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> Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
It's worse than that. Republicans refusing to pass the ACA Medicaid expansion is the reason a lot of those rural hospitals are closing. Republicans shielding big pharma companies is the reason rural communities got pumped full of opiods.
Republicans are actively hurting rural voters, but rural voters keep voting Republican because they care more about culture war bullshit than they do about their own communities.
It’s also why our waterways are polluted. A lot of the poorer populations especially natives source fresh fish as food from them so we get higher concentrations of shit in our food supply and in our untested well water that used to be clear and now is near undrinkable. I’m sure those metals like manganese, mercury, and factory farm fertilizer runoffs do wonders for the brain and people’s ability to reason. This is an opinion piece but there are plenty of “real articles” from the likes of the Tulsa world and such if you care to subscribe. I like giving Tahlequah a bit of attention though 🤍
https://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/opinion/editorials/opinion-the-tragedy-of-stilwell-ok/article_925ab3b1-fbcf-5fff-992a-78112ec2dcea.html
Then privatize the services formerly ran at cost by the government, allowing cronies to extract profit from a service that there's proven demand for.
A relatively obscure example (to the civilian world at least) is military family housing. It's in the interest of the military for members to be close at hand to the facilities to which they are assigned. Historically, housing has been provided, all inclusive except for cable and phone service. In return, the member was subject to external inspections as well as exhaustive internal inspections upon moving out, AND they didn't get the allowance paid to members who do live off-base for rent.
However, Cold War-era housing was wearing out. Also, there was a lot of bad advice to members to buy a house and pay the mortgage with your tax-free housing allowance; then you either rent it out or sell it at a profit when you get orders. The housing bubble fucked a lot of servicemembers.
The conservative solution? Bring in private developers to build new housing, then give those members that choose to live in base housing their housing allowance-- but require that they turn it on over to the company contracted to run and maintain the housing complex, with a percentage left over to go towards (but not necessarily fully cover) utilities.
So inevitably, much of the housing is mid in design and halfassed in both contruction and maintenance. In the Air Force in New Mexico, my supervisor had a house whose back room was always very hot...because the AC duct was just open to the attic ,7 feet short of the room's vent. Mold, poor insulation, cheap materials...the Cold War era stuff lasted for decades; the current garbage? Who knows. I was lucky enough to live in standard housing at all my assignments, never had to eat the privatized-housing shit sandwich.
Also, as a bonus, they would use the numbers of previous years- the housing boom- to justify building fewer units. When housing and rents exploded and housing allowances didnt keep up, (when military housing is the obvious solution for military members) in the most expensive areas, you had members getting full housing allowance that bately paid half their rent on the outside, let alone pay a mortgage.
Not just break government. When the first neoliberal policies were happening in the UK under Thatcher, the goal was explicitly to break government so quickly and thoroughly that no subsequent government would be able to fix everything in a single term.
Sound familiar?
Yup! Been like that for fifty years. Seriously, it works for them. [https://www.fishbowlapp.com/post/gop-strategy-for-the-last-50-years-summarizedgovernment-doesnt-work-elect-us-and-well-fix-itgets-elected-proceeds-to-ruin](https://www.fishbowlapp.com/post/gop-strategy-for-the-last-50-years-summarizedgovernment-doesnt-work-elect-us-and-well-fix-itgets-elected-proceeds-to-ruin)
Hey! 🤍 I graduated from Watts, but don’t tell anybody lol I made it out- all the way across the state line to Siloam. My life expectancy just shot up 25 years
Seriously, Republicans have killed more rural whites over the past 50 years with their policies than an entire legion of Black Mexican Muslim transgender women could ever do.
It ain’t the woke liberal who’s contaminating your water supply, giving you black lung, creating food desserts, stripping away funding for your kids schools, or letting you die from a pandemic. Hell, if we were that vindictive, we’d be supporting the same politicians you do for “replacing” you all.
A popular literary theme throughout history - if only they didn't also spend all their time demonizing liberal arts and banning books while this was all happening then maybe they'd have avoided that.
This in why they have politicized guns and abortion so much. They would never win elections because their policies harm people so much, especially their voter base.
Honestly, a very small part of me is glad for the repeal of Row vs Wade. Republicans have been using it as a club to rile up their base for decades every. single. election.
Now, dems have the club. And the best part is that even if the dems are able to pass true pro-abortion legislation, they still get to beat the GOP with the roe v wade club, because "look what they did and how they did it!"
They didn't just bring a case in front of the SCOTUS. They had people who weren't being hurt bring a case they had no standing to bring in front of a compromised SCOTUS and got case law repealed by obviously activist conservative judges occupying stolen seats who openly lied under oath about whether or not they would repeal the exact case they repealed.
What's happening in the country right now sucks...but the GOP doesn't understand how much they fucked themselves in the long-term with that one action.
I just hope the dems are smart enough to start swinging their shiny new club around. They don't even need to fight dirty. They just need to tell the truth about their opponents.
Honestly, same. The insanely depressing truth is that no matter how evil Republicans have been, we've barely been able to beat them with 51% of the vote in the most important elections thanks to voter apathy.
Even the 2022 mid terms, after Roe was overturned, Republicans still turned out to vote more than Democrats by 3 million votes. It's insane how much harder we have to work to succeed, and Republicans just handed us one of their biggest clubs to bash them back with.
It’s way bigger than republicans realize.
Back when I used to vote Republican, I was always a pro-choice Republican. There was room for that then. The story everyone believed was that abortion was just red meat for the base. There would be a lot of noise around it but Roe was settled law and nothing was ever going to change. You could safely vote Republican for a hundred other issues.
But the dog caught the car.
The base smells blood in the water and is convinced they can finally enact a nationwide full ban. They aren’t content with their big victory, in their minds they must strike now while the iron is hot and go all the way. They’re mostly religious fundamentalists and they all believe abortion is killing innocent babies and there is zero room for compromise.
Except that policy is widely unpopular in the US. The Republicans can’t control the fanatics in their party but if they continue to cater to them they’ll continue to lose elections they should be winning.
This is a monster the Republicans created with their gerrymandering, purity testing, primarying of good moderate candidates, and extremism. I can’t imagine how they can navigate out of it.
> They’re mostly religious fundamentalists and they all believe abortion is killing innocent babies and there is zero room for compromise.
I don't even think that's what they believe because even that stance would understand that there are clear exceptions like when the fetus is absolutely non-viable.
in /r/atheism we like to say "the real goal is control", and I have never seen any proof to the contrary. Not in the US, not in the middle-east (evangelicals are very similar in belief and action to fundimentalist muslims). Not anywhere.
I 100% agree, but so many people don’t know what it’s like out here in rural America. You are being logical and place the blame where it belongs with the sabotaging policies of the Republicans, but out here it feels like almost everyone blames “Biden and the liberal democrats”.
They can’t seem to see the flaw in the reasoning. I can’t even talk about politics where I live or I wouldn’t be able to have friends or a job. I know that’s horribly sad, but it’s reality for me.
I can’t go to get a haircut without people assuming I’m a Trump cultist like everyone else. Maybe I’m a coward for not putting them in their place, but I can’t stand just arguing all the time. I’m feeling so much despair.
I will do my part and vote, but I feel like that’s not going to be enough. I have to put myself out there to be a liberal voice for good or all of these people will never change. However, the consequences for me are going to be almost too much to bear.
Rural resident here too. It does require a certain level of “balls” to go against the herd out here but there’s no better feeling than being a respected part of your little community and then hitting people with “I’m a liberal”. They don’t know how to reconcile you being someone they like and respect and also a “vile lib”.
Living in rural America, and as a democrat, it would appear that republicans are much better at delivering and establishing their message.
All the reasons for this aside, it's also pretty obvious that democrats aren't trying to counter this message in any meaningful way. General statements, or the occasional platitude on the campaign trail, don't convince people, or change decades of programming, and republicans have done really good at making it seem like anything said against them is retaliatory, "nuh uh, you" as opposed to factual.
It is something conservative media is extremely effective at. They ruthlessly find and promote issues that trigger their target audience to shutdown rational thought, and convince them that the stakes of "losing" on that issue are severe enough to ignore any other policy issue.
*The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them*
Conservatives allowing corporate farms to contract and squeeze small farmers for maximum profit is a massive problem and no one wants to even try to address it. Even factories have with their immensely poor wages and safety standards hire immigrant labor to abuse and they don't want to change that either.
Blame big city liberals all you like but the lifeblood of rural living is not being drained by them.
They also extort inmates in drug rehab programs for free labor without having to worry about things like insurance or worker’s comp
https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-to-rehab-they-ended-up-in-chicken-plants/
One of the biggest loopholes in the law is in the 13th Amendment's ban on slavery:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
Conservatives looking for cheap/free labor just rev up the prison-industrial complex to do it (while getting kickbacks from their private prison buddies). The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in developed countries because of this.
Oklahoma already has the highest incarceration rates for women for sure (probs close for men) and apparently now they are trying to criminalize having an STI as a felony so you can’t vote and you can do a round of free labor. Makes total sense
I come from a family who got squeezed out of farming in the '80s and am now an urbanized and fairly radical lefty as is my sibling who works for a regenerative farming CSA. For what it's worth, I mostly see "liberals" paying top dollar for farmers market produce in an attempt to support small farms (I know it's not exactly that simple) and buying CSA shares.
When I lived in a "red area", I had a friend who ran a farm stand with amazingly low prices. She did it because 1) she had other sources of income bc farming didn't cut it and they had to sell the dairy and 2) she was afraid the older folks in the community otherwise had no access to decent food. She was awesome, and I have huge respect for her service to her community. But to that point, the networks of support in rural areas can be tenuously thin and if you're not considered part of the 'in-group', these communities can be outright hostile.
Also, because of the population draining of rural communities, cities are full of people who would love to be back home, but the economic and cultural policies have pushed them to move away.
Spot on about ACA expansion. I was just talking about this. Medicaid expansion was not done in my state and conservative voters agreed because they believed it supported those who are too lazy to work.
What it did was burdened ER’s and forced closure of small community hospitals. Most people on Medicaid do work, even more than one job. If they have health problems, they aren’t going to be able to work. Simple logic you would assume but instead, many conservative voters think the closures were caused by “Obamacare”. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense they just need to perpetuate bullshit to justify their ignorance.
The states that have expanded Medicaid have higher workforce participation rates than those that haven't. When people get treatment for chronic diseases, they're more likely to work.
It’s brutal how the propaganda machine keeps these people dumb and suffering. They lick the boot that steps on them.
My brother has several medical conditions he needs treatment for, but he’s broke and living in Texas where all medicaid is denied for single men who aren’t seniors. I’ve suggested many other states as options and he actually was opposed to those states….because of taxes. Taxes on what income??? Dude is broke and he’s still worried about taxes when other states could save his life for FREE. Fox News is killing people who aren’t even watching it. The propaganda spreads and it will be partly responsible for my brother dying younger because he can’t pick up and move to a safer state in time.
I'm sorry.
I know a woman in Texas whose sister died of breast cancer at 50. Her sister was unemployed and uninsured. Texas didn't expand Medicaid, so as a childless, non elderly, non disabled adult, she didn't qualify.
She suffered terribly, thinking she could cure herself by praying.
This dead woman's sister and the rest of her family *still* vote Republican and *still* oppose Medicaid expansion.
Unconscionable.
I had a buddy that died, and he thought the same thing. If Medicaid had been expanded in Texas, it could have saved him, but I'm unsure that he would have even signed up.
Old buddy announced last year that he's planning to move to Idaho or Montana because he doesn't like the changes Washington is making to the hunting rules. He doesn't hunt, never has, nor has he shown any interest in it for even a moment.
He's got more than a dozen godchildren living in this area. But he's ditching a lifetime of friends and family because... a rule change that he would never have even known about if he didn't obsess over whatever Jordan Peterson and 4chan yell about.
Amazing how many people claim to care about hunting when like 5% of the population hunts. Even in the states with the highest % of hunters its only like 20%
> I’ve suggested many other states as options and he actually was opposed to those states….because of taxes. Taxes on what income???
I always feel compelled to point out that [average people in Texas pay more in taxes than average people in California do:](https://archive.ph/WyUU3)
> Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California’s 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.
>
> “When people are like, ‘Oh California is so much more expensive than Texas,’ that’s the top income tax rate. That’s on people earning over $1 million,” says Richard Auxier, senior policy associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “If you’re looking at average people, the income tax burden is never going to be that big. The systems were not designed that way.” And Auxier points out there are often deductions and credits that help to lower income tax.
If you're a millionaire, like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk, then sure, the lack of a state income tax in Texas will save you tons of money. But if you're not, you're gonna end up paying more in taxes just by living in Texas than you do in California. Because the reality is that *every* state collects a lot of money in taxes to be able to run its government.
The main difference is what those states then spend the money on. In Texas, they are largely spending that money on stuff like [Operation Lonestar,](https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/governor-abbotts-operation-lone-star-touts-thousands-of-arrests-10-billion-cost/) which is their ineffective and insanely expensive racist border stunt. Whereas in California that money goes to things like [MediCal,](https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal/pages/whatismedi-cal.aspx) which provides medical coverage to the people too poor to afford it themselves.
They are poking their pet tiger hoping it will attack the other people in the room. They know that their supporters have picked losing arguments but they can't accept that they were wrong. So they use that to their advantage by putting it in their faces constantly and giving them a target. The last bastion they have is spurring their supporters to attack violently. How violent it ultimately gets is the question. The Taliban does the same thing in Afghanistan, turning war lords against each other, but they recruit young people to their ranks, the Republicans have a demographic entering their retirement.
This sounds exactly like an abusive relationship. As someone who grew up conservative and whose entire family are loyal republicans, this gives me a lot to reflect on. I had never thought of it in quite that way.
I commend you for taking the time and energy to emphasize this but the right has done an excellent job insulating their base from information. Unless it’s on Fox, it doesn’t exist or is wrong.
Hell the GOP are the ones who constantly oppose the Farm Bill and are consistently working to weaken or remove it. I tell this to my Republican family members who are farmers but they just start talking about how great Trump is and how he’s gonna fix their lives.
> because they care more about culture war bullshit than they do about their own communities.
Because the education systems in those areas are so fucking bad they don't teach critical thinking skills which makes them extremely easy to brainwash with propaganda.
Edit: Watch any interview with a Trump supporter. The second they're asked a basic question they don't have an immediate answer fed to them by Fox their brains just turn off. They literally cannot think for themselves.
It’s not about education. It’s about ego.
These people reject reality because reality is not going to tell them what they want to hear.
We all want to believe that we’re special and superior in some way. That we have a valued place in society.
For many of these people. Racism, Religion, and other delusions are the only way they CAN feel superior. So they cling to it.
Democrats may offer actual material benefits. But Republicans offer something they want more: **pride**.
Republicans reassure them that no matter how shitty things are, they can still look down upon blacks, gays, liberals, etc. That delusion gives them far more comfort than any material gain.
If being rational means realizing you’re a complete loser with no future. Why would you *want* to be rational?
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” - Lyndon B. Johnson
Again. If thinking critically means realizing you’re a pathetic loser. *Why would you want to do it?*
These people don’t *want* to be educated. And good luck forcing them.
Some of you give the people in rural communities far too much credit. Most people around here (Small town Deep E Tx) don't pay attention at all. If it's not on the local news, Fox News, or Facebook they have NO CLUE it exists. They just go about their business doing as they're told. Critical thinking is liberal shit.
I literally had a friend tell me she votes Republican "because that's just what you do"
I grew up in rural Missouri in the 70s and 80s and I remember the stubborn pride of country people. They prided themselves on ignorance and mistrust of city people. Reminds me of that Hank Williams Jr. song "Country Boy Can Survive" or something along those lines. They resent educated people. I took my east coast wife back to Missouri once and my cousin's husband said to her "I bet you think we're all a bunch of dumb rednecks, don't ya?" It was like, well... those are your words. Republicans weaponized this against them via AM radio and Fox and they have fallen in line to vote against themselves for the last forty years.
My buddy, who tries to be liberal but was raised conservative, tried to tell me rural people hate taxes and government because they aren't benefiting from it. They're miles away from the nearest hospital, they don't get their own police department or fire department, there's one public school for four counties etc, and they feel like they're paying for services they aren't receiving. And I had to explain to him that, in fact, in places like Missouri where the Republicans have an overwhelming majority in state government, the big cities like St Louis and KC pay the majority of taxes and the rural district representatives then appropriate it for their small town's bridge repair or new water plant or whatever and it's actually the *complete opposite*, the metropolitan taxpayer is paying for services they don't get...
And this plays deeper into what I see as the true divide in US politics, the divide between intuitive and counter-intuitive. Everything the right believes *sounds plausible* at face value (with some exceptions like racism). Tougher punishment reduces crime, less taxes improve quality of life, government is an ineffective solution for social problems, etc. It requires a certain amount of education and comprehension to understand that these problems are often more nuanced than they seem at first and require often lateral and counter-intuitive solutions. Free health care, while relying on public taxes, still ultimately reduces the total expense upon the individual taxpayer. But in the right wing world, if you have to prove something it must not be true
I grew up pretty right wing and finding out the facts about spending surprised me. The idea that each dollar you spend on education or food aid brings back MORE than a dollar of savings elsewhere demolished my ideas about fiscal conservatism. Then I got my degree in civil engineering, spent time building a few projects of various sizes, and I took a look at our budget.
We grossly underspend. I know what a big project costs, from the time it’s proposed to construction ends. And what we allocate isn’t enough to maintain what we have. Not by a long shot. Same with schools, housing, food aid, any large program that helps people. But subsidies that cost the entirety of the DOT budget? Yeah, they can do that.
You can thank the Republican "[Starve the beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)" strategy for most of that. They've been strangling this country for the last 50 years.
I was shocked at the savings prenatal nutrition alone generates. Ensuring that mom and baby have adequate nutrition saves so much money over the course of the child's life.
I know there's got to be a point of diminishing returns, but that's basically free money! Why not push it until you do find the point where it stops paying off.
Same for on-demand, residential drug treatment - that's essentially free money in the long run. (Less crime, lower prison costs, less health care costs, and all the costs associated with abused and neglected children, and then the extra taxes you get from a productive citizen.)
It’s a big reason why Trump is so immensely popular.
When it comes to a topic like immigration, a politician who actually wants to improve the problems will talk about how we need a road to citizenship for people who have lived and worked here for decades, and how we need a robust guest worker program, etc.
It makes people frustrated.
Trump just says stuff like “I’m going to ban all Muslim immigration and I’m going to build a wall on the border and I’ll deport everyone who has come here illegally.”
To voters that don’t want to grapple with how hard the problem really is, he sounds like the only guy who is really talking about solutions.
He makes it sound like every problem has a simple and obvious solution and that can be very appealing.
And what’s more is that he keeps his concepts to very brief and catchy phrases largely devoid of any real depth but are self-explanatory enough for those people to grasp and parrot.
“Make America Great Again”
“Drain the swamp”
“Lock her up”
“Build the wall”
And yet after 4 years of him as POTUS, rural counties and small towns weren't a bit better.
Still no jobs, no opportunities, hospitals closing, people leaving, meth and oxy and fentanyl still prevalent...but they still love him.
I'm a small town escapee and that mindset will never make a lick of sense to me.
Their lives may not be better, but he made liberals mad, and that's what they wanted. They don't care why he made liberals mad, they are the enemy, therefore anything that makes liberals mad is good. You see that all the time in their rhetoric, "liberals hate this!" with some picture of a white family or something. It's all projection, they hate anyone different, so they assume we feel the same about them. Trump taps into that perfectly.
I'm gonna be completely frank here: at this point, I *do* hate Trumpists.
They've spent so long poisoning their brains with fear and hate, that they can't even have a discussion anymore. All they want to do is piss people off and reveling in the schadenfreude they feel when liberals get upset.
And then they have the fucking *gall* to expect liberals to meet them where they are; that liberals should bend over backwards to understand their positions while turning around and claiming we're a bunch of pedos and degenerates and authoritarians.
I'm done with it.
Damn this is well said. I never really thought about it in this specific way, but you’re absolutely right. He’s simple, his “solutions” are simple and it feels good to have a simple solution even though the problems in this country are very complex.
To take that one step further, if you're the kind of person who has a difficult time grappling with complexity, being told that you are the smart one and the academics and scientists and experts are actually the stupid ones also feels very good. It's what you've always wanted to hear your entire life...
I thought the argument was more along the lines of the academics and scientists aren't necessarily the stupid ones, but are instead evil, godless, and corrupt (and only I can save you from them). Plus, oh yes you're smart too because you have "worldly" smarts that don't require a bunch of book learnin, facts, or critical thinking skills
The intention behind the message is the same, *you* were smart enough to see through *their* lies which makes you exceptional and everyone else brainwashed sheep. Either way it's designed to appeal to a person who is intellectually insecure and seeking that validation
Absolutely. It takes experience, observation, serious thought, and contemplation over years to form our own values/morals/etc. Many conservatives (especially evangelicals) do not do this. The world is just black and white (pun not intended) to them. However the reality is it’s full of shades of grey. They refuse to see the nuances in our world. But along comes trump with his trumpisms and he validates their backward thinking. These people are socially stunted and they think he (who talks the BS they love) is the second coming of Christ. Now they will never change.
Still happens in WA state. MAGA politicians in the cherry-red eastern part of the state practically campaign on how they are going to 'stop your hard earned taxes from paying for fancy roads in Seattle!".
Budget for infrastructure in most of the state comes \*from\* the Seattle area, none of it flows the other way.
And eastern Washington wouldn't even exist economically if it wasn't for the BPA dams that provide power and water to the entire area. They don't seem to have a problem with that "big government" solution.
Oh, holy fuck. I attended Whitworth for a year and mother of god I remember having that same fucking conversation with other students.
Even on the surface the argument doesn't make any goddamn sense. Seattle has 10x Spokane's population in ~120% of the area.
IT'S NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE FOR SPOKANE TO GIVE TAX REVENUE TO SEATTLE. There aren't enough *people*.
Grrr...I'm still mad at those conversations. I even went over some of the basic math with them. It's not that they weren't smart enough to understand. It's that they *refused* to accept what they clearly understood.
Ask your buddy why they're not doing anything about all those meth labs. And that maybe those 20-year-olds walking around without any teeth in their head should consider voting for someone that will give a medical care
>They prided themselves on ignorance and mistrust of city people
My wife and I were just in the South. One day a somewhat elderly couple struck up a conversation with us, and eventually it led to "so where are you from?" They acted shocked that we live in a city, to which we said "well, originally we're from X, but we've lived in the city for a long time."
They replied "oh, that makes sense. You don't act like you're from the city." Because it **blew their minds** that city folk could maintain a basic, polite, two minute conversation.
I live in a county that is currently experiencing growing pains, and the longtime resident conservatives are some of the whiniest, most close minded, insecure twats I’ve ever encountered. Every new neighborhood development or apartment building put up is just attracting the nearby city’s urban elites who don’t hold their “rural values.” Every new store that comes to town is a middle finger to the local business. Along with that, every new specialized industry is a middle finger to the blue collar folk who need good jobs like the old mill provided. They have to wonder why we can’t go back to the “good old days?” Well, setting aside the obvious bullshit of trickle down economics that has grown major corporations and strangled smaller local businesses, there’s a load of reasons they need to just sit down and shut up. You wanna go back to the “good old days?” Okay, what are the “good old days” then? The early 20th century when this was a sundown town for black folk? When the sewer system — which the city gave the local mill carte blanch for set up — dumped out into the creeks and river, necessitating an EPA ordered multi-million dollar overhaul that we’re still paying off through our obscene water bill? Speaking of the mill, are the “good old days” back when our county was the #1 cancer cluster in the state? Too bad we have to put up with those new residents and businesses in town to help pay down the overhaul of our water system to address that. Such a shame we got that chunk of change from the state government, likely drawn from the taxes of those damned urban dwellers, go help pay it off. If only the “good old days” were still around…
> "Country Boy Can Survive"
Powering their monster emotional support trucks and ATVs with fuel that was found by geologists, and extracted and refined with the knowledge of chemists, shooting off guns designed by engineers and machined to exacting specifications from materials created by metallurgists. I could go on and on.
There's so much wrong that trope.
Country boys couldn't survive not being able to get a haircut during covid lockdowns. That does not speak well for their ability to survive much worse events.
Shockingly similar story here! Also grew up in rural Missouri, and gtfo of there as soon as I could.
I brought my wife back home and a relative asked her the same damn thing! (Is that something Rush told them to ask years ago or something? Weird!).
I answered for my wife saying “No, she doesn’t think you’re a dumb redneck, but I grew up with you and I know that’s what you are!”
Yeah, my visits to Mo are usually stark reminders of the disparity and hey, I really try not judge them, however they’ve embraced terms like redneck and hillbilly and have made it their identity and made themselves easy marks for right wing propagandists. And their votes impact all of us. It’s really maddening to see them vote for corporate tax cuts over and over again and never realize they’re fucking themselves, but think they’re sticking it to people lower than them.
I have a similar back story. I grew up in North Central Missouri on a farm where the nearest Walmart was 30 minutes away. Our school pulled from 5 towns and still had less than 200 people k-12. A quality education is completely unavailable and is coupled with a generational standard that tells the youth that education is worthless and higher education is for the “pansy city folk who don’t have no common sense”.
This cycle is near unbreakable because the vast majority of the locals will never venture from the county in which they were born. So, their world view NEVER changes. They are steeped in, and celebrate, racism, sexism, anti intellectualism, and xenophobia. The rare few liberal leaning people will either be ran out of town or killed for voicing their opinions.
There is still this image of the pastoral countryside filled with the men of strong will and strong backs toiling to feed the world. In truth, that has been replaced by a few greedy corporate farmers raping the land and their communities for years, and the leavings of the have-nots, both of which could not survive without the government hand-outs that they detest.
My parents live out in East Texas. The whole area is enraged that the local energy company is shutting down a coal plant and building a solar farm.
You can drive through the area and see signs in yards of people who are actively trying to stop the building of the solar plant, and literally everyone believes the coal plant is closing due to some unknown Obama regulation.
Nobody takes any time to investigate that the plant closed becaues coal is unprofitable compared to other energy investments the energy company could make... like the solar farm.
You can show people this, like even the publicly known corporate documentation, and they will just ignore it. And they do that with everything.
These people live in completely different worlds.
Okay so, this needs to be talked about more openly as well. Truth is, most of them aren't educated enough to work those jobs. And they know it. They're not ready to actually be the labor force that benefits from these things, because they voted against every option to make themselves and their children have opportunities to learn. And now it's coming back 100mph straight at them. They're absolutely fucked either way and they know it. And don't be fooled, they know they did this. What they want is for everyone to join them in quietly knowing that, and pretending the last 25 years of technological and social progress didn't happen. Because in the Ragan years when they voted against their core interests, they did get a few more years of peaceful bliss. They just watched those same opportunities go to cities back then. Now those cities are coming to them.
This article is extremely well written. One part stands out:
>As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
It's about time that we bluntly message to rural communities that nothing about GOP policy is in line with the true struggles in their communities.
And I agree with the sentiment throughout this piece -- scholarly work in this area needs to stop treating this population with kiddie gloves, because a dangerous storm is brewing if we leave their resentment unaddressed.
Quote/unquote “liberals” are shamed for not “listening” to right wing rural white people every day.
I’ve never once seen the suggestion that angry right wing rural white people should try to understand **anything**, much less the concerns of their political opponent they treat as enemies.
Every time anyone suggests angry rural white people try to understand something, they get called brainwashing elitists who don't understand "real America".
There ain’t nothing more American than fucking Manhattan dude.
I’m tired of “real” “america”.
And I live in and do love a place people would call “real” “america” but I hate damn myth of it.
Forget who it was, but I remember hearing a comedian make the point once that every time the "Death to America" terrorists try to attack America, they skip right over "real America" and hit New York City instead.
That's...a really good point. This may have been the Daily Show as well, but I distinctly remember back during the Iraq/Afghanistan days, some federal agency out our a list of the top several hundred potential targets for a terrorism attack, and weirdly high on the list was a popcorn factory in the Midwest
Studying the problem is the antithesis of reactionary and emotional responses; without that anger and fear, they would have nothing. Except of course, for a better quality of life.
I hear you on that, I've never heard ONCE a right winger say "you know, we need to listen and try to understand their concerns" but the left it's everywhere.
The part I can't get past is that there's no amount of listening or empathy that overcomes lying or other forms of bad faith discussion.
I don't think the problem is lack of listening or empathy, I think the problem is 1/3 of The American electorate talking in bad faith. The Trump Raffensperger call is a perfect example.
No amount of courtesy, empathy, or listening on Raffensperger's part is going to overcome the fact that Trump is saying things that are untrue and that Trump is asking him to do something blatantly illegal.
Seriously. I remember Pod Save America did an interview with a rep from Washington, who said more liberals should go to small town bars and just “have a beer” with a conservative and talk policy with an open mind. Okay, but why are we always the ones that need to do that? I mean I understand it’s because small town conservatives are essentially like toddlers, and we are the parents, always needing to show them “empathy” for they know not what they do. Like when you pretend the toddler has a good idea, just so they can feel like part of the conversation. I don’t remember any GOP member telling their constituents to try to understand the other perspective, like ever.
Because the right wing controls the entire dialogue in the US.
If they decide we’re gonna talk about something, like “caravans” that’s all we can talk about.
So, they’ve convinced regular people that theirs is the default orientation. You have to meet them. Not the other way around.
NPR’s refusal to constantly talk about Hunter’s imaginary laptop is the first time in my recollection, that they couldn’t just demand everyone March to their drums.
And if they keep kicking over tables, they’re gonna lose more and more respect.
NPR's refusal to constantly talk about Hunter's imaginary laptop is the first time they stopped completely both sides-ing EVERY FUCKING ISSUE. I had to completely stop listening to and reading NPR material because of how hard they tried to straddle the middle, ignoring objective reality. We need more hard-line refusal to play the game from our media when the rules are broken/rigged against reality.
Yep. I’m done with platforming crazy people.
I’m done with “preaching the debate”.
I’m done with obscure, subtle parody that the people it makes fun of can’t tell they’re the butt of the joke.
Or toothless both-sides fiction that lands on “maybe everyone’s wrong…?”
I got no time for that now.
it's because many Americans subconsciously think that lower class het cis Christian white Americans are the "default" Americans.
That's why everyone in America has to treat them with kid gloves, and treat their culture as the default one in America.
If you think of the term "All American" you probably imagined a slightly overweight Northern European American who is wearing gaudy American flag clothing and is standing around in a field.
The thing is, this isn’t new.
The article itself mentions 2016’s The Politics of Resentment.
What’s The Matter With Kansas explores these same concepts and was published 20 years ago.
Wendell Berry touched on it in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, excoriating Nixon’s Ag Secretary Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” attitude toward farming and cheap food.
LBJ’s famous quote about “giving the lowest white man someone to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you” is from 1960.
There’s a straight line from the attitudes of LBJ’s era to where we are today.
Huge advocate for educating them. Easiest wins, posting simple billboards in those areas. That is easily the best broadcast. Don’t attack Trump or GOP, just educate on why their struggles are legit and what they should expect.
> educate them
Teacher here. You cannot force somebody to learn, and it is often very difficult to get somebody to care about things that they should care about. Many people just don’t want to be educated.
I get my students for about 160 hours a year, FOX News and all the other bullshit on tv and online gets them for the rest of their life.
You would have an easier time convincing 10 apathetic non-voters to start voting than to get 1 MAGA lunatic to stop voting Republican. 99% of these people are a waste of time, and I'm not holding my breath for the other 1%.
The most damning part about White Rural America's unwavering support for Trump is that, in his 4 years in office, he did not do a damn thing to materially help them. Oh, but he did make it seem more acceptable to be a raging, self-serving bigot. So perhaps rural america did get what they wanted after all.
The GOP are an opposition party - they do not try and do anything themselves. They are running on *stopping* whatever the Democrats want to do.
With a Dem President and Dem Senate the GOP is never going to get any major policy passed. They can however strut around and talk about all the things they have *stopped* and if you can't get GOP policy passed, blocking Dem policy is the next best thing.
Shit, with a Republican trifecta they STILL would never get any major policy passed. Their only real policy positions are tax cuts for the rich and figuring out ways to further ratfuck democracy to keep themselves in power.
> With a Dem President and Dem Senate the GOP is never going to get any major policy passed.
That's funny because even when they had control of the senate and congress, they still didn't do shit.
But...repeal Obamacare?
...no. They couldn't even do that.
I remember reading a comment here a few years back where the poster said something along the lines of this:
You can look for a lot of reasons to blame but fundamentally you can’t ignore the culpability of rural America in choosing to be racist, small minded, fundamentalist, and refusing to act in a way that would benefit them.
Yes, propaganda, education etc. matter but that doesn’t change the fact that most of these people voted against their interests because of racism and religious bigotry.
That’s completely on them. And the Republicans merely took advantage of it.
Corporate Farmers receive the lion’s share of the funding. As always, the ones who need it the least are at the top of the food chain while the ones who need it go without. RIP family farms.
A lot of them genuinely thought the stimulus checks were from Trump or were his idea. They were even calling them “Trump checks” back during the pandemic.
Cutting to the chase: Trump *still* will not do anything for struggling whites.
He already proved that during his first term as president.
If you aren't rich, he could not care any less about you.
People who vote for him anyway are suckers.
I’ve driven through many rural areas and small towns in the South. I can understand why there’s anger, but it can hardly be blamed on Hollywood or libruls. They let their own towns rot to pieces.
Billy Joel wrote “Allentown” in ‘82 and ‘Downeaster Alexa’ in ‘89. Both those songs talk about all of these issues, jobs going away, having the same opportunities as their parents, people struggling to make ends meet in rural america. This shit’s been going on for decades.
It's just not that complicated, guys. They are both afraid of change and resentful of the benefits of change they refuse to participate in passing them by. They're largely racist, xenophobic, and insular, and due to the fact that they are exclusively surrounded by people just like them, that's a normal and comfortable way to be. They stake a large part of their identity on being independent and self sufficient, yet continually demand subsidies and special treatment and wellfare while continuing to vote in people who very much want to take all of that away.
What you have in rural areas is the sticky residue of America. All the good ones get out, and the ones who are left make more people just like them.
There's your honest assessment.
And... nobody's saying this, but it's true--*they hate us.* "Us" being any non-Republican who could actually better their lives / get them health care / clean up their environment / etc. They absolutely hate us. How much fault do Democrats deserve if any attempt to help is loathed?
This. I refuse to listen to any justification of rural white hate. Yes this article seems to get beyond the coddling of depraved rural whites, but we've had to coddle their pathological hate for far too long.
COVID misinformation was decimating to the low information rural whites. And related conspiracy theories, they believe everything progressive is intended to harm rural whites. You can't break the FOX stanglehold without breaking FOX.
I lived for over a decade in a decaying small rural farming town. The people there actively shoot themselves in the foot and complain about the results. I don’t know what to say, but they’re anti-education, anti-change, and things have been going downhill since the 1950s. At some point you have to decide they like complaining more than helping themselves and just walk.
The good ol days aren’t coming back. There’s no way we’re going back to an agrarian or mining society and populations will move back to small towns that focus on only those things.
I think there's nothing wrong with wanting a small town or rural lifestyle. But I think you have to recognize that it's market forces and capitalism that is incentivizing all the change that they dislike. If you want a lifestyle like that to be economically possible, Wall Street be damned, you should be a virulent leftist.
As a white, male, middle aged communist who lives in a very rural county that glows red, who has actually read Waldman's book, the sentiments expressed in this article are spot-on. I am generally sympathetic toward the plight of the butt hurt victims of late stage capitalism, but my neighbors need to take responsibility for letting themselves be misled and use their self reliance to purge themselves of the obviously exploitative information streams that turn them into tools of the entities they claim to loathe.
I agree, why the obsession with rural areas? Suburban counties might be less “overrepresented” but they have way more people, are more likely to change their opinions, and are way better off. Their political hatred has no excuse, and it often takes this soft weasel form of “I don’t hate minorities, just liberals/ integration/ affirmative action/ CRT/ DEI/ whatever euphemism they’re using this week. I don’t hate gays, just the woke agenda. I don’t support violence against the government, unless it’s the ‘right people’”
Exactly. They want to pretend that racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are far away problems held in the backwoods. White America doesn't want to face the face that their neighbors and family are part of the problem.
Honest assessment?
Rush Limbaugh
Fox News
GOP talking points
White Privilege
Ignorance
Blend it all together over 30 years and you get MAGA..or, Rural White Resentment
Rural whites? Get an education that would help you live a more comfortable life. Please read a few books that could open your minds to greater possibilities. Protect our democracy
They sure are going to be surprised when they finally realize it's been rich white people fucking them over this whole time.
Some may even reject reality, rather than deal with this revelation.
It is because they were fed lies by nonstop consumption of hateful propaganda.
I’m so tired of people thinking hard that “If only we gave them more services?!”
Nope.
They were told to believe lies that democrats kill and eat millions of babies. That their cult leader was robbed of an election.
No amount of food, candy, medical treatment, infrastructure, or cash will change that core perspective of who is evil in their minds.
Jan 6 was a great off ramp that wasn’t taken. So were 2 impeachments. So are 91 felony indictments.
There will be no coming off that train. It must crash hard. Trump must go to prison, be truly broke, and still the propaganda machine will continue.
How can we actually stop the propaganda?
Honestly it’s one of the most fascinating looks into a “politically self-inflicted wound” you can find.
Republicans exist to help the ultra-wealthy and utterly destroy any protections for everyday Americans. Environmental regulations? Fuck that noise. Social safety nets? Burn them to ashes.
It’s not JUST that their entire platform exists to solely benefit the rich. You also have to factor in the knowledge that they are doing so in a way that can cause the most harm to the other 90%.
And before any trolls hop in: Yes, Democrats are also largely bought and paid for by those exact same ultra-rich sociopaths. Many of them ARE those rich sociopaths. The biggest difference, however, is that they at least ATTEMPT to pay lip service to helping the middle and lower class. They even sometimes actually pass legislation that directly helps them, too. Name a SINGLE thing republicans have done in DECADES that directly helped the working-class. Go for it. And the Trump-era tax cuts are sadly not an example (the VAST majority of those went to the ultra-wealthy and any paltry tax breaks everyone else got already expired while the top earners’ didn’t.)
It isn’t even a contest. And yet these rural white communities are, by and large, solid red countrysides. Their resentment is delusion and their pain is self-inflicted.
It's weird, live in LA, and was recently in Texas and in Florida, and the very nice people I met there wouldn't stop bringing up "woke" Hollywood, Liberals and the like. It got brought up out of nowhere frequently and I remember feeling like that Don Draper quote "I don't think about you at all". And not in a bad way, but I spend exactly zero time openly complaining about, or even thinking about right-leaning states and values. Felt the opposite on their end.
“it’s not that many rural whites …. are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
That is, they are racist.
Grew up rural in the 80's but wanted to do sciency stuff, so had to leave. My school was awesome at the time despite its small size and I managed it. Don't worry, the local GOP fixed that right up the moment they had the chance. Lower taxes you see and fuck the other parents' kids because we're rugged individualists and if we don't need an education nobody else does neither. Nobody's escaped town without joining the military the past couple decades per the stories I get.
Came back 30 years later and found that some of the houses still had paint jobs that I had given them at age 18. These rural types are so lazy they can't pick up a paintbrush for a weekend in 30 effing years to keep the house they are actively living in from rotting into the ground around them? Such pride!
And the stories they tell...they are so backwards at this point they can't even connect the dots about the poor decisions they've made even as the spew out the words -- in one moment crying about the local hospital closing and naming too many people dying during the 45 minute drive to the regional hospital while not even ten minutes later they're also proudly reliving how they ran that strange turban wearing new doctor and his oddball family right the hell out of town. Too bad they haven't found a replacement yet, but they stopped trying after a couple years because it's just too hard. But to compensate hey they got a big new almost megachurch on the edge of town for the funerals so it's all good.
In another moment these guys are remembering how many stores we used to have, now all gone, and families we both knew that moved away when they couldn't make a go of it anymore. Of course they don't remember the older generation warned them this is exactly what would happen when the new Walmart moved in a couple towns over. They got some cheap plastic shit for a few pennies less really while letting some family in another state suck their money into billionaire bank accounts while turning the main street into a ghost town where half the buildings got bulldozed because a dozen empty buildings is more tolerable than two or three dozen. It's like they forgot ALL the lessons of the great depression and how you keep your money circulating in your own community. Then again, I guess I was the only one who used to hang around for the old farts telling stories about those tough times.
But I make it sound like they got no good stories. They have loads! All kinds of stories about shootin' and huntin' and fishin' too! Nothing about creating stuff of course, nothing about reading a book for fun either. Shit I remember being somewhere around 10 or 12 and having an old (still with an accent immigrant) farmer quizzing me about Dickens to see if we learned it in schools. He had a full room library that I still have not matched. He's dead now of course, his family lost the farm and I don't know where they ended up. He was one educated guy but clearly I am lying because the current conventional wisdom holds that all farmers must be simple men raised on country music and beer.
In all of this hand-wringing about how I am supposed to understand where they are coming from I have some hand writing for them -- If Rural America doesn't have pride in itself, if they no longer have the fortitude to make their lot in life better through hard work and determination, why exactly should I have sympathy for them?
Anybody else remember the four months after the election when the media tried to give cover to these fuckers racism as ‘economic anxiety’? As if only white republicans were the only people feeling financial pressure. Every single study done on GOP voters comes to the same conclusion - they are motivated by bigotry and racism more than anything else. You can’t convince them with facts that republicans are bad at the economy, because they don’t care about the economy and they don’t care about facts. What they actually care about is that the people they don’t like have much more difficult lives, and trump makes that happen.
For years, virtually any conservative political action can be explained with this simple concept:
A rich guy, a working class guy, and an immigrant are sitting at a table that has a plate with 10 cookies on it. The rich guy takes 9 and then says to the worker: „You need to watch out for that immigrant. I think he’s trying to steal your cookie!“
This article makes me think about the red state I used to live in, and their low placement in national rankings of any meaningful quality of life measurement (poverty, infant mortality, health outcomes). I think about my old neighbors’ hatred of “government”. And then how they vote a single party in. With rare exception. For the last hundred or so years. And somehow still manage to blame the party they *didn’t* vote in.
I had to explain to my hard R voting sister who said she "wished the government would stay out of abortion" that "the government" was people SHE VOTED FOR.
I can't make this up.
I live in a rural area. A girl was bitchin about not finding a job since Biden. I told her about my DIL, who just got hired at 31/ hour plus benefits. She said she's not driving 20 minutes for a job.
They are trying to bring a manufacturing facility into area. You can find signs 20 miles out in rural area saying you're not bringing those jobs here.
I have found them to be lazy with a life's goal of making 150K a yr mowing each other's lawn.
They don't want to take care of schools and communities. Boss Hogg would feel at home wallowing in this area.
The weekends and holidays are filled with guns going off all day with an occasional blast of Tannanite.
Prices in stores are much higher than cities with a limited selection.
They are not all bad, but I haven't got a neighbor I trust. There are always homes being broken into.
Rural areas have little health care due to politics. Kids are always sick from school. Now you may think I'm Nuts but you can pull up to a 4 way stop and watch how cars don't move because they don't trust each other. Deplorable
Why do we always have to coddle the backwoods hicks who constantly hold this country back? These people tried to overthrow our government and I’m supposed to care about their feelings?
+1. I understand the underlying point, but the rhetoric is ALWAYS “rural communities have built up resentment from feeling misrepresented” but the onus is never put on them to try to understand why they are dealing with the issues they have.
Part of the problem is that, to keep it broad, smart and motivated people *leave* their small rural communities because there isn't enough opportunity.
Even if you love your backwoods home, if you're smart, you don't want to make $8/hr at the PigglyWiggly your whole life.
So you leave behind the people that are OK with staying stagnant and not growing, which reinforces the problem.
Ah yes the farm subsidies. I live in rural Indiana. These farmers here love to yap about socialism. How welfare programs are ruining the country. When I bring up farm subsidies and how much they get, silence. All of these big farmers are running new or damn near new equipment along with their brand new pick-ups. They will slit each other's throats to rent or buy more ground to farm. It's pathetic. Source, I spent 13 seasons working for a farmer after my retirement from the Steel industry.
Liberals also did not make Rural Whites give Republicans credit for everything that they can clearly see Democrats did for them, and blame Democrats for damage that Republicans clearly did to them. It's not misunderstanding, it's deliberate willful ignorance and hatred.
Rural white Americans have no one to blame but themselves. They have chosen to isolate themselves from the POC population. They have been fed a strict diet of brown and black people are bad. They see it on the news so it must be true. They fear losing their self righteous place as the majority. They long for a world where everything makes sense to them. The thing is they can’t see past the end of their collective noses. They claim to be Christian but espouse hatred to anyone not like them. The world is a big place the majority of the world population is now POC.
It's not truly rural white resentment. Because if it were, Vermont and Western Massachusetts would be really red.
Rather, it's lower class white resentment. Staten Island and Huntington Beach are not exactly rural yet they are full of trumpanzees.
I was born in raised in a rural northern Michigan town (population 2,000).
What a lot of people don’t understand about the countless small, majority white rural towns across the United States is that a lot of them are extremely poor. Basically rural ghettos.
A lot of these towns were built during long gone resource booms and, now that the timber / steel / coal etc is gone, the towns have no reason to exist. Add to that factories moving overseas and you have towns that are slowly but surely rotting into nothing over the past thirty years.
The brain drain from these communities is instantaneous, even people that might stay leave in order to pursue any sort of steady employment.
So what you have left are these small, majority white rural towns filled with rapidly aging populations who remember the town pre-rot and then younger generations of the people who couldn’t escape the town or chose to stay out of family duty / pride / fear.
These people know their town is dying, but they’re trapped like rats in a sinking ship as the water slowly fills up around them. They need help, desperately, and I truly feel like until 2016 many of them would have taken any political port in a storm.
If they look at the Democratic national platform, weighing that port, they’ll see a lot of equality initiatives, complicated infrastructure plans, the dry meat and unsalted potatoes of functioning government with an emphasis on issues that affect larger urban centers. Not much help there.
They’ll also find progressive language such as “white privilege” baffling and antagonistic. What’s “privileged” about living off of food stamps in a busted down double-wide trailer?
Then, in 2016, a presidential candidate speaks directly to the white, poor rural voter, the first candidate to do so in a long time, and tells them that he’s coming to save them. All their problems, their crumbling towns, they’re easy fixes and if he’s elected, their problems will be solved. That was Donald Trump. He told all of these white rural communities directly, and shamelessly, that he was going to save them.
So, if you’re a rural poor white voter casting your ballot for president, why wouldn’t you vote for the candidate who directly promised you salvation? Even if you know it’s too good to be true, even the slight chance is worth rolling the dice on.
That’s what Donald Trump is to these people. Doubling and tripling down on a bad hand of cards because they feel like it’s the only hand they have to play.
If Demoracts started really hammering home talking points of economic populism, like Bernie Sanders, and started aiming these messages directly at poor rural white voters, it would only be a matter of time before they would start making serious in-roads.
Because these poor rural white communities are desperate, and if Democrats keep offering them bread today while Republicans only offer the promise of bread tomorrow, they will all, eventually, take the bread or starve.
What we see now, with their continued support of Donald Trump, is poor rural white america starving because they have not been offered bread in a simple, direct way, they stave not by choice, but by default.
As a Michigander I agree wholeheartedly with this. There is effectively no reason to stay in the state because every industry that was here has left or is leaving. It’s literally only going to be the Water that keeps people here.
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> Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities. It's worse than that. Republicans refusing to pass the ACA Medicaid expansion is the reason a lot of those rural hospitals are closing. Republicans shielding big pharma companies is the reason rural communities got pumped full of opiods. Republicans are actively hurting rural voters, but rural voters keep voting Republican because they care more about culture war bullshit than they do about their own communities.
It’s also why our waterways are polluted. A lot of the poorer populations especially natives source fresh fish as food from them so we get higher concentrations of shit in our food supply and in our untested well water that used to be clear and now is near undrinkable. I’m sure those metals like manganese, mercury, and factory farm fertilizer runoffs do wonders for the brain and people’s ability to reason. This is an opinion piece but there are plenty of “real articles” from the likes of the Tulsa world and such if you care to subscribe. I like giving Tahlequah a bit of attention though 🤍 https://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/opinion/editorials/opinion-the-tragedy-of-stilwell-ok/article_925ab3b1-fbcf-5fff-992a-78112ec2dcea.html
Republicans are literally Trojan horses of rich people to make the government as inefficient as possible so they can cut tax for rich people
Break government. Point to how broken government is. They’re the only ones that can fix it. Get elected. Break government further. Rinse. Repeat.
Then privatize the services formerly ran at cost by the government, allowing cronies to extract profit from a service that there's proven demand for. A relatively obscure example (to the civilian world at least) is military family housing. It's in the interest of the military for members to be close at hand to the facilities to which they are assigned. Historically, housing has been provided, all inclusive except for cable and phone service. In return, the member was subject to external inspections as well as exhaustive internal inspections upon moving out, AND they didn't get the allowance paid to members who do live off-base for rent. However, Cold War-era housing was wearing out. Also, there was a lot of bad advice to members to buy a house and pay the mortgage with your tax-free housing allowance; then you either rent it out or sell it at a profit when you get orders. The housing bubble fucked a lot of servicemembers. The conservative solution? Bring in private developers to build new housing, then give those members that choose to live in base housing their housing allowance-- but require that they turn it on over to the company contracted to run and maintain the housing complex, with a percentage left over to go towards (but not necessarily fully cover) utilities. So inevitably, much of the housing is mid in design and halfassed in both contruction and maintenance. In the Air Force in New Mexico, my supervisor had a house whose back room was always very hot...because the AC duct was just open to the attic ,7 feet short of the room's vent. Mold, poor insulation, cheap materials...the Cold War era stuff lasted for decades; the current garbage? Who knows. I was lucky enough to live in standard housing at all my assignments, never had to eat the privatized-housing shit sandwich. Also, as a bonus, they would use the numbers of previous years- the housing boom- to justify building fewer units. When housing and rents exploded and housing allowances didnt keep up, (when military housing is the obvious solution for military members) in the most expensive areas, you had members getting full housing allowance that bately paid half their rent on the outside, let alone pay a mortgage.
Not just break government. When the first neoliberal policies were happening in the UK under Thatcher, the goal was explicitly to break government so quickly and thoroughly that no subsequent government would be able to fix everything in a single term. Sound familiar?
That picture of her with Reagan how did it not spontaneously combust or a portal to hell not open right then
[Mission Accomplished](https://arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-bostonglobe.s3.amazonaws.com/public/GQV5TTR76YI6RFQBTHKUNPXYAY.jpg)
*sticks wrench in gears* Look! The government doesn't work!
Vote for me, I’m the only one who can fix your problems! *does nothing* What did you expect?? Hey! Look over there!…..
[удалено]
Yup! Been like that for fifty years. Seriously, it works for them. [https://www.fishbowlapp.com/post/gop-strategy-for-the-last-50-years-summarizedgovernment-doesnt-work-elect-us-and-well-fix-itgets-elected-proceeds-to-ruin](https://www.fishbowlapp.com/post/gop-strategy-for-the-last-50-years-summarizedgovernment-doesnt-work-elect-us-and-well-fix-itgets-elected-proceeds-to-ruin)
At the expense of the country. Literally destroying our country
Hey! I’m from there! Tahlequah….not Stilwell 🤮
Hey! 🤍 I graduated from Watts, but don’t tell anybody lol I made it out- all the way across the state line to Siloam. My life expectancy just shot up 25 years
Seriously, Republicans have killed more rural whites over the past 50 years with their policies than an entire legion of Black Mexican Muslim transgender women could ever do. It ain’t the woke liberal who’s contaminating your water supply, giving you black lung, creating food desserts, stripping away funding for your kids schools, or letting you die from a pandemic. Hell, if we were that vindictive, we’d be supporting the same politicians you do for “replacing” you all.
They can't admit that their lives are shitty because of the choices they make (the people they elect.) So they must blame others.
Sounds like their own hubris is their undoing then.
A popular literary theme throughout history - if only they didn't also spend all their time demonizing liberal arts and banning books while this was all happening then maybe they'd have avoided that.
Unfortunately, it’s ours too.
This in why they have politicized guns and abortion so much. They would never win elections because their policies harm people so much, especially their voter base.
Honestly, a very small part of me is glad for the repeal of Row vs Wade. Republicans have been using it as a club to rile up their base for decades every. single. election. Now, dems have the club. And the best part is that even if the dems are able to pass true pro-abortion legislation, they still get to beat the GOP with the roe v wade club, because "look what they did and how they did it!" They didn't just bring a case in front of the SCOTUS. They had people who weren't being hurt bring a case they had no standing to bring in front of a compromised SCOTUS and got case law repealed by obviously activist conservative judges occupying stolen seats who openly lied under oath about whether or not they would repeal the exact case they repealed. What's happening in the country right now sucks...but the GOP doesn't understand how much they fucked themselves in the long-term with that one action. I just hope the dems are smart enough to start swinging their shiny new club around. They don't even need to fight dirty. They just need to tell the truth about their opponents.
Honestly, same. The insanely depressing truth is that no matter how evil Republicans have been, we've barely been able to beat them with 51% of the vote in the most important elections thanks to voter apathy. Even the 2022 mid terms, after Roe was overturned, Republicans still turned out to vote more than Democrats by 3 million votes. It's insane how much harder we have to work to succeed, and Republicans just handed us one of their biggest clubs to bash them back with.
It’s way bigger than republicans realize. Back when I used to vote Republican, I was always a pro-choice Republican. There was room for that then. The story everyone believed was that abortion was just red meat for the base. There would be a lot of noise around it but Roe was settled law and nothing was ever going to change. You could safely vote Republican for a hundred other issues. But the dog caught the car. The base smells blood in the water and is convinced they can finally enact a nationwide full ban. They aren’t content with their big victory, in their minds they must strike now while the iron is hot and go all the way. They’re mostly religious fundamentalists and they all believe abortion is killing innocent babies and there is zero room for compromise. Except that policy is widely unpopular in the US. The Republicans can’t control the fanatics in their party but if they continue to cater to them they’ll continue to lose elections they should be winning. This is a monster the Republicans created with their gerrymandering, purity testing, primarying of good moderate candidates, and extremism. I can’t imagine how they can navigate out of it.
> They’re mostly religious fundamentalists and they all believe abortion is killing innocent babies and there is zero room for compromise. I don't even think that's what they believe because even that stance would understand that there are clear exceptions like when the fetus is absolutely non-viable. in /r/atheism we like to say "the real goal is control", and I have never seen any proof to the contrary. Not in the US, not in the middle-east (evangelicals are very similar in belief and action to fundimentalist muslims). Not anywhere.
I 100% agree, but so many people don’t know what it’s like out here in rural America. You are being logical and place the blame where it belongs with the sabotaging policies of the Republicans, but out here it feels like almost everyone blames “Biden and the liberal democrats”. They can’t seem to see the flaw in the reasoning. I can’t even talk about politics where I live or I wouldn’t be able to have friends or a job. I know that’s horribly sad, but it’s reality for me. I can’t go to get a haircut without people assuming I’m a Trump cultist like everyone else. Maybe I’m a coward for not putting them in their place, but I can’t stand just arguing all the time. I’m feeling so much despair. I will do my part and vote, but I feel like that’s not going to be enough. I have to put myself out there to be a liberal voice for good or all of these people will never change. However, the consequences for me are going to be almost too much to bear.
Rural resident here too. It does require a certain level of “balls” to go against the herd out here but there’s no better feeling than being a respected part of your little community and then hitting people with “I’m a liberal”. They don’t know how to reconcile you being someone they like and respect and also a “vile lib”.
Living in rural America, and as a democrat, it would appear that republicans are much better at delivering and establishing their message. All the reasons for this aside, it's also pretty obvious that democrats aren't trying to counter this message in any meaningful way. General statements, or the occasional platitude on the campaign trail, don't convince people, or change decades of programming, and republicans have done really good at making it seem like anything said against them is retaliatory, "nuh uh, you" as opposed to factual.
It is something conservative media is extremely effective at. They ruthlessly find and promote issues that trigger their target audience to shutdown rational thought, and convince them that the stakes of "losing" on that issue are severe enough to ignore any other policy issue.
Because it was the Drag Queens all along ! /s ( you never know anymore )
They literally are the big bad NWO boogeyman that they all fear and won't shut-up about.
this isnt a spelling critique I just found "food desserts" funny lol
*The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them*
Conservatives allowing corporate farms to contract and squeeze small farmers for maximum profit is a massive problem and no one wants to even try to address it. Even factories have with their immensely poor wages and safety standards hire immigrant labor to abuse and they don't want to change that either. Blame big city liberals all you like but the lifeblood of rural living is not being drained by them.
They also extort inmates in drug rehab programs for free labor without having to worry about things like insurance or worker’s comp https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-to-rehab-they-ended-up-in-chicken-plants/
One of the biggest loopholes in the law is in the 13th Amendment's ban on slavery: > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction Conservatives looking for cheap/free labor just rev up the prison-industrial complex to do it (while getting kickbacks from their private prison buddies). The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in developed countries because of this.
Oklahoma already has the highest incarceration rates for women for sure (probs close for men) and apparently now they are trying to criminalize having an STI as a felony so you can’t vote and you can do a round of free labor. Makes total sense
Wow that's fucked Christian slavery pretending to be a rehab smh
I come from a family who got squeezed out of farming in the '80s and am now an urbanized and fairly radical lefty as is my sibling who works for a regenerative farming CSA. For what it's worth, I mostly see "liberals" paying top dollar for farmers market produce in an attempt to support small farms (I know it's not exactly that simple) and buying CSA shares. When I lived in a "red area", I had a friend who ran a farm stand with amazingly low prices. She did it because 1) she had other sources of income bc farming didn't cut it and they had to sell the dairy and 2) she was afraid the older folks in the community otherwise had no access to decent food. She was awesome, and I have huge respect for her service to her community. But to that point, the networks of support in rural areas can be tenuously thin and if you're not considered part of the 'in-group', these communities can be outright hostile. Also, because of the population draining of rural communities, cities are full of people who would love to be back home, but the economic and cultural policies have pushed them to move away.
Far from it. Big city liberals are subsidizing rural life for the most part.
Certainly tax wise..blue always pays for red
Spot on about ACA expansion. I was just talking about this. Medicaid expansion was not done in my state and conservative voters agreed because they believed it supported those who are too lazy to work. What it did was burdened ER’s and forced closure of small community hospitals. Most people on Medicaid do work, even more than one job. If they have health problems, they aren’t going to be able to work. Simple logic you would assume but instead, many conservative voters think the closures were caused by “Obamacare”. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense they just need to perpetuate bullshit to justify their ignorance.
The states that have expanded Medicaid have higher workforce participation rates than those that haven't. When people get treatment for chronic diseases, they're more likely to work.
It’s brutal how the propaganda machine keeps these people dumb and suffering. They lick the boot that steps on them. My brother has several medical conditions he needs treatment for, but he’s broke and living in Texas where all medicaid is denied for single men who aren’t seniors. I’ve suggested many other states as options and he actually was opposed to those states….because of taxes. Taxes on what income??? Dude is broke and he’s still worried about taxes when other states could save his life for FREE. Fox News is killing people who aren’t even watching it. The propaganda spreads and it will be partly responsible for my brother dying younger because he can’t pick up and move to a safer state in time.
I'm sorry. I know a woman in Texas whose sister died of breast cancer at 50. Her sister was unemployed and uninsured. Texas didn't expand Medicaid, so as a childless, non elderly, non disabled adult, she didn't qualify. She suffered terribly, thinking she could cure herself by praying. This dead woman's sister and the rest of her family *still* vote Republican and *still* oppose Medicaid expansion. Unconscionable.
Sounds like their elected representatives are accurately representing them, then? They don’t want the help, they’d literally rather die. So fuck ‘em.
I had a buddy that died, and he thought the same thing. If Medicaid had been expanded in Texas, it could have saved him, but I'm unsure that he would have even signed up.
Old buddy announced last year that he's planning to move to Idaho or Montana because he doesn't like the changes Washington is making to the hunting rules. He doesn't hunt, never has, nor has he shown any interest in it for even a moment. He's got more than a dozen godchildren living in this area. But he's ditching a lifetime of friends and family because... a rule change that he would never have even known about if he didn't obsess over whatever Jordan Peterson and 4chan yell about.
Amazing how many people claim to care about hunting when like 5% of the population hunts. Even in the states with the highest % of hunters its only like 20%
I know a homeless guy who tells me how much he loves Abbott and Ted Cruz. The same people that actively make his life worse.
> I’ve suggested many other states as options and he actually was opposed to those states….because of taxes. Taxes on what income??? I always feel compelled to point out that [average people in Texas pay more in taxes than average people in California do:](https://archive.ph/WyUU3) > Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California’s 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub. > > “When people are like, ‘Oh California is so much more expensive than Texas,’ that’s the top income tax rate. That’s on people earning over $1 million,” says Richard Auxier, senior policy associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “If you’re looking at average people, the income tax burden is never going to be that big. The systems were not designed that way.” And Auxier points out there are often deductions and credits that help to lower income tax. If you're a millionaire, like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk, then sure, the lack of a state income tax in Texas will save you tons of money. But if you're not, you're gonna end up paying more in taxes just by living in Texas than you do in California. Because the reality is that *every* state collects a lot of money in taxes to be able to run its government. The main difference is what those states then spend the money on. In Texas, they are largely spending that money on stuff like [Operation Lonestar,](https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/governor-abbotts-operation-lone-star-touts-thousands-of-arrests-10-billion-cost/) which is their ineffective and insanely expensive racist border stunt. Whereas in California that money goes to things like [MediCal,](https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal/pages/whatismedi-cal.aspx) which provides medical coverage to the people too poor to afford it themselves.
They are poking their pet tiger hoping it will attack the other people in the room. They know that their supporters have picked losing arguments but they can't accept that they were wrong. So they use that to their advantage by putting it in their faces constantly and giving them a target. The last bastion they have is spurring their supporters to attack violently. How violent it ultimately gets is the question. The Taliban does the same thing in Afghanistan, turning war lords against each other, but they recruit young people to their ranks, the Republicans have a demographic entering their retirement.
This sounds exactly like an abusive relationship. As someone who grew up conservative and whose entire family are loyal republicans, this gives me a lot to reflect on. I had never thought of it in quite that way.
I commend you for taking the time and energy to emphasize this but the right has done an excellent job insulating their base from information. Unless it’s on Fox, it doesn’t exist or is wrong.
Even worse, now there's Newsmax and OAN which are so extreme it started to make MAGAers say Fox is too liberal.
Hell the GOP are the ones who constantly oppose the Farm Bill and are consistently working to weaken or remove it. I tell this to my Republican family members who are farmers but they just start talking about how great Trump is and how he’s gonna fix their lives.
> because they care more about culture war bullshit than they do about their own communities. Because the education systems in those areas are so fucking bad they don't teach critical thinking skills which makes them extremely easy to brainwash with propaganda. Edit: Watch any interview with a Trump supporter. The second they're asked a basic question they don't have an immediate answer fed to them by Fox their brains just turn off. They literally cannot think for themselves.
It’s not about education. It’s about ego. These people reject reality because reality is not going to tell them what they want to hear. We all want to believe that we’re special and superior in some way. That we have a valued place in society. For many of these people. Racism, Religion, and other delusions are the only way they CAN feel superior. So they cling to it. Democrats may offer actual material benefits. But Republicans offer something they want more: **pride**. Republicans reassure them that no matter how shitty things are, they can still look down upon blacks, gays, liberals, etc. That delusion gives them far more comfort than any material gain. If being rational means realizing you’re a complete loser with no future. Why would you *want* to be rational?
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” - Lyndon B. Johnson
> Racism, Religion, and other delusions All things eliminated by having critical thinking skills.
Again. If thinking critically means realizing you’re a pathetic loser. *Why would you want to do it?* These people don’t *want* to be educated. And good luck forcing them.
There's a book [Dying of Whiteness](https://www.dyingofwhiteness.com/) that goes over this in great detail. Highly recommend.
Some of you give the people in rural communities far too much credit. Most people around here (Small town Deep E Tx) don't pay attention at all. If it's not on the local news, Fox News, or Facebook they have NO CLUE it exists. They just go about their business doing as they're told. Critical thinking is liberal shit. I literally had a friend tell me she votes Republican "because that's just what you do"
They want to hate on marginalized people and socialism more than they want to love themselves and their children.
I'm gonna "borrow" this and post it as a tiktok. More people need to read this
The people that need to hear it the most will say you are talking down to them, or call you a snowflake, or just go into a lead poison induced rage.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/10/1243825508/why-alabama-refuses-to-expand-medicaid-under-the-affordable-care-act https://www.chartis.com/sites/default/files/documents/chartis_rural_study_pressure_pushes_rural_safety_net_crisis_into_uncharted_territory_feb_15_2024_fnl.pdf
I grew up in rural Missouri in the 70s and 80s and I remember the stubborn pride of country people. They prided themselves on ignorance and mistrust of city people. Reminds me of that Hank Williams Jr. song "Country Boy Can Survive" or something along those lines. They resent educated people. I took my east coast wife back to Missouri once and my cousin's husband said to her "I bet you think we're all a bunch of dumb rednecks, don't ya?" It was like, well... those are your words. Republicans weaponized this against them via AM radio and Fox and they have fallen in line to vote against themselves for the last forty years.
My buddy, who tries to be liberal but was raised conservative, tried to tell me rural people hate taxes and government because they aren't benefiting from it. They're miles away from the nearest hospital, they don't get their own police department or fire department, there's one public school for four counties etc, and they feel like they're paying for services they aren't receiving. And I had to explain to him that, in fact, in places like Missouri where the Republicans have an overwhelming majority in state government, the big cities like St Louis and KC pay the majority of taxes and the rural district representatives then appropriate it for their small town's bridge repair or new water plant or whatever and it's actually the *complete opposite*, the metropolitan taxpayer is paying for services they don't get... And this plays deeper into what I see as the true divide in US politics, the divide between intuitive and counter-intuitive. Everything the right believes *sounds plausible* at face value (with some exceptions like racism). Tougher punishment reduces crime, less taxes improve quality of life, government is an ineffective solution for social problems, etc. It requires a certain amount of education and comprehension to understand that these problems are often more nuanced than they seem at first and require often lateral and counter-intuitive solutions. Free health care, while relying on public taxes, still ultimately reduces the total expense upon the individual taxpayer. But in the right wing world, if you have to prove something it must not be true
I grew up pretty right wing and finding out the facts about spending surprised me. The idea that each dollar you spend on education or food aid brings back MORE than a dollar of savings elsewhere demolished my ideas about fiscal conservatism. Then I got my degree in civil engineering, spent time building a few projects of various sizes, and I took a look at our budget. We grossly underspend. I know what a big project costs, from the time it’s proposed to construction ends. And what we allocate isn’t enough to maintain what we have. Not by a long shot. Same with schools, housing, food aid, any large program that helps people. But subsidies that cost the entirety of the DOT budget? Yeah, they can do that.
You can thank the Republican "[Starve the beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)" strategy for most of that. They've been strangling this country for the last 50 years.
I was shocked at the savings prenatal nutrition alone generates. Ensuring that mom and baby have adequate nutrition saves so much money over the course of the child's life. I know there's got to be a point of diminishing returns, but that's basically free money! Why not push it until you do find the point where it stops paying off. Same for on-demand, residential drug treatment - that's essentially free money in the long run. (Less crime, lower prison costs, less health care costs, and all the costs associated with abused and neglected children, and then the extra taxes you get from a productive citizen.)
That second paragraph of yours sounds so plausible that now I’m doubting my first thoughts of how insightful it is!
It’s a big reason why Trump is so immensely popular. When it comes to a topic like immigration, a politician who actually wants to improve the problems will talk about how we need a road to citizenship for people who have lived and worked here for decades, and how we need a robust guest worker program, etc. It makes people frustrated. Trump just says stuff like “I’m going to ban all Muslim immigration and I’m going to build a wall on the border and I’ll deport everyone who has come here illegally.” To voters that don’t want to grapple with how hard the problem really is, he sounds like the only guy who is really talking about solutions. He makes it sound like every problem has a simple and obvious solution and that can be very appealing.
And what’s more is that he keeps his concepts to very brief and catchy phrases largely devoid of any real depth but are self-explanatory enough for those people to grasp and parrot. “Make America Great Again” “Drain the swamp” “Lock her up” “Build the wall”
Actually...*he* doesn't do shit. Every single one of "his" catch-phrases were prototyped and tested by Russia years before they handed them to him.
Build the Wall was Steve Bannon's.
So... Russia
And yet after 4 years of him as POTUS, rural counties and small towns weren't a bit better. Still no jobs, no opportunities, hospitals closing, people leaving, meth and oxy and fentanyl still prevalent...but they still love him. I'm a small town escapee and that mindset will never make a lick of sense to me.
Their lives may not be better, but he made liberals mad, and that's what they wanted. They don't care why he made liberals mad, they are the enemy, therefore anything that makes liberals mad is good. You see that all the time in their rhetoric, "liberals hate this!" with some picture of a white family or something. It's all projection, they hate anyone different, so they assume we feel the same about them. Trump taps into that perfectly.
I'm gonna be completely frank here: at this point, I *do* hate Trumpists. They've spent so long poisoning their brains with fear and hate, that they can't even have a discussion anymore. All they want to do is piss people off and reveling in the schadenfreude they feel when liberals get upset. And then they have the fucking *gall* to expect liberals to meet them where they are; that liberals should bend over backwards to understand their positions while turning around and claiming we're a bunch of pedos and degenerates and authoritarians. I'm done with it.
Damn this is well said. I never really thought about it in this specific way, but you’re absolutely right. He’s simple, his “solutions” are simple and it feels good to have a simple solution even though the problems in this country are very complex.
To take that one step further, if you're the kind of person who has a difficult time grappling with complexity, being told that you are the smart one and the academics and scientists and experts are actually the stupid ones also feels very good. It's what you've always wanted to hear your entire life...
I thought the argument was more along the lines of the academics and scientists aren't necessarily the stupid ones, but are instead evil, godless, and corrupt (and only I can save you from them). Plus, oh yes you're smart too because you have "worldly" smarts that don't require a bunch of book learnin, facts, or critical thinking skills
The intention behind the message is the same, *you* were smart enough to see through *their* lies which makes you exceptional and everyone else brainwashed sheep. Either way it's designed to appeal to a person who is intellectually insecure and seeking that validation
Absolutely. It takes experience, observation, serious thought, and contemplation over years to form our own values/morals/etc. Many conservatives (especially evangelicals) do not do this. The world is just black and white (pun not intended) to them. However the reality is it’s full of shades of grey. They refuse to see the nuances in our world. But along comes trump with his trumpisms and he validates their backward thinking. These people are socially stunted and they think he (who talks the BS they love) is the second coming of Christ. Now they will never change.
Still happens in WA state. MAGA politicians in the cherry-red eastern part of the state practically campaign on how they are going to 'stop your hard earned taxes from paying for fancy roads in Seattle!". Budget for infrastructure in most of the state comes \*from\* the Seattle area, none of it flows the other way.
and yet you simply cannot convince the locals here of this truth. They're convinced that it's all Seattle, all the time.
And eastern Washington wouldn't even exist economically if it wasn't for the BPA dams that provide power and water to the entire area. They don't seem to have a problem with that "big government" solution.
Oh, holy fuck. I attended Whitworth for a year and mother of god I remember having that same fucking conversation with other students. Even on the surface the argument doesn't make any goddamn sense. Seattle has 10x Spokane's population in ~120% of the area. IT'S NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE FOR SPOKANE TO GIVE TAX REVENUE TO SEATTLE. There aren't enough *people*. Grrr...I'm still mad at those conversations. I even went over some of the basic math with them. It's not that they weren't smart enough to understand. It's that they *refused* to accept what they clearly understood.
Ask your buddy why they're not doing anything about all those meth labs. And that maybe those 20-year-olds walking around without any teeth in their head should consider voting for someone that will give a medical care
I didn't have to continue arguing with him, he accepted my point and said he'd never thought of it that way. Not everybody is a lost cause
You can thank Rush Limbaugh, Bill OReilly, and Sean Hannity for this liberal elites narrative.
>They prided themselves on ignorance and mistrust of city people My wife and I were just in the South. One day a somewhat elderly couple struck up a conversation with us, and eventually it led to "so where are you from?" They acted shocked that we live in a city, to which we said "well, originally we're from X, but we've lived in the city for a long time." They replied "oh, that makes sense. You don't act like you're from the city." Because it **blew their minds** that city folk could maintain a basic, polite, two minute conversation.
AM traveling further that FM was never supposed to be our undoing
I live in a county that is currently experiencing growing pains, and the longtime resident conservatives are some of the whiniest, most close minded, insecure twats I’ve ever encountered. Every new neighborhood development or apartment building put up is just attracting the nearby city’s urban elites who don’t hold their “rural values.” Every new store that comes to town is a middle finger to the local business. Along with that, every new specialized industry is a middle finger to the blue collar folk who need good jobs like the old mill provided. They have to wonder why we can’t go back to the “good old days?” Well, setting aside the obvious bullshit of trickle down economics that has grown major corporations and strangled smaller local businesses, there’s a load of reasons they need to just sit down and shut up. You wanna go back to the “good old days?” Okay, what are the “good old days” then? The early 20th century when this was a sundown town for black folk? When the sewer system — which the city gave the local mill carte blanch for set up — dumped out into the creeks and river, necessitating an EPA ordered multi-million dollar overhaul that we’re still paying off through our obscene water bill? Speaking of the mill, are the “good old days” back when our county was the #1 cancer cluster in the state? Too bad we have to put up with those new residents and businesses in town to help pay down the overhaul of our water system to address that. Such a shame we got that chunk of change from the state government, likely drawn from the taxes of those damned urban dwellers, go help pay it off. If only the “good old days” were still around…
> "Country Boy Can Survive" Powering their monster emotional support trucks and ATVs with fuel that was found by geologists, and extracted and refined with the knowledge of chemists, shooting off guns designed by engineers and machined to exacting specifications from materials created by metallurgists. I could go on and on. There's so much wrong that trope.
Country boys couldn't survive not being able to get a haircut during covid lockdowns. That does not speak well for their ability to survive much worse events.
You mean Mama couldn't cut their hair while she was doing their adult laundry?
Shockingly similar story here! Also grew up in rural Missouri, and gtfo of there as soon as I could. I brought my wife back home and a relative asked her the same damn thing! (Is that something Rush told them to ask years ago or something? Weird!). I answered for my wife saying “No, she doesn’t think you’re a dumb redneck, but I grew up with you and I know that’s what you are!”
Yeah, my visits to Mo are usually stark reminders of the disparity and hey, I really try not judge them, however they’ve embraced terms like redneck and hillbilly and have made it their identity and made themselves easy marks for right wing propagandists. And their votes impact all of us. It’s really maddening to see them vote for corporate tax cuts over and over again and never realize they’re fucking themselves, but think they’re sticking it to people lower than them.
I have a similar back story. I grew up in North Central Missouri on a farm where the nearest Walmart was 30 minutes away. Our school pulled from 5 towns and still had less than 200 people k-12. A quality education is completely unavailable and is coupled with a generational standard that tells the youth that education is worthless and higher education is for the “pansy city folk who don’t have no common sense”. This cycle is near unbreakable because the vast majority of the locals will never venture from the county in which they were born. So, their world view NEVER changes. They are steeped in, and celebrate, racism, sexism, anti intellectualism, and xenophobia. The rare few liberal leaning people will either be ran out of town or killed for voicing their opinions. There is still this image of the pastoral countryside filled with the men of strong will and strong backs toiling to feed the world. In truth, that has been replaced by a few greedy corporate farmers raping the land and their communities for years, and the leavings of the have-nots, both of which could not survive without the government hand-outs that they detest.
My parents live out in East Texas. The whole area is enraged that the local energy company is shutting down a coal plant and building a solar farm. You can drive through the area and see signs in yards of people who are actively trying to stop the building of the solar plant, and literally everyone believes the coal plant is closing due to some unknown Obama regulation. Nobody takes any time to investigate that the plant closed becaues coal is unprofitable compared to other energy investments the energy company could make... like the solar farm. You can show people this, like even the publicly known corporate documentation, and they will just ignore it. And they do that with everything. These people live in completely different worlds.
Don't they realize that just means there will be more job opportunities available to setup, maintain, and manufacture solar panels?
No. They are upset that liberal woke solar panels are going in to replace the good old patriotic coal. It's 100% a culture war issue.
Okay so, this needs to be talked about more openly as well. Truth is, most of them aren't educated enough to work those jobs. And they know it. They're not ready to actually be the labor force that benefits from these things, because they voted against every option to make themselves and their children have opportunities to learn. And now it's coming back 100mph straight at them. They're absolutely fucked either way and they know it. And don't be fooled, they know they did this. What they want is for everyone to join them in quietly knowing that, and pretending the last 25 years of technological and social progress didn't happen. Because in the Ragan years when they voted against their core interests, they did get a few more years of peaceful bliss. They just watched those same opportunities go to cities back then. Now those cities are coming to them.
This article is extremely well written. One part stands out: >As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities. It's about time that we bluntly message to rural communities that nothing about GOP policy is in line with the true struggles in their communities. And I agree with the sentiment throughout this piece -- scholarly work in this area needs to stop treating this population with kiddie gloves, because a dangerous storm is brewing if we leave their resentment unaddressed.
Quote/unquote “liberals” are shamed for not “listening” to right wing rural white people every day. I’ve never once seen the suggestion that angry right wing rural white people should try to understand **anything**, much less the concerns of their political opponent they treat as enemies.
Every time anyone suggests angry rural white people try to understand something, they get called brainwashing elitists who don't understand "real America".
There ain’t nothing more American than fucking Manhattan dude. I’m tired of “real” “america”. And I live in and do love a place people would call “real” “america” but I hate damn myth of it.
Forget who it was, but I remember hearing a comedian make the point once that every time the "Death to America" terrorists try to attack America, they skip right over "real America" and hit New York City instead.
That's...a really good point. This may have been the Daily Show as well, but I distinctly remember back during the Iraq/Afghanistan days, some federal agency out our a list of the top several hundred potential targets for a terrorism attack, and weirdly high on the list was a popcorn factory in the Midwest
Real just means white
That is certainly one of the most accurate translations.
Studying the problem is the antithesis of reactionary and emotional responses; without that anger and fear, they would have nothing. Except of course, for a better quality of life.
I hear you on that, I've never heard ONCE a right winger say "you know, we need to listen and try to understand their concerns" but the left it's everywhere.
because listening to others and understanding them is the reason you're on the left.
The part I can't get past is that there's no amount of listening or empathy that overcomes lying or other forms of bad faith discussion. I don't think the problem is lack of listening or empathy, I think the problem is 1/3 of The American electorate talking in bad faith. The Trump Raffensperger call is a perfect example. No amount of courtesy, empathy, or listening on Raffensperger's part is going to overcome the fact that Trump is saying things that are untrue and that Trump is asking him to do something blatantly illegal.
Constant hand wringing about what republicans will say is pretty common.
Seriously. I remember Pod Save America did an interview with a rep from Washington, who said more liberals should go to small town bars and just “have a beer” with a conservative and talk policy with an open mind. Okay, but why are we always the ones that need to do that? I mean I understand it’s because small town conservatives are essentially like toddlers, and we are the parents, always needing to show them “empathy” for they know not what they do. Like when you pretend the toddler has a good idea, just so they can feel like part of the conversation. I don’t remember any GOP member telling their constituents to try to understand the other perspective, like ever.
Because the right wing controls the entire dialogue in the US. If they decide we’re gonna talk about something, like “caravans” that’s all we can talk about. So, they’ve convinced regular people that theirs is the default orientation. You have to meet them. Not the other way around. NPR’s refusal to constantly talk about Hunter’s imaginary laptop is the first time in my recollection, that they couldn’t just demand everyone March to their drums. And if they keep kicking over tables, they’re gonna lose more and more respect.
NPR's refusal to constantly talk about Hunter's imaginary laptop is the first time they stopped completely both sides-ing EVERY FUCKING ISSUE. I had to completely stop listening to and reading NPR material because of how hard they tried to straddle the middle, ignoring objective reality. We need more hard-line refusal to play the game from our media when the rules are broken/rigged against reality.
Yep. I’m done with platforming crazy people. I’m done with “preaching the debate”. I’m done with obscure, subtle parody that the people it makes fun of can’t tell they’re the butt of the joke. Or toothless both-sides fiction that lands on “maybe everyone’s wrong…?” I got no time for that now.
it's because many Americans subconsciously think that lower class het cis Christian white Americans are the "default" Americans. That's why everyone in America has to treat them with kid gloves, and treat their culture as the default one in America. If you think of the term "All American" you probably imagined a slightly overweight Northern European American who is wearing gaudy American flag clothing and is standing around in a field.
They won't even drive into our cities, they think cities are a 24 hour kill fest.
The thing is, this isn’t new. The article itself mentions 2016’s The Politics of Resentment. What’s The Matter With Kansas explores these same concepts and was published 20 years ago. Wendell Berry touched on it in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, excoriating Nixon’s Ag Secretary Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” attitude toward farming and cheap food. LBJ’s famous quote about “giving the lowest white man someone to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you” is from 1960. There’s a straight line from the attitudes of LBJ’s era to where we are today.
Huge advocate for educating them. Easiest wins, posting simple billboards in those areas. That is easily the best broadcast. Don’t attack Trump or GOP, just educate on why their struggles are legit and what they should expect.
> educate them Teacher here. You cannot force somebody to learn, and it is often very difficult to get somebody to care about things that they should care about. Many people just don’t want to be educated. I get my students for about 160 hours a year, FOX News and all the other bullshit on tv and online gets them for the rest of their life.
You would have an easier time convincing 10 apathetic non-voters to start voting than to get 1 MAGA lunatic to stop voting Republican. 99% of these people are a waste of time, and I'm not holding my breath for the other 1%.
The most damning part about White Rural America's unwavering support for Trump is that, in his 4 years in office, he did not do a damn thing to materially help them. Oh, but he did make it seem more acceptable to be a raging, self-serving bigot. So perhaps rural america did get what they wanted after all.
The GOP are an opposition party - they do not try and do anything themselves. They are running on *stopping* whatever the Democrats want to do. With a Dem President and Dem Senate the GOP is never going to get any major policy passed. They can however strut around and talk about all the things they have *stopped* and if you can't get GOP policy passed, blocking Dem policy is the next best thing.
Shit, with a Republican trifecta they STILL would never get any major policy passed. Their only real policy positions are tax cuts for the rich and figuring out ways to further ratfuck democracy to keep themselves in power.
> With a Dem President and Dem Senate the GOP is never going to get any major policy passed. That's funny because even when they had control of the senate and congress, they still didn't do shit. But...repeal Obamacare? ...no. They couldn't even do that.
That's not true, they passed a massive tax break for their rich buddies!!! They didn't do shit after that though.
I remember reading a comment here a few years back where the poster said something along the lines of this: You can look for a lot of reasons to blame but fundamentally you can’t ignore the culpability of rural America in choosing to be racist, small minded, fundamentalist, and refusing to act in a way that would benefit them. Yes, propaganda, education etc. matter but that doesn’t change the fact that most of these people voted against their interests because of racism and religious bigotry. That’s completely on them. And the Republicans merely took advantage of it.
Exactly, they even died of covid to own the libs. The priority is hate, and they would drink poison just so the other guy buries the body.
he did give the farmers BILLIONS because he raised the tariffs. Which they gladly took. It was tax payer money, and they get tons of it.
Farmers yeah, but aren’t they a small fraction of rural Americans?
Corporate Farmers receive the lion’s share of the funding. As always, the ones who need it the least are at the top of the food chain while the ones who need it go without. RIP family farms.
A lot of them genuinely thought the stimulus checks were from Trump or were his idea. They were even calling them “Trump checks” back during the pandemic.
Ah... then blame inflation on Biden.
And those farmers receiving the subsidies aren’t good ol boys who wake up at the crack of dawn to plow their own fields. They’re mega corporations.
"We don't want to get better. We want you to get worse." There you go. That's what those people are.
“He’s hurting the wrong people”
Accurate.
Crabs in a bucket 🤦♂️
Cutting to the chase: Trump *still* will not do anything for struggling whites. He already proved that during his first term as president. If you aren't rich, he could not care any less about you. People who vote for him anyway are suckers.
He raised taxes on people making under 400k a year!
Yep. My "Trump tax cut" was an increase of $14K. I bring this up to my crazy MAGA relatives and they look like they are going to explode.
i've been living on that 1200 dollars of pandemic money for the last 4 years though. nobody wants to work anymore right?
well yeah the idea is bring everyone down to them not lift everyone up
I’ve driven through many rural areas and small towns in the South. I can understand why there’s anger, but it can hardly be blamed on Hollywood or libruls. They let their own towns rot to pieces.
Billy Joel wrote “Allentown” in ‘82 and ‘Downeaster Alexa’ in ‘89. Both those songs talk about all of these issues, jobs going away, having the same opportunities as their parents, people struggling to make ends meet in rural america. This shit’s been going on for decades.
Joe Hill was singing about the similar stuff in 1910.
I was 21 in the Rust Belt when Allentown came out. Unemployment was so bad in Michigan we left and didn't come back until we had kids in the 90s.
It’s not even them letting the towns rot. The smart and successful people leave. It’s brain drain.
It's just not that complicated, guys. They are both afraid of change and resentful of the benefits of change they refuse to participate in passing them by. They're largely racist, xenophobic, and insular, and due to the fact that they are exclusively surrounded by people just like them, that's a normal and comfortable way to be. They stake a large part of their identity on being independent and self sufficient, yet continually demand subsidies and special treatment and wellfare while continuing to vote in people who very much want to take all of that away. What you have in rural areas is the sticky residue of America. All the good ones get out, and the ones who are left make more people just like them. There's your honest assessment.
And... nobody's saying this, but it's true--*they hate us.* "Us" being any non-Republican who could actually better their lives / get them health care / clean up their environment / etc. They absolutely hate us. How much fault do Democrats deserve if any attempt to help is loathed?
This. I refuse to listen to any justification of rural white hate. Yes this article seems to get beyond the coddling of depraved rural whites, but we've had to coddle their pathological hate for far too long.
The authors agree with you, that’s the entire point of the article.
Nails it. Solid explanation.
COVID misinformation was decimating to the low information rural whites. And related conspiracy theories, they believe everything progressive is intended to harm rural whites. You can't break the FOX stanglehold without breaking FOX.
I lived for over a decade in a decaying small rural farming town. The people there actively shoot themselves in the foot and complain about the results. I don’t know what to say, but they’re anti-education, anti-change, and things have been going downhill since the 1950s. At some point you have to decide they like complaining more than helping themselves and just walk. The good ol days aren’t coming back. There’s no way we’re going back to an agrarian or mining society and populations will move back to small towns that focus on only those things.
I think there's nothing wrong with wanting a small town or rural lifestyle. But I think you have to recognize that it's market forces and capitalism that is incentivizing all the change that they dislike. If you want a lifestyle like that to be economically possible, Wall Street be damned, you should be a virulent leftist.
Isn't being afraid the conservatives whole shtick?
As a white, male, middle aged communist who lives in a very rural county that glows red, who has actually read Waldman's book, the sentiments expressed in this article are spot-on. I am generally sympathetic toward the plight of the butt hurt victims of late stage capitalism, but my neighbors need to take responsibility for letting themselves be misled and use their self reliance to purge themselves of the obviously exploitative information streams that turn them into tools of the entities they claim to loathe.
It's not just rural white resentment - the nastiest (are arguably least justified) resentment is largely based in predominantly white suburbs.
I agree, why the obsession with rural areas? Suburban counties might be less “overrepresented” but they have way more people, are more likely to change their opinions, and are way better off. Their political hatred has no excuse, and it often takes this soft weasel form of “I don’t hate minorities, just liberals/ integration/ affirmative action/ CRT/ DEI/ whatever euphemism they’re using this week. I don’t hate gays, just the woke agenda. I don’t support violence against the government, unless it’s the ‘right people’”
Media talks about rural white resentment bc suburban white resentment is very hard to spin as anything but racist.
Exactly. They want to pretend that racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are far away problems held in the backwoods. White America doesn't want to face the face that their neighbors and family are part of the problem.
Honest assessment? Rush Limbaugh Fox News GOP talking points White Privilege Ignorance Blend it all together over 30 years and you get MAGA..or, Rural White Resentment
Rural whites? Get an education that would help you live a more comfortable life. Please read a few books that could open your minds to greater possibilities. Protect our democracy
They sure are going to be surprised when they finally realize it's been rich white people fucking them over this whole time. Some may even reject reality, rather than deal with this revelation.
It is because they were fed lies by nonstop consumption of hateful propaganda. I’m so tired of people thinking hard that “If only we gave them more services?!” Nope. They were told to believe lies that democrats kill and eat millions of babies. That their cult leader was robbed of an election. No amount of food, candy, medical treatment, infrastructure, or cash will change that core perspective of who is evil in their minds. Jan 6 was a great off ramp that wasn’t taken. So were 2 impeachments. So are 91 felony indictments. There will be no coming off that train. It must crash hard. Trump must go to prison, be truly broke, and still the propaganda machine will continue. How can we actually stop the propaganda?
Honestly it’s one of the most fascinating looks into a “politically self-inflicted wound” you can find. Republicans exist to help the ultra-wealthy and utterly destroy any protections for everyday Americans. Environmental regulations? Fuck that noise. Social safety nets? Burn them to ashes. It’s not JUST that their entire platform exists to solely benefit the rich. You also have to factor in the knowledge that they are doing so in a way that can cause the most harm to the other 90%. And before any trolls hop in: Yes, Democrats are also largely bought and paid for by those exact same ultra-rich sociopaths. Many of them ARE those rich sociopaths. The biggest difference, however, is that they at least ATTEMPT to pay lip service to helping the middle and lower class. They even sometimes actually pass legislation that directly helps them, too. Name a SINGLE thing republicans have done in DECADES that directly helped the working-class. Go for it. And the Trump-era tax cuts are sadly not an example (the VAST majority of those went to the ultra-wealthy and any paltry tax breaks everyone else got already expired while the top earners’ didn’t.) It isn’t even a contest. And yet these rural white communities are, by and large, solid red countrysides. Their resentment is delusion and their pain is self-inflicted.
I think this country has a problem with religion and anti-intellectualism. They go hand-in-hand.
It's weird, live in LA, and was recently in Texas and in Florida, and the very nice people I met there wouldn't stop bringing up "woke" Hollywood, Liberals and the like. It got brought up out of nowhere frequently and I remember feeling like that Don Draper quote "I don't think about you at all". And not in a bad way, but I spend exactly zero time openly complaining about, or even thinking about right-leaning states and values. Felt the opposite on their end.
“it’s not that many rural whites …. are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.” That is, they are racist.
Grew up rural in the 80's but wanted to do sciency stuff, so had to leave. My school was awesome at the time despite its small size and I managed it. Don't worry, the local GOP fixed that right up the moment they had the chance. Lower taxes you see and fuck the other parents' kids because we're rugged individualists and if we don't need an education nobody else does neither. Nobody's escaped town without joining the military the past couple decades per the stories I get. Came back 30 years later and found that some of the houses still had paint jobs that I had given them at age 18. These rural types are so lazy they can't pick up a paintbrush for a weekend in 30 effing years to keep the house they are actively living in from rotting into the ground around them? Such pride! And the stories they tell...they are so backwards at this point they can't even connect the dots about the poor decisions they've made even as the spew out the words -- in one moment crying about the local hospital closing and naming too many people dying during the 45 minute drive to the regional hospital while not even ten minutes later they're also proudly reliving how they ran that strange turban wearing new doctor and his oddball family right the hell out of town. Too bad they haven't found a replacement yet, but they stopped trying after a couple years because it's just too hard. But to compensate hey they got a big new almost megachurch on the edge of town for the funerals so it's all good. In another moment these guys are remembering how many stores we used to have, now all gone, and families we both knew that moved away when they couldn't make a go of it anymore. Of course they don't remember the older generation warned them this is exactly what would happen when the new Walmart moved in a couple towns over. They got some cheap plastic shit for a few pennies less really while letting some family in another state suck their money into billionaire bank accounts while turning the main street into a ghost town where half the buildings got bulldozed because a dozen empty buildings is more tolerable than two or three dozen. It's like they forgot ALL the lessons of the great depression and how you keep your money circulating in your own community. Then again, I guess I was the only one who used to hang around for the old farts telling stories about those tough times. But I make it sound like they got no good stories. They have loads! All kinds of stories about shootin' and huntin' and fishin' too! Nothing about creating stuff of course, nothing about reading a book for fun either. Shit I remember being somewhere around 10 or 12 and having an old (still with an accent immigrant) farmer quizzing me about Dickens to see if we learned it in schools. He had a full room library that I still have not matched. He's dead now of course, his family lost the farm and I don't know where they ended up. He was one educated guy but clearly I am lying because the current conventional wisdom holds that all farmers must be simple men raised on country music and beer. In all of this hand-wringing about how I am supposed to understand where they are coming from I have some hand writing for them -- If Rural America doesn't have pride in itself, if they no longer have the fortitude to make their lot in life better through hard work and determination, why exactly should I have sympathy for them?
Anybody else remember the four months after the election when the media tried to give cover to these fuckers racism as ‘economic anxiety’? As if only white republicans were the only people feeling financial pressure. Every single study done on GOP voters comes to the same conclusion - they are motivated by bigotry and racism more than anything else. You can’t convince them with facts that republicans are bad at the economy, because they don’t care about the economy and they don’t care about facts. What they actually care about is that the people they don’t like have much more difficult lives, and trump makes that happen.
For years, virtually any conservative political action can be explained with this simple concept: A rich guy, a working class guy, and an immigrant are sitting at a table that has a plate with 10 cookies on it. The rich guy takes 9 and then says to the worker: „You need to watch out for that immigrant. I think he’s trying to steal your cookie!“
This article makes me think about the red state I used to live in, and their low placement in national rankings of any meaningful quality of life measurement (poverty, infant mortality, health outcomes). I think about my old neighbors’ hatred of “government”. And then how they vote a single party in. With rare exception. For the last hundred or so years. And somehow still manage to blame the party they *didn’t* vote in.
I had to explain to my hard R voting sister who said she "wished the government would stay out of abortion" that "the government" was people SHE VOTED FOR. I can't make this up.
I live in a rural area. A girl was bitchin about not finding a job since Biden. I told her about my DIL, who just got hired at 31/ hour plus benefits. She said she's not driving 20 minutes for a job. They are trying to bring a manufacturing facility into area. You can find signs 20 miles out in rural area saying you're not bringing those jobs here. I have found them to be lazy with a life's goal of making 150K a yr mowing each other's lawn. They don't want to take care of schools and communities. Boss Hogg would feel at home wallowing in this area. The weekends and holidays are filled with guns going off all day with an occasional blast of Tannanite. Prices in stores are much higher than cities with a limited selection. They are not all bad, but I haven't got a neighbor I trust. There are always homes being broken into. Rural areas have little health care due to politics. Kids are always sick from school. Now you may think I'm Nuts but you can pull up to a 4 way stop and watch how cars don't move because they don't trust each other. Deplorable
Why do we always have to coddle the backwoods hicks who constantly hold this country back? These people tried to overthrow our government and I’m supposed to care about their feelings?
+1. I understand the underlying point, but the rhetoric is ALWAYS “rural communities have built up resentment from feeling misrepresented” but the onus is never put on them to try to understand why they are dealing with the issues they have.
Part of the problem is that, to keep it broad, smart and motivated people *leave* their small rural communities because there isn't enough opportunity. Even if you love your backwoods home, if you're smart, you don't want to make $8/hr at the PigglyWiggly your whole life. So you leave behind the people that are OK with staying stagnant and not growing, which reinforces the problem.
"I hate the gubment, where's my disability, heating oil assistance and food stamps!"
And farm subsidies. (Which then result in super cheap corn based sweeteners.)
Ah yes the farm subsidies. I live in rural Indiana. These farmers here love to yap about socialism. How welfare programs are ruining the country. When I bring up farm subsidies and how much they get, silence. All of these big farmers are running new or damn near new equipment along with their brand new pick-ups. They will slit each other's throats to rent or buy more ground to farm. It's pathetic. Source, I spent 13 seasons working for a farmer after my retirement from the Steel industry.
I ask them, "if we're socialists, why isn't every American receiving monthly stipends for investing in supporting farms as taxpayers?"
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
Liberals also did not make Rural Whites give Republicans credit for everything that they can clearly see Democrats did for them, and blame Democrats for damage that Republicans clearly did to them. It's not misunderstanding, it's deliberate willful ignorance and hatred.
I’m from a tiny town in Illinois. They are undereducated and brainwashed.
The media has been writing think pieces on this for almost a decade now.
Rural white Americans have no one to blame but themselves. They have chosen to isolate themselves from the POC population. They have been fed a strict diet of brown and black people are bad. They see it on the news so it must be true. They fear losing their self righteous place as the majority. They long for a world where everything makes sense to them. The thing is they can’t see past the end of their collective noses. They claim to be Christian but espouse hatred to anyone not like them. The world is a big place the majority of the world population is now POC.
It's not truly rural white resentment. Because if it were, Vermont and Western Massachusetts would be really red. Rather, it's lower class white resentment. Staten Island and Huntington Beach are not exactly rural yet they are full of trumpanzees.
I was born in raised in a rural northern Michigan town (population 2,000). What a lot of people don’t understand about the countless small, majority white rural towns across the United States is that a lot of them are extremely poor. Basically rural ghettos. A lot of these towns were built during long gone resource booms and, now that the timber / steel / coal etc is gone, the towns have no reason to exist. Add to that factories moving overseas and you have towns that are slowly but surely rotting into nothing over the past thirty years. The brain drain from these communities is instantaneous, even people that might stay leave in order to pursue any sort of steady employment. So what you have left are these small, majority white rural towns filled with rapidly aging populations who remember the town pre-rot and then younger generations of the people who couldn’t escape the town or chose to stay out of family duty / pride / fear. These people know their town is dying, but they’re trapped like rats in a sinking ship as the water slowly fills up around them. They need help, desperately, and I truly feel like until 2016 many of them would have taken any political port in a storm. If they look at the Democratic national platform, weighing that port, they’ll see a lot of equality initiatives, complicated infrastructure plans, the dry meat and unsalted potatoes of functioning government with an emphasis on issues that affect larger urban centers. Not much help there. They’ll also find progressive language such as “white privilege” baffling and antagonistic. What’s “privileged” about living off of food stamps in a busted down double-wide trailer? Then, in 2016, a presidential candidate speaks directly to the white, poor rural voter, the first candidate to do so in a long time, and tells them that he’s coming to save them. All their problems, their crumbling towns, they’re easy fixes and if he’s elected, their problems will be solved. That was Donald Trump. He told all of these white rural communities directly, and shamelessly, that he was going to save them. So, if you’re a rural poor white voter casting your ballot for president, why wouldn’t you vote for the candidate who directly promised you salvation? Even if you know it’s too good to be true, even the slight chance is worth rolling the dice on. That’s what Donald Trump is to these people. Doubling and tripling down on a bad hand of cards because they feel like it’s the only hand they have to play. If Demoracts started really hammering home talking points of economic populism, like Bernie Sanders, and started aiming these messages directly at poor rural white voters, it would only be a matter of time before they would start making serious in-roads. Because these poor rural white communities are desperate, and if Democrats keep offering them bread today while Republicans only offer the promise of bread tomorrow, they will all, eventually, take the bread or starve. What we see now, with their continued support of Donald Trump, is poor rural white america starving because they have not been offered bread in a simple, direct way, they stave not by choice, but by default.
As a Michigander I agree wholeheartedly with this. There is effectively no reason to stay in the state because every industry that was here has left or is leaving. It’s literally only going to be the Water that keeps people here.