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The Myth of Rural Rage
by ELIZABETH CURRID-HALKETT, May 16, 2024
Red states and small towns are not, in fact, full of hate
Today, talk of a divided America has become a cliché, almost too obvious to remark on. The country’s political geography is now reductively mapped as urban versus rural, the meritocrats versus the uneducated, liberals and the far Left at war with conservatives and the far Right. Much of the polarization argument centers on the belief that liberals and conservatives do not share the same values. According to the standard narrative, rural Americans feel rage and hate toward the liberal elite, and we are hurtling toward another civil war.
But what if, for the vast majority of rural Americans, none of this is true?
I first spoke to Craig Parker, now 72, in the autumn of 2022. Craig is a retired environmental worker, now a tree farmer, who lives in Jesup, Iowa, population 2,806. His great-great-grandfather came to Iowa in 1857, and the family has been there ever since. After our first conversation, Craig sent me a photo of himself with his son and grandchildren riding a green Oliver tractor, a moody sky and vast verdant landscape behind them. “Three generations of Parker men at the tree farm,” Craig wrote.
Over the course of two years, I had many conversations with Craig, a lifelong rural Republican, about his views on America and its hot-button issues. “There should be a way for people to come to this country and follow their dreams and build up,” Craig told me when I asked him about immigration and the infamous wall.
Craig was clear that he’s lived a very fortunate life, but for him privilege isn’t about money and things. He knows he was born into a world where many are not treated equally. “We had a guest pastor and he talked about white privilege. I’d never thought about it that way — a pretty sheltered life. Everyone should have the opportunity to do things for themselves. Nobody should have to sleep in the streets or go home hungry.”
Craig doesn’t own a Whole Foods tote bag, but he is a true conservationist who lives mainly off what he grows on his own land. When I asked him about same-sex marriage, Craig said he “struggles,” given his relationship to Scripture, but believes civil rights should be for everyone. His responses capture the sentiment of dozens of rural Americans I got to know over the past few years while conducting research for my book, The Overlooked Americans. But these aren’t just anecdotes.
Yet you would never know that Craig, or any of the millions of Americans like him, existed if you read many of the recent observations of rural America as a place filled with hate and vitriol. Recently, an academic, accompanied by his journalist co-author, trotted onto MSNBC and denounced rural Americans as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, geodemographic group in the country,” and their book, endorsed by a Nobel Prize–winning economist, became an instant best seller.
In reality, most Americans, in all regions, care about the same things — family, friends, health and happiness, democracy. Rural citizens are more likely to include religion on that list. But according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, even on politically charged issues of racial equality, religion, the environment, and trust in our government, urban and rural Americans largely feel the same way. Statistically, about half of both rural and urban Americans are religious, even if rural Americans are more likely to openly discuss their belief in God. Over half of both rural and urban Americans feel too little is being done to protect the environment. When asked whether they believe government should aid black Americans, rural and urban respondents are similarly supportive. The General Social Survey also reports that rural Americans with less than a high-school education are the most likely group to support preferential hiring of black people.
For years, pundits have issued shrill warnings that rural American voters are at best ignorant of what is best for them and at worst angry and vengeful. In his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank portrayed rural, working-class America’s loyalty to the Republican Party as a form of “derangement.” Every few years a book comes out claiming to reveal the real rural America, as we’ve seen in the condescension of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, the false-consciousness argument in Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, or the mistrust and bitterness described in Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment. Some reporting is more sympathetic than others, but all of it says more or less the same thing in different measures: Rural America is angry. Rural America is backward. Rural America feels left behind. For many liberal academics and journalists, it is simply incomprehensible that the vast majority of rural Americans might actually be content and not resentful of coastal elites — or, perhaps worse, not thinking about coastal elites at all. People like Craig challenge the view that rural America is a monolith of angry, poor racists. I’m here to tell you it’s not.
I’m a university professor who lives in Los Angeles and a lifelong liberal who interned for Senator Hillary Clinton when I was a graduate student at Columbia. I was euphoric when Barack Obama won the presidency and I cried when Hillary Clinton lost. I voted for Biden in 2020 and will vote for Biden again in 2024. I read the New York Times daily and I listen to NPR. But I have a problem with how some in liberal media and academia castigate an entire section of our country. We call Fox News partial (and it is), but media outlets that are supposedly neutral are also partial. The veteran NPR editor Uri Berliner argued in a viral piece in the Free Press that NPR, which is partly government-funded, has an increasingly apparent systemic liberal bias in its news reporting.
You might wonder how I ended up talking to Craig and other rural Americans in the first place. I spent my childhood and adolescence in rural America. I was born in West Virginia and raised in Danville, Pa., a town of about 5,000 people in Montour County, nestled along the Susquehanna River. When Trump won the White House in 2016, liberal elites were convulsing over what they felt was a rural reckoning and an ensuing fracturing of the country. I hadn’t yet met Craig, but I would read the pieces in liberal media about rural revenge, the deepening political divide between city and country, and the anger felt by everyone who had cast a vote for Trump and would often think — know, really, given my background — that this was not an accurate depiction of rural America.
So I used my training as a researcher to uncover the real story. Over the last five years, I have talked to Democrats, Republicans, pro-Trump conservatives, and anti-Trump conservatives, sometimes all in the same day. I have spoken to painters, the unemployed, teachers, farmers, doctors, and nurses. I have listened to a progressive Democrat and a Trump voter who supports election-conspiracy theories — they live down the road from each other in a town of fewer than a thousand. I have talked to wealthy landowners, farmers in the Midwest, and poor people living in desolate parts of Appalachia, some with irregular running water and no grocery store within dozens of miles. In almost 20 years of interviews for my books and academic articles, I have come to learn that it is only when you talk with people for a long time, ask them about their lives, and actually listen that you find who they are and what they want.
When I spoke to Craig and other people in rural America, they weren’t angry at cities or progressives or Democrats. Sure, some fretted about the state of the country or the economy, or had concerns about current policies. Republican voters weren’t satisfied with President Biden, but no one — neither the conspiracy theorist in Kentucky, nor Craig in Iowa, nor the “hard-core Republican” (self-described) in Missouri — expressed vitriol or visceral hatred toward their fellow citizens.
Some I spoke to worried about America’s future, but almost all of them were hopeful and believed life was better now than in previous eras. Even those I interviewed who were economically struggling, coping with drug addiction in the family, or living in food deserts expressed hope and optimism. “When you look at America today, it’s not where we wanted to be, but compared to [the past]?” a man from a Midwest town, population 400, said to me. Comparing the relative peace and prosperity of our time with the Cold War era and economic downturns that previous generations had coped with, he went on: “My life has been a whole lot better than theirs. . . . When you were scared of being blown out of existence, every other person you knew was unemployed? . . . From that perspective, we are a lot better off.”
Most important, almost everyone said they could relate to fellow Americans regardless of whether they live in a city or a small town. “Sure, I could talk to anyone. You’re from California, aren’t you?” Jane from Pennsylvania said with a laugh. “I think there’s crazy people everywhere, and if someone’s culture is different, I want to know about it, I want to hear about it.” This was the general sentiment expressed by almost everyone with whom I spoke, that they could talk to anyone. “I can’t imagine not relating to someone who was also a person,” remarked Clay, a young man from Kentucky. “Being American is enough of a specificity that we had something in common and we could relate to.”
Many months after my initial interviews, as the media continued to foment political division, I emailed my contacts in rural America to ask whether I could talk to them again. Within hours they replied and offered times for me to call. So I asked in one way or another, No, seriously, don’t you hate liberal America a little bit? Aren’t you a little bit angry with Democrats? And their answers remained the same.
“My perspective is they [liberals] hate me with all the vitriol in the world and they assume I hate them,” explained a man from a rural town in Missouri near the Ozarks. “I don’t hate them. . . . Any of them want to have dinner with me, they’re welcome.” A rural Wisconsin man said, “I don’t have hatred about America, there’s just too much going on. People are focusing on themselves as individuals, not what is best for the country.” A woman from Appalachia remarked: “We don’t have to agree on everything to like each other. I would never hate. Would only pray for someone, not hate ever.” One rural Pennsylvania woman said, “I don’t hate anyone, especially not based on where they live or how they vote.” Simply put, not a single person I communicated with for my research expressed hatred toward anyone.
As for how coastal urban America thinks of them? “They probably think we’re a bunch of hillbillies,” was a sentiment that my interviewees echoed more than once — and not without reason.
The narrative of an angry rural America looking askance at our cities doesn’t explain the place I know both personally and intellectually. Rural Americans do not feel rage or hatred toward liberals. If anything, they feel liberals look down on them. For the most part, when we connect as humans, not voters, when we pay a little less attention to the media’s endless drumbeat of division, we find that Americans of all stripes like each other irrespective of whether they are Democrat or Republican, rural or urban. What Americans don’t like are the politics of division and the media’s role in stoking it.
Are there angry people in rural America? Of course there are. Are there racists, homophobes, and xenophobes in rural America? Definitely. But such hateful people exist everywhere — including in our cities — and they are, thankfully, in the minority everywhere. We cannot extrapolate a broad, sweeping narrative about a significant portion of the country from the loud, intolerant voices on the fringe. The fourth estate and our public intellectuals must keep their own biases in check rather than lean into the preconceived notion that rural Americans are inadequate, ignorant, and one-dimensional. That best seller I mentioned earlier? After the publication of the book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, the very researchers whose statistics were used to support the idea of white rural rage said the book misrepresented their data to make rural America look bad.
As a citizen who has always defined my politics as left-leaning, I am painfully aware of how condescending liberal elites have become toward rural America. I am repelled by their castigation of good people who don’t happen to live on either coast or in some boho, college-educated neighborhood. Overall, I find the illiberal Left to be increasingly intolerant, particularly as witnessed in the recent manifestations of campus antisemitism.
Our public intellectuals and leading media outlets have a duty to reset the conversation about rural America and take the time to find out the truth about the people who live there. Americans who live in cities and those who live in rural towns are equally complicated. While we may exist in different contexts, geographies, and circumstances, we share the same joys and vicissitudes of life in 21st-century America. And that through line should be honored, not dismissed.
ELIZABETH CURRID-HALKETT is the James Irvine Chair of Urban and Regional Planning and a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. She is the author of
The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country. 
