Yes, and since I see my views as more correct, I want to make sure my views are more ascendant. Whole chunks of conservationism has ZERO asnwers for such people. Trade wars and trying to get in a time machine where small towns are propped up by a single major industry is a fantasy solution. Cutting tax rates on wealthier households is not going to to help rural areas. It will pad the well to do that invest, and allow a bit more investment, allow a bit more wealth to leave to their descendants. How does that help them?
There is an entire world view built up on a house of cards that deserves to be exposed, so that we can shift people off the withering stacks before further collapse. That is how I see modern conservatism. None of this means I’m willing to sign onto every left wing policy under the sun, but the solution coming from the right are empty.
Pretty much. We here in Portland have respect for the ranchers and farmers in our state. They work hard to feed all of us and often are on the edge of financial disaster. Why they think we look down on them is a mystery to me, as I’ve never heard anybody disparage where or how they live.
On the other side of things, there was a OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) story some time ago about a program to have city kids go out to live with a country family for awhile to experience that life. These were not deprived children or kids from broken homes. One comment to the film crew by the mother at the ranch was that she was “glad to have a city kid with them so they could see how a real family lives.”
It’s not just a rural vs city thing in the midwest. They only places I’ve lived for more than a year have been what some call flyover country but I prefer to call “we have water” country. I grew up in the Toledo area of NW Ohio. Lived the longest part of my adult life in mid Michigan. I’m currently in central Indiana. Where I’m at now is the most rural I’ve been, about 30 minutes outside Indy.
Except for my current district I’ve always been in blue leaning to blue dominated, mid sized metro areas. Even now I’m more in an exburb than true rural area. I’ve worked in manufacturing, with most of the labor from urban/suburban areas, including for a logistics company that supported a GM plant. Those lifelong Democrats, till Trump, just aren’t like what you expect them to be. The strength of the correlation for the national urban vs rural divide is much weaker among them IME.
Debbie Dingell, represents Michigan’s 12th district. It’s a predominantly urban/suburban not rural district. It includes the countries biggest concentration of muslims and a progressive island around Ann Arbor thanks to the university of Michigan. It’s heavily blue; she’s won just shy of 2/3 of the vote as a Democrat both times she’s run. It was a problem for Hillary Clinton both in the primary and the general election. You might want to read Rep. Dingell’s WashPo editorial about her district and the past election cycle. They aren’t the Democrats you are expecting. They are why the state was viewed as part of the blue firewall. They are part of why Trump won.
Clinton struggled with Democrats in that district not because they were rural. In the midwest there are urban Democrats fucking with your preferences…because they view you as fucking with their preferences.
Born in Chicago, raised rural, lived urban, suburban and now rural. I’m a moderate/liberal.
Instead of trying to force rural people into urban environments, I would suggest that a realistic approach would be to find a more middle ground. For both political parties.
I said it to many folks that I was very glad to leave central Illinois and move to Colorado (1975, I was 15yo). My opinion of the people in central IL was “If my Daddy didn’t like it, I don’t either”. I couldn’t stand that.
My father did not change at all by moving to the Denver area (years and years later in 1989). Dad continued to support his ideals by listening to Beck and Limbaugh. Moving to the city did not change his opinion at all. I introduced Dad to computers and the internet. It was easy for him to find support for his original bias.
I know that’s anecdotal.
But… information is the key. For everyone. It will take generations, but the idea of tying to force people to move to cities is just silly.
You definitely see a lot of this. Basically every city in the US over 200K went for Hillary, even if the surrounding counties did not.
Then on the west coast & northeast, you have small counties that go red. The public is way too dumb to get that though, and buys into this narrative that California & New York would control the entire election if it wasn’t for the electoral college of idiocy.
Who says this? Where have you heard this sentiment? Have you considered the fact that you think you can read the mind of the common rural folk and this is what you’ve uncovered is a contributor to their resentment of you?
I read the Cracked article that SantaMan linked above.
Oddly, the quote that really struck me was this:
I’d like to ask (because I really don’t know) – How much in taxes do rural people pay?
I do know that when you look at a list of states ranked by how much federal tax they pay versus how much federal funds they receive, your states with large urban populations tend to be “donor states” while those that are largely rural tend to be “welfare states.” So on a gross scale, maybe rural Americans aren’t paying their fair share.
Another data point, anecdotal: Some years ago there was a movement in Illinois to change how schools are funded from mostly property tax based to state income tax based. The biggest pushback on this idea seemed to be from the downstate people who objected bitterly to the idea that their money go to subsidize inner city schools, where, you know, *those people *went. Then someone released a study that showed that the schools that would be the big beneficiaries of the new plan would be rural schools in southern Illinois. I don’t remember what happened to the movement (we still fund schools by property tax) but the uproar from the downstate people did seem to die down a lot after that.
The evil side of me wonders if some rural Trump supporters didn’t care that he didn’t pay any taxes because they themselves don’t pay any.
Everybody uses the same federal income tax table. Everybody pays their fair share. The US does not have a flat tax, rich people pay more than poor people.
Actually, if you read that cracked article, he mentions that there is an economic barrier to moving to a city that acts as a 100 foot wall with the increased property costs and rent costs.
But you know what? Not all areas of a city or the nearby surrounding areas are that expensive. But what might need to happen for some rural white people that were not economically well off is they might have to move into areas where there are more… wait for it… minorities !!! A white person moving into a black neighborhood that is NOT related to gentrification… how often does that happen? If it happens at all it tends to be more well to due populations moving into the prime real estate that was abandoned with white flight when they saw too many black people nearby and wanted to get the eff out.
I have zero data on this, so I can’t prove anything, but I do wonder if there is an aversion to moving to the city because of some misplaced sense of pride about not wanting to place oneself at the same level of a marginal minority population. Better to wither in the sticks with no job prospects than THAT indignity.
Or maybe this is completely off base, but it’s not obvious to me it is.
Well, as I said in another thread at another time;
There is a perpetual outflow of people from rural areas into cities. Kids head off to college and never look back. People move to the city for opportunity and options.
So who is left in the countryside? The scions of farmers and business people who stay behind to run the family business.
School teachers, doctors and professionals, sure. Maybe they even grew up locally, or maybe they grew up in the city (or another country) and decided rural America would be good.
And then there’s the people with either insufficient ambition or insufficient opportunity to move away. They work at Wallmart or the convenience store, their spouse may do the same, and hey, maybe they think it is a better life and more power to them, but the choice was theirs and they decided to stay and make do with the limited options and opportunities left to them.
Back when I was a semi neocon (long story, voted for McCain in 2008 in my last days), I was listening to a talk with Adam Serwer on bloggingheads.tv and he was making a case that based on some of the studies he read, part of the reason we did not see the kinds of larger welfare states in the US vs other more homogeneous western nations like Sweden had to do with the fact that we were more diverse. Because many of the benefits of a larger and more generous welfare state would also go to THOSE people vs people like themselves that were more like them, US residents were less supportive of such projects.
I balked at the time as I was more hostile to liberal critiques of just about anything against conservative ideas not related to social issues. But as my affinity for neocon policies thawed, so did my cool reception to the notion that people are MUCH more generous and receptive to helping those like themselves with social policy.
Another example of this was a talk on the Bill Maher show with a formal Mormon.
Note the discussion of how Mormons tax themselves with tithing so that they can redistribute resources within their own group, but step outside and they are some of the most conservative anti tax for the benefit of others in a secular sense around.
Part of the reason I like the idea of a universal basic income is that it would be something that was not specific to any one group, EVERYONE could get it, perhaps some people would get less based on income but everyone in society would get something back, and it could be sold as something NOT just to help one specific group more than others, but as a universal safety net for a modern society. Something more resilient against us vs them attacks.
So people with low incomes in rural communities would be doing themselves a favor if they just picked up and moved to the lowest rent part of the city, as you describe? But they won’t because racism, of course?
Less than 20 miles outside of most cities, you are going to find relatively reasonably priced housing.
You don’t have to live in the city, but you get all the economic benefit of living somewhere with a diverse economy, rather than one where, if the one factory or mill or mine in the town shuts down, everyone is screwed.
You don’t even need to work in the city, as the city’s economic sphere of influence extends well beyond the borders.
I don’t know what you consider to be relatively reasonably priced housing in the suburbs, but I’ll guarantee you it dwarfs the cost of living in the rural Midwest.
And anyway, you’ve missed the point. Why do people in rural communities need to move at all?
Ah, but my point was that it’s more than a bit hypocritical for rural people to denounce urban people for not paying taxes if they themselves aren’t paying them.
You could pick up the house down my street for under $40k. A bit further down, $25k, but needs work. If that dwarfs the rural midwest, then I don’t know what to say to them. Are their homes worth only hundreds of dollars? Besides, I am of the opinion that the govt should provide relocation assistance.
Because there are no jobs where they live. Why do they expect the jobs to move to them?
Because if your major worry is that jobs in your area are becoming scarcer, or are dependent on a single industry whose continued existence is not guaranteed, it may behoove you to move to an area where there are job openings and/or more diverse employment options. Which these days tend to be in or near cities.
Americans these days are not only less socially mobile but also less physically mobile. There has been some back-and-forth among economists / sociologists over to what extent these two phenomena are related, but they’ve been following more or less the same trajectory.
You also have racist homosexuals and homophobic minorities.
In the end you aren’t going to get everybody to like everybody else until we are all so intermingled that we all look like Star Trek’s Khan (the real one, not the shitty one they gave us on this otherwise awesome reboot), and once we all look like Ricardo Montalban, no one’s really going to blame you for being gay.
