Fair enough but they’re still too big a minority, and there are too many of them, to shut this down. Even if they don’t or can’t pull off an insurrection, they can sure make things really, really bad for a long time.
They sure as hell can - no doubt about it.
@ Asahi: Superb. Simply Superb. As to this snip:
The fact many (60+%?) are embedded in a local geographical monoculture where they are in the local majority or damn near the local entirety makes it even worse.
Even absent the malign influence of social media plus conventional media rage-politics-as-revenue-generator, this local cultural homogeneity ensures a natural self-reinforcement of “We are normal Americans living in normal America. They are not.”
How we address the geographically-driven cultural monoculture is gonna be a huge problem.
That’s a good point, LSL.
And yet, I am reminded that not all that long ago, places like Kansas - yes, Kansas - had two fairly moderate senators. Missouri had moderate senators. Ohio was as Democratic as it was Republican.
But as you say, the rural white areas…it’s all changed. The maps now highlight the divide between diverse metropolitan areas and largely white rural counties that cut large swaths across state maps.
I don’t have enough data or knowledge at my fingertips to explain the phenomenon entirely, but it seems like much of the trend can be traced to the death of small town manufacturing, which used to tie the economic interests of White townsfolk with Black, Hispanic, and other laborers in metropolitan areas. With the collapse of that economy has followed the collapse of unions. What’s left is economically depressed white communities that are left with a sense of relative - and in many cases, very real - deprivation. Hence the heroin epidemic. But on top of that, there’s a sense among these people that while they’re losing, non-white folks in urban and metropolitan areas, and White “elites”, are gaining at their expense.
The people who showed up to riot at the Capitol may not have necessarily been people directly impacted by this phenomenon, but they might be connected to people who are. Or they might simply be politically-motivated opportunists – there’s that, too, of course.
If you’re not already familiar with the term “the Big Sort,” you should google it. There’s whole books on the subject, including one by that title.
I’ve read Big Sort. Good stuff.
As to
All true.
I’d argue that the central cause is simply that small-town America largely stopped evolving in the 1950s and the rest of the country has massively changed in that 70 (!) year period. Changed economically, racially, culturally, and religiously. Much as many honest Republicans lament that “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me”, those folks are living much as their parents and grandparents did and yet somehow they’re out of step with the country at large. From their POV, the country did leave them.
If it’s a 7-hour drive to the nearest place not just like where you live, most folks will never personally experience that larger world. Or do so only a couple days per year. At just a 4-hour drive you’re still not doing it unless you have a darn good reason. And certainly not regularly.
It gets worse. The nature of social and evolutionary change is that the more different it is, the more the rate of change increases. It’s an exponential process and small-town America is umpteen “generations of cultural evolution” behind. IOW, absent explicit directed efforts to the contrary, the natural path of evolution will be for the gap to only grow.
Note this is not a qualitative argument that big city USA is evolving in a “better” direction. At this level of argument it’s simply a “different” direction embodying an ever-growing difference.
There is a lot to be said for modern urban values over the inefficient and blinkered 1950s. At the same time, a few babies have been cast aside along with a lot of filthy bathwater. I have no doubt that modern values are better overall, but it’s an error to claim the traditional small town folks never have a point in their favor.
I like what you’ve written here, especially the observations about the “rates of change” being so different.
Re-inventing the rural economy is one of the great unsaid tasks of the coming century. There’s a lot there worth saving but we’ll need 21st century ideas with which to save it.