The final paragraph is where the disagreement is. They actually aren’t trying to make abortion illegal for everyone. Roe v. Wade is what made it so that they themselves weren’t allowed to make it illegal. Similarly, when Massachusetts made gay marriage legal, most of them were saying ‘Glad we don’t live in Massachusetts.’ Their issue was that they didn’t want it legal where they lived. Your statement is exactly the problem that they have. “We (meaning people from urban areas outside of their communities) have decided that this is what we want and we’re going to make you do it, regardless of your wishes. If you don’t like it, you can get out of ‘our’ (meaning not your) country, despite the fact that you have been here just as long and your way of life is in fact much, much older.” I think you can see why that would cause a certain degree of fear within a population.
Your final paragraph is exactly what I was saying. They exist in a community where they need that homogeneity and feeling of ‘oneness’ in order to survive. You exist in a ‘society’ where homogeneity is not prized. You feel that their need for homogeneity is rightly discriminatory-it almost has to be unless homogeneity is something formed simply from chance. You think they shouldn’t be able to be discriminatory and work to change their laws. They feel (correctly by the way) that their social structures are being attacked. And let’s face it, the posters here agree that they are attacking them, they just think that they are right to attack them. I won’t disagree as to who is right or who is wrong in this essential divide, but the question is what unites the supporters of Trump and the (real) feeling that their structures are under attack is what it is.
One issue is that they way rural people vote seems to invite the problem. Take, for example, the recent response after the murder of Mollie Tibbetts by an illegal immigrant. The accused in this incident was working at a local dairy farm, along with several other undocumented workers from Mexico. Of course the reason they were there is because the owner of the farm did not want to pay decent wages to local workers, preferring to instead to hire cheaper undocumented workers. As a liberal, my response to this is that if you don’t want immigrants moving in to your community in large numbers and working for less than minimum wage there are better solutions. One would be to prosecute the business owners who hire illegal immigrants. Another would be to support higher wages and better working conditions so that local people would be more likely to take these jobs and the owners of the dairy farm or whatever wouldn’t have to turn to immigrants to take these jobs. What happens in the real world, however, is that the locals elect someone like Steve King who works to make things worse for immigrants rather than a Democrat who would work to pass laws to make the lives of local workers better.
I grew up in a small town of 20,000 people and know many from that town who, as you say, value homogeneity in the community. What I don’t get, even having grown up in such a community, is how homogeneity actually benefits the people in the community. If someone or even a group of people I went to school with, for example, had come out as being gay, or atheists, or transgender, how would that have hurt me, or any of the other kids in my class that I went to school with? If a kid stays seated for the pledge of allegiance or doesn’t say a prayer before the football game on Friday night, how does that hurt anyone? OTOH, it’s obvious to me how it is hurting someone if one of the kids who does say the pledge and pray before the football games bullies a kid who doesn’t do those things.
I think the OP may have it but the wrong way around. Liberals will hate on anyone who isn’t sufficiently supportive of them. I remember a cartoon consisting of four panels. The first three each consisted of a different liberal berating someone along the lines of, “If you don’t support X…”. The fourth panel consisted of the three liberals asking each other why they lost the election. The opposition, of course, welcomes these people with open arms. So yes, Trump & co delight in being abused by the Left because it’s a vote-winner for them.
Trump literally spread white nationalist propaganda, supported anti-gay and anti-trans policies, spent his entire campaign endlessly linking the words “black”, "urban, and “crime”, and that’s not even getting into the whole GOP position on issues that affect women. And your argument is that liberals are the mean ones for opposing those things? Or is it the mean things liberals said, as opposed to all the nice things Trump and his supporters said about Clinton and her supporters?
When you’re done stamping down those molehills, better grab your shovel and make a start on the Himalayas behind you.
The only reason liberals berate anyone is if that person initiated the hatred. Liberals don’t go around saying “I hate A, B, and C but support X, Y, and Z.” What they say is “X, Y, and Z are harmless, and I don’t understand why some people who are A, B, and C hate people who are X, Y, or Z. Because of that, I don’t support people of groups A, B and C if those particular people are haters of people in groups X, Y, and Z.”
I believe that all people are equal and deserve equal rights. That includes both gay people in Massachusetts and gay people in West Virginia. If they don’t want gay marriage to be legal where they live, it is because they have an irrational hatred of homosexuals. There is ONE other explanation - you’re one of those ultra-libertarians who says the government shouldn’t condone gay marriage OR straight marriage, because it should stay out of the marriage business altogether - but I very much doubt that there is a large number of people for whom that applies.
Slave owning is a much older way of life too, and we told them that wasn’t OK either. We had to fight a war to get the point across, and that’s what we did. Because if these people are calling themselves “American” and discriminating against blacks and gays, how are we as American supposed to pressure third-world countries to modernize their human rights laws?
They do not need homogeneity and a feeling of ‘oneness’ to survive. They need it to feel superior to those they dislike. If it makes them feel funny to see two gay men walking down the street, tough. They can suck it up. Because as upset as they are about being exposed to “the gays”, how do you think those gay people feel living in a town where they are hated this much? How do you think a kid growing up in Smalltown, USA feels when his parents disown him and kick him out of this town where “oneness” is so important and community is so powerful, just because he feels things towards men that he has no control over?
If their social structures are evil, then the parts of those social structures that are evil need to be removed. Period. Is urban society perfect? Nope, and there’s definitely a lot of crap we need to change about urban culture too. Does that mean that rural societies get a free pass to discriminate? Nope. We aren’t attacking their society – just the parts of their society that are discriminatory, hateful, and evil. If that’s the hill they want to die on, history won’t look kindly on them a hundred years from now.
It hinges on community vs society and how these social structures work. Community works by everyone being on board. It doesn’t work when people aren’t on board. They are literally ‘not part of the community.’ Getting back to earlier posts, it’s about predictability and stability. Society uses governmental structures to enforce conformity. You get rid of say thieves by creating a governmental structure that pressures thieves to stop thieving. Community structures don’t work that way. They work by creating an environment in which social pressures force thieves to conform to a certain way of thinking or else risk being thrown out of the community and the benefits it provides. When people aren’t all onboard, then the social pressures that prevent that thieving become weaker and it leaves people more susceptible to thievery. Community though can’t just work in isolation like society can. You can’t say “I’m part of the community when it comes to thieving, but not so much when it comes to murdering.” Community only works very broadly, so it’s much harder to target it. You are either part of the community or you are not. You probably experienced this growing up. By the time a town reaches 20 thousand people, the ‘community’ as a whole is already under strain, so likely you had multiple communities within your town. You likely were pretty much like people in those other communities, but my guess is that there were communities that you were not a part of and were even unwelcome. You were placed within another group despite the fact that you probably only differed from them superficially, maybe only by the neighborhood you lived in. The community though to function has to be a homogenous single entity with those within and without.
This means that all deviations from the normal are egregious because they signal that an individual is not part of that community, but something else. If you are gay, that could be a threat to the institutions of the community (it doesn’t have to be, community is not completely rigid, it’s just slower to adapt. There are certainly rural communities where homosexuality is not an issue.) and so must be suppressed. The benefit though is a very strong sense of in-group where the people within that community function as protectors and stabilizers for others within that group. What’s important though is that all of the members have to work within the confines of the group and be seen as part of that group. It’s actually possible for non-conforming members to still be part of the group as long as they don’t attack the group structure.
I’ll give you an example. My mom lives in a town of about 300. She’s very religious as most people are. There’s a guy named Stevie who lives in her town and grew up there who is very flamboyantly gay. Stevie though is universally liked by this religious, small community. He is generous, participates in the ‘rituals of community’ and attends their church and all of that good stuff. If you asked the people in that community, “Is homosexuality sinful?” They would all say, “Yep, no doubt. Bunch of godless heathens.” If you asked them “Is Stevie going to Hell then?” They would say, “Well, you know, he’s just Stevie. A little mixed up, but good people. God understands these things.” The point is that Stevie is gay and largely loved by the community because he does not present as a threat to that community. He upholds the community structures and because of that is well-liked. Those community structures are what offer the safety and stability of a group of people without needing to rely on societal structures which prove inadequate.
I think hatred is the universal characteristic of the far right. I don’t buy that rural areas NEED homogeneity, they THINK they need it because they have little experience dealing with non-whites, non-Americans, and non-Christians. They fear what they don’t know and the right exploits this fear with spreading of white nationalist hate speech. Sure, the rural areas were formerly Democratic. So was the South. But with the Civil Rights movements, formerly racist white Democrats switched parties. This fear is stoked by the phony outrage over anthem protests or saying Happy Holidays or hysteria over non-existing bans of the pledge of allegiance or hysteria about a Pepsi can (REALLY stupid since it was RC, not Pepsi) from 2001.
So the Republicans milk white nationalism for easy votes the same way they milk the anti-abortion people for easy votes. The racists and theocrats vote their way, cutting their own economic throats to get the perceived goal of protection from non-existing threats. The donor class laughs all the way to the bank as they reap the financial rewards of rural white insecurity.
Your profile suggests you’re from Scotland. I’ve asked this question before but you didn’t deign to answer. Let me try again in a larger font: Where in heck do you get your news about the U.S.A. from? ?
Is it from Rupert Murdoch TV?
You really need to open your eyes, because that is simply not true. I will cite the hate on me in the Kavanaugh threads. I merely pointed out that he was entitled to the presumption of his innocence, that people were presuming his guilt, and that Ford provided no evidence to back up her claim. And the portals of Hell opened. At no point did I say her claim was false. At no time did I call her a liar.
IMHO this seems to be the crux of the matter regarding the rural / urban divide. I think the hate thing is a whole different ball game, and as I mentioned upthread is present in vastly different cultures from different time periods, i.e. is part of human nature for some humans. So the question then is why do societal structures prove inadequate in rural areas? IMHO it’s because the people who they elect to represent them and run the societal structures in fact represent the few rich businessmen in town (like the dairy farmer who hired the guy who killed Mollie Tibbetts) rather than representing the actual interests of the ordinary people. What I don’t get is why the rural people don’t see that and change the way they vote.
It has to do with the size of the community and limited resources. They can’t afford to antagonize the rich dairy-man because he provides employment and the resources they need to function. When you talk about small communities, they don’t have the levels of resources to pool into making grand societal structures. Let’s talk about say West Virginia. Let’s say that West Virginia votes next year to be a liberal paradise. They tax the rich and lift up the poor and so on. Where exactly does the money for this come from? They have a GDP of 57 billion dollars. That’s about half the size of Hartford Connecticut’s GDP, for the entire state. There isn’t money for larger police forces or better roads or anything else for that matter. There are no rich people to tax and the few that do exist, you can’t afford to get rid of. Societal structures that work in dense, wealthy places just are unaffordable and impractical in Nowhere, Wyoming. They have to rely on their community for pretty much everything and so a community style of social structure springs up to support these areas.
There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin…
you are a random poster on a message board. You are communicating with other random posters on a message board. That’s not indicative of what “liberals” as a whole do. If your conceit is that some liberals are assholes, I will happily grant you that. But we are talking about liberals as a whole.
Kavanaugh is not entitled to a presumption of innocence because he is not facing criminal charges, so the legal terms “guilty” and “innocent” are totally irrelevant. We aren’t trying to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that he tried to rape Ford, we are trying to determine whether he is fit to be a supreme court justice.
when a woman accuses a man of rape, and your first response is “by God, that poor man! He could be… FALSELY ACCUSED! That’s like the worst thing that could happen to a person!” you’re an asshole. Obviously he could be innocent. That’s why we didn’t, say, immediately lock Kavanaugh up in federal prison. It reeks with a very similar stench to JAQing off - “I’m not SAYING Ford is a liar, I’m just point out that she MIGHT BE!”. and you very well know this.
EDIT: And number 4, you don’t have to say the words “Ford is a liar” to accuse her of lying. Just look how many people get warnings here on the Dope for accusing other posters of lying without saying those words. Obviously if Kavanaugh didn’t attempt to rape her but she claims to clearly remember him trying to, then she is a liar.
:smack: