White Rural Rage review: Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ jibe at book length

Don’t expect White Rural Rage to win too many hearts or minds. Under the subtitle The Threat to American Democracy, it’s more likely the book will offend. Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman profess “not to denigrate or mock our fellow Americans who live in rural areas”, but at times appear to do so.

Their first chapter title is Essential Minority, Existential Threat. Chapter six, Conditional Patriots. Pro-tip: nobody likes being branded irredeemably deplorable.

Schaller is a political science professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Waldman a former op-ed writer at the Washington Post. They seek to cover a lot of ground but often come up short.

For starters, the authors refuse to grapple with the age-old concept of “blood and soil” as a driver of politics. Brexit in the UK, the rise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the persistence of the far-right Le Pens in France are labeled as mere byproducts of globalization and inequality. When it comes to the US, this means neglecting arguments posited more than two centuries ago by John Jay, the first supreme court chief justice, in Federalist No 2.

“I have as often taken notice,” Jay wrote, “that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.”

Native Americans might have something to say about that but a lot of white Americans in rural areas do trace their roots back a long way and do not like being told what to do – or even the appearance of it – by urban elites. Fear of immigration, whatever the immigrant roots of such communities, is also a simple fact of politics.

Schaller and Waldman also ignore the role of resentments stoked by the