From White Rural Rage (Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman, 2024) pp219-23
Denigrating cities and the people who live in them doesn’t come just from Trump. The supposed depravity and danger of American cities is hammered home again and again on conservative media, frequently with the implication that the more Black people a city contains, the more dangerous that city must be. (Breitbart, the popular right-wing news site formerly run by Trump adviser Steve Bannon, for a time had a “Black crime” tag so all its stories about Black people committing crimes could be located in one place.) Republicans across the country were convinced by Fox News that during the protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, entire American cities literally burned to the ground, that if you went to Portland or Seattle today, it would be little more than a pile of rubble.
The drumbeat on conservative media then seeps into mainstream media-a dynamic that has always been an essential part of the strategy under which those conservative media outlets were created. In the 3022 midterm elections, for instance, Fox News pounded day after day on the supposed crime wave in “Democrat cities”, in the week before the election, they aired 193 separate segments about crime (the weekly number plunged to 71 once the election took place) * Mainstream news outlets ran plenty of similar stories, which may have featured slightly less inflammatory rhetoric but still reinforced the idea that cities run by Democrats were engulfed in crime. “Democrats are embracing the police, but can that distract from crime in their cities?” asked one NPR story at the time.
Crime continues to be portrayed as an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. When crime rates spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, it led to a wave of media coverage that, in both mainstream and conservative media, focused on cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, both supposed to be bastions of liberal values and nightmares of crime. What wasn’t a topic of extended discussion in the media was the fact that at the same time, there was a dramatic crime increase in rural areas, where violent crimes rose 25 percent in 2020.
This narrative of the dangerous (blue) city and the safe (red) rural area has been a staple of conservative rhetoric for so long that it encourages Republican politicians to ignore or dismiss the violence suffered by their own constituents, as Oklahoma’s governor Kevin Stitt proved during his 2022 re-election bid. In a remarkable moment during a televised debate, Stitt literally scoffed when his opponent, Democratic nominee Joy Hofmeister, pointed out that the Sooner State’s violent crime rate is higher than New York’s or California’s. Stitt peered out at the in-person audience, laughed, and said with a huge grin, as if he couldn’t believe his opponent was so dumb, “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California? That’s what she just said!” But Hofmeister was right: According to the CDC, the homicide rate in Oklahoma at the time was 9 per 100,000 people, while in California it was 6.1, and in New York it was 4.7. And Oklahoma’s violent crime rate has been higher than either New York or California for two decades.
Stitt found the mere suggestion that his White, rural, conservative and 2030-could possibly suffer a higher crime rate than two in 2016 end 2020-could possibly suffer a higher crime rate than two racially diverse, coastal, urban states preposterous. When the audience chuckled along with him, Stitt seemed convinced he was right. Or maybe he knew the truth about crime rates but took comfort in a more useful truth about truth itself It no longer matters. His supporters no doubt found the idea that Oklahoma could be more dangerous than New York or California simply too absurd to believe. A month later, Stitt cruised to re-election by thirteen points.
Egged on by conservative media, Republican politicians around the country reinforce these myths about which parts of America are safe and which are unsafe. As U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, a Republican from Arizona, said in 2022, “We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence. It’s gangs. It’s people in Chicago, St.Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly. And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
This dark vision of the supposed miseries of urban life comes up again and again. In 2022, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas warned on Fox News that Democrats who want to address climate change “want to make us all poor. They want to make you live in downtown areas, and high-rise buildings, and walk to work, or take the subway?”s People pay huge amounts of money for the ability to walk to work in a downtown area full of accessible public transportation, entertainment, and restaurants, which is why rent and the prices for goods in so many cities have been driven so high. But Cotton sought to convince rural Americans that urban life is some kind of dystopian hell of endless suffering to which liberals want to condemn rural people.
Contrast those statements with Barack Obama’s memorable 2008 comment about people in small towns clinging to guns and religion. His then-opponent Hillary Clinton attacked him for it, the news media eagerly turned it into a big story, and for years afterward, Republicans held it up as proof of the contempt with which Obama and, by extension, all liberals regard regular White Americans.
But what really matters about that incident is how right Obama was. In fact, he offered an insightful analysis of how the events of recent decades had altered the nature of political identity among Whites in rural areas and small towns. Here’s what he actually said:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
What Obama was describing was essentially the culture war displacing material arguments as the main focus of politics. He indicted both Republican and Democratic administrations for not helping these communities through the process of deindustrialization that was fed by trade agreements made in the 1990s and for making promises of economic revitalization that never came to pass. He argued that the response of those communities was essentially to give up hope that either party could help them economically and to focus their political attentions on issues such as guns, religion, and immigration.
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