Article summarized:
“Cities are big, scary places where people do things we consider weird. And we’re so brainwashed that we think that cartels in Mexico and religious extremism in the Middle East are somehow the fault of liberal cities in the US. Our small towns are still clinging to industries that died 30 years ago and are now relying on subsidies from the blue states to survive, but people are afraid to move somewhere relevant because their neighbors lie about how horrible those places are, so instead of actually doing something about it we all collectively threw a temper tantrum.”
This is basically the same shit they were saying pre Civil War to justify keeping slaves. It’s a toxic mindset that’s 200 years overdue to die.
If Republicans finally decide to stop just making shit up and actually listen to scientists rather than spitballing from a 2000 year old mythology book, then they can participate in adult conversations. Throwing a childish tantrum and then refusing to grow up garners no sympathy from me.
The article is not about sympathy. It’s about understanding how all this happened. And maybe a bit of empathy.
I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Just because he said words they wanted to hear? Politicians do that all the time! How is he the one they believe?
All the points in the article are accurate, but it just doesn’t make sense that the personification of everything they hate about cities is who they end up worshipping.
He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
Except he didn’t fight for them and he lied constantly about fighting for them with no results.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn’t make one “a fighter” - just a narcissistic asshole criminal.
Hooray what a hero.
Even if I grant all the arguments are true for the sake of discussion, the fact that they’ve seen how incompetent and ridiculously stupid he is for FOUR YEARS not to mention he tried to destroy their fucking government and they’re all “yay we upset city people” Okay Granpa Jones but that makes you objectively a complete fucking asshole moron and your continued support of this rapist fraud criminal is not helping you in any way at any level. Try again. Got someone smart? Articulate? Anyone? We’re open - any age, any gender, any race - anyone? No? This guy huh. He’s your guy is he. Yeah.
That’s what we thought.
And dementedly burning down everything one sees and grabbing pussies doesn’t make one “a fighter”
Yeah it does.
Like, by definition. He fights.
But they didn’t see who he was. Their news media fed them a different story about liberals getting in his way and the immigrants making things worse and the government not letting him fix things. It’s all the “lazy” city people voting for big government handouts that’s making the world worse.
Anything he’'s accused of is just liberal politics and a hoax.
It’s a good explanation. And it confirms the core nihilism motivating these voters. “Burn it all down” is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Their frustration and motivation, while I can understand it, is an insult to those of us continuing to keep it together as they make everything worse.
“Burn it all down” is an abdication of responsibility and self-infantilizing by forcing that responsibility on everyone else.
Left wing doomers and “revolutionaries”: sweats profusely
If only there was a group of people who told us neoliberalism and NAFTA would be disastrous!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
Since NAFTA, Americans have watched the economy grow, but its stability plummet.
https://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/testimonies/comesatime.htm
Interesting reflection in today’s world where we keep getting told that the current administration has done great for the economy, and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
There’s an also an interesting linguistic difference that is very noticeable between this movement and today’s repercussions of the inaction that followed. While in English we often speak of “anti-globalization” in French they say “alter-mondialisation”. A different globalization instead of against globalization. The French term much better described the left wing movement of the time, while the media only spoke of anti-globalization which now became a calling cry of the right.
Fun fact, a Twitter was originally conceptualized as a result of the 1999 protests^1 due to the difficulties and successes people on the streets had with coordinating via SMS (which at the time was rather new and novel).
Anyhow, I guess we should all vote for the neoliberal again, surely that will fix it!
and yet the wealth devide keeps growing, and more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck.
I’m actually go with “you are wrong”. Under Biden, the wealth gap has grown in absolute dollars, but only because the wealthy had so much more to start with. Lower income families saw much higher percentage growth in wealth and income. Mathematically, it will take a long time for lower income families to catch up, but this is a good trend.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/feb/us-wealth-inequality-widespread-gains-gaps-remain
It’s not what he says, but how he says it. He knows what outrages them and plays on it. He pretends that it outrages him too.
Who they worship doesn’t matter. Based on the article, they voted for a brick to be thrown into the window of the elites. It really doesn’t matter who that person is, just as long as they inflict damage on the elites who have been marginalizing them for years.
It was a super informative article and I hope people read it, and not assume from the title or read the summarized version like we usually do.
If we keep labelling them ‘deplorables’, it’ll make things worse. We need to reach out and listen while also helping as best we can.
I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.
Because he gave their bigotry a voice.
Credit to @shalafi@lemmy.world - this applies very well to this comment.
Yeah, what does that Occam guy know?
Are you firm on the stance that it’s only bigotry, and not, like, I dunno, motions wildly to the article a complex set of multidimensional issues?
What’s the logical fallacy called when you misuse a logical fallacy?
E: “fallacy fallacy” or “argument from fallacy” (also known as: disproof by fallacy, argument to logic, fallacy fallacy, fallacist’s fallacy, bad reasons fallacy [form of])
Description: Concluding that the truth value of an argument is false based on the fact that the argument contains a fallacy.
Good philosophy.stackexchange discussion about it.
Hey, if you want to believe it’s just simple noble country folk that support Trump and not a bunch of fucking bigoted shitheels, that’s your benefit of the doubt to give.
If you want to convince me, you’ll need to do better than an op-ed in Store Brand Mad Magazine from someone who is airing his grievances that New Orleans got too much attention after Hurricane Katrina.
Are most of the people who voted for Trump bigoted shitheels? Possibly. Is everyone who voted for Trump in 2016 a bigoted worthless life? Absolutely not. Not even close. He campaigned on a multitude of issues, if you’ll recall. And before that thought enters your head, no, I voted for Sanders in 16 and Biden in 20.
I know it helps to simplify things, but you can do better. Think outside of the Monkeysphere, or whatever you need to call it so you don’t feel like you got the idea from Store Brand Mad Magazine.
Is everyone who voted for Trump in 2016 a bigoted worthless life?
Perhaps not, but January 6 left no doubt about the supporters who remained with him.
Lemmy: where everyone to the left of Biden must be a Russian Chinese Shill bot child, but let’s give actual Trumpists the benefit of the doubt.
Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.
This isn’t an insult, its a fact.
When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.
Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.
I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.
Why latch on to Trump in particular?
Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.
Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.
You know, standard fascist shit?
It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.
The article: Rural people aren’t just racist, homophobic assholes - they’re struggling with apocalyptic economic destruction, constant discrimination and hatred, and have fallen through the cracks of society while society stomps on their face.
The comments: RURAL PEOPLE ARE BAD, FUCK RURALS
I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them read the article…
I will say, though, that as much as rural people get fucked out of their votes in most situations, they are vastly over-represented in others. For example, each vote in the electoral college for California represents 703,000 people. In Montana, on the other hand, each electoral vote represents closer to 250,000 people. There’s a strong sense among city dwellers that the rural folk are dragging the entire country into hell just because they’re suffering under capitalism - and they aren’t wrong, in some sense. America’s inconsistent, patchwork electoral system definitely contributes greatly to the urban / rural conflict.
You are spot on. I need to disable my notifications on Lemmy or I’m not going to get any work done today.
We need to move past First Past The Post.
It’s not that rural people are bad, to me, it’s that they’re under resourced and groomed. They’re often victims of their ignorance, which is why so many people that ‘get out’ cite the exposure to other ideas as to why they evolve.
Yes they are dragging us down and backward, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But the ones to be angry at are the people in power.
Yeah I think it’s extremely tactically important (and good for the moral high ground) that we don’t mock them for being rural or for the struggles rural folks face. The meth and opiate problems are no funnier than crack. It sucks when you’ve only ever had one prospect and it was going to kill you but you can’t even do that just because it’s causing an apocalypse
Yup. Digging the county by county stuff too.
Here’s my state for 2020:
You see those three GIANT counties in SE Oregon?
Left to right that’s Lake, Harney and Malheur county.
Ruby Red. Here’s how they voted in 2020:
Lake - Biden - 792 - 18.15% Trump - 3,470 - 79.53%
Harney - Biden - 894 - 19.95% Trump - 3,475 - 77.55%
Malheur - Biden - 3,260 - 27.62% Trump - 8,187 - 69.36%
Sorry guys, square miles and cattle don’t get a vote.
You see that tiny little sliver of a blue county next to the panhandle? That’s Multnomah county. I.E. “Portland” or “where the people live”.
Multnomah - Biden - 367,249 - 79.21% Trump - 82,995 - 17.90%
I remember looking up Iowa’s county results right after a past election, and Florida too, and thinking: it is very easy to see the university towns. One or two oddities I had to look up… it turns out they were small universities. The correlation between education and liberalism is extreme. Austin vs. Texas at large would be another example.
Whereas I do believe that it’s not just “education” but moreso intelligence that is the predictor of liberalism today, the “where the people are” as well as the age bracket make a big difference. Most small colleges are in small towns, but these colleges have a commanding presence in the population of the area. They can be gerrymandered into oblivion tho.
Just realized this article is 8 years old. Doesn’t seem like much else has changed.
Fanaticism happened in the 8 years since. Trumpism is essentially a new religious movement and to its adherents, anything Trump says goes.
In 2014 these rural people would have gladly driven their 4 wheelers over to Russia to shoot Russians themselves. Now, since their god-emperor is in bed with Russia, they love Russia.
All the motivations that led rural Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016 no longer apply. Now it’s pure religious fanaticism, propaganda, and doublethink.
So one of the movies wasn’t Idiocracy? I’m surprised.
But we aren’t in an Idiocracy like in the movie. That movie was about well meaning idiots in government because they were the “smartest” of the idiot population. What we currently have is an evil corporatocracy. Capitalism decides how our elected officials govern through lobbying. People are becoming dumber over time because of knowing, bad actors who want that to be the case. Education is getting worse, those in charge want citizens to fall in line and they want us to fight so that we elect the same people over and over and over again so that said people can continue to reap the benefits of that corporate lobbying.
Top to bottom the system is the way that it is because of intelligent bad actors squeezing us for all we are worth, not idiots.
I’ve lived in cities most of my life. I’m now in a very rural area.
Yeah, it’s economically dead. I have to drive 45 minutes to get to work. I’m not super enthusiastic about that. Rents aren’t really that much lower than in the cities, because there really isn’t much available to rent, other than a trailer that might or might not have utility hookups. I understand a lot of the points that the guy makes.
On the other hand, yeah, there’s overt racism here, and overt homo- and transphobia. Yes, local lose their goddamn minds over the thought that a trans person might need to pee, or play sports. My state is passing laws to prevent libraries from having any books–other than the bible–that even mention sexuality, or the possibility that LGBTQ+ people exist. One county south of me was a sundown county up until the 80s (!!!); in the 20s. Nearly every goddamn public official in my county ends their term of office by going to prison for some kind of corruption on embezzlement; people see that as just the way shit goes.
I do agree that many city people have lost the ability to be self-reliant in any meaningful way, or even reliant on small, self-defined communities. Most people I know in cities can’t do basic auto maintenance (maybe because they have no place to work or tools, but often no interest as well), certainly don’t do home maintenance (which, yeah, if you rent, that’s risking eviction), they certainly don’t hunt (I don’t either yet, to my chagrin), and many of them don’t do any significant cooking. They’re usually more reliant on systems rather than other people; there’s a breakdown of community in cities, with people feeling less connected to each other. And as a former city person, I’m certainly guilty of that now, since I share so fer of the values with people that live near me.
votes do not matter and the election is rigged
there are people such as myself barred from voting and there are states wanting to only have one candidate on the voting ballot on top of what this article mentions
please change my mind with good facts begging you please give us hope that this comment is wrong
also great fucking article
If votes don’t matter then you shouldn’t care that you can’t vote… I’m of the opinion that no one should lose voting rights ever. It’s a stupid punishment.
The election is “rigged” if you consider “rigged” to mean that first past the post voting always devolves into a two party system, and Citizens United caused both of those parties to be bought.
If by “rigged” you mean that someone today already knows for certain who will win in November, then no, that’s crazy. But I’d agree that the difference in candidates is smaller than it should be because both are heavily influenced by money.
mean rigged as in the bipartisan politics that took my vote away were crafted by the same groups that have candidates on the ballot for people to “vote” for
democrats and republicans made laws and policies on a bipartisan effort nationally and statewide to invalidate a portion of Americans from voting and they disallow third parties from debating on the national debate platforms
https://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/green_partys_jill_stein_cheri_honkala
the two corporate parties both rigged the game board in their favor plain as day and it does not matter which of the two “parties” win because either way we the people lose
Ok yeah. That’s just the first past the post voting system in action. Until that changes, the best we can do is vote against the candidate we hate the most.
Why are you barred from voting?
in the US your rights are dependent on which state you reside in 24/7 and you are not allowed to live in more than two states 24/7 so only one state’s rights per person and those rights do not carry over state lines
Vacation houses and the like do not count unless you register as living there 24/7 which registering requires an ID or driver’s license from where the state gives out licenses (different office and name in different countries mean states)
this is all because of how fractured the “US” is think fifty different countries all pulling in fifty opposite directions even the states that are in the republican or democrat camps
the stickiness comes in when a citizen of one state registers as a citizen in another state without giving up the other state’s citizenship thus making a person at least on paper as living in two states simultaneously giving that person the rights of two different states depending on which state they are in and registered also
for example registering to vote is a state by state thing not connected nation wide and if you are registered as citizen in more than one state you could in theory be registered to vote in more than one state and do so since not really checked nationally only state wide and registering to vote is validating an address
some state driver’s license/ IDs are slowly being connected nation wide but it is still not a national thing across all “states”
to wrap this up not able to vote because am living in more than one state 24/7 in order to use the rights of other states when am at my other address - if voted it could be contested and deemed illegal voting which is a felony because being registered in another state is very frowned upon
so technically could vote legally but it could result in a felony if contested
would not be an issue if the US had national laws that all states had to abide by and a national playbook that was played on in all states
