We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
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What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. 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.
As someone living for decades in rural Mississippi, Rural conservatives are willing to hurt themselves if it means hurting others. They fight against raises for themselves so the "lazy" people dont get what they dont deserve. They fight against healthcare subsidies for the poor, subsidies that they themselves would qualify for, because they want revenge on "welfare queens". They are horrid people that go to church every sunday to hear teachings against all of the shit they do.
tldr; its racism all the way down but no one wants to call them on it. big surprise. no mention of the foxnews propaganda machine that instills/reinforces these 'views''.
There are tens of thousands of towns that have no reason to exist anymore. The railroads don't stop there anymore, coal isn't in demand, or the factory where everyone used to work closed long ago. It's a death spiral. Nobody who lives there can admit they need to cut bait and start over elsewhere. They cling to the past and the delusion that the world will go back to the way it used to be.
Biden already did the best thing that could be done for these people which is funding a massive expansion of rural internet. If corporations continue to be pushed into allowing remote work, these rural towns would see the new economic infusion they need to survive.
I think Chomsky nailed it as far back as the nineties, at least. I cannot find the exact quote, but he was commenting on the "Angry White Male" thing and said that of course a great many people had the right to be angry about their situation, but that of course they'd be pointed at the wrong things/people either as deflection or as the (false) cause.
When people say that the cons manifested donnie vs. donnie somehow coming along and changing the cons, they are not wrong. It's no coincidence that donnie is glued to grievance outlets like Faux and just repeats their bilge. When these angry people have been eating up Faux nonsense and a candidate comes along that just repeats everything on those grievance outlets, and gives them a permission structure to start saying some of the worst thoughts they have out loud, it's all too obvious who they are going to vote for.
Naturally, that candidate will be doing absolutely nothing for them beyond their feels and will most likely just enact policies to make their situation even worse.
As a rural white (I'm one of the good ones i swear): we are ignored, it's an objective reality that the better parts of the country neither attempt to understand rural America or the problems it faces. No blame here tho, i spend most of my time trying to ignore this shithole too. Some places in America are nearly third world levels of bad, even when the was an economic reason for these places to exist they were terrible and the people are awful in so many ways. There is no 'but' here if anyone was expecting one, no saving grace, no happy ending.
The only way i see this working out well is if it starts in the cities, though. Organize our cities better and force reasonable housing costs, then relocate most of rural America to someplace better now that it's not insanely expensive for basic survival there. Sure an actual farming town might not be and to be relocated, but shitty coal town #4642 shouldn't have ever existed in the first place and rail stop #556 has been dying for over 100 years. It'll be good for future generations to not be in places like that.
As someone that was born and raised, and still lives in a super majority pro Trump part of the rural South, boy is this article true. I can't begin to explain the rabid love so many have for Trump and the republican party.
I was eating with some family at a restaurant and got to listen to them railing about the public schools grooming kids and letting them read porn. Even pointing out that they literally know the local teachers and go to church with them. Asking who is supposed to be doing what they are claiming gets absolutely nowhere.
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. 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.
This right here is so on the nose it's not even funny. Republican political strategy in rural America is 100% distraction politics. Using every nonsense "moral" issue they can come up with to distract from the fact that they are completely incapable of governing anything effectively for the benefit of the people.
It's true that the cultural left didn't suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals.
When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.
It's so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man's party by anyone since the 1890s
Yet that doesn’t give any answers. Conservatives lie, misdirect, scapegoat, and seem to act against their constituents’ interests. That’s the common view from the other side.
But why do they still get elected? Why do those constituents not see through the BS? Why does it continue to happen?
Is it all they know? Is demonization so successful? Are they that gullible? Is there something positive to conservative politicians we don’t recognize?
The real shame of all this is that we have to care what some of the worst elements of this country think. They are a minority and they live in areas that are not all that strategic when it come to the future, or economics, etc.
Their argument is always "we grow your food!". And I've never understood this argument as a valid one for so many reasons. For one, it's not like this is done as some kind of altruistic thing, any more than any other industry, lol. So you are part of agriculture, uh, so what? Secondly, most of the food that I personally eat is not grown in the flyover country they seem to indicate. Lastly, things like automation might be coming for all of that and so I don't know why I or anyone else have to be held hostage by a minority group that happens to be distributed in remote areas of our country and who may have been tenuously connected to food production at some point in the past...
Is the same thing happening in the US as in the UK. Whenever data is taken working class white men always come off worse in the stats. But all the money goes to women and minorities while also talking about how the white man is today the cause of all the problems.
It's like being at the bottom of the barrel and then also being shat on while everyone gets a helping hand but you.