Don’t sneer at white rural voters — or delude yourself about their politics

I grew up with them.

I absolutely sneer at them.

You don't understand the sheer level of ideological depravity otherwise 'nice' people are willing to drop to unless you know (or have taken an interest in) a demographic like white rural voters in the US.

I spent much of Trump's term trying to understand and reason with the right wing magats on social media. The vast majority were complete idiots, unable to spell (even with spell check), use capitalization, or write a sentence, much less a complete paragraph that made any sense.

After hundreds of exchanges three things became pretty clear:

1. They gloried in the fact that Trump had become president despite (or often because of) the fact he was an adulterous, thrice divorced, repeatedly bankrupt, lying pervert that gloried in sexually assaulting women.

2. Their primary incentive was flat out cruelty. They wanted to inflict as much pain as they could on the "other". They hated pretty much everyone who wasn't a white Christian and that hate was another major motivation.

3. They believed that the Trump presidency was proof that their ignorance was just as good as other people's knowledge. (Paraphrasing Isaac Asimov.)

Ultimately I learned that there is no reasoning with these people. Sneering is the best they're going to get.

It's the churches, stupid. Without the churches, Trump is nothing.

But by all means let them sneer at you.

Let them say that you and all the libs are what’s wrong with the country. You can’t say anything like that, you’d be part of the problem.

Now you must let them propose “2nd amendment solutions” and put crosshairs on your pictures online.

Let them say you’re not a real American, after all they said Obama wasn’t even a citizen. You have to let them say stuff like that or else you’re the problem.

So now you must also let them claim your politicians eat babies and are pedophiles.

Let them repeat lies about the election, the president, the country, the rest of the world EVERYTHING.

So now you must let them storm your capitol and smear their shit on the walls.

Remember according to them Covid isn’t real, or at least it was man-made by evil Fauci and the libs! You now have to let them say this otherwise you’re being mean.

So of course now you have to let them spread Covid and yell at you about your mask, everyone’s else’s masks.

Let them parade donald trump around as he cheats on his wife, lies about it, and sells bibles.

Let them tell everyone how godless the libs are.

Let them elect the majority of presidents in your lifetime with a minority of the population and then let them tell you it’s your fault.

After all the problem is you, you godless liberal. You city dweller! How dare you dwell in that place and not be like them!

Since you are godless and hurt their feelings they’re not responsible for their actions, you are.

If you upset them they may bomb a federal building in OKC, start an armed stand off in a federal building in Montana, shoot up a pizza parlor or even start a civil war all of which they did before in the name of the same “politics” you just don’t understand.

I believe that my politics are more moral than those of a Trump voter, but I don’t think that says much about my moral character. I was born to liberal parents in a left-leaning suburb of a blue state. If I’d grown up in a rural town where everyone I knew and loved believed that Democrats were the Godless servants of corrupt elites and shiftless poor people, then I’d probably have voted for Trump; the data admits no other conclusion.

Awareness of how thoroughly accidents of birth and experience shape our selves and life outcomes should make us more supportive of income redistribution and more opposed to retributive criminal justice policies. But it should also make us a bit more patient with Trump voters.

I grew up in a red state with at least one parent who was conservative and religious. The other seemed to be kind of in the middle when I was a kid and liberal later on. I rejected authority and religion on my own. I get that a lot of people are biased because that's how they were raised, but I don't think that grants them any exception for not thinking critically.

Anyone else sick and tired of these articles?

Grew up in a rural red state. I've spent a lot of time trying to really understand their politics, and as best I can summarize, here it is:

• They are angry about how life has gotten worse for them, economically and culturally.

• They have very good reason to be angry about that, because it has.

• They are misinformed about what changed since the 50s and 60s, and too many of them seem to think more racism and sexism will restore their prosperity and dignity

• They have decided the only thing to do about it any more is to burn everything down until they get the respect they feel entitled to

• They are sincerely sad and angry it hasn't worked yet

The shorter story here, of course, is that the establishment GOP of the late 70s underestimated the willingness of its fascist wing to not die and completely didn't do the necessary things to prevent the party from being almost completely taken over by fascists

Sneering is rude, and I try to be polite. But those voters, those souls are lost and cannot be reached. Our survival depends on getting sane voters to vote.

Bringing up FDR just to say "that's too long ago" while ignoring 08 Obama is just nonsensical...

Rural voters have a shit ton of problems, and if they believe a candidate will help, that's the biggest part in who they vote for.

The mistake is not in painting rural politics as racist, it's in inferring that suburban and urban politics are not. This goes all the way back to the founding. Northern and urban whites need the redneck Klansman (and his slaver great-granddad) to feel better about their own stake in maintaining a permanent racial underclass.

From the "Great Migration", Northern and Western States created a patchwork of policy that officially and informally enforced racial segregation that the Confederate States could only envy. That segregation persists to this day. Notice how integration in blue States required "forced bussing" implying the literal distance between races.

The whole reason suburbs exist was a government largess in cheap loans for houses connected to the city by interstate highways. Minorities and women were excluded from the loans while the interstates plowed great polluted holes in the neighborhoods where they could live. This period of "white flight" cemented the idea that cities were the locus of crime, disorder, and filth. The privileged could maintain connection to urban economies while living (and paying taxes) in "the country". (it also married us forever to car culture)

In America, geography is race.

Rural white communities are often the most isolated from government. I didn't grow up in them, but I worked in them as an adult.

On the local rural level the issue with government is the absentee nature of state and federal government. That state is just a suit who comes to town occasionally and the fed is just the suit for the state.

So the churches, the landlords and the industry leaders maintaining their fiefdoms are the ones who controlled local politics.

And to say the least, they all resoundingly knew they were maintaining fiefdoms and not communities of citizens of a free nation.

There at one point was this idea that it urban centers tended to be more liberal because of ready exposure to different cultures and ideas. By extension of that, one would thing that the rise of ready access to the Internet would have helped disburse that to the rest of the population, particularly with things like social media letting people post their thought directly.

In reality though, just the opposite happened. Now people get pushed this constant reinforcing stream of information that feeds into their already established ideas. Then to top it off, 'journalists' (which are a dime a dozen these days since everyone with an opinion and a mic likes to claim themselves to be one) continually try to differentiate themselves by writing in more extreme and sensationalistic fashion so they stand out from the mass of other feeds.

Unfortunately, reigning in the deadly wave of stupid unleashed on society may be an impossible task.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But the latest round was triggered by White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, a bestselling book from the political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman.

In their telling, these retrograde impulses turn this group into easy prey for a Republican Party that shutters rural hospitals, denies workers’ health insurance, erodes labor rights — and then says, in so many words, let them eat hate.

All political violence is lamentable, but individual militants cannot undermine the independence of federal law enforcement, the integrity of the electoral process, or the peaceful transfer of power; an insurrectionary president plausibly can.

Some point to the fact that rural white Americans supported the New Deal and conclude that many in the demographic would back Democrats again today if only the party offered more ambitious economic reforms.

In Salon, Amanda Marcotte applauds White Rural Rage for treating its subjects as “functioning adults who have agency” and not “the childlike ciphers of Fox News.” This is an understandable sentiment.

If I’d grown up in a rural town where everyone I knew and loved believed that Democrats were the Godless servants of corrupt elites and shiftless poor people, then I’d probably have voted for Trump; the data admits no other conclusion.

The original article contains 2,014 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

He's basically saying White Rural Rage was correct.