Different views on a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, attracting national attention

 Penguin Random House

A new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, is getting a lot attention nationally -- both positive and negative. In his opinion essay for the New York Times, Paul Krugman writes positively about the book and explores how technology and connection grew cities while rural Americans lost jobs, dignity and their place in the national dialogue.

When progress benefits one region and destroys another, anger and resentment are natural outcomes. Krugman writes, "It can be devastating economically and socially for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but whole communities. . . .This isn't a hypothetical proposition. It's a big part of what has happened to rural America."

The continuum of white rage is "laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail" in the book, Krugman adds. 

The technology Schaller and Waldman point out isn't limited to the Internet, cell phones and global competition. It's the advances in farming technology and worldwide shifts in energy production. "American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural workforce declined by about two-thirds over the same period," Krugman writes. "[Due to] technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled."

Schaller and Waldman's book discusses
Jason Aldean's controversial song and video.

Jeffery H. Bloodworth takes a much different view of the book's main points and conclusions. In his opinion piece in The Daily Yonder, Bloodworth writes: "Rather than listen and understand complicated, three-dimensional rural Americans, they stereotype. Their analysis is an amalgam of our collective ills. Unwilling to reach across the divide, Schaller and Waldman gorge themselves on the negative and nihilistic. Then they regurgitate every rural, red America stereotype imaginable."

Bloodworth writes that many concerns of rural voters do involve economic issues, but reaches a very different conclusion that the book's authors. He writes: "Kirkus Reviews neatly summarizes their argument, “A view of rural America as a font of white privilege—and of resentment that the privileges aren’t greater.”

Bloodworth responds that the problems are grounded more in the huge declines in social interactions among people, a concern addressed more than two decades ago in Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, and made much worse by smartphones and social media. Bloodworth writes: "Mr. Schaller and Waldman, rural whites aren’t a threat to American democracy. A rural-urban economic divide, cable news, doom scrolling, and 'bowling alone' endanger it."

For more on the topic, the 2017 story "For the rural right, the key's what 'feels true'," by Christina Pazzanese of The Harvard Gazette offers another exploration.

To read an excerpt of Schaller and Waldman's book, click here. For Waldman's recent column on the topic, go here. UPDATE: For a rip-snorting riposte from Pulitzer Prize-winning Editor Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northeast Iowa, click here.