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.
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
The article: let’s construct a false image of city dwellers having a false image of rural dwellers to absolve rural dwellers of any personal responsibility.
It completely ignores how much they voted for and continuously cheered on their own economic demise and acts as if poverty only exists in the country and no one has ever suffered similar hardships in an urban setting.
The article got one thing right, THEY LOST THEIR MINDS.
They’ve lived through how many republican administrations yet it’s everyone else’s fault? Republicans have continuously gotten their way… reagonomics, 3 terms from the bush family, Donald trump…and things are demonstrably worse off. You cannot look at America and say the issue is that it was at any point NOT conservative enough.
All while these sensitive rural voters call the rest of the country “out of touch”. They aren’t bad people but holy shit how much do we need to coddle these children while this happens?
It really is two different America’s;
Urbanites have to compete internationally, Chicago vs. Sao Paulo, Los Angeles vs. Berlin. The international corporations compete against each other.
Rural folk are at the mercy of the urban markets, and large corporate resellers. The local wealthy merchant, isn’t interested in international affairs, they want to be a despot of their local county/state.
So you get local rural ‘noble’, that have every interest in undermining urban business, as it doesn’t affect them. It’s why politics is so bitter and cancerous. The wealthy rural owners, have no steak in the game for America to do well internationally. The most conservative people tend to be wealthy rural people, think of the guy that owns a farmers co-op in rural Nebraska.
Essentially this is what happened during the American Revolution. The northern cities had enough of England, and rural American farmers fought because they thought they would wrestle some control for themselves away from the east coast cities.
In my home of Ohio we’re so gerrymandered that we regularly pass ballot initiatives. We frequently have to amend our state constitution.
I get the nuances here. I really do. Most of the people I’ve dated have been Appalachians, my girlfriend grew up on a tobacco plantation in Tennessee. Most of my career puts me in rural factories where as a visibly queer women in a male dominated career I’m routinely treated slightly worse than in cities and I deal with their very real problems. But the thing that I keep coming back to is that they aren’t punching up, and when we mock them as slack jawed yokels we aren’t either. We need to show them solidarity but we also need to stand firm on important issues. Yeah feel free to mock us city folk for thinking we’re better, but don’t act like plenty of us didn’t flee your small towns because of your behavior.
When we as a left show them an open hand we can let them reject it
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.
On the other hand, more conservatives voted for Trump in California than in Texas. That’s a LOT of conservatives who are having their voice drowned out. This is also why a few red states have signed on to the national popular vote amendment. So many people in deep blue and deep red states stay home on election day, we don’t actually know how the popular vote would play out. People like to say we have way more democrats but that’s not necessarily true - it’s just a matter of current vote totals.
