Of course rural whites do not like democracy

Thoughts on "White Rural Rage"

A newly published book offers a diagnosis of “the group most likely to abandon democratic norms,” as characterized by a now-infamous MSNBC interview with the two authors, Tom Schallre and Paul Waldman:

(In transcribing the interview for this post, I switched between quotation and annotation; as a result, some quote marks may be out of place.)

Launching directly into a summary of their research, Schallre describes the “four-fold, interconnected thread” of moral failings which render white rural Americans such a threat:

1. They are the “most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-gay geo-demographic group.”

2. The “most conspiracist group: Q-Anon support and subscribers, election denialism, Covid denialism and scientific skepticism, and Obama birtherism.

3. They hold “anti-democratic sentiments:” They “don’t believe in an independent press, free speech, are most likely to say the president should be able to act unilaterally without any checks from Congress, or the courts, or the bureaucracy.” They are the “most strongly white nationalist and white christian nationalist.”

4. They are “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”

Further discussion during the interview is strongly guided by Mika Brzezinski’s “2010s-and-late” mystification over how lower or middle class voters could identify with Trump, who was born to wealth (and therefore should try to run for president on the votes of millionaires alone?). Thus, Schallre and Waldman’s further comments in reply may not reflect the thesis of their book; I am not going to read the book to find out.

But in response to Brzenzinski’s prompts, they opine that this nexus of threatening sentiments is driven by the economic disempowerment of rural America wrought by globalization and late stage capitalism. Because the material problems afflicting rural America are (rightly) seen as external and beyond local political remedy, economically hopeless rural whites “might as well vote on cultural issues.” (The airlessness of the venue in which the authors deliver this analysis, is demonstrated by the absence of anyone who would ask them, “Wait, wouldn’t it be more simple to suppose that the reason native whites are politically animated by anti-immigrant and anti-gay sentiments, is because for decades elites and the media have shoved a pro-immigrants and pro-gays Cultural Program down their throats?”)

Weber’s reply

My initial reaction to the book and this bit of publicity was mental apprehension — this particular instance of self-pitying hatred of American whites by the establishment is just too unseemly, confused and confusing, and tiresome, and anyway no one will remember it in a few weeks. I was prompted to more specific criticism thanks to the insights of Mark Weber in Tuesday’s weekly “Guide to Kulture” podcast, where he joins host Frodi Midjord. Readers may wish to know that Mark Weber is considered a Holocaust Denier; though as previously discussed, that term is used to describe anyone who might research the Holocaust with the same intellectual liberty as applies to nearly every other important historical event. I only am familiar with his very insightful remarks on post-War political history on the podcast, which I only recently discovered.

Weber rightly highlights the fact that Schallre and Waldman evince a confused understanding of “democracy” — obviously, many of the sentiments which they posit as a threat to democracy would be voted into policy in the American present or in other places and times; “pro-gayness” is not usually a consensus favored position. In fact (to offer my own thoughts) many of Schallre and Waldman’s likely political preferences, the norms under threat from the right, have been foisted on American subjects “unilaterally” by the Supreme Court; others are the outcome of elite paternalism or special interest machinations in Congress.

Weber further asks when America became a democracy — was it when slavery was banished, when women were given the vote, when ID verification laws were and are banished, or is it yet still far off in the future? Schallre and Waldman obviously seem animated not by democracy but by some notion of core “American values,” though they never make a reference to such a concept in the interview, only confusedly referring to “democracy” as the system under threat. And, Schallre and Waldman have obviously excluded cultural and identitarian preferences from this notion of American values without any justification — as if “violence” and “white Christian nationalism” are somehow intrinsically in conflict with the political logic of a country founded in revolt and governed for two centuries by white Christians alone.

As a further critique, Weber points out that the distinction of “rural” white Americans is a fig leaf to disguise the fact that whites are now so outnumbered in other settings as to be politically irrelevant. I would like to borrow this frame — where below I refer to “rural” whites, I am referring to all whites who are not yet outnumbered in their own local politics, which of course includes a lot of Democratic voters who would feel horror at the sight of a MAGA bumper sticker.

The status quo before 2008: White American cultural and political hegemony

Here I will once again offer the reader a novel “model” with which to understand the present times. It may not be convincing; but even so could be useful.

Above, I do not do Weber’s response justice in my summary — it works better in the spoken word. The reader should watch his remarks for a fair impression. But what Weber clarifies is that Schallre, Waldman, and their hosts do not have a concept of “democratic norms” which can be placed into context either with the notion of majority rule or American political tradition (note that MSNBC is the source of the term “norms” in the title of the youtube clip; but it is a fitting choice). Their notion of norms is stranded from the violent, tumultuous American compact and derives its source from university thought in the 1960s. “Democratic norms” simply refers to the regime getting what it wants, which is to interpret the concept of individual rights in whichever ways justify the destruction of white cultural and political hegemony.

In fact Schallre and Waldman have an agenda and are pursuing it effectively; only, they are also attempting much less successfully to obscure the moral logic of this agenda.

They wish to alert the reader to the fact that white, rural Americans are not, going forward, liable to respond politically to mere tokenism — voting for Biden because he was born kind-of where they were — or to considerations of their material betterment. This demographic will only reply to Trumpian grievance politics; and as such, obviously, they are politically incompatible with what is preferred by elites, since these preferences are the source of the same grievances. This is a correct judgement; as such, it is useful analysis for both elites and mainstream-aligned viewers at home who are appalled at the sight of a giant American flag on a pickup truck. Of course, it would be just as useful, but less narcissistically self-victimizing, to say that “white rural Americans resent the fact that the media and Federal government have destroyed the political and cultural hegemony they grew up with.” They are politically animated by cultural issues, because we, the type of people writing and reading books such as this, are attacking their culture.

Of course even Trump himself, let alone Trump voters, would be reluctant to acknowledge that they have ever been in possession of this privileged status in national and most local politics, even less that they valued it and resent losing it. To do so would be to concede that the left (the “left”) is correct when it claims that Blacks were kept in subordinate status, even into the present century, an admission which would seemingly invite political destruction as such a fact cannot be compatible with, again, “democratic norms.” For, yes, even the American right (“right”) shares this confused idea of what is America’s legitimate historical tradition, placing its origin somewhere around the “I have a dream” speech.

Yet consider the facts. The active eras of the Great Migration, those in which urban Black populations increased, were all littered with hundreds of white riots which kept Civil-Rights-aligned housing policies from being effected locally, limiting the admission of factory-employed Blacks and their families into white neighborhoods. The reader may consult wikipedia for a somewhat complete list. These Great Migration era riots were pre-modern, in the sense that they were dominated by violence directed against civilians (of a particular race) rather than against property or police; they were motivated by a defense of property on racial lines and were typically supported by police passivity. They upheld local political and cultural hegemony.

Credited to Arthur Siegel, 1942, for the Office of War Information.

These urban riots in the north can also be seen as an expansion of the Reconstruction-era, anti-election riots which banished Blacks from government in the south, and ushered in Jim Crow. The infirmity of the 14th Amendment in federal courts before 1954 was hardly sufficient to bring about white political preferences on the local level, given that local politicians could reply to civil rights advocates, or that Blacks might outnumber whites at the polls — therefore, American politics was suspended whenever and wherever it failed to deliver the only result considered adequate by white residents.

Not withstanding the role of recent and less-employed southern white arrivals in these northern riots, this backlash against Black migration only ended after highways and suburbanization facilitated the abandonment of the cities whites had built (an abandonment which left behind poorer and elderly whites). Although this removed the check of white violence on urban Civil Rights policy, law enforcement practice still tended to treat Blacks as second-class citizens. This is to say, the urban riots of the late 1960s — the “ghetto riots,” in which Black violence was directed against property and the police — reflected that white political and cultural hegemony had persisted in urban America even when white riots had become obsolete.

What followed this crisis was not a golden age of equality but of lip-service to the idea, while all across the country prisons were expanded in order to keep a substantial portion of the Black, male population apart from society at all times. While prison populations do not substantially increase until the 1980s, the relevant political language that would lead to this increase — the “War on Drugs” — dates to Nixon.

From wikipedia; sources in caption.

And no sooner did the set of policies and law enforcement practices which maintained this system come under attack, in the second Obama term, then did white Americans transition overnight to the “greatest threat to democracy,” or the primary threat of “terrorism” in the present day. (In fact, the incarceration rate declines beginning in 2009; however, I do not think incarceration is “liquid” enough to reflect changed attitudes toward policing and sentencing before, in fact, the Trump years.)

Only the 1950s and 1970s may be cited as an era of American history in which white political hegemony was not actively held in place by state-sponsored means — either police passivity to white race riots, police suppression of Black riots, or the de novo creation of a prison superstructure which, at the 2010 peak, kept American Blacks at a higher incarceration rate than the populace of any country in the world, with 4% of Black males in prison at a given moment.¹ In the case of the earlier decade, no one would argue that white Americans did not still enjoy political favoritism at every level of government (what else was the Civil Right movement about?); in the latter decade, despite the paucity of white violence, white political, cultural, and economic satisfaction were not at any sort of high (what else was Taxi Driver about?).

What I am saying is that nothing in fact changed between 1950 and 1980 - 2008 in terms of the cultural and economic privilege of white Americans, except that in the latter era it became taboo for rural whites to say out loud the source of their satisfaction with the status quo, leaving that source as a strictly “leftist” complaint. In the interest of transparency, I myself have limited in-person familiarity with rural whites in this era. I only had one political conversation with a girl my age in rural Pennsylvania while traveling one summer; I remember well, however, that she claimed to hate Bill Clinton “because he’s a racist.” If this is the extent of personal experience which justifies my model of the white rural mindset — satisfied with white cultural and political dominance, but resentful of having it pointed out by politicians or the media — the reader must obviously make up their own mind about its validity.

Thus, again, we have identified an important transition in the political status of American Blacks which goes beyond the symbolic weight of Obama’s election; one which is obvious and yet never mentioned, and which immediately preceded the radicalization of the American left² and right (leading to the oft-bemoaned problem of “polarization”). An out-of-view-to-whites state apparatus which after the 1970s enabled the ongoing and often permanent removal of Blacks from society — the prison system and tough-on-crime policing practices — fell from bipartisan political and media favor to attack, and suddenly white Americans rediscovered the urge for violence which they had used to maintain first-citizen status before the 1970s.

But we are not supposed to understand any link between these developments. In fact, the reader must imagine that I have become the one who is confused — after all, Trump himself furthered the dismantling of the prior status quo, by reducing prison terms. Therefore, one might suppose, it should be impossible to argue that Trump was elected in response to the erosion of de facto white hegemony represented by and effected during Obama’s presidency. Of course, merely reading the same sentence should make the truth of it seem more obviously possible.

If democracy can not effect the representation of a people, it is not rational for them to support it

This is not to say that immigration isn’t relevant to white Americans; it is of course very much so. And I certainly appreciate Trump’s ability to credibly oppose the elite/mainstream indifference to the problem — I have said before that the most significant development of 2020 was the removal of his opposition to unlimited migration.

But I cannot praise Trump in this regard without making it clear that overall, he helps perpetuate the confusion of white Americans on their own cultural and political preferences. By channelling white American racism into covert and symbolic expressions — exactly as the left, a.k.a. the “real racists” claim he does — he perpetuates the suppression of more widespread overt acknowledgement of the root cause of white grievance.

Still, this caveat is perhaps a tremendous distraction from a more simple point, which it might have benefitted me to leave as the sole focus of this post. In their new book, Schallre and Waldman posit that the problem with white, rural Americans is that they don’t believe that either peaceful, political discourse or (anti-majoritarian) checks on executive power will permit effective political representation: With these things in place, white grievances will not translate to necessary national and local policies, for example on the return of gay “rights” to a pre-Obama understanding. Well, if they believe that, and it is in fact true, then why shouldn’t they favor alternatives to “democracy”?

To put it another way: In 2016, Hillary Clinton received more votes than Donald Trump. Because America elects presidents according to what the different states ask for, not directly what the people ask for, Trump was still elected, a fact which irked millions of urban white professionals. But what if he hadn’t been elected? Well then, the votes of 62,984,828 mostly white Americans would have counted for nothing, simply because 3 million more other Americans voted for Hillary.

But what then would you actually do with the fact that 63 million white Americans voted for a reversal of radical, “bipartisan” changes to American culture and politics, and their government plowed on with those changes regardless?

It is in the first place difficult to actually justify such an outcome without at a certain point invoking a particular illegitimacy to white cultural preferences. The safest course in attempting such a justification is reference to the anti-majoritarian concepts which shaped the Constitution; but as the Constitution was written in large part by rural, racist, slaveholding whites who used violence to overturn a government seen as overly favorable to foreigners (Indians), this isn’t satisfactory in justifying the modern disenfranchisement of this same class of American in the midst of a demographic invasion.

If taking a majoritarian approach, one needs to hold, eventually, that whites intrinsically don’t deserve to live under a pro-white government (or political and cultural hegemony). But why not? One can only answer, still more eventually, because then non-whites would not get to live under an anti-white government — one in which, again, it doesn’t matter what rural white voters prefer. Of course government should represent minorities, too; therefore it must not represent whites, since they would prefer government to only represent them. (Only whites who do not actively share this preference are represented, but “representation by correct belief” is not true representation.)

In the second place, no matter what justification one might make for the outcome, the fact would remain that “democracy” as such, meaning the modern media and political apparatus, has ceased to offer any value to white Americans who prefer “democracy” to represent only them. It would therefore obviously be rational for those same Americans to prefer alternatives: Either a Trump 2, one who is effective in bypassing the bureaucracy and media, or violence.

Now the reader might imagine that I am simply serving up high-school level political oversimplification, that I haven’t learned and absorbed the complicated reasoning which explains why American liberal “norms” have never guaranteed that the American government maintains white hegemony.

But in fact I understand and agree completely that the American system of individual rights has never afforded this guarantee. I am instead pointing out that at almost no point in America’s history have the majority of white voters been asked to agree peacefully to the outcomes of this fact.

Whenever individual rights infringed on white hegemony before 1954, whites organized in mob or paramilitary fashion to keep Blacks subjugated. After 1970, following the abrupt and demoralizing showdown of the state against white extralegal violence, individual rights became subverted on an even larger scale than before the Civil Rights era, in the form of mass incarceration of Blacks (and to a moderated extent Hispanics); and thus the state itself maintained white hegemony on behalf of whites, at every level from local and national governments to the media.

What can follow the sudden, national dismantling of white hegemony, then? If the answer must be found in the past, then it cannot be a period of widespread contentment with “democratic norms,” because in fact such a period has never taken place at any time in American history. It is a fantasy; a fictional Eden that the white mind creates to displace responsibility for the “backwards” overt racism that lived on in covert form even as Obama was sworn into office.

No, what can follow is only a return to the 1960s or one of the eras of violence before it.

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1. Using figures compiled from various sources in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate. Currently, El Salvador leads the globe at 1,086 per 100,000 imprisoned, but this would be a higher rate than before Bukele’s campaign against gangs. Whereas, even in 2021 after a year of unprecedented prison-evacuation, American Blacks were imprisoned at a rate of 901.

2. In the case of the left, the radicalization to “woke” concepts of racism follows from the failure of this transition to symbolic political equality (Obama’s election) to effect equal outcomes between whites and Blacks in cultural and economic playing-fields. To a great extent this proceeds and in fact causes the attack on policing and incarceration. And of course, the reaction on the right, in the form of birtherism and Tea Party know-nothingness, also follows the symbolic change, but this reaction was somewhat ephemeral, and was not as obviously anti-political and pro-violent (some exceptions aside).