White Rural Trump Supporters Are a Threat to Democracy
White Rural Trump Supporters Are a Threat to Democracy
A new book shows how many supposed “elitist stereotypes” of rural MAGA voters are true—and backed by hard data.
In the popular imagination of many Americans, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum, the typical MAGA supporter is a rural resident who hates Black and Brown people, loathes liberals, loves gods and guns, believes in myriad conspiracy theories, has little faith in democracy, and is willing to use violence to achieve their goals, as thousands did on Jan. 6.
According to a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
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Our style of government is the largest threat to democracy.
We need to eliminate the electoral college, primaries, the Senate, President restricted to 1 term, perhaps 6 years, term limits for the House, All elections publicly funded, No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied. No party affiliation on any campaign documents, signs, advertisements, no straight ticket voting.
Voting booths exist for a reason. They are to ensure the privacy of the person voting.
Otherwise all sorts of overbearing people can force others to vote per their direction.
Consider an abusive partner, or a extremist pastor, or a factory manager. In all cases they have power over others, and voting may be one of the few places where individuals can express their choices.
Voting booths are an outdated relic. We live in the most technologically advanced age ever and we should still rely on methods from the 1800s? What would be more convenient than pulling out your phone, wherever you are, being able to pull up details and platform of every candidate, make selections, then cast your ballot? Force people to vote on policies, not parties.
You missed their point.
It's so convenient, you have no excuse when your boss demands to watch you vote or you're fired. Your abusive spouse or parent demands your phone to use your vote. Someone manages to identify unregistered voters and register on their behalf and get massive votes because of flaws in the electronic system.
Which is also a potential issue for mail in ballots.
In the in person scenario, you aren't allowed to have anyone with you, to talk to anyone, or take pictures of videos that could be used as proof of who you did and did not vote for. This means you know that no matter what threats have been made against you, you can't prove which way you vote at you can vote however you like without fear.
i like the idea of voting by encrypted app as an option, but lots of disenfranchised/disempowered folks can't rely on that. by which i mean there are homeless folks without phones, and people with abusive families who lack privacy/safety to really utilize it the way we night intend.
According to a recent study 94% of the unhoused have a cell phone.
These days houses cost what cell phones used to cost and vice versa
I love the theory, but considering that every week we see some headline about some digital fraud or another, I think there is a great reassurance in keeping democracy as analogue as possible
Hanging chads...
Well yeah ok.
I support this entirely, but good fucking luck
The US can't even figure out giving IDs to its citizens, what makes you think they can make a cryptographically secure voting app? Not to mention that all forms of electronic voting opens up new attack vectors, which will definitely be exploited.
Just make election day a public holiday, make mail-in voting easier and assign enough polling stations with sufficient personnel to prevent long queues.
You know, the deriders of this bring up some good points, but I'd also like to bring up the point that digitally secured voting doesn't really need to be a super great solution. It would be great if it was, sure, but it doesn't need to be great, it just needs to be better than the alternative, which is pretty easy, I think. Voting analog is not necessarily a very secure way to vote either, as many people who remember the "hanging chads" issue will be quick to point out. It's also a pretty massive inconvenience for some people, which shouldn't really be discounted as a thing that prevents people from voting. "Oh but if they can't spare the time we don't want their votes anyways", but then you gotta keep in mind that in some places the wait times are gonna be multiple hours upon hours, and maybe days.
In any case, if you still wanted analog voting for any particular reason, you could still keep it open as a backup, which might not be a bad idea generally.
The 17th should be reverted and Senators should be elected by the state legislatures, not abolished altogether. It should serve it's intended purpose as the voice of the States. The Electoral College also still serves a purpose, but all states should be proportional delegate instead of winner take all. Ranked Choice or something similar is also needed, because FPTP always results in 2 shitty parties and is a root cause of many of our issues.
The House definitely need to be unlocked and proportional to population. Term limits are needed in both House and Senate, and money definitely needs to be removed from politics. Government provided war chests and that's all you get, hard agree on that. Hard agree on no ads, no PACs, etc. Get your message out in debates and town halls in an actual real campaign.
The states do not need a voice that is not proportionate to the population. If you want to have a second body with the indirection through state legislature, that maybe good, but it needs to be promotional allocated or vastly reduxed in power. Likely both.
Why do you think that the States don't need a voice in Government? The country is divided between the Federal Government, the State Governments, and the People, with the former being elected by the latter 2. Each State having the same number (2) of Senators puts all States on an equal level. Wyoming is just as valid a state as California or Texas, and should have an equal voice. Proportional representation in the House puts the each person on the same level, eliminating the current unbalance between Wyoming and California.
The People elect their local/state legislatures, which influences those who appoint their Senators, but the People and the State have different perspectives and prerogatives as they have different "jobs". It's certainly fallen out of style, but the whole "everything not explicitly granted to the Federal Government belongs to the States" is still a thing. We are a Republic of States, or are supposed to be at least.
I for one want more States to experiment with things like Universal Healthcare (Massachusetts), UBI (Alaska, kind of?), etc. They can do this because they are States in a Republic.
We should also get rid of the two party system by introducing a party chartered to only support or oppose things that multiple 3rd party polls find over one standard deviation from the norm support.
It's insane that given a political distribution that's normal for most topics we arbitrarily divide it into two halves rather than focusing on the center.
Even as someone who would fall to the left of the first standard deviation, I'd much rather live in a world where there was consistent stability around the norms as I fought to move the social norms in my preferred direction over time than live in a world where there's a 50% chance of Nazis being a thing again.
A significant majority of the county agrees on a surprisingly broad number of major topics, and yet we're divided into two camps currently being driven more and more by outspoken fringes that represent less and less of the general population, with everyone else falling in line out of a greater fear of the "other team."
No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied.
You are seriously underestimating just how many people don't have smartphones (22.5 million eligible voters in the US). A number of your other suggestions are good, but the idea of all digital voting needs at least some form of backup option for people who either have hardware access issues or digital competency issues.