Rage Would Like a Word

As America goes mad, the temptation to turn on each other grows virtually irresistible. The loudest voices scream insults and indignities across widening divides, drawing us deeper into hostilities, fracturing our nation along a spider web of fault lines.

One of those fault lines is racial, several others are social, another is economic. One of the most pronounced and unstable is geographic, a modern-day equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line, except it doesn’t divide north and south. One side of the line is urban, the other side rural.

Not long ago, two urban authors—one an academic and former journalist, the other a media pundit—wrote a national bestseller about rural rage and the threat it poses to American democracy. The book bulges with telling facts and anecdotes but is just as full of galling stereotypes.

Rural is casually treated as a synonym for white even though a quarter of rural Americans are not white and nearly all rural population growth so far this decade is due to multiracia…