Kristin Lantz Trujillo grew up proud of her family’s lifestyle. In the summers, she would prepare cattle to show at the county fair. During school, she would rush home after class to feed chickens on the family’s corn and soybean farm. Neither of her parents went to college, but they encouraged her decision to attend Carleton College, a liberal arts school two hours’ drive from their farm in Minnesota.
Despite being physically close to her hometown, Luntz Trujillo was surprised at how foreign her upbringing was at university. When she researched the agricultural club and found out that its members wanted to brew kombucha, not milk cows, she was dismayed. When an art history teacher asked students which famous paintings they had actually seen, Luntz Trujillo remained silent: she had never been to a museum. This sense of cultural alienation shaped her research when she became a political scientist. What is rural identity? How does it shape one’s politics?
Earlier this year, Luntz Trujillo, now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, was reading a best-selling new book that cited her own research to explore the same question, but the review didn’t generate the excitement she had hoped for.
“It seemed like an attack on rural America,” she said.
“White Rural Rage,” a book published in February by journalist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of rural America. The authors argue that rural residents are more likely than their urban counterparts to accept political violence, which poses a threat to American democracy.
Several rural scholars whose research is included in the book were quick to denounce it. In a critical essay in Politico, Colby College political scientist Nick Jacobs wrote, “Imagine my surprise when I picked up this book and discovered that some of the research was my own.” In a Newsweek opinion piece, Luntz Trujillo blasted the book as “a classic example of how intellectuals sow distrust by demonizing those who are different.”
People who study rural communities often feel that politicians and commentators draw the wrong lessons from their work, in part because they are too removed from those communities. It’s a problem rural studies scholars have tried to solve, but one they feel keenly. Some of these scholars grew up on farms or in small towns, but their university ties can create suspicion among their subjects. Books like “White Rural Rage” can make that suspicion even harder to overcome.
“By saying, ‘Here’s what the experts say about rural people and country folk,’ we are contributing to a further devaluation of expertise,” said Jacobs, co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who is going to trust the experts if they’re saying that about you?”
Rural Renaissance
Until recently, scholars have ignored the urban-rural political divide for an obvious reason: it barely existed.
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, rural counties were similar to urban counties in presidential elections, supporting Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a notable gap in rural-urban voting patterns emerged in presidential elections, and it’s been widening ever since. In 2016, Trump won 59% of rural voters; four years later, that gap rose to 65%, according to the Pew Research Center. And in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans won 69% of the rural vote.
Even if this shift suggests that “rural” is now an identity of its own, it’s a hard group to define. (The authors of “White Rural Rage” throw up their hands, declaring themselves “agnostic” about the differences in definitions among the studies they cite.)
The Census Bureau classifies communities as rural if they’re not within a city area, meaning they’re not part of a densely populated area with more than 5,000 people or more than 2,000 housing units. (In the 2020 Census, 20% of Americans were classified as rural.) The Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service looks at a variety of measures of counties, including population size, proximity to metropolitan areas and commuting patterns.
Beyond these basic definitional issues, rural communities can be very different socially. “So much gets lost when you lump it all together at the national level,” says Zoe Nemerevar, a political scientist at Utah Valley University. “It’s especially frustrating when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latin America. In the Deep South, it’s black America.”
Traditionally, political scientists have argued that measuring the impact of place is merely a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, such as race or education. And growing up rural has tended to not stand out to scholars as a salient part of political identity, since many are not from rural areas.
Perhaps because until recently few people called themselves “experts on rural politics,” the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural republicanism were widely accepted by the general public.
For many years, the most understandable theory was the one Thomas Frank laid out in his best-selling 2004 book, “What’s Wrong with Kansas?” Frank, the historian, argued that the Republican Party’s focus on social issues like abortion and guns encouraged rural voters to set aside their economic interests and vote on their cultural values, rather than for candidates who supported labor unions and corporate regulation.
But Kansas’ theory of Midwestern republicanism was not very satisfying to readers who actually lived in rural America. In fact, several scholars were so dissatisfied with the book that it prompted them to pursue their own research.
Michael Shepard read the book in high school, college and graduate school, and it never changed his opinion. “I thought it was pretty arrogant,” says Shepard, who grew up in Bardstown, Kentucky, the bourbon-brewing capital of the country, and is now a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “It really missed a lot of what was going on in communities like mine.”
Another scholar who disagreed with Frank’s diagnosis was Kathy Kramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Kramer’s 2016 book, The Politics of Resentment, has become a staple in the rapidly growing field of rural politics studies. At least six scholars have credited Kramer with basing their own work on ideas. The authors of White Rural Rage also cited Kramer’s work, but Kramer was disappointed by its conclusions.
“There’s been a lot of focus on, ‘What is going on with those people?'” she says, “But most people who study rural political behavior have empathy for rural people. They’re not dismissing rural people as ignorant or uninformed. Rather, it’s an attempt to understand how they see the world.”
Generally, rural Americans believe that the rise of free trade and new technology hurts their communities and helps cities thrive, Jacobs said, so their resentment toward city dwellers doesn’t come from nowhere, though Jacobs distinguishes it from the concept of “rural rage.”
“Anger and resentment are not interchangeable words,” he wrote in Politico. “Anger implies irrationality., “Unjustified and disproportionate anger. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational and is a reaction based on some negative experience.”
And while resentment, like anger, does not easily disappear, he suggests that trying to understand its causes could be the first step in bridging the growing urban-rural divide.
