"Is it that the Dems don't understand white, working-class America?" No, that's not it

“The dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America: a view from the inside”

I’ve seen in different threads attempts to figure out what makes Trump supporters tick. There doesn’t seem to be any logic or self-interest at work. I saw a headline someplace yesterday where people in Florida are worried about the demise of the ACA-- well, they voted for DT and he swore to repeal it. Didn’t they see a connection? This article IMHO puts to rest the notion that if coastal liberals only understood rural America, we wouldn’t have this great divide. The article is REALLY long (4,000 words), so don’t just take my word for it and limit your reading to these snippets. I believe this guy nails it (and yes, the tone is somewhat snarky, but it doesn’t negate the solidity of his reasoning). See what you think.

The opening:

The author’s credentials:

The meat of the article follows, carefully presented, and this is the concluding paragraph, which I have formatted into bullet points to avoid continuing the wall o’ text. The author addresses each one of these points in the article.

It’s not an optimistic picture.

So really they need to be got rid of completely, or compulsorily re-educated.
It’s not the FDR vision of the Great Depression Years, nor yet LBJ’s War on Poverty, but obstinate kulaks cannot stand in the way of progress.
Forward with Goldman Sachs !

I find your sentiments deplorable, yet have an odd urge to subscribe to your newsletter.

Wow. I think the very first reply supports the author’s position. Good job.

Did you read the whole article?

His position is that change has to come from inside the person. Not that change is not possible. After all, HE changed.

He said change can happen when the issue becomes personal:

The Great Depression of the 1930s had this effect:

But the recession of 2008 did not (my emphasis):

:smack:

(My emphasis)

These people voted Republicans into office who are going to do away with the very programs they rely upon.

I both agree and disagree.

I also grew up in this environment. The author is right, facts are literally meaningless to these people. They live in a safe space bubble of misinformation because the real world is too complex and overwhelming for them to handle. So their beliefs about the world are usually a collection of lies and heuristics to support their identity and ideology which needs to be simple, black and white and allows them to feel self righteous indignation as well as morally and mentally superior to the rest of humanity. Any facts, no matter how valid, that puncture the bubble are ignored. Any facts no matter how irrational and false are supported if they uphold it.

One tactic I’ve had fun with when talking to these people is to make up pro liberal facts, and then when they ask where I read it I say fox news. They don’t know how to respond. I gave up trying to have intelligent debates with these people a long time ago. But apparently even bill O’Reilly admits the stimulus package created twelve million jobs.

I once tried explaining to one of them that their welfare would be targeted by the gop who they kept voting for. Their response was no, the gop would only target people who abused welfare, not her. What She really meant was she believed the gop was only going to take away welfare from people she thinks she is morally superior to. Blacks and Latinos. Trying to explain that she was on the chopping block too was a waste of time. Even if she lost her welfare she’d never take responsibility for it. It sucks.

Having said that, there are high school educated whites and white evangelicals.

White evangelicals have supported the gop candidate for president by about 75-85% since the 1980s. They supported Trump, Romney, McCain, Bush, etc. They are consistently Republican.

But if you look at whites with a high school education as a group (35% of the electorate) they are more varied. In 2008 the gop won them by about 14%. It was 25% in 2012 and 39% in 2016. There are lots of white religious evangelicals in that group who would have voted for any Republican 80% of the time like they always do. But there are also a lot who supported Obama who then turned to Trump.

I think those people need an outreach by Democrats. Once you factor out the white evangelicals from that group of high school educated whites, the Dems have been losing this group for the last few cycles.

However the religious right, etc are a lost cause and not worth the effort.

Also it is really more authoritarianism that is the problem. Religious fundamentalism is just the spiritual ideology of right wing fundamentalists whether they be in the US or the Middle East. If you want to understand these people better, read up on right wing authoritarianism.

I know. I was supporting his hypothesis and pointing out how the first reply was as reactionary and held in opposition to any facts presented in the article. He actually illustrated exactly what the author was describing. I thought you’d appreciate that.

First the progressives were being accused of being elitist snobs when calling out Trump supporters for their stupidity. When it’s made painfully clear that Trump supporters voted against their own interests, progressives we’ll be accused of victim blaming.

Thanks for that well thought out reply.

:smack:

Obviously too sub-tile for me.

the problem is that he’s talking about people who will never vote Democratic, ever. they’re “lost” to the Democrats, so saying Trump won because of them is foolish.

The people that the pundits are claiming the Democrats “don’t understand” aren’t rural bible-thumpers, but the people in e.g. Downriver (Detroit,) Milwaukee, northern Ohio. The blue collar industrial areas in and near cities. the ones who have seen their industries fade and jobs steadily leave under both Republican and Democratic governments. These are the areas the Clinton campaign took for granted and ignored until it was too late.

see, the problem is with you people who think that anything which isn’t NYC, SoCal, Chicago, or D.C. is just cows and cornfields and churches and guns. The people who the Democratic Party couldn’t get this year are people who have voted solidy Democratic in the past (e.g. union workers) and decided this time to go a different way. Michigan as a whole turned red this year (after 20 years blue) based on just a couple of counties flipping red. But keep telling yourself that Trump won because this country is racist and bigoted even though it put Barack Obama in office for two consecutive terms.

Not really, I believe in none of the things such American goobers believe. But I believe strongly that every person has a right to believe whatever the fuck is they believe.

It is an ever-present temptation to impose morality or belief; but such are as unsuccessful as forcing people to be attracted to lovers they feel nothing for, or making them appreciate art they find unbearable.

As for Welfare, if these idiots have swallowed the Koch and want government to swing the axe on Welfare like a Clinton, does it not speak to their rude integrity that they are willing to suffer from it’s removal for the sake of self-reliance and sturdy independence in the gutter ?

The people who elected Donald Trump as President are tired of people thinking that they’re stupid? Is that the long and short of it?

He appears to be a lapsed Mormon, and I’ve read many such things by people who escaped a dense, community religious life like Mormons and some Baptists.

The flaw is that they are still carrying with them the notion that “everyone there was just like me” - the attitude that comes from the individual and group selection of friends, associates, business connections etc. until only those of identical mindset remain. I long ago figured out that a lot of people with strong beliefs tend to filter and select until they deal with no one but other believers… and therefore fall into the mindset that “everyone is really like us, except for a few malcontents and outliers.”

He’s just inverted the arguments. No, I don’t believe everyone in the red states is a guns’n’god zombie moron.

They want the govt to swing the axe on them because of their integrity??

Nobody wants that. Look at the situation again. Follow the money. In reality, not in your fantasy.

I give up. Apparently my first post needed a lot of work, as Evan also didn’t see it as I intended. My apologies everyone. I’ll back out now.

Well, and the article says that they’re stupid.

here’s the problem- those people think the Dems are stupid too.

and that’s why political discourse in this country is non-existent. we wall off into two sides, scream at each other for being stupid, then go running back into our like-minded safe havens and pat each other on the back for having screamed at the other side for being stupid.

O.K., “Y’all are exactly the same!” isn’t really a solution-it’s just fence sitting at it’s finest. If you think the person linked to in the OP is wrong about what will or will not work when trying to reach the target audience, why don’t you tell us what will work?

because you won’t stop screaming at each other long enough to listen.

So you don’t know then.