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Don’t sneer at white rural voters — or delude yourself about their politics
https://www.vox.com/politics/24128478/white-rural-voters-politics-trump-biden-2024-election-polling
What the debate over "white rural rage" misses.
https://www.vox.com/politics/24128478/white-rural-voters-politics-trump-biden-2024-election-polling
What the debate over "white rural rage" misses.
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.
Yeeeeaaahhhh same here. Grew up in a podunk Arkansas town. You are right to sneer at these people. The most casually awful things will just come out of their mouths without thought; like "I'm proud to be white, ain't you?" levels of fucked up. Or, when talking about buying baby clothes that might be too 'boyish' for a girl, saying "Better not, you never know what will turn 'em."
These are both real situations that have happened to my husband and I that I can remember off the top of my head. They are not willing to be reasoned with (kindly or otherwise), they will just close ranks and ostracize you. Everyone can keep their pity, because even if they had it, they'd throw it back at you because they just don't like people who aren't like them.
I understand the human desire to empathize with a group, but trust me, it's being put in the wrong place here.
Do you think improved public education would help, or is it more familial/social mores that drive the fear of differences?
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:
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.
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.
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.
You've described most of my family and half the friends I grew up with. Not a single one of them deserves respect.
Basically boils down to people being hypocrites even with evidence being put in their view. That's the worst part, they think they have some divine mandate but they follow the person who wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire, let alone help them in a time of need.
So the only conclusion that's left is they're bigoted and racist as hell and just want someone to tell them it's okay to act that way. Well it's not, for a functioning society that wants to grow that is. Unfortunately these problems don't have simple solutions but education has left them behind.
...education has left them behind.
IMO they left education behind.
When someone grows up believing that ignorance is as valuable as knowledge there is no reason to ever learn anything. These people are narcissistic to the extreme and they think if they believe something strongly enough it makes it true for everyone. "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place." - Johnathan Swift.
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.
Well, when you put it as mic-droppingly thorough as that, kinda....kinda seems like the article is pretty cowardly, and like these fucking traitors should be tarred and feathered.
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.
Yeah all you have to do is look around and start asking a few questions. I grew up fully indoctrinated. Church school k5 - high school graduation. Within a couple years being out of that bubble it was all so obvious.
Rural Americans deserve little grace in this regard. They absolutely do know better.
It's not like Fox News is ever going to have a segment calling for empathy with minority urban voters, or 538 running an article on Republicans failing to address issues that minority urban voters have.
It's not enough that we have to live with their terrible choices in politics, subsidize their localities, and put up with their biggest assholes screaming at us in public about who the current president is for some reason, we have to completely understand and commiserate with that worldview and pretend that we too would've been just like them if we had the misfortune of growing up in the same dusty coal mine town we imagine they did.
I mean fucking Beyoncé is making country albums, I think all of America is well aware of rural white people.
Election season is coming up - time for suburban middle class liberal journalists to go to rural areas, have some cheap waffles with old people, marvel at how "Oh they're just people like us" and write long op-eds about it.
It's tradition.
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.
But you have to understand that they actually like their problems. They don't want that coal mine that only employees a tenth of the workers they used to to shut down, because it is their "livelihood". They don't want new technology to improve their life, their suffering is proof of their righteousness.
You must understand all the best and brightest left those small towns the first chance they got. They know they are the leftovers and like it that way. The ones left are bitter, ugly, and unintelligent.
They give their cows a season break between breading for their health but will get their woman pregnant every year until their uterus falls out. The cruelty is the point. They are not logical, kind, or understanding. They are hurting and want others to hurt too.
All the while ginned up on the high of their "superiority" feed to them by faux news. They are told they are the farmers, the backbone of our country. Elevated to a magical status that belays the reality that they are useless vestiges of a society that left them behind.
These people are not political, rather they have been co-opted by charlatans and liars. Propagandized to, manipulated, and twisted into the tools of the conservatives. The truth is they have no place in the future and will die off eventually.
Perhaps they know this on some level. They can sense the impending doom and like most assholes want to take everyone else down with them. So no, we don't need to recognize them or let them be heard. There is nothing to gain because they have nothing to offer.
...
How are your assumptions and prejudices different than when Trump voters talk about cities?
I lived in rural Idaho for several years during Obama's entire term. You have no idea how many times I had to listen to people's fantasies about hanging or shooting Obama.
My children went to school and they would come home and tell me the kids talked about murdering him all the time. The teachers even joked about it.
You have no fucking clue what you are talking about. You don't know hate.
And now you're showing them by acting just like them...
Have you never heard the phrase "circle of hate"?
I don't hate them, but I will not delude myself. I know it, I lived it. You really have no clue about the reality of the situation because you lack first hand knowledge.
You ever lived in a town where if you talked to a woman she would have a black eye the next day because her husband heard about it?
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.
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.
I suppose it's fitting, then, that these particularly remote, commonly white enclaves continue to experience the self destruction of loneliness, crime and drug death.
They and their predecessors championed those terrible policies to enhance disconnection, without understanding the consequences they now endure.
Even if we urban/suburban folks could reconnect with them, it'd be generations before there was true mutual understanding.
As for them forcing politics on the rest of us... we'll see.
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.
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