For the last year, the two of us have been lucky to talk strategy with more than 130 other rural organizers and volunteer leaders. In the process, we built the beginnings of the Rural Defenders Union, a network of isolated, under-resourced, anti-authoritarian rural efforts. These folks are fighting a wide range of live authoritarian threats: from rural police forces weaponized against Black folks and unsheltered people; to local school boards and city councils undermining speech and democratic norms; to white supremacists and militias targeting LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities; to routine state violence against immigrant and indigenous communities, and beyond. 

What follows is a snapshot of what we heard from rural people who are tired of being misunderstood, scapegoated, and underestimated. They offer a hard look at reality, counsel on some radical steps towards change, and an invitation to join them in the work for deep democracy.

Believe us when we say things are bad

RuralOrganizing.org conducted a survey of 847 of their members earlier this year and found that 64.5% were experiencing at least one of the following threats (and usually more): book bans, anti-LGBTQ government action, anti-immigrant rhetoric, voter suppression, or political violence. Attacks on democratic institutions merely scratch the surface of what we’re up against. In most rural places, we are facing a generational crisis. Compared to our parents’ generation, jobs are harder to get, they pay less, and they are harder to keep. Suicide, mental illness, incarceration, divorce, liver disease, family separation, and overdose deaths are at or near all-time highs. We have been ringing the alarm bell for decades, but we were largely written off. Now, the authoritarianism we’ve been up against is coming for the whole country. 

If you tell us that America is already great, don’t be surprised if we reject the premise. More often than not, politicians of both parties do not have a communications problem in rural America; they have a reality problem.

We are already fighting back, and there are more of us than we imagined

In July, we put the word out: we were looking for rural, under-resourced groups, facing a live authoritarian threat, and boasting a base of volunteers with some track record of fighting back. We wanted folks willing to invest in a leadership cohort tasked with building a new sort of support group—committing to six three-hour training and strategy sessions over six weeks. We hoped maybe 30-40 groups would answer the call, and that maybe 20-25 would fit our criteria. Instead, we had 271 apply, and roughly 260 fit the criteria. Pride groups fighting to protect their people; immigrant- and indigenous-led projects; housing and harm reduction organizations; civil rights and participatory defense groups. From every region of the country, and across age and race differences.

As we got to meet them, four things surprised us about our new comrades:

• First, there were obviously a lot more of us than we thought.
• Second, they didn’t come from traditional non-profits (more than 85% of our applicants worked in groups with no full-time paid staff). 
• Third, folks had an overwhelming hunger for camaraderie —with each other, with national groups, and with movement elders who could offer practical advice and training. 
• And finally, they were employing a much broader range of tactics than we were used to seeing from larger non-profit community organizing groups. 

Help Us Buy TV Stations, Not TV Ads

The most common thing we heard from organizers was some version of “the same old tools don’t work here.” It makes sense. When authoritarian forces take hold, institutions crumble, faith in government falters, elections become less competitive, and folks rationally grow suspicious of powerful interests. Add all that up, and it’s no wonder that traditional issue advocacy and electoral campaigns just don’t work so well. 

Instead, we saw folks building their own infrastructure, and choosing to replace those in power, instead of persuading them. That looks like folks in Phenix City, Alabama scraping together a participatory defense program by and for the families of incarcerated people. Or groups like Texas Workers Defense Project, the Starbucks and Amazon Unions, and the Union of  Southern Service Workers injecting new grassroots energy into the labor movement. Or folks in Morgantown, West Virginia forcing a referendum to overturn an ordinance that criminalizes homelessness. Or Better Wyoming running their own slate of school board candidates to help protect public schools (and winning 15 out of 20 races in 2024). In rural Indiana, Hoosier Action describes its strategy to build rooted, lasting rural power as “Church. Bomb shelter. Vanguard.” Hoosier Action runs issue campaigns, to be sure, but those campaigns are the outgrowth of deep local institution-building. Most of all, it looked like community leaders cobbling together lasting shelters, community centers, citizen media outlets, land trusts, and other mutual aid institutions. 

While we pride ourselves on being scrappy, what if we didn’t have to be? As one activist put it when a national funder approached them offering to pay for an information campaign around abortion rights, “For that money, we could buy up TV stations or newspapers – not just TV ads.” And this is exactly the level of funding for bold new strategies we need. Our right-wing opponents have been serious about investing in organizing rural communities for generations. It’s time progressives are serious, too.

Quit punching down and running to the Right

Every week, it seems, a new group of poor or working-class people is targeted by national Democratic leaders as the reason we can’t have nice things: Black and Latino men, pro-Palestine activists, unsheltered people, transgender people, immigrant families, rural white folks, and so on. At best, they ignore us. At worst, they scapegoat, criminalize, or vote to deport us. They rarely take an honest assessment of where they went wrong, but instead blame us and run the same losing strategy again: appealing to white moderates. White moderates didn’t win the victories of the civil rights movement, and they will not win this moment. Instead, history teaches us that the only shot we have of moving the American public is this: when the most vulnerable stand up to the most powerful in order to expose a moral injustice that is too great to look away from.

Too often, we watch national progressive organizations and Democratic party leaders forget this lesson from past movements. Sometimes they even tell us in rural areas that they’re picking on another vulnerable group in order to curry favor with us, using the same divisive tactics the far Right uses. In our home states, much of the authoritarian agenda has been bi-partisan for a generation (the criminalization of homelessness and harm reduction, corporate tax breaks, mass deportation and incarceration, etc). We say, “Not in our name.”

When supposed pro-democracy leaders offer authoritarianism-lite as an alternative to real-deal authoritarians, it hurts all of us in the long run and loses elections in the short run. Working people are smart, and we know this country isn’t working for the vast majority of us. It may seem clever to appeal to conservatives or win celebrity endorsements, but anyone who wants our votes is better off fighting for the things we want instead—like healthcare for everyone, stronger labor unions, and affordable housing. 

This is not the first existential authoritarian threat in American history. Rural people stood at Standing Rock this decade, led by Native American elders. Black rural people were on the frontlines of the movement for civil rights 50 years ago in the South. Fifty years before that, Black, white, and immigrant miners formed a Redneck Army and fought authoritarian coal companies in Appalachia. Freedpeople, many in the countryside, built democracy and fought the resurgent Confederacy during Reconstruction. 

We are tired. From coal and natural gas operators to pharmaceutical companies and corrupt politicians, we are used to outsiders squeezing us for our labor and then skipping town. The record from those battles is clear. Change will require collective, bodily courage – from the most vulnerable, and against the most powerful. No shortcuts. We aren’t looking for handouts or lectures or messaging suggestions. But we could really use more comrades.

An invitation.

There is well-earned anger and resentment in rural America. But the overwhelming spirit we uncovered this year from rural volunteer leaders was hunger. Hunger for support, hunger for camaraderie, hunger to not be so alone. We have real wisdom too, earned under the thumb of self-described constitutional sheriffs and neo-Nazi school board members. Part of what makes us worth your time and talent is that we are used to doing a lot with a little. We take big swings and tinker in our basements. Necessity is the mother of invention. 

So often the people with the least are made to risk the most. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

What if we never had another conversation about rural America without rural Americans? What if foundations transferred wealth (buildings, newspapers, land), not just temporary salaries or program costs? What if big donations were made as a match to local membership dues, so that money power and people power both effectively came from the base? What if the lion’s share of attention and resources went to groups led by the people who have the least? What if boards and coalitions and leadership teams were majority-led by people without college degrees? What if our calendars were overrun by meetings with working-class folks facing live threats?

What if we never had another conversation about rural America without rural Americans?

And, what if we sought out the riskiest alliances and investments, instead of the safest? That’s what some folks are trying to do in small towns, and they’ll take all the help they can get.

Over the next few months and years, we will be given every reason to isolate ourselves, to retreat to our corners. This letter is an invitation to those who might be interested in doing the opposite. For national leaders looking for rural allies but aren’t sure where to start, drop us a line. For rural freedom fighters who are feeling alone, you aren’t. 

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