The Frontlines of Democracy - Part I: White Rural Rage with Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman 52:05

Hey everyone, it's Reed.

Before we get started, this is a quick two-part miniseries on where the front lines of democracy really are in those rural and ex-urban areas. Those places you always see reporters go to and talk to people in diners. What's really driving the folks out there? In the ex-urbs, what's really going on in those places where those who once lived in cities or even suburbs have now fled? I hope you enjoy it. I hope you learn as much as I did by interviewing these folks.

And now, on with the show. Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by Tom Schaller and Paul Waltman, co-authors of the recently published New York Times bestseller, White Rural Rage, The Threat to American Democracy.

Tom is an author and professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a former columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times. He's also a regular television analyst of U.S. politics and has appeared on ABC, CBS, and MSNBC. Today, he's coming to us from Charm City, Baltimore, Maryland. Tom, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Thank you, Reid.

Paul is a journalist and opinion writer whose work has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines and digital outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Week, MSNBC and CNN. He's a former columnist at The Washington Post and is author of multiple books on media and politics. Today, he's coming to us from Washington, D.C. Paul, welcome. Thanks, Reid. All right, guys, let me ask you.

A lot of big open spaces, thousands of counties in this country, Tom, they are mostly empty.

I was born in, I don't know if it was rural Ohio, Marietta, the southeast corner in Washington County, right across the river from Parkersburg, West Virginia, right at Coaltown. And here we are all this time later, and journalists still spend more time going to diners in these little towns, trying to explain, like some anthropologist, why it is that white Americans in rural areas are so upset about everything.

So, in five words or less, what's the answer? No, I'm just kidding. So, give us a sense of what brought you to the book. Well, it's funny you mentioned Marietta. I've been there. I think they have like a riverboat restaurant there. I taught a year on the Hocking Hills at University of Ohio in Athens, of course, which the university town is not, I wouldn't classify as rural, but larger Athens County is quite rural and was featured in a recent New York Times piece about rising homelessness in Appalachia.

I mean, what brought us to the book? You know, Paul and I have been friends for about 20 years and we have the same agent and we are sort of poking around and looking at some better explanation for the Trump movement and the MAGA movement. And as we started to look at polls, we noticed this persistent pattern. And it was that white rural Americans and not all of them, of course, and not exclusive to them, but they tended to be at the top or the bottom, most likely to agree or least likely to agree with various principles and so forth.

And so we saw this pattern, which was like in terms of, you know, racist attitudes and xenophobia and fear of immigrants and conspiracism, belief in sort of undemocratic or anti-democratic principles and a justification for violence, particularly January 6th violence.

That white rural Americans were not the whole of the Trump movement, but they were the leading edge or the tip of the spear, if you will. And as we dug further and further, we realized that not only was that a problem, but given the fact that, as we call them, they've been the essential minority in American history, a country that was, you know, majority rural until the 1920 census.

And the fact that they're overrepresented at every level of government, state legislatures, but also Senate malapportionment, presidential elections. And even as we showed in Chapter 3 of the House, they wield inflated power that at a moment of existential crisis with our constitutional democracy, in effect, in our view, on the ballot, we needed to write this book and we needed to write it and publish it into this 2024 presidential cycle.

And so, Paul, let me take a step away from white rural Americans. The kinds of things that Tom is describing are not particularly unique to rural citizens throughout history, right? There's always been a little bit of a disconnect. Well, let me put it this way. Since the rise of maybe the Industrial Revolution, right, there's always been a disconnect between rural towns, agrarian communities, and the urban areas, and then obviously subsequently suburban areas.

So why is it now that here in the U.S. that, you know, something that is not new to history is suddenly so impactful to what we're facing today?

You're right. I think that tensions between rural people and urban people probably date back as far as there have been cities. And you see that all over the world. If you go to other countries, generally speaking, if there is a right-wing populist movement, whether it's in Europe or anywhere else, it's probably going to get kind of the heart of its support from the rural areas. The difference in the United States is that rural people have such disproportionate power

both in kind of the permanent structures like the United States Senate, where 580,000 people who live in Wyoming get the same representation as 39 million people in California, and the Electoral College. But it's also often used by Republicans in particular to kind of magnify their power at the state level. And so you see in a lot of different places through gerrymandering and other kinds of things that they do, they sort of want to lever up the power of the rural areas where they have so many votes.

And so that kind of disproportionate power is not something you necessarily see in other countries. And what we've seen here is that, you know, it used to be for a long time that Republicans would do a little bit better in rural areas, but not dramatically so necessarily. And there were a lot of progressive movements that came out of rural America.

But in the last, especially the last couple of decades, rural and urban voters have started to move farther and farther and farther apart. And that has come at the same time as there have been some really profound problems that have begun to affect rural people in health care, in economies, you know, the movement overseas of manufacturing jobs. And all this has led to some real genuine suffering across rural America and the

a lot of people decided that you know neither party was really giving them much on economics

And that really created, I think, an opening for Republicans to basically say, you know, don't worry about that stuff anymore. All you have to worry about is the culture war stuff. And if you are angry about what's happened to you, we're going to give you a set of people whom you can blame it on. You can blame it on snooty coastal elitists. You can blame it on immigrants. You can blame it on Black Lives Matter or whatever. That way,

All of your anger will be directed away from the people who actually represent you. And that's really, I think, the great trick that the GOP has managed to pull off, that a lot of rural places, they are represented top to bottom. You know, the United States Senate, the U.S. Congress, the state reps, the state senators, all the way down to dog catcher. It's all conservative Republicans.

And yet, when they look around at the problems that they have, which are very real and we document extensively in our book, they're not asking, why haven't the politicians we keep electing done anything about this? They're looking outward to try to find somebody to blame. And so you have this kind of anger that never goes away because the problems are still not being solved.

And yet they can just keep getting exploited election after election. And then, of course, I'm sure we're going to talk about Donald Trump. He comes along and gets more support than any Republican ever has in rural America. So that's its own story. Right. So, Tom, you know, that's one thing that Paul was alluding to was this idea that, you know, whether or not it's the media, Democrats, you know, you guys are in academia. I don't even know if I'm in politics or media or some weird hybrid thereof. But like, you know, you always see every election year.

Why do these people vote against their own economic interests? Why do these people vote against their own economic interests? I don't understand it. If they just understood, which then, of course, leads to the snootiness and the looking down, right? Maybe they just don't know enough. But the truth is they do know enough. And they're like, but you know what? If I got to take a bunch of people who don't who aren't helping me economically or otherwise for my livelihood in my life, I'll take the guys that sort of put a salve on my anger.

Or maybe put gasoline on my anchor. Yeah, maybe put gasoline, I think is the right answer. But, you know, Paul and I have sort of a nuanced view on this, which is that some of the economic problems can't be solved by

by either party. So, for example, you can go to Congress, even if you got every Republican and every Democrat in both chamber, to vote against the globalization of the economy, right? You could vote that way, but it's not going to stop it. And it's not going to make third world countries or China stop using children and paying them a few dollars an hour with no environmental regulations and no worker regulation. So you can't make that stop. You can also vote against technology. I mean, I guess you could, but you can't vote to eliminate the center pivoting

irrigation system that has reduced the number of farmers needed to water and field farms or the combines that can pick through the fields in a way that human hands used to have to do it. You can't pass, certainly the industry would oppose it if you try to pass it, you can't make illegal the mountaintop removal system where a giant crane removes coal a ton at a time, which used to be done a pound at a time with a pick action shovel with guys sent down through a little hole.

with their lunch pail between their legs on these conveyor belts if you watch the Matewan movie by John Sayles. We went to Mingo County where Matewan is. So we were at the center of ground zero, if you will, of the coal industry in Mingo County, a county that has half as many people today as it has 50 years ago. So once you reach the conclusion, logically or not, that neither party can change your economics,

And by the way, Republicans tend to think, you know, the political economy doesn't affect me. It's pluck and luck and my hard work anyway, right? That's a conservative orientation that government doesn't decide my fate economically anyway. You may as well rationally vote on the party that says we're going to eliminate choice, the party that says we're going to, you know, close the border, the party that says we're going to oppose trans rights, you know? And in that sense, it's a perfectly rational vote. I mean, we sort of agree with Tom Frank's thesis about voting against your interest in, you know, what's the matter with Kansas, but, you know,

If you get to the point that you agree that neither party can provide deliverance, so to speak, on the economic issues and revitalize rural communities.

The tiebreaker clearly goes to the Republican Party and the conservative. You should vote Republican and conservative because they are the party that differentiates themselves on social and cultural issues. And you're closely aligned to them than the Democrats. You also write, both of you write, Paul, the idea of this sort of mystical hold on the American imagination. And frankly, maybe a lot of people overseas, too, that sort of rural America has. And it could be from the farmer and the trucker cap.

in the old blue jeans to the cowboy, right? We have always mythologized the open space, manifest destiny, whatever you want to call it, right? You guys go through a litany of... It's interesting that these pop up more. I guess it's maybe not interesting now that I say it. This image tends to pop up more on Super Bowl ads than anywhere else, right? You guys reference two or three different Super Bowl ads. But there's that sort of mythology too, which is, you know, this is the heartland, right? Fly over country, you know, so...

Suburban New Jersey is not the heartland, right? Right. There's nothing romantic about the suburbs, which is where, you know, a plurality of Americans live. And, you know, if you talk to people in rural places, they'll often complain that they get either ignored or demeaned in popular culture. You know, we have sort of images of hillbillies and rednecks and all that. And that's true in some ways and has been probably was more true in the past than it is now. But there's also, as you say, this kind of lionization of rural America that happens everywhere.

That there are a lot of stories about rural Americans as being full of common sense and strong values and strong communities. Homespun wisdom. Yeah, that they are wise and competent. And there are all things, you know, you reference the Super Bowl ads. We have a little section in there about pickup trucks, which I think are... Don't read ahead. Don't read ahead. I got a whole thing on pickup trucks. Okay, go ahead. So the point is that there are ways, and you see this in politics all the time, where politicians talk about the importance of small town values and...

And, you know, these are the real Americans. So what happens is I think in a lot of occasions is that people feel like, well, we're the real Americans. We keep being told that we're the real Americans. And yet we have all of these problems and we feel like the economy is leaving us behind. And so that distance between their kind of self-image, they're just the most patriotic people and all these things that they embody the true spirit of America.

And yet they feel like they're not sharing in, you know, the spoils and also that their power and their position is being diminished. You know, we have a country that gets more diverse literally by the day. And you can have a politician like Trump or many others who comes along and says, you know, we want to turn the clock back and make America great again, because the way that the country is looking now, your place in it has been diminished.

And this is something very profoundly wrong and you ought to be angry about it. And the way to handle that is to basically go to the ballot box and give a big middle finger to the people you don't like. And the thing is, that's not a problem that gets solved either. You know, Donald Trump was president for four years and did a lot of things that he wanted to do, but he didn't make America any less diverse. You know, there were no fewer immigrants at the end of his term than there were at the beginning of his term, even besides all the things that he didn't do in terms of, you know, bringing back the coal jobs and all that.

So America is still changing in the way that a lot of real people don't like. And so their anger can just keep getting renewed and renewed.

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There's a couple of things I want to talk about, Tom, but I want to start with this to just follow on to Paul's point, which is, you know, there's the idea of, you know, the bootstraps, right, which really got its heyday, you know, literally in like the 1950s cowboy stuff, you know, watching it on film or, you know, William F. Buckley, the famous bootstrapper who had his dad not only publish his first book, but then buy the publishing company so he could keep doing it, right, like these famous conservative bootstrappers.

But, you know, it's interesting to me, too, that so much of the the rural ethos, maybe it's more American, but it seems to be the countryside seems to embody it as this whole sort of like self-sufficiency. I don't need anybody. Leave me alone. You know, I'm my own person. I'm a libertarian. You know, you talked about the sovereign citizen insanity. But then they're also like democracy. Yeah.

Maybe it's not a big deal. And so those are the sorts of cognitive dissonance that I've read. I don't know how many books in the last three years on this stuff. That's the one that still I just can't, I can't break through.

Well, I think the Horatio Alger story still applies and maybe even applies more to rural Americans given globalization and given the fact that so much of technology and modern 21st century industry, whether it's health care and hospitals or education, tends to be located in cities and suburbs. So bootstrapping may be in greater demand than it ever has been for people in rural communities.

And you're right. There's a disconnect. I mean, I have a personal peak with Elise Stefanik. I'm from upstate New York. I grew up in Albany. She grew up in Albany. I went to public school. She went to Albany Academy for Girls where they wear uniforms and it's private school, an expensive private school. And she went to Harvard. She went to Harvard. I went to SUNY Oswego, the state university, because I had a kid sister and a kid brother behind me.

I've spent a lot of time in the Adirondacks, including Willsboro, and we interviewed the town supervisor of Willsboro, Sean Gilliland, who the town is literally named after his great, great, great grandfather, William Gilliland of Willsboro, right? She ran from Willsboro in her parents' summer home, right? Not her original town. So she's a carpetbagger and a poser and an Ivy League private school girl. If I moved to Willsboro and tried to run, that's what they would call me. But she ran and she has some kind of

legitimacy just by dint of the fact that she's a Republican, even though she's about as Willsboro and North Country Adirondacker as you are, Reid, right? And she's a complete outsider. And so I think this notion that a bootstrapping and make it on your own is undermined by the kind of people like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham and all these other people. Josh Hawley. Josh Hawley, who went to Stanford and Harvard and Yale. Ron DeSantis. Yeah.

And then look down their noses at Harvard and Stanford and Yale, even though they went there. And so there's a lot of phony populism.

Among the elites. And it's working, right? Remember when Ron DeSantis, who grew up in suburban Tampa, said, but I felt like I grew up in the country. Like, shut up. It's all so phony and contrived. He said he had Ohio values. Ohio values, right. Right. And Paul wrote recently about how there are things about rural values that are important. And we always have candidates like Doug Burgum who say we need more rural small town values in Washington. We never say...

city or urban values. That is complete apostasy, even though there's lots to be said for living in a city. You have to live in a diverse culture where people look, think, act, pray, speak different languages from you. It's a much more monolithic experience in rural America. And by the way, we never talk about the 24% of rural America that's minorities. We whitewash the rural experience to be essentially the privileging of white rural America. And the fact of the matter is, my old saw here on this read is, I'm from the Tina Fey

I call her my TV girlfriend, 30 Rock School, which is that Americans are equally real no matter where they live, no matter what their race, no matter what their place. And that a 65-year-old white Christian evangelical father and grandfather who's a Vietnam vet and lives in Southwest Missouri and a rural community that's sparsely populated is no more real than an Afro-Latina 22-year-old single woman who's working on her art history degree

masters and Ubering and waiting tables at night in Brooklyn. And so this privileging of white rural America as somehow more real, more authentic, more virtuous, that needs to stop. We're not saying rural people are any lesser than. We're just saying they're not better than. That's all. Paul, I mean, to Tom's point, that goes back to the idea of the othering. And there was a study in the Washington Post, I think it was last summer, guys, where it said that between 2016 and election day this year,

30 million new voters will come online and something like 22 million older voters will die off.

Right. So it's like 52 million vote swing, all things considered. Most of the people that died are white, probably an older. I mean, disproportionately, I would assume more of them came from middle America, rural, exurban America. And they are not being replaced, to Tom's point, by old white men. They're being replaced by younger people of color, you know, from different parts of the world, different parts of the country.

And so I guess my question is, this is, you know, I've always said that, yes, demographics can be destiny, but not if the bad guys get there first. And so, you know, I think you guys have both made a compelling case, both in the book and here in our conversation that like the country's moving on economically, socially, you know, from an electricity perspective, it doesn't matter how much you think coal is great. Like coal is going away. It's dirty. It's inefficient. It's too hard to deal with compared to everything else. So like

Do these places someday soon, Paul, become so empty, right, that like the Republicans who are taking the most advantage are going to go figure out what the hell to do then because there's just not enough of them anymore? Yeah, you know, most rural counties between the 2010 and 2020 censuses lost population and some of them lost quite a bit of population.

And if your place is shrinking, that creates a kind of a vicious cycle that infringes on economic opportunities and all kinds of things. We traveled around the country visiting all kinds of different rural places. Everywhere we went, one of the things that people said was that we can't keep our smart, ambitious young people here. That they look around, they finish high school and they say, there's just not enough opportunity. So I'm going to go move to the city. We talked to...

I remember one ex coal miner in West Virginia tearing up when he started talking about his son. And I thought he was going to tell us that his son had died, but it turned out that his son just moved to Houston and he misses him. And that happens in a lot of different places that they can't keep their young people because there just isn't enough opportunity there. There aren't the things that they need to build businesses if that's what they want to do. And so this is a constant problem in rural America.

And so I think, you know, you're right that the places, they get smaller and smaller. And one of the things that happened is that the real political fights, the real battleground is now in the suburbs. And there are a lot of places, especially throughout the South and to Texas and stuff where the suburbs used to be kind of a Republican stronghold and the suburbs are getting more diverse and

And now those are the places where it's really close and the two parties are really fighting. But in so many different states where, especially where Republicans have control, they've managed to kind of keep that firm control on the rural areas and draw the lines in such a way that they still have that influence. And they're always kind of trying to come up with new ways to enhance that power. So I'll give you one example. In Missouri, the Republican Party there has had a problem, which is that they have statewide initiatives. And

And the Missouri voters keep passing these kind of progressive ideas, like increasing the minimum wage, accepting the Medicaid expansion. And so the Missouri Republicans said, like, well, what can we do about this? So what they came up with was an idea to basically create an electoral college for ballot initiatives. So they have a proposal. I think it's already passed the state Senate.

that says that for any ballot initiative to pass, it would not only have to get a majority in the state, it would have to get a majority in at least five of the eight congressional districts. And if you look at the congressional districts, it turns out that of their eight congressional districts, at least five of them are

are either wholly rural or partly rural. So it would essentially give rural Missourians a veto over state ballot initiatives. And so they're always kind of trying to come up with ways like that to kind of hold back that tide as states grow more diverse, as the country goes more diverse, to keep rural America as kind of the anchor on their power.

And obviously, you know, one of the things that we've seen recently is that Republicans seem to be boosting their numbers a little bit with with certain minority communities. And they obviously would like to do even better there. But the rural population is still going to be the foundation that keeps them in power, even in places where their majority is threatened or they may get a minority. And like Texas is a great example. You know, Joe Biden only lost there by six points, but they have near super majorities in both houses because of the way they've drawn the district lines.

Right. You know, speaking of Texas, the late great Hal Ketchum has a great song called Small Town Saturday Night. And if you'll indulge me,

One of the verses is Bobby told Lucy the world ain't round. It drops off sharp at the edge of town. Lucy, you know, the world must be flat because when people leave town, they never come back. Right. Like the brain drain is real. But if you are a young rural American, it's not like guys when we grew up. Right. Where you only knew it was around you. Right. I mean, you can make an argument back when we were growing up, like ignorance was sort of bliss. We didn't know what else was out there. So therefore, we didn't really have anything else to compare it to.

Now, even if you're in a rural town, right, you got a phone, probably. If you don't have a phone, although we've been talking about rural broadband for 20 freaking years, right, you still got Internet. So, you know, the rest of the world is out there and you shouldn't be surprised, nor should we look down on kids who are like, Dad, Mom, you know, thank you so much for all you've done for me, but I'm moving to Houston.

I mean, Tom, I mean, how do they deal with that? Because it is, you know, you talk about the loss of place, but it's also the loss of family and the loss of of everything they've known, which is why I think for so many of these voters, what we're seeing now and we can get to the politics in a second is an existential fight for something they believe they are losing. But frankly, it seems like maybe they've already lost. You know, we were very careful in writing the book read not to use the metaphor of the lost cause in the Civil War because, A,

obviously there are rural communities in the other 30 United States that weren't part of the Confederacy. And B, we didn't want to equate rural white politics of the moment with people who defended slavery, the inhumane and most persistent form of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States. But

But if you divorce it from that for a moment, there is a similar phenomenon here. And I think it's perfectly rational for rural people to believe that the rural way of life is dying out. Again, the country was majority rural until the 1920 census. Now it's down to 20% rural and only 15 of that 20% is white. The other five or one quarter of that 20% is non-white and that share is growing. And so something is being lost that it is disappearing.

And yes, we have been arguing about rural broadband for 20 years, but it hasn't been really truly affected. And the reason it hasn't been delivered to rural America, other than the fact that it is much more expensive, is because Republicans are backing the giant telecoms and fighting the people who are trying to bring rural broadband in a much more smaller to the smaller companies now.

The fascinating thing to me is I met a woman, she's got 26 permits in Eastern North Carolina to expand rural broadband. And she's fighting both with the federal government and the big tech companies because they don't want her there. And she's got opponents and people like Ted Cruz and others who would rather, because they get big fundraisers from, you know, Comcast and Verizon, to fight for her.

don't really want to expand rural broadband. And the one thing that we know, Reid, is that if we could expand rural broadband, for all the talk about this is some kind of silver bullet, here's what could happen. First of all, people get interviewed for jobs that they can't interview for right now. And second of all, the smart kids who are told by their parents, because 60% of rural adults tell their best and brightest to leave, according to a poll, they could code

from a poor rural town and draw a San Francisco salary or a Dallas salary or a Raleigh salary to do the exact same work from afar remotely, or it could work for a defense contractor or could work for a remote telecom company doing customer service and draw the exact same salary at a much lower cost of living. That would be a huge boon to them because they could buy some of the biggest houses they could have or expand their houses. They could spend a lot of money.

That would ramify to the rural communities because $125,000 salary in a county where the median income is $45,000 for a family, that is super rich in a way that living in San Francisco, $125,000 is pretty tricky, right, for a young couple, let's say. And so rural broadband could actually even the playing field substantially if we could get it done. And I think there could be a coalition of left and rights, Democrats and Republicans to

to do it, but you've got to push back against the big tech companies that want their oligopolies. Well, we'll get to that next year. Paul, so let's talk about that because this seems like a devil's bargain.

Right. It seems like that Republicans get all the power and everything they want and they get it for really not much more than keeping, you know, otherwise decent people angry and upset all the time. Yeah. And this is kind of the political tragedy of rural America is that it has been kind of hollowed out politically. You know, Democrats are always told you got to go back there. You have to reengage with people. You've abandoned rural America and a lot of places. That's true.

But in many ways, Republicans have abandoned it, too. You know, just to relate another conversation we had in West Virginia with a guy who used to be the chairman of the Mingo County Democratic Party and the majority leader of the state Senate. He said, you know, the old Robert Byrd political machine here, the Democrats built that was really engaged in people's lives. And the county chair was the guy you called if you needed something that's gone. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't exist anymore, but it has not been replaced with a Republican machine. Republicans haven't built a machine there because they don't need to. And, you know, that's a place where Donald Trump got 85% of the vote in 2020. And the Republicans, you know, they come in right at the end of the campaign and they say, don't you hate the same people that I hate? We all hate them together. Great. And that's all they have to do. And so.

People don't expect anything. And there are also times when the Republican Party writ large is actually working against their economic interests. It's not just a matter of they're, you know, they're giving tax cuts to people who don't need them and that's not going to help people. You know, to take an example in Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor, has this voucher plan, school voucher plan. Now, people in rural areas, vouchers are meaningless to them because they don't have private schools. They couldn't use them even if they wanted to.

And so for a change, something unusual happened there in the last legislative session. Rural Republicans in the statehouse joined with Democrats to defeat that voucher plan. And Abbott said, I'm going to take revenge on you. And he looked for primary candidates to get rid of those Republicans. And in a lot of cases, he was successful. And now he's probably going to be able to pass that voucher plan that's going to suck money away from the public schools that people in rural Texas rely on. And Tom, who does it go to, as we've seen in Ohio? Yeah.

the voucher money goes to people who don't need it anyway. Right. It goes to rich people who can afford to send their kids to Columbus or Cincinnati, whereas rural people, you know, they'd have to basically send their kids away to school to do it, many of them. I mean, there are some private schools in rural America, but not to the degree that they are in the suburbs and the cities. And so this is a good example where the Republicans really are enacting a corporate national agenda and trying to sell it to rural America that

if they take a minute like those rural Republicans in Texas do, they think this isn't really good for our community, just like big corporate oligopolies in tech aren't really good for the expansion of rural broadband. And frankly, we're advocates of that. We're advocates of

essentially doing what we did for rural electrification, although I've learned a lot about rural electrification from people who do that as well. And there are 960 co-ops around the country, and we haven't really actually completed rural electrification yet before we moved to broadband. And so there are problems of distributed politics. There are problems of infrastructure that are long lasting. And I think rural Americans, white, black or brown, are right to be upset about that.

that. And we support them in that regard. And that's why we call for a pan-racial, pan-ideological rural movement to bring both parties to heel, to deliver things that are long overdue or delivered in an incomplete way in service to corporate oligopolies and late-stage capitalism. You guys brought up the sort of post-materialism society too, which is

You know, and I asked I had Ron and Sana from CNBC on the on the show the other week, and I talked about that, like, you know, we are in a weird place, right? We are as big and successful a country as humanity has ever known, really just in the last 80 years. And so for the most part, people have what they need to survive. And now we're arguing about values, not about whether or not you're going to get fed, although I'm sure there are too many people still not secure enough where dinner is going to come from or their kids, you know, going to get breakfast or lunch.

But the truth is, you know, for the Ted Cruz's, the Josh Hawley's, the Tom Cotton's, all these guys like for them, this stuff is also really small ball, right? They don't care. Let me switch gears literally and figuratively to something about the pickup truck. All right. So the pickup truck, I didn't realize that Henry Ford invented the pickup truck, but it makes sense because he invented so many things. But, you know, look, I live in.

Technically, I think we're rural, right? But we're a suburb of Salt Lake City. I live in Park City, Utah. We are a mountain town. We're a ski town, right? So it's a big deal when we got a Chipotle a couple of months ago, right? But like this is not rural America. But a ton of my friends drive pickup trucks. Most of them don't go to a job site ever. Most of them carry their skis or their mountain bikes on the back.

Right. I know a guy who drives a gigantic, jacked up, blacked out F-350. And what does he tell with it? His hundred twenty five thousand dollar airstream. Right. So, like, it's amazing to me, Paul, the iconography of middle America, too, in something like the pickup truck, which is.

It's even so ingrained in the culture now that like I knew when the Rivian pickup truck came out because they all got delivered on the same day to the same co-working place I work out of and like nine of them showed up. Right. So even like even e-vehicles are now like still somewhat beholden to that image of like the rough and tumble guy out on the range on his truck.

Yeah. And, you know, I'm not going to begrudge anyone whatever they choose to buy. There are perfectly good reasons why people might want to have a pickup truck. But what's interesting about it is, you know, it started as this vehicle that was supposed to be used on farms. And that was about 100 years ago. And today, the three best selling vehicles in America are the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado and the Ram pickup.

And that's every single year. And most of the people who get them are like suburban dads who don't really need them for any kind of real practical purpose. And I think people understand that consumer choices say a lot about identity, and there may be nothing we buy that says more about our identity than the car or truck that we buy. It's a real message to the world. And if you look at the way that pickups are marketed, they

They still really like to evoke that kind of rural masculinity. It's a big part of truck marketing. It's all about how, you know, you may be a suburban dad, but you can capture a bit of that rural manhood that is capable and strong and competent and has mastery over the physical landscape. That you too can be a little bit of that, even if you're only driving your kid to soccer practice and maybe taking the groceries home in it.

And so you still see all of those ads that like to evoke this kind of rural manhood that a lot of people think about as past. And that, I think, is a big part of why

Especially as so many of us spend all day looking at computer screens, that pickups continue to be so popular long past the time when most people really absolutely needed them. They have become this kind of symbol of this kind of rural masculinity. And it's one of a lot of ways that there's a sort of elevation of that rural ethos.

in popular culture in general, that it still is supposed to stand for something that is deep and embedded with values and strong and self-reliant and something that we all want to kind of capture some part of.

And even if you're not bringing hay to the back 40, you can drive your pickup truck down to the co-working site and still feel like you're a little more of a man. Yeah. I mean, I will say this, that there's no, to me anyway, guys, in the pickup genre, there is no greater distance between the need for a truck on a work site or on a farm or a ranch and

and the reality of so many people i know than like the ford raptor which will go for a hundred thousand dollars like that is a luxury vehicle and is geared for off-roading not towing so it doesn't tow very well right and none of the guys that drive up take them off road right and so i'm being a little bit silly about the pickup truck and look i've certainly you know perused them but

It's just one of those things where, you know, especially I would say probably amongst middle aged white guys, too. It's this whole idea of holding on to something, Paul, as you said, of, you know, I do have this rugged individualism, this Americanism. It's, you know, it's John Wayne. It's the Marlboro man. Right. It's this idea of, you know, the being out on the range and windblown and the guys with the squinty eyes because they, you know, they've been staring into the sun for 30 years.

When the truth is, is that most of the guys that drive the Raptors, Tom, wouldn't last about 10 minutes on the range if you needed them to. Right. And they're selling insurance or they're a manager at a retail outlet or a restaurant chain. Which again, which is nothing wrong with those things. Which is noble work, but you're not coming home with dirt under your fingernails and showering at the end of the day. You're showering at the beginning of the day and you're filing your timesheet on computer and you're managing a bunch of employees using a software system and you're doing Zoom meetings three times a week with the corporate office or the regional office and you're

You didn't use a pickaxe or a shovel or a nail gun or anything like that. In fact, most of the people using nail guns in the country and power tools are Latinos who are building our commercial and residential real estate who are really putting their back into their work.

This is what I said is if you really wanted to help working class Americans when it comes to the pickup truck, you would not have given, you know, the 2017, whatever it was, 2018 tax cut of Trump. You would have given any guy working off the back of a truck, right? A zero interest loan on that truck. The guy who goes to the job site, right? The guy who is working, I'm sure you can do depreciation and all the other tax tricks. But my point is, is like, if you really wanted to help

Working class Americans become middle class Americans and true business owners like it trickle down is done. It hadn't trickled down to rural America. Right. And I think maybe, too, is Paul, some of this all just sort of a conglomeration of resentment over the decades of sort of like, OK, yeah, I still have my ethos. I still have this. But the truth is, is like I am left behind and nobody seems to care.

Yeah. And, you know, there are ways in which that is a legitimate complaint. You know, we document, as I said, pretty extensively all the problems in rural America, and those problems are really deep and profound. And some of them are not amenable to any kind of government action, and others of them are. You know, there are almost 200 rural hospitals that have closed in the last 20 years. And...

If you accepted the Affordable Care Act expansion to Medicaid, a lot of those hospitals would be able to stay afloat. And, you know, we talked to rural people in one rural county in North Carolina where our county supervisor said to us, you know, not only do we not have a hospital in this county, we don't even have an urgent care center. Like if you break your ankle, you're going to have to get in your car and drive for half an hour to get medical care. And like, what if it's not a broken ankle, but a heart attack? So that's a problem that can be fixed, actually. You know, government can fund some of that.

But then there are other problems that people see as really intractable. And especially as they age, you know, you begin to feel like, you know, there's a lot of ways I think as a middle-aged guy, I can attest. There's a lot of ways in which when you, as you get older, the world seems like it's moving past you. You know, it's not your music anymore on the radio and you feel like the future is being created for people who are coming after you.

Well, which is. Yeah. And then there's a party who says, you know what? You're right to feel mad about this. And we can turn back the clock and bring all the things that you liked back if you only kind of cultivate that anger and sort of punch it outward.

at the other party. And that's a false promise, but it's a promise that has a lot of power. And so, and I think that was part of the magic of Trump. And, you know, I think sometimes it's hard to tell. Trump made a lot of kind of elaborate promises to people. Did they really think that he was going to fulfill those? You know, when he went to coal country and put on a hard hat and said to all you miners out there, get ready because you're going to be working your asses off. Did they really think that the coal jobs were going to come back? I don't know. But it was certainly something that they enjoyed hearing.

And then they didn't hold him accountable when it turns out that he didn't bring the coal jobs back. And there were fewer coal jobs when he left office than when he started.

So there's something very powerful in telling people that those kind of deep emotional feelings they have about being left behind can be turned around, even if it may really be a practical impossibility. If you can just touch those emotional places, and this is obviously something that, you know, Trump is in many ways not a smart man, but he has a real radar for the things that get people mad, for their anger, for their resentments, for kind of the worst parts of them. And he knows how to poke at those things.

And that's what he did successfully. If I can add a little something to two policies you mentioned earlier, which show the divergence on Trump. One is Social Security and Medicare, and the other is tax cuts. I was waiting for years for a Republican to figure out, as you pointed out,

When you talked about the 20 million people who died of the older generation, that the two biggest welfare programs in the history of the United States and therefore the planet are Social Security and Medicare. And they're disproportionately received by the oldest generation, which by definition is the whitest generation. And Trump comes along. And here's my theory of Trump. Trump started to run for office. And he said, you know, Mexicans are bringing their worst, Mex rapists and murderers. And he was like a comedian. He was like Tom Segura. He goes out.

You know, most comedians, they go out and they do their bits for a year and they are like, oh, this joke works or this punchline for this joke works. And they keep the bits in that work and they get rid of the ones that don't.

And Trump realized, oh, I can attack the Clintons on their sex scandals and I'll call for a wall. And then he says one day Mexico will pay for it. And he keeps it in. Trump didn't have a core ideology. He didn't have a core set of issues other than please pay attention to me. Please come to my rallies. Please donate to me and please vote for me. And when Trump realized something that no offense to sort of moderate Paul Ryan style Republicans, and I know that's some of your kinfolk.

that Social Security and Medicare redound to white people. We have a welfare state where the Social Security is the largest program, Medicare is second largest and the fastest growing major program, and Medicaid, 70% of their recipients are over 65. Now, they skew a little bit more minority, but 40% of the federal government's outlays and 50% of the non-defense outlays go to people over 65. The

The oldest generation is the biggest welfare generation. When you say the word welfare, people think of a black mother in downtown Baltimore. But the fact of the matter, if you want to know what a welfare recipient looks like in America, she's got a walker at the casino. That's who's on welfare. And Trump sort of figured this out. And people were like, don't touch our Medicare and Social Security. You remember this came out when Obama, when that person said, keep government's hands off of my Medicare, right? Like, don't they know it's a federal program?

So that's one thing that Trump figured out. But he didn't figure out the tax thing. And to go to your earlier point, Republicans, and I don't mean to pick on a wound here, Republicans for years said we're for low taxes and hard work, but they never want to cut the only tax on work, which is the payroll tax. In fact, the payroll tax inception in the FDR presidency is the only tax that has never been lowered or even delayed except for once. And what president did that? Barack Obama. Right. Barack Obama during the stimulus.

the payroll tax back for one year. The Republicans fought them on it and they stopped them from doing the second year. If you wanted to help rural America, we'd figure out a way to change the payroll tax because it's the one and only tax levied directly on work. Income tax is levied on

on work if you make all your money from work. But it also, income tax is levied against people who make their money from investments and owning homes and properties. And so I would be for what Howard Dean was sort of calling for, which is a reconfiguration of the one tax on hard work, which is the payroll tax. But we never talk about that. We never take it off the table because it funds Social Security and Medicare. Right. But

Again, you know, it's now the 21st century. We're almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Those are programs, as you noted, that started during FDR. The listeners have heard this before. Like we talk about, you know, the post-war era. The war ended 80 years ago. Right?

Right. Like, I think we've got to move on. I think that there are like it's all well and good to say, oh, yeah, you know, this is how we've always done it. Yeah. I mean, that look, you know, there's no easier word in the English language to say the no. Right. Because no is by definition gives you power over something. And people love to say no just so that they can feel like they made a decision that somebody else can't get around. But also, you know, there's no better word in marketing than new. Right. How about something different?

Now, again, the particular cohorts we're talking about, rural Americans, not fan of new.

but their kids are, their grandkids are or will be. And so let's talk about this, guys, as we wrap up here. Paul, what do you see politically for white rural Americans, angry Americans between now and, say, November? Well, that's awfully short term. I mean, think about it this way. Donald Trump got 62 percent of the white rural vote in 2016. In 2020, he got 71 percent. I would not be surprised if this time around he goes up even farther to 75 percent. And

If he makes it back to the White House, it's going to be on the backs of white rural Americans the way it was in 2016. Now, I don't know if politics is going to change between now and then, but.

The argument that we end the book with is basically that it has to change. Now, there are a lot of progressive activists out in rural America who are doing really, really thankless work trying to organize people. But one of the things they run up against is that in so many rural places, there just isn't any politics anymore. And that's what they really need. They need more political competition. They need

A rural movement that crosses ideological and racial lines, as Tom said, a quarter of rural people are non-white. And, you know, they're not the ones, despite the fact that they do worse than their white neighbors on a lot of those health and economic measures. They're not the ones trying to overrun the Capitol building when they don't get the election result that they want. But you need a comprehensive rural movement that has its own list of demands and is able to come to both parties and says, what are you going to do for us?

Because right now there's this kind of vacuum in rural America. It's a political vacuum that Republicans can exploit and don't have to be accountable for any of the conditions of of the areas that they represent. And so that's what I think you really need. And maybe that'll mean voting for Democrats sometimes. But at the very least, for rural folks, it should mean getting themselves some better Republicans.

So that you can have some competition, you can have some accountability. And once you do that, that kind of opens up the space for a broader conversation that I think will actually solve some of these problems or at least begin to address them, improve people's lives. And once you get some real political competition, that can happen. But if you as long as it's like it is now, when Democrats aren't there and Republicans don't have to do anything to get votes, you're never going to make any progress. All right, Tom, tell us one more smart thing before I let you guys go.

You know, I think there needs to be something similar to the rural electrification. And maybe it's not just broadband. Maybe it's the government rethinks how to incentivize bringing jobs and economic growth to rural areas. So, for example, the largest county east of the Mississippi River is St. Louis County. And it's not classified really as a rural county because half of the population lives in the greater Duluth area, about 100,000 of the 200,000 people.

But the rest of the people live north of there all the way up to the Canadian border. And one of the things that we learned, and there's a great think tank called Headwaters Economics out of Montana, is that it's not just population density, it's also proximity to the city. So there can be two rural communities that are about 15,000 people each and have the same population density, but one of them's 17 miles from Duluth and the other one's three times that, 51 miles.

They're going to have a very different experience because one of them is very integrated socially, politically, economically with the greater Duluth area. They're going to have people who literally live in Duluth and commute out the 17 miles. They're going to go to theater and they're going to interface with different types of people.

because they're only 17 miles away, even though it's the same population density of a town that's 51 miles away that's going to be cut off in many ways. So maybe we use some Republican ideas like tax incentives. You can't force businesses to locate far from the cities, but maybe you could have a system where the distance from the city is rewarded in terms of some kind of tax benefit or some kind of labor offset or compensation in a way that induces companies to say, you know what, instead of setting the factory up in the suburbs, one

20 miles outside the city. I'm going to set it up 60 miles and build a factory there. And it's only going to employ 100 people, but I'm going to get a federal subsidy because I'm far from the city. And that would be a way for rural revival, I think, and I'm

And I'm not an expert in policy, but we need to think about inventive solutions like that to bring these communities back in so they don't have to send their kids away and they don't have to shutter their towns and become ghost towns. And particularly with rural broadband, you'd be rewarded for setting up a job for the accountant there and get a labor offset or a wage offset to build that factory 50 miles outside of the city instead of 15. Well, look, I mean, I'll tell you this, guys. I mean, I love the country.

I love to drive in the country. I love to ride horses. I love to go camping. You know, I think as Americans, we all not we all, but a lot of us have an affinity for wide open spaces as the Dixie Chicks or the chicks, I guess, as we would call them now have. All right, Paul, before I let you go, where can we find you online?

I am a columnist for MSNBC, so you can go to MSNBC.com. I also have a sub stack. It's at paulwaldman.substack.com, and that's called the cross section. Everyone should subscribe. And I do a podcast with my sister. I yell it. It's called Boundary Issues, so people can listen to us there. Awesome. All right. Well, listen, a brother and sister podcasting together. What could go wrong, Paul? All right, Tom, how about you?

I'm homeless right now. I wrote a column for The Sun for a long time, and I'm looking for a place. I mean, I'm mostly a college professor. Oh, yeah. They're under new ownership now, huh? Yeah. So I left back in 2016, but, you know, I'm looking to start writing again a little bit. And so maybe somebody listens to this podcast and offer me a freelance job, and we'll see what happens there.

All right. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok, as long as it's legal, at Reed Galen on Instagram and threads at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP. And also like Paul over at Substack, the home front. I hope you will sign up there too. Tom, Paul, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. Thanks so much, Reed. Everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening.

Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review. To connect with us, follow us on Twitter, at Project Lincoln. And for more information on our movement, to join our mailing list, subscribe to our newsletter, or make a contribution to our efforts, visit lincolnproject.us.

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