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Ada's avatar

Hi, my name is Ada and I am a board member of el Tribuno del Pueblo, a national bilingual newspaper dedicated to sharing stories from progressive movements. Can we republish your piece? You can check out our website here: https://tribunodelpueblo.org/home/

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Rafi Simonton's avatar

While it's not exactly fair to comment on a book I haven't read, there are warning signs.

I started with your link to the poll work by Mike Lux--solid data and practical recommendations. His 2nd item says "Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs."

Maybe because this research is aimed at Dem party strategists and he is being diplomatic, Lux leaves unmentioned that the Dems do have an econ "plan." Continuing support for the neoliberal belief that The Market knows best. Also unmentioned is how the economics of this abstract entity dismisses devastated communities and destroyed environments as externalities. However, Lux's careful wording implies that for pragmatic reasons, (let alone that it might be fair or humane or moral,) offering some alternatives or ameliorations to the harsh system would be helpful politically. Anyway, the data gathered by this set of polls also very much support your work. And call into question the assumptions and interpretations of //White Rural Rage.//

Next, I read reviews of //Rage// both pro and con on several sites. Including by academics who seem to support the basic themes as well as angry criticisms by conservative rural people and by those on the far left who frame everything as class warfare. I can't say for sure if any of these views are representative of what the book actually says.

The reviews on Amazon that are pro seem to me often to reflect a liberal intellectual bias--they already "know" this Other is ignorant, bigoted, and dangerous, so the book just reinforces their beliefs. Aside from the anger of the con opinions, a few presented logical critiques. Among them comments that apparently another writer, Nicholas Jacobs, whose book //The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America// (2023) is on similar issues to //Rage// said on a radio interview that Schaller and Waldman cherry picked the data he and his co-author Daniel Shea developed and used it for their own ends. A commenter on Amazon who gave //Rage// 3 stars noted that Jacobs did a review on "Politico" 4/5/24 saying that the authors of //Rage// had misused the research done for //Rural Voter.// If so, pretty damning.

I'm left wondering whether there's anything objective to //Rage// at all. The MSM that tends to repeat these horror stories--including the NYT and MSNBC--seem to me to serve as disseminators of "info" that justifies Dem party neglect or outright condemnation. If "those people" are all only uncultured violent bigots, then they're undeserving of any sympathy whatsoever and no need for D econ or social policies that might help them.

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