To be quite honest, that is true in all the rural areas I’ve lived too. Massachusetts is a good example of how Boston and its sprawl determines the (typically unfair) fate of rural western counties, and has since the Revolution.
I don’t know where Trump is finding all these angry rural voters who want to stick it to the libruls. But he is certainly finding them.
I agree the reality doesn’t always match the perception. But as somebody who grew up in a very rural area, I can tell you the perception is definitely there.
Unfortunately a lot of rural people take the wrong response to this problem. They decide that if the government isn’t giving them the services they feel they deserve then there’s no reason for them to support the government. So they’re easy targets for conservatives who promise to shrink the government.
But when the government gets smaller, it just makes the rural situation worse. Any cuts in government services are more likely to be made in rural areas where they will affect fewer voters. If you feel you’re getting the short end of the stick, the last thing you should be doing is whittling down the stick.
Not really. Rural electrification for example, now rural wifi, didn’t make rural areas into cities. It just made rural people’s lives easier. It isn’t “rural” to not have a post office, or a hospital. It’s poverty.
OK, now give that same rural area three hospitals, and five grocery stores within a five-mile radius, and a school within walking distance for every student, and a shopping mall, and franchises for ten different fast food chains, and a professional sports arena. That’s just a small sample of the services that city-dwellers have. Can you give all of that to a rural area, and keep it rural?
Obviously, it was a while ago but LA stole the water from the Owen’s Valley because those rural people didn’t need it as much as the urban core.
A more recent example would be something like the urban voters in Colorado fighting for lower taxes as the expense of rural school districts.
I think that concrete examples are hard to come up with since in general it is benign neglect where rural voters are screwed over by a new road in a suburban housing project while their road continues to be unpaved and barely maintained.
This reminds me of my political-campaign-intern days a decade ago when Carly Fiorina gave a speech in Bakersfield and she mentioned an incident where a man (farmer?) in California was told by the Californian government that he couldn’t use his own property because it was home to an endangered species of fly.
That’s not something urban voters specifically voted for (referendum-style,) but the type of voter who would usually care about species/environmentalism and vote in a government that would take such a stance, is much likelier to be found in the cities than in the countryside.
Where I liive in southeast Michigan many of the rural folk prefer unpaved roads because it discourages outsiders from cutting thru their area. Some of these rural folk are quite well to do and drive Land Rovers covered in mud as a sign of pride. Some are long standing residents that want to be left alone to enjoy their property.
You don’t generally see grocery stores, fast food franchises, shopping malls, and professional sports teams listed as government services.
And people aren’t asking for three hospitals or a school within walking distance. But they would like an emergency room or an elementary school that was less than an hour’s drive away.
Back about 15 years or so, both St. Louis and Kansas City were looking to the state of Missouri to guarantee hundreds of million in bonds to upgrade the cities’ football and baseball stadiums. Meanwhile, people in outstate Missouri were getting tired of the highway dept. claiming poverty, A bunch of “No Roads/No Stadiums” signs popped up all over the state.
Huh, I’ve never lived any where rural that people would cut through on the way to something. I did manage to come out of a state park the back way after grouse hunting over the weekend and ended up driving down a messed up “public” road that was littered with signs that everything off the road was private property so maybe that was intentional. My in laws do hate when their dirt road is graded since they get a flat tire from all the nails it kicks up each time but their prefered solution is to pave it not to stop maintaining it.
Maybe the difference is the rural people who don’t have to work vs those that have to get to their job even after a 10" snowfall.
Wanting the road plowed and wanting it paved are two different things.
They still plow the dirt roads around here.
Still I never encountered an over abundance of unpaved roads until I moved to Michigan from Ohio almost 20 years ago and it has taken me awhile to figure out what is going on with them by talking to locals and making observations. There are places in the richest neighborhoods just north of Detroit (Franklin Michigan) that have unpaved roads with multi-million dollar mansions on them. And its like going through craters on the moon just west of the Franklin Cider Mill. Those people can afford big SUV’s and have their own car washes, if you turn down their road in a little car you quickly turn around.
Then I have friends that live west of Detroit and like that people don’t just cut through using their road. I often will go a couple miles out of my way to get to a paved road rather than cut through. It’s very obvious that this is what the people who live there want as I have spoken to several of them about it. My boss lives on one of these dirt roads and he likes it.
I’m guess you’ve never driven on a dirt road in 10" of snow. It turns to mud amazingly quickly and quickly becomes impassable for all but the largest 4x4 vehicles.
If the people like dirt roads because it keeps people out I guess more power to them here in Colorado dirt roads get closed quickly since they are hard to repair once they gets ruts deeper that 6" in them. I live on the only dirt road in a paved neighborhood, my road is 600’ long. It is also the only road in the neighborhood they don’t plow and these are all public roads. We’re looking at moving our driveway (and changing our address) so that we can go directly onto a paved road.
The 80’ wide dirt road my in-laws live on gets plowed but all dirt roads in their count are considered tertiary roads so they are the lowest priority in the county and rarely get plowed before noon. That doesn’t overly help when they are going to work at 6 am.
I live on a dirt road. I don’t drive on it in 10" of snow; but I routinely drive on it after it’s been plowed, sometimes of significantly more than 10" of snow, and have done so with no problem in a two-wheel-drive low clearance Civic.
We have quite a few dirt roads around here. The only ones that become impassable in winter are some private roads that don’t get plowed. The very steep ones down to the lake require 4WD; but they’re liable to do that any time of year.
It seems to me that you’re describing roads that aren’t plowed at all. As I said before: wanting the road to be plowed and wanting it to be paved aren’t the same thing.
I have to say I never understood the opposition to this. After all, I have to register my car, although it is not restricted in any way. The registry was not intended to take guns away only to keep track of them.
Ha, that’s just what those liberals want you to think. Don’t you get it? The registry is just the first step, so they know where to look when they decide it’s time to take the guns away. Wake up, sheeple! /s
Whenever a political division comes down to Country vs. City, the Country usually loses and usually deserves to lose. The City is where Civilization happens.
The rural areas are financially dependent on the urban areas. I think the average per capita income in urban areas is twice what it is in rural areas. Red states rely on blue states to pay the bills and rural areas depend on urban areas to pay the bills. The GDP of the NYC metro area is about 1.6 trillion. The rural parts of the nation are heavily dependent on that economic activity to pay for their medicare, medicaid, social security, military, etc. Its one reason why truly breaking up the nation along urban vs rural lines won’t work, because the rural areas will realize how poor they are and dependent on the urban areas to pay their bills when the money spigot is turned off.
Also the resentment you describe is about them being upset that they get less votes but aren’t allowed to rule. The entire political system rewards rural voters. The house, senate and presidency rewards rural voters on the federal level.
It used to be even more favorable to rural areas than now. Most states’ constitutions were written in immitation of the US Constitution. That included the way representation in their senates was allocated. Each county got a fixed number of senators (usually one, I think). This didn’t make much difference when the states were new and all counties had low population, but as they developed, the rural-urban difference became rather stark. So rural areas dominated pretty much all state senates. Eventually the US Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional and states then had to create senatorial districts of equal population.
But before that happened, there was one interesting effect. Section 3 of the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution (repeal of Prohibition) says
Note the highlighted words. This is the only amendment that specifies convention ratification. And the reason why is that, in general, rural areas were in favor of Prohibition while city areas were against. The writers of the article figured they couldn’t get ratification via state legislatures because of the rural domination of the various Senates, so they went with this alternate mode of ratification.
I think we should make the rural states pay for themselves. They’re all a welfare states. They wouldn’t have roads or schools or mail or electricity or hospitals without the city folk footing the bill. There isn’t much of a move to do this because it won’t pass the Senate, this is a bi-partisan scam. Most of the country doesn’t know about this, that’s why they keep paying the bill, and the problem is only presented in terms of the Electoral College, and most people have no clue how that works. That’s why the urban folk don’t even bother trying to screw over rural folk even though that bunch of welfare queens and deadbeats do it to us every day.