Eight years after the election of Donald Trump, #TheResistance resembles Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab: maniacally hunting Trump and his voting base at the expense of its own sanity. In polls, the former president is edging ahead of Joe Biden.

Enter Paul Waldman, the former Washington Post columnist whose new title, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, makes it clear that its white whale is still the white working class. His quest to paint these voters as undereducated rubes blinded by their own gleeful racism, sexism, and xenophobia has been going strong since at least 2016. “If you have any sense, you’re coming to the realization that it was all a scam. You got played,” he wrote about Trump voters in a 2016 postelection column. “While you were chanting ‘Lock her up!’ he was laughing at you for being so gullible.”

Cowritten with political scientist Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage is a book-length version of that argument — but with the MSNBC-friendly amendment that rural whites aren’t just dumb hicks; they’re public enemy number one. “More than at any point in modern history, the survival of the United States as a modern, stable, multi-ethnic democracy is threatened by a White rural minority that wields outsize electoral power,” the authors proclaim.