Rural Rage, Subtitle, The Threat to American Democracy, Author, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, Imprint, Random House

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Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2024.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schaller, Thomas F. author. | Waldman, Paul, author.

Title: White rural rage: the threat to American democracy / Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

Description: | New York: Random House, [2024]. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023041429 (print) | LCCN 2023041430 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593729168 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593729151 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Proportional representation—United States. | Rural population—Political activity—United States. | Rural-urban relations—United States. | Democracy—United States. | United States. Congress. Senate. | United States—Politics and government—2021–

Classification: LCC JF1075.U6 S36 2024 (print) | LCC JF1075.U6 (ebook) | DDC 320.97309173/4—dc23/eng/20231213

Ebook ISBN 9780593729151

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2023041429

LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2023041430

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook by Vincent Mancuso

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Cover photograph: Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

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Contents

Dedication

Introduction to the Paperback Edition

Prologue: Small Towns, Big Trouble

1. Essential Minority, Existential Threat

2. Rural Ruin

3. The Greatest Political Hand Ever Dealt

4. Cultures at War

5. The Unlikely King of Rural America

6. Conditional Patriots

7. Race and Rurality

8. Despair, Distraction, Disillusionment, and Democratic Decline

Authors’ Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Authors

_151561045_

To Dan, my closest and most trusted friend for more than fifty years—and counting. (by TS)

To my children. (by PW)

Introduction to the Paperback Edition

Knowing how important rural votes

have been to recent elections, Kamala Harris was determined to reverse Democratic losses in rural areas when she became her party’s 2024 presidential nominee. The Biden-Harris administration had spent four years doing what Democrats often do: They passed legislation that included numerous carve-outs and initiatives specifically aimed at rural development, from green energy to infrastructure to healthcare to broadband. They sent cabinet officials to rural places around the country to tout the new programs. They created the Rural Partners Network to coordinate government efforts. But few voters seemed to be aware.

For her running mate, Harris picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz, in part because he had deep roots in the rural Midwest (he grew up in farming communities in Nebraska) and was supposed to be able to speak persuasively to such voters. After their convention, Harris and Walz went on a bus tour of southern Georgia, visiting rural areas that almost never see a presidential candidate.

The Harris-Walz campaign hired Matt Hildreth, a rural advocate with superb personal and professional credentials, to spearhead her rural outreach and messaging. The campaign published a policy plan for rural America, which included provisions such as hiring ten thousand healthcare providers to deploy to rural areas, addressing the urgent lack of access to healthcare.

What was Donald Trump’s rural plan? Nothing. He assumed he didn’t have to lift a finger to get rural voters to choose him, and he was right.

Trump sent one clear message to urban voters, however. The day before Harris published her plan, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, traveled to Minneapolis, but not to praise the people who live there. Instead, he insulted them and their city, claiming falsely that Biden and Harris let it burn to the ground in 2020 during protests against police violence, and that it has now become overrun with crime. Minneapolis is a thriving city known for having one of the best qualities of life anywhere in the country, but Vance warned that the story of Minneapolis is coming to every community across the United States of America if we promote Kamala Harris to president of the United States.

If this attack sounded familiar, it was: Days before, Trump had gone to Detroit to deliver the same vulgar insult, telling people there that our whole country will end up being like Detroit if Harris were elected. In fact, Detroit is experiencing an extraordinary revival, with plummeting crime rates, new economic development, and a population that’s increasing after years of declines. But to Trump it is worthy of nothing but scorn.

Had Harris gone to a rural area, said that it was beset by problems, and, rather than expressing a desire to help solve them, merely said that if she didn’t win we’d all be living in the same kind of hellhole, the resulting controversy would have been so loud it would have been used as an object lesson in Democratic elitism for decades. Yet there was almost no criticism of Trump and Vance for the contempt they poured on urban America and the people who live there.

In sum, when it came to the urban/rural divide that determines so much of American politics today, the latest presidential election looked a lot like the ones that came before.

As we researched and wrote the hardcover edition of White Rural Rage in 2022 and 2023, we couldn’t know how 2024 would play out, but one question we asked ourselves was whether Trump had any room to improve on his extraordinary dominance of the rural vote. It turned out that he did. While his margins increased over 2020 in all kinds of places, early data showed him improving in rural counties by 4 points.

The geographical divide is as stark as ever and remains one of the key fulcrums of American politics.

This topic engenders strong feelings on all sides, which we certainly heard about after the hardcover was released. The debate is a vigorous and intense one, and we knew we’d get plenty of angry and even threatening emails, which we did.

But we also heard from many people who said we had captured something important about their communities and the challenges they face. We started great conversations with readers about how to move rural America forward to a new, more promising future.

Perhaps most encouragingly, we connected with activists and thinkers who have taken on the sometimes daunting task of creating a new political reality. People like Paolo Cremidis of the Outrun Coalition, which has successfully elected young, diverse candidates to local offices across rural America, and Berry Craig, a courageous columnist who encouraged his western Kentucky readers to grapple with, rather than ignore, our arguments. We learned a lot from Mayor Mondale Robinson of Enfield, North Carolina, who is featured in a new documentary about the political challenges of being a Black mayor in a small, rural community.

As Christopher Gibbs told his podcast listeners at the end of his interview with us, our book alone will not revive rural communities, but it’s chock-full of clues for those interested in helping rural folks get what they deserve in policy. Gibbs is a farmer from rural Maplewood, Ohio, and board president of Rural Voices USA who not long ago abandoned his post as the Shelby County Republican Party chair to chair the county’s Democratic Party. If anyone understands the possibility of change, it’s him.

We’re writing this new introduction in the days after the 2024 election, too early for us to fully examine the voting patterns that produced Trump’s victory, though we have updated the book with new citations of studies that have added to the understanding of rural politics. Our overarching message remains the same, however: Rural America has political problems that are as deep and profound as its material problems, and every citizen has a stake in the people who live there finding solutions to them.

Prologue

Small Towns, Big Trouble

"Friend, Jason Aldean recorded a

song praising small-town values, and the Radical Left has canceled him for it. Why? Because they want every small town in America to look like the socialist disasters in California and New York."

This was the beginning of a fundraising email from the National Republican Congressional Committee in July 2023, responding to the controversy over Try That in a Small Town, the single that country star Aldean had recently released. The song’s lyrics present a list of alleged liberal urban horrors—people spitting in cops’ faces, robbing liquor stores, burning American flags—as well as the specter of gun confiscation, and they issue a challenge: Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road.

Aldean, whose oeuvre is heavy with well-worn tributes to rural life, was not canceled. In fact, his fantasy of vigilante violence meted out against urbanites supposedly ready to bring their criminal mayhem to the idyll of rural America became his greatest success. Conservative media defended him, Republican politicians praised him, and Try That in a Small Town became Aldean’s biggest crossover hit, shooting to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Had Aldean released his ode to resentment and vigilantism a decade earlier, it might not have made the news, let alone become the controversy it did. But coming out when it did, with hostility between rural and urban America intensifying as the country headed into a presidential election that promised an even more profound division between the two, the song was bound to produce a fiery reaction. For Republicans, it was a gift, yet another implement they could use to convince their rural supporters that blue America was a socialist disaster to be feared and hated. The criticism the song received from liberals only reinforced this point.

The undercurrents that produced this controversy are the reason we wrote this book. We stand at what may be the most dangerous moment for American democracy since the Civil War. A great deal of attention has been bestowed upon rural Whites since Donald Trump’s ascension in 2016, yet that discussion has overlooked a vital political truth this book hopes to illuminate: The democratic attachments of rural White Americans are faltering.

Rural America has suffered greatly in recent decades. Layered atop cultural resentments that are nearly as old as our country, this suffering has produced powerful antipathies that are aimed not just at certain groups of Americans, but often at the American democratic system itself. Were rural White Americans as disempowered as they believe themselves to be, their anger would be impotent. They would mutter Try that in a small town to themselves, indulging in meaningless fantasies of revenge against the liberals and urbanites they despise. But they are not disempowered. In fact, in critical ways, they have more power than any other large demographic group in America.

This power has already distorted the outcomes our system produces, leaving us in an age of minority rule in which—to take just one example—the party that won fewer votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections managed to assemble an activist 6–3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, one that is now busy remaking the laws all of us live under to conform to a right-wing policy vision that overwhelming majorities of the public do not share. This minority rule is a consequence of the disproportionate power wielded by rural Whites, power that is often justified on the right by the insistence that these are the worthiest Americans, the ones most possessed of virtue and values, and that, therefore, it is only proper that their votes count for more.

The fact that their votes do count for more is why Donald Trump became president in the first place, and played a role in his return to office in the 2024 election. Yet even as the threat to American democracy Trump represents has become the subject of enormous concern and debate, few have connected that threat to its essential source: rural White America.

Name a force or impulse that threatens the stability of the American political system—distrust in the fairness of elections, conspiracy theorizing, the embrace of authoritarianism—and it is almost always more prevalent among rural Whites than among those living elsewhere. Even as they are in some ways the greatest beneficiaries of democracy’s distribution of influence, rural Whites are the least committed to our system.

While at various times in American history some extraordinarily creative and progressive movements began in rural areas, today most of rural America is gripped by a right-wing politics that is angry when it should be constructive and passive when it should be engaged. To many of the most cynical and malevolent characters in the political world, this is all part of the plan: Keep rural Americans bitter, and they’ll be an easily manipulated force of destruction when democracy doesn’t produce the proper results. The worse rural Americans feel, the better this plan works.

The devastating force of late-stage capitalism has inflicted enormous damage on rural Americans. But we are more concerned with how the political system responded and, specifically, why so few rural Americans have noticed that they’ve been exploited and lied to by the conservative politicians they elect. Their own leaders deploy a sophisticated propaganda system meant to ensure that every problem rural America faces will be blamed on faraway forces and people who have little if any actual influence on rural Americans’ lives. It’s the best way to stoke the voters’ seething—that and telling them the solution to their problems will always be to elect more conservative Republicans, who will continue to spend more effort in ratcheting up rural anger than in addressing the problems confronting rural communities.

So, when urban America suffers from a spike in unemployment or violent crime, the right-wing noise machine quickly points its collective finger at liberals, minorities, and Democrats who dominate cities. Cities, they are told, are both nightmares of depravity and a threat to rural Americans. But when rural America suffers from precisely these same problems, who gets blamed? Those same liberals, minorities, and Democrats from faraway, scary cities. Almost daily—hourly on talk radio stations from Maine to Maui—those constituents hear Republican politicians and their conservative allies in the media redirect rural fury toward the boogeyman of the moment: immigrant caravans this month, critical race theorists next month, woke professors the month after that. Though most rural citizens are represented at all levels of government by conservative Republicans, those officials somehow bear no responsibility for their constituents’ problems.

But Hollywood didn’t kill the family farm and send manufacturing jobs overseas. College professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids into rural communities. Immigrants didn’t shutter rural hospitals and let rural infrastructure decay. The outsiders and liberals at whom so many rural Whites point their anger are not the ones who have held them back—and as long as they keep believing that they are, rural people won’t be able to find their way to an effective form of politics.

This book is not intended to be mere polemic or a broadside critique of rural Americans or White rural citizens specifically. Rather, it is a warning about a growing problem that politicians and the media are reluctant to discuss. Rural voters—especially the White rural voters on whom Donald Trump heaped praise and upon whom he built his Make America Great Again movement—pose a growing threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Rural discontent and grievances are hardly new. But more than at any point in modern history, the survival of the United States as a modern, stable, multi-ethnic democracy is threatened by a White rural minority that wields outsize electoral power.

In order to be complete, this story must be told from multiple vantage points, some high enough to view the entire country and decades of history and some directly on the ground. So, we have woven together data on economic and physical well-being and voting trends, and from public opinion surveys, with our own on-the-ground reporting from rural counties spread across the country, to describe the political reality of rural America today and what it portends for the rest of us. We examine not only what happens at the ballot box but also the underpinnings of rural culture and rural ideology. We journey from the Electoral College to West Virginia coal country, from the Affordable Care Act to the Arizona desert, and many places in between.

The story that results is often a disheartening one. Though the various parts of rural America differ in important ways, as a whole, they are weighed down by their struggles: resource economies where powerful interests extracted wealth and left the people who toiled to remove it with little or nothing to show for their decades of labor; manufacturing jobs that fled overseas; inadequate healthcare and physical infrastructure; limited opportunities that push talented young people to leave; and much more. And all this exists within a landscape of political emptiness in which a lack of real competition leaves Democrats believing there’s no point in trying to win rural votes and Republicans knowing they can win those votes without even trying—and give the people who supply them nothing in return.

We have no illusions that the story we tell will be kindly received in most corners of rural America, nor by large swaths of the national media. Those media have spent years writing article after article in which customers at small-town diners explain what they’re mad about, so many that pieces with headlines amounting to In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Still Support Trump have become a cliché. This coverage insists that the views these people express, no matter how alarming or repellent to coastal-dwelling cosmopolitans, demand consideration and respect. Rural sentiments, even undemocratic ones, must always be validated and amplified.

Some will surely respond to this book by charging that as two coastal cosmopolitans, we have no right to offer this critique of White rural politics. That is an understandable reaction, and there are certainly many fine books we would recommend from people who grew up in rural America exploring its past and present. But we set out on this project after years of thinking and talking with each other about how ordinary rural-urban tensions of the kind that have existed throughout the world for centuries have turned into something far more dangerous. Put simply, this is a problem that no American, no matter where they live, can ignore any longer.

This book asks some difficult questions: Is the support of White rural citizens for U.S. democracy conditional? If so, what conditions do they expect in return for remaining devoted to our democratic project? And what happens if the demands of the only group capable of holding America hostage are not met? Can our constitutional system survive, or even function, without the consent and cooperation of America’s essential rural minority?

We conclude the book with preliminary answers to these questions. But we also argue that rural America can reimagine itself and its role in our democracy in a way that would not only offer a better future for rural people themselves but also make it possible for rural America to no longer be an anchor dragging down the rest of the country.

We do not offer ten-point plans for rural redevelopment. There are plenty of those around, in think tank white papers and government reports. But none of them can succeed on a national scale without a new political era for rural America, one that replaces self-perpetuating resentment with more constructive action built on demands for change.

Unfortunately, rural White Americans are told daily by the people they trust that what they really need is more rage and resentment. They’re told that their fellow Americans who live in suburbs and cities look at them with disdain and that the answer is to look back with their own brand of belligerent contempt. This cycle of resentment leads nowhere but down—away from solutions to rural people’s problems and away from a functioning democracy. Without a change, the politics of rural America will become meaner and more opposed to the foundations of American democracy—and more of a threat to all of us.

Chapter

1

Essential Minority, Existential Threat

When we visited Truman Chafin

in his law office in Williamson, West Virginia, he regaled us with stories of the colorful and obviously guilty clients he had successfully defended over the years, then insisted we pose for a picture inside the jail cell, our hands gripping the bars as though we were small-time thieves nabbed by the sheriff. The former Democratic majority leader of the state senate, Chafin shares a sprawling suite with his wife, Letitia, herself a prominent attorney in the state, inside what used to be the courthouse. The cell is now used as a kitchen.

After running unopposed for years, Chafin was voted out of office in 2014, the victim of a Republican sweep that gave the GOP control of both houses of the state legislature. It was a key moment in West Virginia’s transformation from one-party Democratic rule to one-party Republican rule,[1] but it was more than a transfer of power. The personal brand of politics that centered on the distribution of resources through the government was now just a memory.

The machine built by legendary West Virginia Democratic senator Robert Byrd is long gone, as is the importance of the county Democratic chair, a position Chafin held for many years in Mingo County. "The county chair was the wheel down here, he told us, the person who maintained all the critical relationships that not only provided services but kept people loyal to the Democratic Party. Now you can’t get anybody to take the job."

But the vacuum created by a withered local Democratic Party hasn’t been filled by an active Republican Party. Republicans don’t have a good system, either, Letitia Chafin said, but they don’t really need one.[2]

Indeed they don’t. For decades, the county was firmly Democratic, a streak that lasted through 2004, when John Kerry beat George W. Bush there by a comfortable margin. But Barack Obama’s arrival brought a hard swing to the right, and in every election after, the Republican margin of victory increased. Today, no politician is more popular there than Donald Trump, and not because during his four years in office he turned rural America into a paradise or delivered on his promise to bring back all the lost coal jobs. He didn’t. But in places like Mingo County, few seem to mind.

This paradox is part of what led us to write this book and what brought us to Mingo County, one of many rural places we visited during our research. It has a fascinating political and economic history, one that decades ago earned it the nickname Bloody Mingo. The seminal period is referred to as the Mine Wars, a series of conflicts that took place over the first two decades of the twentieth century pitting miners asking for fair treatment against coal companies who often responded to those demands with murderous violence.[3]

That history is remembered by union members and their allies as a story of heroism and oppression. But it was the New Deal that began to bring what those miners fought for in the Mine Wars, and for a brief period after Franklin Roosevelt enacted his program of labor reform, it looked as though widely shared prosperity might come to the coalfields. Roosevelt had signed laws protecting collective bargaining rights and curtailing abuses from employers.[4] The United Mine Workers negotiated contracts that not only improved pay and working conditions but also offered health and pension benefits, and coal mining still required enormous numbers of men to go underground, which meant lots of jobs. In areas like Mingo County that had seen stifling poverty even before the Great Depression, a middle-class life was now attainable.

But things started to change in the 1950s. First, automation dramatically reduced the number of miners needed to collect the same amount of coal; with each new technological development, fewer miners were necessary.[5] As those good jobs with good benefits became less plentiful, union power began to recede. Then came Ronald Reagan and the war on collective bargaining, followed by the spread of mountaintop removal, carried out with explosives and massive machines, further reducing the number of miners needed to extract the coal as it turned large swaths of Appalachia’s picturesque hills into a lunar-like landscape.

It wasn’t just the economy and the topography that changed. When the union was strong here, the voice was from the union, we were told by Raymond Chafin, a former miner who had a terrible fall in a mine decades ago, broke his pelvis, and nearly died. (He’s not related to Truman Chafin; there are a lot of Chafins around there.) But today, that voice has gotten quieter and quieter. The industry created a public relations campaign called Friends of Coal to convince people that they were all united against environmentalists and other outsiders. Fox News and other conservative media came to dominate the informational landscape. Today, the traditional alliance between the Democratic Party and the unions has become all but irrelevant because both institutions are so much weaker in West Virginia. "The Republican stronghold that you’ve got now is a strong hold," Raymond said.[6]

There are fewer and fewer miners in Mingo County, as in so many places across Appalachia; according to the state of West Virginia, in 2021 there were just 296 people in the county employed by the coal industry,[7] or about 2 percent of the working-age population. Yet coal is an inescapable presence there, celebrated and venerated everywhere you look. The most notable building on the main drag in Williamson is the Coal House, a structure built out of coal. In the fall, you can participate in the Coal Dust 5K Run/Walk, where (fake) coal dust is tossed onto the runners at the finish line. Young girls can come to the firehouse for the Sweetheart of the Coalfields pageant. Mingo Central High School sits on King Coal Highway. Its sports teams are named the Miners and the Lady Miners.

One might argue that coal has been more of a curse than a blessing to Appalachia, but that is not a conversation too many people there seem eager to have. The old conflict between workers and owners no longer means much, because in every way that matters, the owners won. That brief period when coal actually offered something like widely shared prosperity was made possible by union organizing and the actions of a Democratic government in Washington, but the governor of West Virginia when we visited, Jim Justice, is a coal baron and the wealthiest man in the state—and one who switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican. (In 2024, Justice was elected to the U.S. Senate in a walk.) Politicians who make dishonest promises to restore coal to its former glory—if you can call it that—are cheered and rewarded at the polls. Few people have ever done so with more lurid dishonesty than Donald Trump, and the voters in coal country ate it up; he didn’t just win there, he won by astonishing margins. In 2016, Trump got 83 percent of the vote in Mingo County.[8] Four years later, they gave him 85 percent of their votes.

Although there are rural places that don’t face the same grinding struggles that Mingo County does, it shares this devotion to the GOP with almost every other majority-White rural county in the country. If you look at where Trump got his most overwhelming support, the places are invariably rural and White. Rural Whites are the linchpin of Republican power at both the state and national level, yet in so many of the places where they live, there is a political void. Democrats can’t compete there anymore, and Republicans can take lopsided victories for granted.

So, what do rural Whites get in return for all they bestow on the GOP? Almost nothing. The benefits they receive are nearly all emotional, not material. They’re flattered and praised, and then they get whatever satisfaction can be had from watching their party win office and their enemies despair. Consider the opioid crisis, which took a devastating toll on Mingo Countians. Though some politicians try to pin the blame for America’s addiction crisis on Mexican immigrants, look at the long list of companies that have now agreed to pay more than a billion dollars in settlements to West Virginia for this crisis. They include drugmakers like Purdue Pharma; the three major distributors McKesson, Cardinal, and AmeriSourceBergen; and frontline retailers including Food Lion, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart.

Mingo County is suffering from a rash of economic, social, and health-related woes. As a small state, West Virginia is overrepresented in both the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. With its large blue-collar, White population and deep mining traditions, West Virginia is the kind of flyover state routinely praised and glorified by the media as a repository of true heartland values. Unfortunately, politicians in the state—Democrats before, Republicans now—exploit West Virginians’ worries that their way of life and their values are being replaced by those of citizens from more vibrant, racially diverse, and cosmopolitan cities and states.

The combined effect of these trends undoubtedly causes citizens from places like Mingo County to feel passed over, desperate, even angry despite winning elections. As they spread across the small towns and counties of the United States, these fears and resentments are undermining rural White Americans’ democratic commitments to the world’s oldest constitutional republic.

The Four Compounding Factors

Since the rise of Donald Trump, few groups of citizens have received more fawning attention from hand-wringing journalists and pundits than rural Americans, especially disgruntled rural White voters. Over the same period, political observers began openly fretting over the fate and even the survival of American democracy. Somehow, almost nobody has noticed that these two phenomena are connected.

And they are connected. As we argue, the serious problems now plaguing rural White Americans are causing too many of them to lose faith in the American project, to the point where some are abandoning or even threatening the vital norms, traditions, and institutions that undergird the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Four compounding factors are causing a crisis in democratic support among rural Whites that, in turn, is undermining American democracy in potentially catastrophic