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.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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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''.
"all the way down" is missing the heart of it. The article is describing people with real issues, who have really been let down and really need better from their government.
That this has been channelled into racism is awful and sad for everyone, for all the victims of misinformation.
A huge portion of the country has been let down by the government. You don’t have to be rural for that. Lack of healthcare, education, and support are nationwide. Not everyone decided to be racist because of it.
You do realize that all of those issues you listed are a direct result of Republican policy, correct?
Of course I’m aware. What I’m saying is that it’s stupid to give rural white Americans a pass for being shitty and racist just because life hard.
They want to blame everyone else for the problems and double down on a party of grifters and con men, because that is more appealing than admitting they have been wrong. That the propaganda they have been fed their whole lives is a pile of garbage they have been happily eating.
They would rather continue swimming in shit as long as they are told that they are better than everyone else, which is what the right has been telling them for decades.
It's not giving them a pass. But you can blame them and do nothing, or you can try and lift them up.
And you propose I do what exactly? They are dead set on ignoring reality and substituting their supremacist fantasy. Any program that is aimed at uplifting people is deemed communist and assaulted by the very people it’s aimed at helping. Any influx of people and capital that could replace all the lost industry is viewed as an invasion of “elites” or whatever enemy of the day is.
They are ruled by fear and hate of everything that outside of their safe propaganda bubble. They cannot be helped until they are willing to do a bit of introspection, and decide they are open to listening and learning. I will not feel sorry for the people who would happily destroy the world around them just because it doesn’t align with what they want it to be.
I grew up with this. I know these people. I got away from it, and I am happy to never go back.
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It's been channeled into racism, on purpose, by the representatives in government who are doing the "really need better from their government." to the people. They've managed to implement policies that are actively harmful to their constituents, while convincing their constituents that it's all some other group's fault.
I agree this is why I described them as victims
Except this happened for over 60 years.
The efforts to create a Great Society were stopped when it became apparent that the benefits of the Great Society would be shared by all. Responses to racial integration included closing school districts for years and filing public pools with cement.
The government was trying to do better, but since it wasn't hurting the wrong people, the response was to make the government worse.
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You ever try begging Kentuckians to accept that they’ll need to do something, anything, other than mine coal and to let the government fund them learning how? I have. They did not like that.
They're the ones keeping the government from doing better. And you can't help those who reject help.
Until they genuinely ask for help. And stop blaming others. May they enjoy how much they've fucked themselves.
And you can’t help those who reject help.
We're going to have to, at some point. Or they'll be forever holding us back.
We may have to force on them things like good schools and living wages, before they'll be able to grow past the "hate liberals" phase
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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 spend dozens of hours a year driving through the rural South. So many towns as you describe. And I have no idea how they're alive at all.
A weird thing I've seen: Most small Alabama towns are quite charming and well kept. How does that work when there's no obvious economic driver?!
Cross the border into Mississippi and it's a different story. You could teleport me to a random highway or town and I could tell you whether I was in AL or MS.
The wealth gap is on full display everywhere. You'll see a stunning property and home, rambling across several acres, and then a couple of trailers so beat down the county would condemn them if they cared to look.
How do those small towns still work? Cars. Sit and talk to people living in those forgotten towns, and they generally have very veeeery long commutes to work, or one of the few poorly paying jobs in town. +90 minutes commute is not uncommon to get to the next closest printing press/slaughterhouse/steel mill/etc that hasn’t moved overseas or closed down.
I dated a girl from one of those small towns. Pretty much everyone either worked at the school, the county hospital, or the Hormel factory.
It's weird how the radicalized right wing took umbrage to the notion of retraining with their sneering use of "learn to code". Of course, not everyone can write code (and those jobs may dwindle, too) but the notion of doing anything other than mining coal just seems to really, really, really offend a certain type of person.
The idea that someone should just "learn to code" shows a huge lack of understanding of what "learning to code" entails. It also doesn't help that they'll need to earn a living while they're learning to code, and that they'll have to move from a dying town to find a job where they can code.
They weren't offended by the idea of learning to code. They were offended by the dismissive nature of the major life change that switching careers and moving to a different state entails.
And, as someone who learned how to code, I'm offended by the dismissive nature of the technology industry as just "learn to code."
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"Learn to code" is just the 21st century version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".
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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.
This misses an important point. Cities like Chicago and Miami compete globally, against places like Berlin and Sao Paulo. Smaller regional centers, like Oklahoma city, and Des Moines are ruled by their own elite and are not concerned by international affairs.
The wealthy in smaller regional centers don't have the ear of the Federal government, but they do employ most people in the local area, so locals are tied to their success. Locals also rely on them for donations to local hospitals, charities, and sporting clubs.
The wealthy in smaller regional centers don't have the ear of the Federal government
If anything, they actually have an oversized voice in the federal government due to the Senate.
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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.
And no one ignores the plight of rural folk as much as Republicans. Indeed they want to make it worse to gin up more discomfort. I'm from deep rural Alabama. To say my family votes against their own interests is a given, for the two choices, but they vote for the most extreme antithesis to their best interest every time because frankly, they're committed to the "invisible war against """other"""".
I agree they should escape, but I also am not going to extend them some bullshit about how they're "forgotten" or "ignored". They know exactly what they're doing. They are making their choices.
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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.
Perfect analysis by Cracked of all places: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Not even "of all places". Cracked had some great articles before everyone bailed.
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
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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 answers are all here:
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Nothing I've read makes more sense regarding Trump's support. I get it now.
What's so weird about donnie in particular is that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, spent much of his life trying to be accepted by elite culture in Manhattan, was given a game show in which he played a businessman.
He's like the embodiment of every single douchebag in an 80s flick. I grew up in an extremely rural area, and most people I remember, left and right, hated donnie and his antics as a so-called businessman. I just don't get how he has transformed into someone they think represents them. Does he insult other elitists? Okay, yeah. Is he still an 80s caricature of a douchebag who flies around in his own jet and plays a lot of golf? You bet.
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Isn’t cracked.com supposed to be comedy?
That essay covers it pretty well and maybe I’m in the same boat as the author. The small town I grew up in was a great place but dominated by a single large employer. When they left, they left a huge gap still not filled decades later. I left, and the few times I’ve visited have been mostly sad at what is left.
I did go to a high school reunion at some big number like 20, and it was even sadder. It was mostly people who stayed local and they hadn’t changed at all from high school. My best friend has the same hobbies so can’t talk about anything new after 20 years, and claimed he had never been more than 50 miles from where he grew up. What the ever living fuck? My brothers best friend still lives in his Mom’s basement and works on his Camaro on weekends. What else can I feel except pity?
However the large employer in our town was a tech employer so this is new, playing out in a single lifetime. For most of these small rural towns, their way of life has already died long ago, but the people either don’t understand or don’t want to understand. The article talks about farming mechanization requiring far fewer people, but there’s also the rise of large corporate farms and global trade making it much harder to succeed at a family farm. But that’s half a century or a century in the making. You can’t blame the current president, nor can some blowhard change that with BS. Your way of life is already gone and your desperation is from clinging to it, doing the same thing over and over for years. Somehow expecting something to change. I know change is hard and I wouldn’t want to, but your actions are locking your children, your town, yourself in the same cycle of desperation that will keep getting worse. It’s long past time to rip off the bandaid, to face the music. To take responsibility for your future instead of hiding from reality
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WOW
As a former Republican who lives deep in MAGA territory that article resonates so hard I'm sure a nearby Geologist just looked at their seismograph in alarm.
Wow, just...wow.
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Republicans have a huge and extensive propaganda network that feeds their constituents a steady stream of misinformation, fear, hatred, intolerance, and ignorance. Fox News primes them, Republicans parrot Fox or whatever right-wing news outlet people get their news from, and get elected because most people don't have the media literacy to see that they're being lied to.
We can't reason with them, because they live in a world that has been carefully crafted to keep them compliant. The only way to fix this is to break the GOP's propaganda machine. Until we can do that, they are lost to us.
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