Will Donald Trump Exploit White Rural Rage?

Want the latest riff on how and why Orange Shithead (a.k.a., Donald Trump) is such a great ‘threat’ to democracy? Try a new book by an academic, Tom Schaller, and a professional spieler, Paul Waldman, called White Rural Rage, with a subtitle which gives it away — The Threat to American Democracy — and you’ll be taught all the reasons why Trump and his MAGA bullshit has been so bad.

What these two savants have discovered is that not only is there a growing anger and resentment in the countryside against the elitism and liberalism that the entitled urban populations represent, but if things keep going the way they are going, sooner or later those downtrodden rural folks are going to rise up in a massive wave of violence and do the rest of us in.

And who are the rest of us? It’s the people like you and me who go into a Barnes & Noble store, buy a four-dollar latte in the store café, then plunk down thirty-two bucks to buy and read this pretentious and stupidly self-assured book.

The authors begin their lament about the existence and growth of rural rage by saying that it represents “the most dangerous moment for American democracy since the Civil War.” [p. 4] They then go on to elaborate on this discovery based on a combination of other studies which also describe the great Trumpian ‘threat,’ along with what they…