Silent upon a peak in Darien, watching the dawn of new forms of epistemic public arguments

From An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America by Tyler Austin Harper.  The subheading is White Rural Rage has become a best-seller—and kindled an academic controversy.  

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman was published a couple of months ago.  The authors have been on the circuit of TV programs and legacy mainstream media trying to make their racist and ill-informed argument.  While popular among the Left and legacy mainstream media, there has been a great deal of pushback from ordinary Americans, realists, and those who like arguments to be made based on facts, reason, and logic rather than emotive animus.

I have seen snatches of a couple of interviews and Schaller and Waldman come across as blatant hacks who are merely propagandizing a hateful world view, not as scholars making an argument.  Consequently I have invested little attention to their controversies.  It seems like one of those commercial and Mandarin Class blips that will disappear in time.

There is an argument made.  Urban - rural is not an unfamiliar divide in our own history and that of other major nations.  Sometimes it rises to the level of rage, from either direction.  There is usually a class aspect.  Very occasionally a race or ethnicity aspect.  It is not impossible that the Schaller and Waldman thesis could have merit.  However, it is not obviously true and does need the ordinary elements of empirical evidence, logic and reason to support it.  

But given the absence of empirical evidence for white racial rage at all, its proposed locus in rural America seems reasonably untenable.  As best I can tell from what I have seen, Schaller and Waldman have conjured a phenomenon without any empirical evidence (white racial rage) and have chosen to locate it in rural America; also without any empirical evidence.  Their argument comes across as racially and class-biased urban political activists spewing ideological propaganda.  

There is enough of that going around without wanting to find more to waste time on.

But beyond the argument they want to make, there is, to me, something more interesting happening.  I am seeing more instances of what I see here.

More specifically:  It seems to me that White Rural Rage made a big splash in its first couple or weeks of release, solely in the legacy mainstream media (print and cable/TV) and solely among the Mandarin Class.  They all agreed with its argument.

And then the new media, blogs, twitter accounts, etc. kicked in, pointing out that the Schaller Waldman emperor had no clothes.  That their argument was untenable.  And just like that, White Rural Rage seems to have dropped off the radar screen.  I haven't seen it referenced for a week or two until today.

It made a legacy mainstream media splash through hard and expensive traditional commercial marketing but then was refuted through an atomized evidence-based argument emergent in an uncoordinated fashion through new media (blogs, Substack, X accounts, etc.)  

This morning I come across an example of the latter, a double-barrel argument.  The first is in legacy mainstream media left-leaning stalwart, The Atlantic Magazine with An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America by Tyler Austin Harper.  

Harper goes to town on the fact that Schaller and Waldman seem to have come close to academic fraud, misrepresenting and omitting facts in order to try and sustain an argument that cannot actually be made.  Harper invests the time to check Schaller and Waldman's factual claims to produce the evidence of, charitably, error.  He also finds and interviews the leading scholars in the field of rural studies who overwhelmingly reject the Schaller and Waldman thesis in part and in whole.

From this effort, Harper produces this comprehensive indictment.  

The intriguing thing to me is the new epistemic ecosystem aspect.  The Atlantic Magazine is read by the elite and polite, the inside-the-beltway and inside-the-faculty-lounge people.  For the Mandarin Class.  It is written for the most educated and most political audience.  The people who natively would wish to believe the Schaller Waldman nonsense.  Harper is taking his argument to those least likely to be receptive of it, and the argument is apparently strong enough that one of the stalwarts of the Schaller Waldman world, The Atlantic Magazine, is willing to give it a platform.

Complementing the long form essay in polished language in The Atlantic Magazine, Harper also makes the same argument on X in a thread of tweets.  Far more abbreviated, little polish, but the bare bones facts.  His argument there is mutually reinforced by linking to The Atlantic Magazine article.  

I wrote about the book White Rural Rage and the scapegoating of rural people.

I talked to over 20 experts in the field of rural studies and found a pattern of errors, distortions, and misleading uses of scholarship in Schaller and Waldman’s book. It’s egregious.

Buckle up. 🧵 https://t.co/4NOSKcBdl5

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) April 4, 2024

Click through to read the 28 tweet thread.  While spare, it has the skeleton of the argument and is dense with names, references, quotes, links to source experts, links to source studies, links to source data.  

Epistemically, Harper has effectively and incisively dispatched a specious piece of ideological propaganda (White Rural Rage).  He has done so by writing for two different audiences, the Mandarin Class in The Atlantic Magazine and the Demotic on X.  He has made his argument in two different styles, discursive and refined literary in The Atlantic Magazine, and barebones but punchy on X.  And all at the same time.

The contrast in means and style between Schaller Waldman and Harper is striking.  

Schaller Waldman's approach is antique - Publish book and deep-pocketed corporate marketing department roadshow of TV, radio and print interviews with a pat, emotive, fact-free argument made in conjunction with a fawning legacy mainstream media.  

In contrast Harper's is a one man effort strategically going after multiple and far wider audiences of believers and unbelievers through legacy (The Atlantic Magazine) and emergent (X) channels in different formats.

In the past year I have seen half a dozen or more instances of this clash between a sluggish propaganda machine targeting a narrow audience (the Mandarin Class usually) and a lone or small group of adaptive, responsive, creative individuals making a much better argument to more people (including those who will oppose) over more platforms.  This seems like an emerging phenomenon.  

It is a contrast between tired, thread-bare propaganda arguments made in a flat, turgid, unattractive fashion through traditional formats to a narrow audience seeking only affirmation versus dynamic, structured, evidence-based arguments made to many audiences in many domains inviting intense scrutiny.  

The latter is epistemically far healthier and far more likely to produce useful truths and better knowledge much faster than the former approach.