Stein and his buddies wanted to do more than vent their anti-Muslim anger. They began plotting to kill Somali immigrants in Garden City, one of three small, rural meatpacking towns that form the so-called Meat Triangle in the southwest corner of Kansas. Meatpacking is a dangerous industry, one where fast-moving conveyors and sharp blades cause repetitive-motion injuries and occasionally claim an employee’s finger or more. With long hours, meager pay, few benefits, and a high burnout rate, meatpacking jobs are the kind that most Americans refuse to perform. Which is why profit-hungry agribusiness executives fill their factories with recent immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia who have limited employment prospects.
Garden City is the seat of rural Finney County, which Donald Trump carried by thirty points in the 2016 election. Raised in a farming family, Patrick Stein was thrilled by the campaign promises Trump made that year, especially the Republican nominee’s pledge to ban Muslim immigrants. Each one a White, middle-aged conservative who owned guns and adored Trump, Stein and his buddies regarded themselves as “sovereign citizens.”[2]
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the sovereign citizen movement is “based on a decades-old conspiracy theory…that the American government set up by the founding fathers, under a common-law legal system, was secretly replaced” with a shadow government based on admiralty law, either after the Civil War or in 1933, when the United States abandoned the gold standard. Founded by John Birch Society member William Potter Gale, the movement claims that “U.S. judges and lawyers, who they believe are foreign agents, know about this hidden government takeover” but cover it up.[3] Stein’s sovereign Crusaders was a splinter group of the Kansas Security Forces militia, itself an offshoot of the White nationalist Three Percenter movement. Stein and his fellow Crusaders likely knew and perhaps chanted aloud the Three Percenters’ militant, anti-government motto that bastardizes the meaning of Thomas Jefferson’s warning, “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”
By the summer of 2016, conversations among Stein and his three friends morphed into plans for a lethal terrorist bombing. The four men amassed three hundred pounds of urea nitrate fertilizer. They chose as their target a brick apartment complex that houses hundreds of Somalis. They researched how to make a blasting cap detonator. They even picked a date: the day after the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Any earlier, the four men worried, and they might provide Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with a campaign talking point.
What Patrick Stein did not know was that only two of his confederates, Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright, were as hell-bent on blowing up innocent immigrants as he was. The fourth “Crusader,” Daniel Day, was working as a paid FBI informant. Once the group moved from loose, angry talk to concrete plans, the FBI asked Day to introduce the plotters to “Brian,” an undercover FBI agent posing as a black-market bomb maker.[4] Soon thereafter, the FBI arrested the three would-be terrorists. They were each convicted and sentenced to more than twenty years in federal prison.
Episodes like the Garden City terrorist plot often fail to make the news because law enforcement officials foil many of these plots. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies at any given moment are tracking hundreds of potentially violent plans to harm or kill civilians. Increasingly, successful or would-be terrorists also target government agencies, buildings, and employees. Whether well planned like the 1995 Oklahoma City and 1996 Olympic bombings or spur-of-the-moment like the 2017 Charlottesville car attack, violent White supremacists, radicalized militia groups, or Christian nationalists have murdered hundreds of innocent people.
The perpetrators of these crimes are often White men, some but surely not all of whom hail from small towns or who organize in remote, rural locales. Often, their victims are non-Whites, non-Christians, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, or agents of the state or federal government whom the perpetrators believe are acting on behalf of these out-groups.[5] During the Trump presidency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued similar reports that identified White supremacist groups as America’s biggest domestic terrorist threat.[6]
Violent or not, anti-democratic sentiments and behaviors come in many forms and emerge from all over the nation. But rural Whites pose a unique threat. Heartland citizens may salute the flag and proclaim how much they love America and cherish its ideals. They may promise to fight to the death to defend those ideals. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that the patriotism of millions of rural White Americans seems conditioned on the expectation that U.S. democracy serve them primarily, if not exclusively.
Specifically, rural Whites pose four interconnected threats to the republic:
First, in a nation experiencing rapid demographic change, rural Whites are uniquely xenophobic toward Americans who look, speak, act, or pray differently from them. Their animus toward racial and religious minorities, and immigrants especially, is unmatched. More than any other demographic group, rural Whites reject cultural diversity and bristle at the idea of a pluralist, inclusive society. A striking share of them believes Whites are the real victims of racism. Millions of rural White Americans also harbor deep-seated, place-based resentments toward people of any race or citizenship status who live in cities.
Second, the views of rural White citizens are least tethered to reality. Rural Whites are most likely to believe the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that former president Donald Trump would be returned to the White House months after Joe Biden had already taken office. Rural Whites are also most likely to subscribe to fantastical QAnon conspiracies about Democrats running secret pedophile rings, or that a coming “storm” will overthrow and imprison nefarious “deep state” elites. With fatal consequences, rural Whites were more likely to dismiss the Covid-19 pandemic as a hoax and to refuse lifesaving vaccines. Rural Whites also seized upon the birther controversy that gave life to Trump’s political career, and they did so before Trump in 2011 began questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship.
Third, rural White citizens are less supportive of democratic principles like free speech, a free press, the separation of church and state, and the value of constitutional checks and balances. Rural White Americans are more likely than other demographic groups to support efforts to limit ballot access and less likely to accept the legitimacy of election results. Many are enthralled by either White supremacist or White Christian nationalist messages and movements. Locally, a growing number of rural county sheriffs—almost all of whom are White men—falsely claim their authority supersedes state and national law.
Fourth and finally, rural Whites are more inclined to justify the use of force, even violence, as an appropriate means for solving political disputes. They are more likely than other Americans to excuse or legitimize the domestic terrorist attacks of January 6, 2021, and not only to support the extralegal reinstallation of Trump in the Oval Office but to believe it ought to be done by force.
These threats are not just serious, they’re interconnected: Attitudes or behaviors of one type often lead to or bleed into others. For example, a person with a heightened fear of immigrants is more susceptible to conspiratorial claims about immigrants voting illegally. From there, it becomes easier for that person to question the legitimacy of elections, to back undemocratic efforts to restrict ballot access, and perhaps to pester election boards with frivolous Freedom of Information Act requests designed to hamstring election officials. From there, it becomes easier for that person to support or even participate in efforts to intimidate, harass, or even harm those officials.
The would-be Garden City bombers exhibited all four threats. They targeted a racial and religious minority group. They believed in wild conspiracies and affiliated themselves with a group founded upon absurd conspiracies. They harbored undemocratic or anti-democratic attitudes, including hatred toward government and public officials. And they intended to use violence to carry out their political agenda—the very definition of domestic terrorism in the federal code.[7]
Rural White Americans assert a deep reverence for the Constitution and America’s democratic principles. Millions of them demonstrate this reverence daily. But the democratic commitments of too many rural Whites are weak, limited, or quickly abandoned. Poll after poll confirms that rural Whites are the vanguard for the xenophobic, reality-defying, undemocratic, and increasingly violent movements that currently threaten to undermine the world’s oldest constitutional democracy and the pluralist society that democracy protects.
The attitude of too many rural Whites may best be described as “I love my country, but not our country.” Their brand of exclusive patriotism appears conditioned upon maintaining or remaking the U.S. political system to their advantage at the expense of equality and opportunities for Americans different from them. If these conditions are unmet, millions of rural Whites appear willing to abandon the nation’s most sacred constitutional norms and principles in favor of reactionary, even violent alternatives. Because rural Whites often brag about how much they love the United States, we call this phenomenon the patriotic paradox of rural America.
Given the position they hold, rural Whites ought to be the role models for democratic citizenship. They ought to have the highest voter turnout, the best-run elections, the most participatory local government, and the most passionate commitment to binding American ideals. Instead it’s the opposite.
Dozens of surveys and academic studies confirm that a disproportionately high share of rural Whites harbor unusually xenophobic, conspiracist, anti-democratic, and even dangerous attitudes. We recognize that these attitudes are often (but not always) expressed by a minority of rural Whites, but we emphasize that rural White support exceeds that not only of their rural minority neighbors but also of White Americans who reside in cities and suburbs. What follows is detailed, empirical evidence of rural Whites’ opinions and beliefs as they relate to the four threats.
Rural and urban Americans recognize each other as different. This makes sense: Cultural traditions and lifestyles in the city and the country diverge in notable, if mostly harmless, ways. Questioning the values of fellow citizens, however, can turn superficial differences into chasmic civic divides.
How differently do urban and rural citizens see each other? According to a 2017 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 48 percent of urbanites describe rural Americans as having values “different from them,” with 18 percent describing the values of rural citizens as “very different.” Whether viewed as skepticism or scorn, that degree of perceived difference may seem high. Yet skepticism runs much deeper in the opposite direction: Fully 68 percent of rural residents say urban Americans exhibit “different” values, and 41 percent describe urban values as “very different.” Both groups recognize the chasm, but a much higher share of rural citizens views urbanites as having different values than the other way around.[8]
Racial antipathy and rural resentment. Part of rural citizens’ judgments are coded forms of racial antipathy, the too-polite term pollsters use to describe racist attitudes. Surveys repeatedly confirm that citizens from rural communities—the Whitest part of the United States—express deep resentments toward their racially diverse counterparts in cities.
In 2020, political scientist Kal Munis published results from his study of “place resentment.” Raised in a rural Montana town of nine hundred people, Munis examined whether Americans resent people from other parts of the country for getting benefits they believe their in-group does not. If the enmity between country folk and city folk is mutual, resentments should exist across the board.
But place-based enmities are not symmetrical. Munis identified five characteristics that predict place-based resentment: Those who are young, male, live in rural areas, hold strong place-based identities, or who score high on racial antipathy measures exhibited significant resentment toward those outside their communities.[9] With his colleague Nicholas Jacobs, Munis also determined that rural resentment had a powerful, independent effect on Republican voting in both the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections. “Place resentment, or rural resentment more specifically, appears to be a powerful explanatory factor in understanding the urban-rural divide that now so strikingly characterizes American politics, beyond the fact that rural areas are simply whiter, older, and more likely to have Republican partisans,” they conclude.[10] The root of these antagonisms, they say, is the belief among rural residents that they suffer from “geographic inequity” in the form of less government attention and more cultural scorn. “Without these beliefs, the urban-rural political divide would not be as vast as it is today.”[11]
Rural citizens also exhibit unusual hostility to the prospect of an inclusive and diverse society. Fully 65 percent of urban Americans say they are comfortable with a changing and diversifying America, nearly double the rate of the 38 percent of rural residents who express comfort.[12] According to a 2018 Pew Research survey, only 46 percent of rural White citizens say they value diversity in their communities—the lowest share of any geographic subgroup. Rural America is also the only place where a majority of citizens disagrees with the statement “White Americans benefit from advantages blacks do not have.”[13] Support for Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban ran about 15 percentage points higher among nonmetro residents than Americans who live in metropolitan areas.[14] Rural majorities also believe it is either “very” or “somewhat” bad for society to recognize gay marriages,[15] and rural Whites rate gays and lesbians thirteen points lower on one-hundred-point feeling thermometers than urban Whites do.[16] According to the Trevor Project, 49 percent of rural LGBTQ+ youth describe their communities as “unaccepting” of LGBTQ+ people, nearly twice the 26 percent of suburban and urban youth who say so.[17]
Not surprisingly, the rural-urban divide is evident in White attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement. The 2020 American National Election Study (ANES) asked respondents to assign a one-hundred-point feeling thermometer score to various groups, including unions, corporations, the police, and the National Rifle Association, with one hundred indicating the highest approval score for a group. The twenty-four-point gap between rural Whites’ average thermometer score of thirty for BLM and the fifty-four score among urban Whites was the widest for any group about whom the survey tested respondents’ feelings.[18]
Some scholars stress that rural Whites’ views about race may not be explicitly racist because those attitudes stem from broader beliefs about class, work, and government dependency. Law professor and rural Arkansas native Lisa Pruitt stresses that rural Whites distinguish between the “settled” members of their communities who may struggle yet who work hard and live right and their “hard-living” White neighbors who lack the proper work ethic, tend to rely upon government support, and tend to engage in transgressive behaviors like drug use and petty criminal activities.
Settled rural Whites, Pruitt argues, should be regarded differently for two reasons. First, they reject overtly racist language or stereotypes and shun White supremacists who embrace them. Second, they lump hard-living folks of all races together in a way that evinces a class-based, race-neutral disdain for people who fail to carry their societal weight.[19]
But after spending eight years interviewing small-town Americans in all fifty states, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow concluded that race and rural resentments are inextricably bound. He acknowledges that attitudes toward government help explain rural Whites’ hostility toward cities and the minorities who live there. But Wuthnow found race to be the key factor driving rural resentment. “I’m not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these [rural] communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating,” he says. “And that’s why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There’s a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame ‘others.’ ”[20]
In her 2016 book The Politics of Resentment, Katherine Cramer argues that it can be difficult to precisely determine when rural resentments are based in race and when they aren’t, even if “the urban-versus-rural divide is undoubtedly in part about race.”[21] But when we interviewed her, she told us, “The social welfare programs of the sixties, the civil rights movement of the sixties, the changes just demographically in the country, all of that has kind of been a slow burn in rural communities as in other communities, and yes, I think that’s part of the reason Donald Trump was able to use racism as a tool.”[22]
Combining survey data with interviews of rural Wisconsinites, social scientists Matthew Nelsen and Christopher Petsko also found rural consciousness to be specifically linked to negative, racialized attitudes that rural citizens express toward urbanites. “The words rural Americans use to describe city dwellers as well as the mental representations they call to mind seriously challenge the idea that rural consciousness exists independently from racial resentment. While rural consciousness may not be reducible to simply racism, as scholars of rural America suggest, it appears at least in these data to play a central role,” they write. Nelsen and Petsko found that the higher degree of rural consciousness Wisconsinites expressed, the more racialized their attitudes were toward residents of Milwaukee, home to the state’s largest population of African Americans.[23]
Race- and place-based resentments also influence rural citizens’ evaluations of the two major political parties. In 2021, Rural Objective PAC surveyed two thousand rural Americans in nine battleground states to find out whether they associated nineteen principles or attributes with either, both, or neither of the two major parties. The items included ideas or phrases like “honesty,” “getting money out of politics,” and “fighting for the underdogs.” What’s remarkable is how similar the evaluations of the two parties are for many items, in some cases a difference of only a few points. In the eyes of rural voters, the Republicans’ biggest net advantage, twenty-two points, was being perceived as “pro-small businesses.” For Democrats, it was their seventeen-point edge on “working for affordable health care.”
The most stunning split—third largest in magnitude among the nineteen items—was how rural respondents rated the two parties on the phrase “pandering to racists.” The partisan gap was sixteen points, 46 percent to 30 percent, but rural Americans described Democrats as more pandering.[24] That’s right: The same rural Whites who exhibit high rates of racial antipathy and who routinely sneer at “woke” Democrats for supporting greater diversity nevertheless believe the Democrats pander more to racists because, to them, the real racists are liberals and minorities who play identity politics and criticize others for being racially insensitive.
Anti-immigrant xenophobia. Nowhere does rural anger run deeper than the xenophobic opposition to immigrants. Rural Whites we met while reporting this book repeatedly insisted that they harbor no ill will toward legal immigrants and that they are angered only by those who arrive in the United States “illegally.” We take them at their word—but they must be outliers, because polls repeatedly show that rural Americans are the demographic cohort most fearful of, and furious about, immigrants.
In a 2017 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 62 percent of suburbanites and 71 percent of city dwellers agreed with the statement “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Only a 49 percent plurality of rural citizens agreed—and that’s despite the likely influence of what researchers call “social desirability bias,” the tendency of survey respondents to shade their true feelings in order to adhere to perceived social norms.[25] In a similar finding a year later by the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of rural respondents said that the “growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values.”[26] Notice that the wording in those polls explicitly uses immigrants or newcomers without indicating how these immigrants/newcomers arrived in the United States, nor their citizenship status. In other words, these results reflect rural citizens’ attitudes toward all immigrants, not just those who are undocumented.
At a Llano County Tea Party chapter event in November 2022, we saw how frustrated many Texans are about immigration policy. The guest speaker that night, Sheena Rodriguez of the Alliance for a Safe Texas, came to Llano to promote her organization’s effort to have the state’s border situation declared an “invasion.” Rodriguez circulated a two-page resolution that cites Article IV, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution, which mandates that the federal government “shall protect each [state] against Invasion.” During her lecture, entitled “The Lie: Immigration Is a Federal Issue,” she assured attendees that she is “not against legal immigrants—and there’s nothing racist about opposing illegal immigration or wanting safe communities.” Rodriguez shared experiences from her visits to the Rio Grande Valley. She told harrowing stories about “coyotes” (human smugglers) who use color-coded bracelets to traffic people across the border; about dead immigrants found in the farms and yards of citizens who live close to the border; about how immigrants seeking to enter the United States outnumber border patrol agents by sixty to one; and about a conversation with one border agent who told her, “I need help; we’re being invaded.” Her ambition, as stated at the end of the resolution, is to persuade Llano and the state’s other 253 counties to “recognize our southern Texas border is under invasion.”[27] The Tea Partiers in Llano nodded along with her presentation, then gave her a rousing round of applause.
What Rodriguez and those who follow her fail to mention is that anti-immigrant sentiments fuel radical ideas and leaders. Citizens whose anti-immigrant feelings lurk near the surface need little inducement from politicians to summon their dormant xenophobia. It’s bad enough that Donald Trump referred to certain immigrants as coming from “shithole countries.” Worse was his telling four U.S. House Democrats—all of them minority women and U.S. citizens, three of them born in the United States—to “go back” to the countries they came from. Platoons of talk radio hosts and media figures like Tucker Carlson echo these attacks daily with paranoid rants about border caravans and “replacement theory.”
Not surprisingly, 60 percent of rural Americans support building a wall between the United States and Mexico, a share significantly higher than the 46 percent of suburbanites and 34 percent of city dwellers who do.[28] Anyone who thinks that rural anti-immigrant sentiments are a recent phenomenon triggered by the election of the first Black U.S. president or his openly anti-immigrant successor should think again. According to results from a national phone survey conducted back in 2004, on twelve of thirteen immigration-related questions posed, rural Americans expressed greater anti-immigrant sentiments than suburban or urban residents did.[29]
The pattern is clear: Rural xenophobia toward immigrants arrived at the station long before the “Trump Train” did. If non-White rural voters were eliminated from the survey results that lump rural citizens together, support for immigrants among only rural Whites would be even lower.
Backlash driven by a fear of immigrants is hardly unique to the United States: A study of Western democracies found that once the foreign-born population reaches about 22 percent nationally, the share of right-wing populists tends to breach 50 percent.[30] And the actual size of out-groups need not be large if they’re perceived to be so. Polls consistently show that people vastly overestimate the size of minority populations; for instance, in a 2022 YouGov poll, Americans asked to estimate the size of various groups said on average that 41 percent of Americans are Black (the actual number is 12 percent), 39 percent are Hispanic (it’s 17 percent), and 27 percent are Muslim (it’s 1 percent).[31] Political scientist Ashley Jardina refers to this phenomenon of overestimating the size and power of racial or religious minorities as the “myth of the white minority.”[32]
To be sure, America’s White majority is shrinking as a proportion of the population. Yet Whites continue to wield disproportionate power and will do so even after relinquishing their numerical majority. White legislators are overrepresented in both chambers of Congress and in all fifty state legislatures.[33] The overrepresentation of White executives in corporate C-suites is even more profound; in 2021, 93 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were White, and 86 percent were White men.[34] “Demographic changes in which whites’ relative share of the population continues to decrease may lead whites to feel that their relative power as a group has waned considerably,” writes Jardina, and they may eventually “come to believe that their group is actually racially disadvantaged.”[35] Clearly, millions of rural Whites already believe this.
Hostility toward out-groups. Social isolation magnifies rural White fears of the “other.” Isolated and homogeneous rural communities are infertile laboratories for understanding, much less accepting, people who are different. Forty-two percent of rural Americans live in the community in which they grew up, a rate higher than for either suburban or urban residents.[36] Rural Americans are most likely to say they have few if any friends of a different race.[37] Rural citizens and people who reside in less racially diverse U.S. states are also less likely to hold a U.S. passport or use it to travel abroad.[38]
Missouri state representative Ian Mackey understands these sentiments all too well. Growing up gay in rural Hickory County—home to 8,600 residents, 96 percent of whom are White—Mackey always felt out of sorts. In a floor speech confronting colleague Chuck Basye, a Republican co-sponsor of an anti-trans bill, Mackey delivered the type of passionate remarks rarely heard in the well of any state legislative chamber. “I couldn’t wait to move out. I couldn’t wait to move to a part of our state that would reject this stuff in a minute,” Mackey said of his home county. “Thank god I made it out, and I think every day of the kids who are still there who haven’t made it out—who haven’t escaped—from this kind of bigotry.”[39]
Self-sorting does more than create cultural silos and fuel prejudices. In his fascinating “density divide” study, Niskanen Center analyst Will Wilkinson explains how rural and urban parts of the United States increasingly differ beyond characteristics like race, ideology, or even partisanship. In fact, so great is this density divide that rural and urban Americans now diverge on some of what psychologists have identified as five core personality traits, especially the “openness to experience” trait.
According to Wilkinson, citizens who score high on the openness trait are more likely “to make an in-state move, and nearly twice as likely to move to a new state. Which is to say, people with close-minded dispositions are less likely to move. This difference in propensity to migrate between individuals with liberal-skewing and conservative-skewing temperaments is exactly what we’d expect to find if the density divide is a result of liberal self-selection out of lower density areas.”[40] Unfortunately, once the citizens more open to experience—the Ian Mackeys—leave rural communities, a higher share of close-minded rural residents remains, exacerbating personality divides between city and country.
Plenty of city folk are equally uninterested in bridging the urban-rural divide. But rural Americans’ combination of isolation and incuriousness increasingly separates them—not merely geographically but dispositionally—from the rest of the nation. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” Mark Twain famously quipped. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Rural isolation would not matter much in a stable democracy with low levels of partisan or geographic polarization. That was the state of affairs in America during the immediate postwar years, when the partisan differences among rural, suburban, and urban citizens were small compared with today’s chasmic geographic divides.
That America no longer exists. The civil rights, feminist, and gay rights revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s were quickly followed by a major immigration reform act—passed in 1986 by a Republican U.S. Senate and signed into law by Republican president Ronald Reagan—that created a massive new wave of citizens by offering amnesty to anyone who had immigrated to the United States prior to 1982. A new and very different-looking nation promptly began taking shape. Fast-forward to today, and the United States is diversifying rapidly and becoming increasingly polarized and more politically unstable. As political columnist Ezra Klein argues in his book Why We’re Polarized, the single biggest driver of polarization in the United States is rapid demographic change.[41] Demographic changes are impactful and perhaps unsettling to millions of Americans living in all parts of the country. Yet these effects may be felt most acutely by rural Whites, which is ironic given that demographic changes are smaller and arrived later (if at all) to most rural communities.
Place-based resentments exist everywhere and arise among citizens of varying backgrounds. But politicians and the media who cite tensions on both sides of the rural-urban divide are peddling the false equivalency that resentments operate in both directions and in equal measure. They do not. The truth is that rural Whites are the nation’s most resentful demographic group, especially on matters of race, place, religion, and sexual identity. Their higher levels of racism and xenophobia exacerbate America’s cultural divide and foment political instability.
Wherever they take root, racist, xenophobic, and place-based resentments are born from a desire to turn back the clock on history—which is why again is the key word in Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” For many rural Whites, Trump’s slogan recalls an exclusive, more familiar American era, during which members of what we call the nation’s essential rural minority faced little competition in business, educational, and social circles from people who looked, thought, or prayed differently from them. Not surprisingly, studies show that White Trump supporters exhibit unusual animus toward minority groups.[42] “Trump’s campaign promise of a return to the imaginary past was largely a promise to transport Americans to a time when racism, misogyny, and xenophobia were mainstream attitudes,” writes Masha Gessen, author of Surviving Autocracy. “More than that: it was the promise of a new history in which a greater inclusivity not only had not happened but would never happen.”[43]
The nation’s demography is changing rapidly, but the United States cannot be magically transported to some imaginary past—nor should it be. Sadly, millions of rural White Americans are triggered by these changes and are lashing out accordingly, imperiling the nation’s transformation into a more pluralist and inclusive society.
On Sunday, December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch was driving northbound on Interstate 95 from North Carolina to Washington, D.C. He pulled out his cell phone, stared into its camera, and hit the Record button, to save for posterity and his daughters some final thoughts in case a fatal martyrdom awaited him. “I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupted by evil,” a bearded Welch, in a black winter cap, promised his daughters in that recorded message. “I have to at least stand up for you and for other children just like you.”
Welch was on a mission. From his hometown in Salisbury, North Carolina—he called it “Smallsbury”—the twenty-eight-year-old father of two young daughters was determined to investigate what he believed was a dungeon where Hillary Clinton, her longtime Democratic adviser John Podesta, and their satanic network of allies molested children they had kidnapped. With his trunk full of firearms, Welch intended to save those helpless kids.
Welch was a walking contradiction. A divorced but devoted father and volunteer firefighter, he worked twelve-hour shifts at the local Food Lion supermarket to provide for his daughters. He had two Bible verses tattooed on his back and had traveled with his church group to Haiti to help earthquake victims. That was Welch’s public persona.
Privately, he was unraveling. Painful memories of losing his older brother twenty years earlier in a fatal car accident may have been revived by a more recent tragedy: Two months prior to his messianic mission, Welch accidentally hit with his car and wounded a thirteen-year-old boy. (The boy survived.) Welch’s parents, who live in the rural outskirts of Salisbury, had no idea their son had fallen down an online rabbit hole where he listened to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and read QAnon articles about a child abduction ring that top Democrats allegedly ran out of the basement of a Washington pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong.[44]
That afternoon, Welch learned the truth about the “Pizzagate” conspiracy he had read so much about online. He brought a loaded AR-15 assault rifle and a revolver into the pizza parlor. As traumatized customers cowered in fear, Welch ordered an employee to show him Comet Ping Pong’s basement. He fired his gun into the lock of a closet door. A few minutes later, a confused Welch surrendered to police upon realizing the building had no basement. He was convicted of transporting a firearm and assault with a dangerous weapon and sentenced to four years in prison.[45]
Conspiracy theories attract women and men, people of every race and religion, and the young and old alike. Although those who espouse either far-left or far-right views tend to be more conspiratorial, there’s scant evidence that conspiracists fall along one side of the ideological divide or the other.[46] However, conspiracy scholars have identified a few demographic and psychological traits that make people more inclined to believe conspiracies. Conspiracists tend to be less educated. They often feel a loss of control in their lives. They are less politically active or likely to vote. They tend to have generally prejudiced personalities and are more likely to commit petty crimes, evince populist or Manichean worldviews, and condone violence as a way of solving problems.[47] In the United States, conspiracy theories also flourish in rural communities.
QAnon. Let’s start with QAnon. In 2021, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) surveyed Americans to determine who subscribes to one of the three major QAnon conspiracies. The language for each statement and the nationwide share of Americans who agreed with it were as follows:
PRRI discovered that 85 percent of what it calls “QAnon believers” also say the Covid-19 virus was human-made in a foreign lab, 73 percent claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and 39 percent believe the Covid-19 vaccine “contains a surveillance microchip that is the sign of the beast in biblical prophecy.”[48] The conspiratorial mind contains multitudes.
Republican partisanship and conservative media consumption are major drivers of QAnon conspiracism. But PRRI found rurality also to have a powerful, independent effect: QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural than in urban areas.[49] According to an Ipsos poll taken two weeks before the January 6 domestic terrorist attack, QAnon followers tend to be “largely male, non-college educated, Republican, and primarily from the South and Midwest regions…and largely from rural and suburban areas.” The same poll found that 49 percent of rural Americans—ten points higher than the national average—believed the QAnon theory that a “deep state” network of officials is “working to undermine” Donald Trump.[50] “It’s one thing to say that most Americans laugh off these outlandish beliefs, but when you take into consideration that these beliefs are linked to a kind of apocalyptic thinking and violence, then it becomes something quite different,” PRRI director Robert Jones says of QAnon adherents.[51]
Rurality also fosters anti-intellectualism, which in turn helps conspiracy theories flourish. Political scientist Kristin Lunz Trujillo discovered that citizens who express a strong rural self-identity are unusually anti-intellectual. Her findings help explain the skepticism that rural Americans, especially rural conservatives, express toward professors, scientists, and experts generally.[52] Scientific skepticism proved especially lethal when rural Whites—the citizens most dubious of pandemic experts—refused safe Covid-19 vaccines at rates higher than urban and suburban citizens. That skepticism proved fatal for more rural Americans than would have died had heartland vaccination rates mirrored those nationwide percentages.
Election denialism. Rural citizens are also more likely to believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and to doubt the legitimacy of elections generally. PRRI’s 2021 “Competing Visions of America” poll found that 47 percent of rural Americans either “completely” or “mostly” agree that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The comparable combined shares for those who live in the suburbs and cities, 30 percent and 22 percent, respectively, are significantly lower.[53] Were non-Whites removed from these results, the share of election deniers among rural Whites alone would be higher.
Given rural Americans’ higher electoral support for Trump—who continues to repeat the “Big Lie” and other bogus claims about election fraud—these differences make perfect sense. Prior to both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump cast doubt on whether any election he lost could be legitimate. Never mind that he paid two firms $1.3 million to investigate supposed voter fraud in 2020 and then quietly buried both reports because neither firm could prove any of his absurd claims.[54]
More than any other public figure, Trump has undermined democracy’s most sacred act: voting. At an October 2022 rally, nearly two years after his re-election defeat, the former president continued to repeat his false and incendiary claims of election fraud: “I don’t believe we’ll ever have a fair election again.” It’s unclear whether Trump meant this statement as a prediction or a pledge.[55]
In 2022, the Bipartisan Policy Center profiled election deniers. Its polling showed that 33 percent of rural residents are deniers, a rate half again as high as the 21 percent of urban deniers.[56] Flipping the question around, in May 2022 the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP) asked Americans if they “generally trust our elections to be conducted fairly and accurately counted.” Only 43 percent of rural respondents agreed, lower than the national average of 56 percent or the 57 percent of suburbanites and far lower than the 65 percent of urbanites who trust election results.[57]
Given their constituents’ beliefs, is it any surprise that a disproportionate share of the 139 House Republicans who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election hail from rural districts? Using CityLab’s district classifications, 48 of those 139 members represented “purely rural” districts, and another 55 came from mixed “rural-suburban” districts. In a chamber where 42 percent of districts are either purely rural or rural-suburban, the 103 combined members from these rural-influence districts produced 74 percent of the votes opposing certification. Just one member who voted not to certify Biden’s election represented a “purely urban” district: Staten Island’s Nicole Malliotakis from New York’s Eleventh District.[58]
These members share another important characteristic in addition to their disproportionately rural districts. After doing a deep dive into the background of those 139 House election deniers, The New York Times found an interesting pattern. “Many represent districts where racial and demographic change is churning more swiftly than in other Republican areas,” the reporters discovered. “But in comparison with other Republicans, the objectors represent districts where the White portion of the population is decreasing faster relative to other racial or ethnic groups.”[59] Election denialism is one of the most profound dangers American democracy faces, and it runs deepest with rural voters and the House Republicans from majority-White but rapidly changing and disproportionately rural districts who represent them.
In the 2022 midterms, Republicans nominated nearly three hundred election deniers for offices including U.S. senator, governor, and secretary of state.[60] More than half these candidates lost, including every GOP secretary of state candidate from a 2020 presidential swing state.Many political observers breathed a sigh of relief. Yet more than one hundred election deniers won. Election denialism and the 2020 “Big Lie” have gained wide currency with rural citizens. Curiously, these rural voters never seem to question the electoral legitimacy of Republican officials whom they elected from the same states during the same election cycles.
Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol argues that election denialism is designed to question not so much the legitimacy of voting outcomes as the legitimacy of certain voters. What deniers really believe, says Skocpol, is that votes of those who look, think, or pray differently from them are inherently illegitimate. “I don’t think Stop the Steal is about ballots at all. I don’t believe a lot of people really think that the votes weren’t counted correctly in 2020,” Skocpol said in an interview with The Atlantic. “They believe that urban people, metropolitan people—disproportionately young and minorities, to be sure, but frankly liberal Whites—are an illegitimate brew that’s changing America in unrecognizable ways and taking it away from them. Stop the Steal is a way of saying that. Stop the Steal is a metaphor.”[61]
Obama birtherism. Finally, there is the mother of all recent right-wing conspiracy theories: Obama birtherism, a fitting name for the conspiracy theory that birthed Donald Trump’s presidency. In the spring of 2011, when Trump briefly considered a 2012 presidential run, the reality TV star began to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s 1961 Hawai’i birth certificate, and thus Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president. Political scientist Philip Klinkner lined up Trump’s statements alongside poll data and media mentions of birtherism. His findings are stunning: During just six weeks in March and April 2011, Trump’s comments coincided with a fourteen-point drop in the percentage of Americans who believed Obama was born in the United States.[62]
To be fair, birtherism did not start with Trump: During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, key Hillary Clinton allies circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s birthplace,[63] and throughout that campaign and into his presidency, challenging Obama’s citizenship was a constant theme of right-wing rhetoric. But Trump turbocharged the conspiracy theory: In just six weeks, he almost single-handedly convinced one in every seven U.S. adults that Obama was an illegitimate president.
According to Klinkner, racial resentment was the single best predictor of support for the birther conspiracy in 2011. Not surprisingly, five years later, birtherism was one of the strongest predictors of which Republicans supported Trump in the 2016 presidential primary. GOPers who believed the companion claim that Obama is a Muslim were a whopping 40 percentage points more likely to support the reality TV star.[64] For millions of Americans, racialized attitudes dovetail neatly with conspiracist beliefs.
And where was birtherism strongest? You guessed it: in rural communities. In 2009, two years before Trump first seized upon the issue in 2011, Public Policy Polling surveyed voters in North Carolina and Virginia about this issue. PPP concluded that birtherism is “very much a rural phenomenon”[65] after finding that rural Republicans in both states were twenty percentage points more likely than other state Republicans to believe the birther conspiracy.[66]
The evidence is overwhelming: Heartland America is home to unusually high levels of dangerous, often self-destructive conspiracism and beliefs in other fictions. Edgar Maddison Welch’s story is a tragedy—for him, for his parents and daughters, and especially for the dozens of people he terrorized at the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in 2016. Fortunately, nobody was injured or killed that day.
But Welch’s story is also a cautionary tale: Research shows that conspiracist beliefs are linked to undemocratic, even violent tendencies.[67] Nor is Welch alone: Millions of other rural White Americans also endorse wild and potentially dangerous conspiracist ideas.
Opposing democratic norms like checks and balances between the branches of government, the role of a free press, and citizen access to the ballot; embracing authoritarian, White nationalist, or Christian nationalist alternatives over secular, constitutional rule; believing local sheriffs can defy superseding state and national laws—each of these political beliefs shares two commonalities. One, they are undemocratic impulses that threaten the U.S. constitutional system. And two, rural Americans are more likely to express them.
Democracy requires a vigilant defense of its norms and institutions. Unfortunately, in their analyses of the 2020 American National Election Survey, political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown found rural residents to be less supportive than city dwellers of core democratic principles: “[Rural Americans] were much more likely to favor restrictions on the press, for example, and to suggest it would be helpful if the president could unilaterally work on the country’s problems without paying attention to the Congress or the courts. These indicators point to a serious divide in the U.S. polity, one that threatens the health of democracy.”[68]
The fact that rural Americans are more likely to dismiss the need for checks and balances on presidents or an independent media suggests that their beliefs in constitutional principles are limited and conditional. Rural America’s favorite president agrees: Donald Trump proclaimed that Article II of the Constitution gave him the “right to do whatever I want as president.”[69] And everyone knows how Trump feels about the media, whom he routinely castigates as scum and enemies of the state worthy of scorn or even violence.
Ballot access. Anti-democratic impulses are evident in the urban-rural split on support for the core democratic principle of ballot access. A 2021 Marist College poll asked Americans which concerned them more, “making sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so” or “making sure that no one votes who is ineligible.” Nationally, 56 percent of respondents were more concerned about ballot access, but a shocking 41 percent were more concerned about ineligible people voting.[70]
We say “shocking” because the latter group is fretting about a phantom problem. After analyzing literally billions of votes cast by millions of voters in hundreds of elections over multiple election cycles, the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that vote fraud amounts to at most three out of every million votes cast. The center’s findings echo results from similar studies conducted by Columbia University, Dartmouth University, Arizona State University, The Washington Post, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Even Kris Kobach—a voter fraud fabulist appointed by Donald Trump in 2017 to head a commission tasked with finding examples of fraud—documented just 14 cases out of 84 million votes cast in twenty-two states, a rate even lower than the Brennan Center found.[71] Voter fraud is the Freddy Krueger of American politics, a fictional demon who appears in the fevered dreams of cranks like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Yet two out of every five Americans are more worried about this imaginary “crisis” than they are that their fellow citizens have ballot access.
As for who believes in voter fraud, the Marist Poll results are predictable: Majorities of Americans who live in big cities (68 percent), small cities (65 percent), and the suburbs (59 percent) express greater concern about eligible citizens being able to vote. Conversely, majorities of residents of small towns (51 percent) and rural areas (58 percent) are more worried about nonexistent voter fraud. The direct relationship between population density and beliefs in ballot integrity could not be more obvious.[72]
Authoritarianism and nationalism. Authoritarianism, White nationalism, and White Christian nationalism present another series of connected threats to American democracy. In the United States and other Western nations, authoritarians backed by White nationalists and Christian nationalists like Trump are increasingly emboldened. Their followers degrade democratic institutions and norms, including transparency, accountability, the rule of law, and civil liberties and rights. The impulse to follow and elevate authoritarian figures is a human reflex so innate that it may be hard-wired into humans’ evolutionary biology.[73]
In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat studies the characteristics common to modern authoritarians. What stands out, she says, are the ways strongmen employ powerful appeals to in-group solidarity. “For authoritarians,” Ben-Ghiat explains, “only some people are ‘the people,’ regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status.” Moreover, she explains that a strongman’s “rogue nature” draws followers to him because he “proclaims law-and-order rule” for out-groups “yet enables lawlessness” for his supporters.[74] Certain people are instinctually attracted to strongmen, especially those who affirm their base supporters’ political predispositions.
Among the citizenry, authoritarian personalities tend to fit a similar demographic profile. In their book Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart provide the basic profile of authoritarian voters in the United States and other Western democracies. “Voting for authoritarian parties is strongest among the older generation, men, the less educated, white European populations, in rural areas, and among the most religious.”[75] For these aging, less educated, rural White men, the authoritarian’s appeal is rooted in an expectation that his (or her) hardfisted rule will benefit those whom Ben-Ghiat calls “chosen” groups.
In the U.S. case, no group enjoys a more chosen status than heartland White Americans. Which is why Trump’s most devoted voters, rural Whites, so often excuse his rogue behavior, whether it is sleeping with porn stars or mocking Sen. John McCain for being captured in Vietnam. “Cults of personality are anathema to democracies,” warns Sarah Longwell, founder of the Republican Accountability Project. They tend to be “based on the same things—lies, pledges of loyalty, and intolerance of dissent,” she says.[76] So long as authoritarians hate the same out-groups as their followers, politicians like Trump can have all the extramarital affairs and mock all the wounded veterans they want.
Emboldened by his authoritarian followers, Trump ordered tanks to appear on the National Mall for a July 4 rally, deployed the Secret Service to clear away White House protestors so he could walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square to hold a Bible aloft, and incited the January 6 domestic terrorists to attack the U.S. Capitol. The president whose electoral following was strongest in America’s rural corners was the only 2016 presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, for whom the authoritarianism personality trait predicted electoral support.[77]
Self-styled patriot groups seek to restore power as exercised primarily if not exclusively by Whites, Christians, or both. Groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters openly advocate upheaval, revolution, and violence as a necessary means to achieving this restoration. These radical, undemocratic groups find supporters in every corner of the nation, but their rural connections are indisputable. In their study of “rural rage,” investigative journalists Chip Berlet and Spencer Sunshine describe the geography of violent White nationalist groups. “Patriot movement groups were active on the streets in 2017, 2018, and 2019, joining the frequently violent pro-Trump street rallies which are also attended by organized White supremacists,” Berlet and Sunshine explain. “And although the Patriot movement’s tactics are still fringe, they are also inching toward the mainstream under Trump’s presidency. While not exclusively a rural phenomenon, the current right-wing populist backlash against diversity and human rights has established a strong foothold in the United States in rural areas with economies based on farming, ranching, the timber industry, and mining.”[78] (Northwestern University’s Kathleen Belew, an expert on authoritarian and White nationalist movements, and other scholars of White nationalism disagree about the degree to which patriot movements can be classified as distinctly rural.)
As a subset of the White nationalist movement, Christian nationalism presents a related threat to U.S. democracy. In their book, Taking Back America for God, Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead explain how Christian nationalists seek to undermine secular governance by infusing Christian identity and norms into public life. Millions of Christian nationalists believe the United States should be a Christian-only or at least a Christian-dominant nation. They reject the separation of church and state and want biblical precepts to replace secular practices and constitutional law.[79]
According to a Pew poll released two weeks before the 2022 midterms, 45 percent of Americans say the United States should be a Christian nation. Among these citizens, 54 percent say that if the Bible and the will of the people conflict, the Bible “should have more influence,” and 31 percent say the federal government should “stop enforcing the separation of church and state.” A sizable segment of the U.S. citizenry, ranging between 15 and 25 percent, favors theocratic over secular governance.[80] Their views were neatly summarized by Colorado representative Lauren Boebert, who said she’s “tired” of church-state separation and believes the “church is supposed to direct the government.” Presumably, Boebert doesn’t mean the Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim church.
Oddly enough, many Christian nationalists believe simultaneously in both their dominance and their victimhood. “Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism see themselves as representing ‘the nation,’ and ‘the real Americans’ over and against a corrupt ‘regime’ of elites who would take away their rights and plunge the nation further into decadence,” Perry and Whitehead conclude. “This should sound familiar.”[81] It does: This persecution complex echoes many right-wing and Trump-peddled talking points about how either Whites or Christians are under siege and are therefore justified in resorting to undemocratic means to impose their will.
Combating perceived persecution motivated millions of Christian nationalists to support Trump—a man who never goes to church and who couldn’t quote a single line of scripture when asked—as some sort of divine savior. “There is a very common claim that Trump is a new iteration of King Cyrus, in that he himself is not a believer, but God is using him to restore America,” Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, writes. “Many of his supporters continue to claim a divine mandate for his administration and its policies.”[82] Among those whom Perry and Whitehead identify as movement “ambassadors”—citizens who most closely identify with Christian nationalist ideals—87 percent who both are White and hail from rural communities voted for Donald Trump in 2016.[83]
Journalist Katherine Stewart explains why Christian nationalism, cast as a religious movement, is actually a political movement. Right-wing political donors including the DeVos/Prince, Bradley, Ahmanson, Scaife, Olin, Friess, Wilks, and Green families have funneled millions of dollars into Christian nationalist organizations. “Christian nationalism is not a religious creed but, in my view, a political ideology,” Stewart writes in her book The Power Worshippers. “It asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but on adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic or cultural heritage. It demands that our laws be based not on the reasoned deliberation of our democratic institutions but on particular, idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible.”[84]
Who are these Christian nationalists? Not all Christian nationalists are White evangelicals and not all White evangelicals are Christian nationalists, but the groups overlap substantially. According to Samuel Perry, 58 percent of White evangelicals say the name “Christian nationalist” describes them either “well” or “very well.”[85] A 2023 poll conducted jointly by PRRI and the Brookings Institution pegged that percentage at 64.[86] The fact that roughly three-fifths of White evangelicals openly admit they are Christian nationalists is alarming.
Not surprisingly, White evangelicals also express exclusionary, anti-democratic attitudes. Fifty-seven percent believe one must be Christian to be “truly American,” a rate twice that of the next closest religious subgroup, White mainline Protestants, at 29 percent.[87] A remarkable 84 percent say the Bible should have “a great deal” of or at least “some” influence on U.S. laws.[88] White evangelicals are also strongly anti-immigrant: Only one in five supports a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamer immigrants brought to the United States as children, the lowest of any religious group. More than half of White evangelicals—higher than any other religious identity—believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.[89] And at 27 percent, they are the religious group least likely to agree that “American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better.”[90] An almost identical 26 percent of White evangelicals—again, highest among religious groups—say that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save the country.”[91]
More to our point is where White evangelicals reside: Forty-three percent of rural residents identify as evangelical, a rate twice the national average.[92] Consequently, Christian nationalism is “unevenly distributed around the country,” explains Paul D. Miller, author of The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism. It is “more common in the South with a strong representation in the Midwest. It is stronger in rural areas and smaller towns, less common in bigger cities.”[93] White evangelism and its ugly cousin, Christian nationalism, are not exclusively rural phenomena. But Christian nationalists find unique comfort in rural pews.
Constitutional sheriffs. Rural sheriffs present yet another threat to U.S. democracy. From Western movies to The Andy Griffith Show, the local sheriff has long been depicted as the archetypal American hero—a strong, silent, impartial defender of the weak against various predators. But a dark trend has emerged among America’s self-styled “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert self-serving, invented claims that their office grants them powers superior to those of any other public official at any level of government, powers they can use in pursuit of whatever radical agenda they please. The roots of the constitutional sheriff movement trace back to the Posse Comitatus, a White supremacist and anti-Semitic movement in the 1970s that emerged from remnants of the Ku Klux Klan and introduced the notion that sheriffs are above the law.
There are roughly five thousand members of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which, along with Protect America Now, is one of two organizations leading this nascent movement.[94] With notable exceptions like Joe Arpaio and David Clarke—both of whom gained fame as close allies of Donald Trump—few of these sheriffs are known beyond their home counties. But they are convinced they have the right to exercise extraordinary power.
Indeed, constitutional sheriffs believe that within their counties, they are the law. In a modern nod to the reactionary, pre–Civil War theory of “nullification” advanced by slavery defender John Calhoun, CSPOA and PAN sheriffs reject the concepts of national supremacy and state-level authority. According to the Marshall Project, roughly 10 percent of the nation’s three thousand head sheriffs believe they have “interposition” powers to insert themselves between their constituents and state and national officials.[95] They reject the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which makes clear that federal authority exceeds that of other levels of government. To the constitutional sheriffs, it is the county that is supreme, and they are the highest authority in their counties. Being a constitutional sheriff means believing you are empowered to rule like a one-man judge and all-White jury, picking and choosing which laws and court rulings to enforce and which not.
The “one-man judge and all-White jury” line is not hyperbole: U.S. sheriffs are almost all White men. Only 5 percent are minorities, and only 3 percent are women.[96] Fully 71 percent of sheriffs describe themselves as either “conservative” or “very conservative,” and most of the rest self-describe as “middle of the road.”[97] Never mind that they do not look or think anything like the nation overall: Sheriffs in rural counties are not even demographically representative of the rural counties over which they have authority. Those connected to the CSPOA harbor unusually radical and revanchist attitudes, like the sheriff from rural Oklahoma’s McCurtain County who was caught on tape joking with three other county officials about assassinating a local journalist while pining for a return to the glory days when it was still legal to lynch Black prisoners.[98]
Although they may not yet have led the kind of violent revolution against other levels of government they believe they can wage, in recent years sheriffs have begun to make their ideas clear. Egged on by the CSPOA, sheriffs in three states took it upon themselves to investigate supposed fraud in the 2020 presidential election. All three were among dozens who met in Las Vegas in 2022 with representatives from True the Vote, MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, and other election conspiracists.[99] Calvin Hayden, the sheriff of rural Johnson County, Kansas, was one of the three. Eighteen months after the 2020 election, in a state Donald Trump won easily, Hayden continued to pursue what he called a “criminal prosecution” of vote fraud in his county, which Biden had carried narrowly. Hayden claimed that his office had received two hundred calls alleging election fraud. A public records search revealed just one such call.[100]
Sheriff Dar Leaf of Michigan’s rural Barry County decided to investigate Dominion Voting Systems machines in his home county. Trump supporters in two other rural Michigan counties, Antrim and Cheboygan, engaged in similar efforts. Leaf coordinated his activities with Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Stefanie Lambert, who filed a voter fraud lawsuit in Michigan that was so outrageous, the judge sanctioned both attorneys for misconduct. “The upheaval in Barry County shows how the right’s misinformation-fueled efforts to control elections have spread to even the smallest towns,” Reuters reported. “Here and in some other conservative communities, Trump-aligned activists have sown doubt and discord that is putting long-serving election clerks on the defensive.”[101]
On three other issues—Covid-19, immigration, and violence against women—experts Emily Farris and Mirya Holman found that constitutional sheriffs not only flout state or national laws, but also harbor attitudes that often prevent them from properly administering those laws. Constitutional sheriffs were less likely to enforce Covid-19 mask mandates during the pandemic. They are more prone to allowing their animosities toward immigrants to justify enforcement activities that go “far beyond” what immigration law specifies. And their views about women make them less likely to believe reports of rape and domestic violence committed against women.[102]
Then there is the matter of gun rights, an issue on which constitutional sheriffs have defiantly planted a flag. The sheriffs are especially resistant to what’s legally known as extreme risk protection orders—informally called “red flag” laws—that empower judges to order law enforcement officials to take guns from citizens who pose a demonstrated and imminent danger to other persons.[103]
The constitutional sheriff movement is gaining strength. Dangerous CSPOA-affiliated teachers are training other law enforcement officers who are entrusted to protect the citizenry. These radicals impart to trainees not only their views on the law, policing, and the use of force, but their racist, conspiratorial, and authoritarian views as well. Some express beliefs similar to those of trolls on the online bulletin board 4chan, including support for QAnon, the Proud Boys, and other White nationalist groups; the belief that the 2020 election was stolen; the most vulgar forms of Islamophobia; and the allegation that President Joe Biden is a pedophile.[104]
Right-wing money supports the movement. In 2021, the conservative Claremont Institute hosted its inaugural Sheriffs Fellowship program. Slate’s Jessica Pishko obtained a copy of the curriculum, which was chock-full of right-wing, Christian nationalist, and authoritarian messaging. “The office [of sheriff] is already vulnerable to extremism and…sheriffs can enable other extremist actors like vigilantes and militias to wreak havoc on society,” Pishko writes. “Claremont provides a historical and intellectual cover for selected sheriffs to continue a march into white Christian nationalism; for Claremont, the sheriffs are elected influencers who can push their message into the mainstream.”[105] And that message is clear: Sheriffs should be able to wield unfettered authority in their respective counties to carry out whatever radical agendas they want.
U.S. democracy is in peril. Ballot blockers, wannabe authoritarians, White Christian nationalists, and constitutional sheriffs each pose existential and often overlapping threats to American constitutional governance. Unfortunately, rural Whites form the tip of the spear for each of these movements.
In August 2022, a federal jury in Grand Rapids, Michigan, convicted Barry Croft and Adam Fox for their roles as ringleaders in a failed plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer. With the help of an informant, undercover FBI agents recorded videos of Croft, Fox, and nearly a dozen of their “Wolverine Watchmen” confederates making bombs and surveilling the governor’s summer cottage. Two other Watchmen pled guilty to lesser charges and testified against Croft and Fox, who were convicted and sentenced to sixteen and nineteen years, respectively, in federal prison.[106]
Although he was living in the basement of a vacuum shop at the time of the failed plot, Fox hails from Potterville, Michigan, a small rural town of roughly two thousand citizens. Croft’s hometown of Bear, Delaware, is a slightly bigger rural enclave of twenty thousand people. The two would-be terrorists connected through the Watchmen, a violent splinter group of the “Boogaloo” movement. U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler told the jury that the defendants’ kidnapping plans were part of their grander ambition to “set off a second American civil war, a second American Revolution, something that they call the boogaloo.”[107] Responding to the verdicts, Whitmer warned about the existential stakes: “Plots against public officials and threats to the FBI are a disturbing extension of radicalized domestic terrorism that festers in our nation, threatening the very foundation of our republic.”[108]
Insurrectionist attacks. Famous for his scholarship on the New Deal and the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics, noted political historian Richard Hofstadter in 1970 wrote a less noticed introductory chapter in a book about key episodes of political violence entitled American Violence: A Documentary History. In it, Hofstadter makes two trenchant observations about patterns in political violence. His first observation pertains to who is targeted—or, rather, not targeted—in domestic violence episodes. His second observation concerns the perpetrators. Hofstadter writes:
An arresting fact about American violence, and one of the keys to understanding its history, is that very little has been insurrectionary. Most of our violence has taken the form of action by one group of citizens against another group, rather than by citizens against the state….
One is impressed that most American violence—and this also illuminates its relationship to state power—has been initiated with a “conservative” bias. It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.[109]
Hofstadter’s list of targets is a bit outdated, and some of the labels he uses are inappropriate today. His second observation, however, is evergreen: As the implicit “conservative” beneficiaries of state power, White, middle-class Protestants have long targeted any out-group that dare challenge their privileged position. The Garden City terrorists who wanted to bomb Somali immigrants exemplify Hofstadter’s point about how conservative violence typically targets new, foreign, or different claimants to the American dream.
But Hofstadter’s first observation about violence exempting government officials and agencies no longer holds. Starting with Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, conservative violence increasingly targets government officials, agencies, or facilities. Croft and Fox led an attempt to kidnap and kill a sitting governor. Days before the 2022 midterms, the Department of Homeland Security reported that threats issued against members of Congress rose to 9,600 in 2021, a new record and a more than tenfold increase since Donald Trump’s 2016 election.[110] And, of course, millions of shocked Americans watched the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attacks live on TV.
Anissa Herrera learned firsthand what happens when people opt for violent threats against public officials over peaceful resolution of electoral contests. As the election administrator of rural Gillespie County, Texas, Herrera had heard the claims made by election deniers about rigged results. For the most part, those complaints seemed like little more than loose talk. Unfortunately, a subset of individuals began to harass her. “I was threatened, I’ve been stalked,” Herrera said. By 2022, she and her fellow election officials no longer felt safe. “We have some people who are pretty fanatical and radical about things,” Gillespie County judge Mark Stroeher told the local newspaper. “Unfortunately, they have driven out our elections administrator, and not just her, but the staff. Everybody has resigned.”[111]
At that point, supervising the 2022 election fell to Gillespie County clerk Lindsey Brown. With only weeks to prepare and with the national media descending upon Fredericksburg, the county seat, Brown scrambled to administer the election properly. When we caught up with her at the county elections office five days before the 2022 midterms, she was upbeat, if understandably beleaguered. And as if the recent resignations did not make her supervisory duties tough enough, she was also a close friend of Herrera’s and used to wait tables at the local restaurant Herrera’s family owns.
Brown told us that neighboring county clerks had warned her that voters—especially those whose candidate lost the presidential race two years prior—tend to be a little more agitated during midterm cycles. But aside from one angry elderly voter and one camera crew filming inside the state-mandated, one-hundred-foot-radius boundary around polling sites, Brown encountered no problems in Gillespie County in 2022. “Elections is a whole other ball game,” she said, reflecting upon election supervision relative to her more mundane responsibilities as county clerk, like building permit applications and recording tax deeds. “People are passionate and want their votes to count. And the legislature is always changing laws regarding elections.”[112]
Wanting one’s vote to count is a legitimate democratic reflex. Gumming up the works for election officials—a tactic many Trump supporters are deploying to create administrative problems—is not.[113] Threatening election officials is even less legitimate. Sadly, as a 2021 Brennan Center for Justice report documented, there has been a rising number of threats issued, and sometimes carried out, by violent radicals against innocent election officials just trying to do their jobs.[114] For Anissa Herrera and the other Gillespie County election officials who quit in fear, the damage has been done.
Nearly two thousand miles from Gillespie County, citizens of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, were shocked to experience public threats of violence in their small, rural town. Nestled along the Kootenai River and home to just 2,500 residents, Bonners Ferry is the largest town and the county seat of Boundary, Idaho’s northernmost and lone Canada-bordering county. Fewer than 13,000 people live in the county, which is 93 percent White and 74 percent rural.[115] Boundary voters supported Trump over Biden by a nearly three-to-one margin in 2020.
In August 2022, angry armed protestors showed up in Bonners Ferry for a public meeting to demand that four hundred books be banned from the local library. Many of the books on their list involved sexuality or gender. But the list was likely generated by some person or organization outside Boundary County, because none of the four hundred books the protestors sought to ban was even part of the library’s collection.
Indeed, the protestors’ agenda seemed rooted in White Christian nationalism, in particular White Christian nationalists’ obsession with forms of sexuality they regard as deviant. A parent at one town meeting warned local officials that they were “sexual deviants” who would suffer the consequences of heavenly wrath. Another told town officials they “bring curses upon” themselves “from the most high.”[116] A Boundary County librarian explained that the agitators are mostly newcomers who had come to Idaho or one of four neighboring northwestern states as part of the American Redoubt movement. A Christian survivalist group formed in 2011 by James Wesley Rawles, Redoubters encourage likeminded Christians to move to sparsely populated areas in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, or the eastern part of Oregon or Washington to create off-the-grid and well-armed Christian communities. “In effect, we’re becoming pistol-packing Amish,” Rawles quipped.[117]
A small but significant number of White Christian nationalists promote violence. University of Pennsylvania religion scholar Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, foresaw the January 6 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol and the role Christian nationalists played in it. The warnings, she said, were evident a few weeks earlier, during the December 12 Jericho March near the White House. “While everybody said, ‘We couldn’t believe 1/6 was going to happen,’ I could have told you that 1/6 was going to happen because I saw it in December, you know, when they were marching around at the Jericho March in DC,” Butler told a radio interviewer. “Nobody wants to think religious people are going to take up arms, but religious people talk about violence all the time. And we’ve been trained because of 9/11 to think that’s just Muslims. But Christians are very violent, and they like guns.”[118] The Proud Boys participated in the Jericho rally at which four people were stabbed and twenty-three were arrested, including six people for assaulting police officers.[119]
These threats and acts of violence are taking place at a time when some politicians have come to look kindly on violence when it is committed by conservatives. In June 2021, Congress voted 406–21 to award the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who had defended the U.S. Capitol Building five months earlier, on January 6, more than 150 of whom were injured. Several of those 21 “nay” votes, all Republicans, objected to the use of the word insurrection in the Gold Medal resolution. All but three of the 21 “nays” had also voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election, and most were among the 20 votes opposing Kevin McCarthy’s House Speaker bid two years later, including Arizona’s Paul Gosar, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, Georgia’s Andrew Clyde, Maryland’s Andy Harris, Montana’s Matt Rosendale, South Carolina’s Ralph Norman, Texas’s Louie Gohmert, and Virginia’s Bob Good. Eighteen of the twenty-one House holdouts represent either “purely rural” or “rural-suburban” districts. Apparently, “backing the blue” is a conditional sentiment for some of the United States’ most rural House members.[120]
Sadly, election officials, local librarians, and sitting members of Congress are not the only targets of harassment and violence. In the Trump era, radical MAGA followers have called for violence against Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and several federal judges. A right-wing loner broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer. Conservatives and Republicans are not exempted from attack. Witnesses who either testified in one of Trump’s two impeachment trials or with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attacks were repeatedly harassed with profanity-laced, violent threats via phone, text, and email. From White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to Arizona state house Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, many of these victims had either supported Trump’s presidential campaigns or worked in the Trump administration.[121]
Justification for violence. Where does the appetite for state-directed violence emerge? In the University of Chicago Institute of Politics poll cited earlier, Americans were asked whether they agreed that “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.” The differences were slight, but rural Americans were most likely to agree, at 35 percent, compared with 29 percent of city dwellers and 25 percent of suburbanites.[122]
In fact, those who justify political violence number in the millions. According to University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape and his colleagues at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), the tens of thousands who descended upon Washington on January 6 demanding that Donald Trump be reinstated for a second presidential term were not alone. CPOST found that 25 percent of American adults—roughly 67 million total—believe the “2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Nine percent agree that the “use of force is justified” to restore Trump to the presidency. Overall, 8 percent agree with both statements. CPOST estimated that this 8 percent translates to roughly 21 million Americans who believe Trump should be restored to office, even if by force.[123]
Among these 21 million potential insurrectionists, CPOST estimates that approximately 8 million own a gun, 6 million said they support right-wing military groups, and 1 million said they personally knew at least one member of such groups. Fully 63 percent of them also believe racial minorities in America will “eventually have more rights than whites.” And 54 percent are QAnon conspiracists who believe a “secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the U.S. government.”
Where do these insurrectionist-minded citizens reside? Thirty percent of the 21 million Americans who say Biden’s win was illegitimate and the 27 percent who say Trump should be returned to power by force live in rural areas.[124] Those percentages are significantly higher than the estimated rural population share of 20 percent.[125] Not every citizen with violent, anti-government tendencies is rural, but rural Americans are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.
Scholars who study partisanship are increasingly noticing not just the urban-rural fault line, but also the potential for radicalism coming from rural areas. As political scientist Lilliana Mason said when asked if she foresaw a repeat of America’s first civil war, “the geographic divide is very different now. It’s largely urban vs. rural, rather than North vs. South.” Consequently, she says, many of today’s conflicts are intra-state battles that take place at state capitals. “And then people go back home to the rural areas and get ready to go fight again.” Mason worries that Republican-controlled legislatures may engage in voter suppression or install “a government that is not duly elected because the state legislatures disobeyed the actual counted votes,” prompting resistance from the left. “I think the way that this gets dangerous is if we have really massive protests from Democrats met with violent counterprotesters from rural areas or Republican protesters.”[126]
In recent years, terrorism in America has become primarily a right-wing phenomenon. Far-right domestic terrorist attacks in the United States have outnumbered those committed by all other groups combined. The two groups most prone to violence, says domestic violence expert Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, are “white Christian evangelical Republicans [who are] outsized supporters of both political violence and the QAnon conspiracy” and “those who feel threatened by either women or minorities.” Here we see how violence is linked back to the first three threats, especially in rural America, a place where White evangelism, support for QAnon, and animosity toward minorities are all higher than anywhere else in the United States.[127]
As Richard Hofstadter predicted, historically privileged citizens continue to direct their violent rhetoric and actions at whichever out-groups threaten traditional power structures: racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, woke liberals. But Hofstadter did not foresee that once members of those in-groups conclude that the state is no longer their ally in dispensing violence, those with violent tendencies may redirect their anger toward the state itself. We take his insight one step further: Once the essential rural White “chosen” minority comes to believe it no longer commands its long-enjoyed veto power over the rest of the nation, the incentives for rural Whites to abandon support for U.S. democracy rise. And at that point, rural Whites’ willingness to traffic in precisely the sort of anti-democratic, insurrectionist behaviors that Hofstadter argues have rarely occurred in American history becomes even more of a threat.
Not every rural White American espouses xenophobic, conspiratorial, undemocratic, or violent attitudes. But rural Whites are overrepresented across all four of these threats. Journalists and pundits may explain away these patterns by citing the “economic anxieties” rural Whites experience. But explanations do not justify attitudes or behaviors that imperil the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.
Nor can economic anxiety explain why rural African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans—all of whom face even greater economic and health challenges than their White neighbors—exhibit stronger democratic commitments than do rural Whites. We offer a simple explanation for this racialized aspect of the patriotic paradox: Non-White rural citizens are not now, nor have they ever been, part of what we call America’s essential minority.
Unfortunately, a shockingly high percentage of that essential rural White minority so fears losing their long-enjoyed privileged status that they are willing to embrace undemocratic ideas and reactionary or even violent leaders—so long as doing so perpetuates their outsize power. These conditional patriots may pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, but they do so with stipulations.
Finally, readers surely noticed that we connected Donald Trump to all four threats. This was no accident, but neither was it a stretch. Throughout his two presidential campaigns and his four years in the Oval Office in between, Trump repeatedly supported racist, conspiratorial, undemocratic, and violent beliefs and behaviors. Millions of rural White voters seem undeterred or even thrilled by the former president’s statements and actions. In fact, they are the only major geo-demographic cohort among whom Trump performed better in the 2020 presidential contest than he did four years earlier.
With clear eyes and full hearts, rural Whites recognized Trump’s exclusionary, reality-defying, undemocratic, and violent tendencies—and then rallied behind him because of, not despite, his repeated disregard for America’s most sacred democratic traditions. Although we have cited here more than three dozen polls and academic studies linking rural citizens and rural Whites specifically to the four threats, perhaps the most powerful evidence that rural Whites pose a unique danger to the nation is their throaty, unmitigated defense of Donald Trump’s repeated assaults on American democracy.