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As Paul Waldman writes in the article I just linked, he and Schaller also knew their book would inflame the hard right – but it's been a surprise to see some "centrist" hot-shot young scholars side with the hard right and attack the book savagely, with claims it's unfair and unsympathetic to rural whites and the plight that facilitates their voting against their self-interest – over and over, deepening their immiseration.

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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This is especially a surprise because these same scholars are willing to criticize all sorts of OTHER groups – but want to maintain the fiction that right-wing rural white voters are somehow off-limits and should be above criticism. It's also a surprise because Schaller and Waldman are crystal clear about their sympathy for rural white voters and the plight neoliberal economics has left them in.

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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As Paul Waldman writes, the ferocity with which these young scholars are insisting that people like Waldman and Schaller should keep their hands off the white rural voter question only proves a central point of the book: that white rural voters have been accorded an iconic, untouchable status in our culture accorded to no other groups.

Waldman writes,

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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"Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history."

I say, let the hot-shot young scholars willing to play complicit games with the hard right play those games and see how far this gets them in the long run.

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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I'm not impressed with folks willing to hop into bed with the hard right, whether they're academic or corporate media types. Opportunism never has held much attraction for me. Show me whom you're willing to hop into bed with, and you show me just who you are.

One reason I stop my ears when these folks talk is that I know Schaller and Waldman have a good fix on rural white voters, because my own roots lie in that very demographic.

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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And I know that what Schaller and Waldman are reporting about rural white voters is right on target.

I grew up in the very rural, deep-red state of Arkansas, a state dominated to the hilt by white evangelical culture – and I grew up in that white evangelical culture as a Southern Baptist. I still live in Arkansas.

My four grandparents all grew up on farms in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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My father's parents farmed in northwest Louisiana into his boyhood, and my mother's family lived in a small town in south central Arkansas. I know from rural and small-town white Southern culture – so don't even think about preaching to me, young hot-shot scholars who live in much more privileged and insulated places, about how you understand rural white voters and I don't. Or Schaller and Waldman don't.

Because I'm not listening.

#WhiteRuralRage #WhiteRuralVoters #Trump #Republicans #MAGA
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@wdlindsy How many decades have we heard them plead for "understanding", that the world is moving "too fast" that we're "loosing tradition" when what they're really been screaming at the top of their lungs is "No, I don't wanna"

@tawtovo I don't listen to people who hop into bed with the hard right – in this case, with the plethora of folks attacking this book from the hard right – while claiming to represent a liberal-progressive position. Their alliances give their game away.

@wdlindsy
Wouldn't the same logic lead us to reject all Democrats in the US House of Representatives for voting to oust McCarthy?

It's possible to critique the same thing that someone else is, but for different reasons without forming an alliance.

@wdlindsy
I also have no use for anyone using the hard right for their own advancement.