So at this point on election night it’s completely, undisputedly true that Trump either held onto his existing rural voter base or grew it slightly in every single state over the last 4 years. Not a single rural county flipped. Not a single “solid red” county even shed a couple percentage points. If Biden added votes they came entirely from the lack of a 3rd party candidate. There was higher turnout, but that higher turnout matched the split that existed in 2016.
We don’t have the results yet. Biden is doing worse than Hilary with Latinos. He’s doing better with suburban whites. He still might win…but Trumpism hasn’t waned at all. Safe to say that 2016 was not an anomaly.
COVID, kids in cages, impeachment, sexual harassment, graft, nepotism, massive crippling personal debt, not paying taxes…it’s a long list. All totally cool just so long as the city folk are unhappy.
My neighbor two houses down had a flag up literally clamoring for more liberal tears, of course. That’s all they are, walking masses of venal, self-serving hatred.
People love to call them out of the closet racists. Many are, but that’s not their guiding principle. Hating liberals of all stripes is their north star. And that shit is deep, deep in their DNA. It won’t go away until they die off.
There was a brief interview on the BBC with a Trump voter and self-identified independent. She was very afraid of Biden because she didn’t want the country to turn socialist. I was taken aback a little, feels different to hearing that straight from the horse’s mouth. Wonder how many of them are like this? Unreal.
Most of them think that. They fear authoritarianism just like liberals do. But somehow they see Trump running the fascism playbook and don’t recognize it, but when liberals talk about Medicare for All they start picturing Stalin or Castro. It’s cognitive dissonance.
Many? You are wrong. All are. Take a wild guess why they hate liberals. If it weren’t for activism to have Blacks and other non-whites, but especially Blacks, treated with dignity and equality, there would not be the level of hatred on the part of those magaters/trumpers for the liberals.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” ~President Lyndon B. Johnson
I don’t think there’s any dissonance going on. They see the ACA or other similar programs as “socialist” because the government is basically forcing everyone into the plan, one way or another, and there’s no way to opt out.
Meanwhile, they see Trump as not fascist, because he’s (thus far), staying mostly within the lines of our system of government as written, even if he’s trampling all over the unwritten rules right and left.
It’s not a matter of cognitive dissonance, but a matter of perception.
Let them out of the ACA and find their own insurance in a market with no restrictions. Pre-existing condition? Sucks to be you. Can’t pay the fee when admitted to this hospital? They stabilize you and put you on the curb. See if they can find a spare $100,000 lying around for medical care.
Farm subsidies? That’s socialism. Stop that. Grazing fees on federal land should be charged market rates. Stop oil subsidies. Hurricane slams into Louisiana or Florida? They can hope their state kept a rainy-day fund because the feds won’t send any help.
Let them have no regulations on what is in their food or medicine.
If this is what they hope for let them have it. Enjoy their Libertopia. See how long it takes them to squeal.
Oh, I never said it was particularly perceptive or intelligent. I just said that I don’t think there’s any cognitive dissonance going on.
The big problem is that the right basically has weaponized the term “socialist”, and has redefined it to mean anything that the government provides to the population that’s mandatory, but outside of generally accepted public services like police, fire, water, sewer, trash pickup, flood control, road construction and maintenance, defense, etc… All of which would be “socialist” if they weren’t accepted as fundamental governmental functions for at least a couple of centuries now.
The real argument concerns the scope of government- i.e. are things like internet, health care, jobs, etc… fundamental governmental services, or are they things that should be left to the private sector.
But the right has at least rhetorically poisoned the well by co-opting the old Cold War propaganda terms and hatred against things that the left believes should be these fundamental services. So what you have is a lot of boomers and Gen-Xers who still think socialist = communist = USSR = the enemy, and then they hear “socialist” with respect to something pretty innocuous like municipal internet, and it’s instantly bad and should be fought, even if it’s not nearly so fraught with ideology as all that.
There’s also a sort of “right to choose” mentality that I don’t quite get, that seems to be willing to accept substandard service(s) merely for the right to choose not to have it at all, even though everyone has that service in the real world and would probably be better off with either a public version or a regulated monopoly than our current crazy quilt of ISPs and phone providers who basically can currently choose to underserve poorer areas due to profitability concerns. I mean, it’s great to be able to choose your ISP, but it also sucks when you live in the ghetto and you are stuck with 1 mbps DSL because Verizon doesn’t think they’ll make any money by upgrading the connection to your area. And these days, it’s about as harmful as if the water department decided that your pipes aren’t worth fixing for similar reasons.
I think that all BLM land should be turned to the states. Not just the parts that they have decided can be profitable, but all of it.
Yeah, if they can’t compete in the free market, then why are they expecting an equality of outcome. Let them go bankrupt and sell their land to megacorporations.
Agreed. Laugh at that Prius and “coal roll it” while you are paying $8 a gallon for gas.
Flood insurance as well. If people want to insure their homes living in a flood plain, why shouldn’t they take advantage of the free market opportunities?
I’ve yet to meet someone who said that they were for deregulation that could actually name a specific regulation that they would want removed. So, they must just not want any of them. Get rid of regulations on the amount of arsenic they can have in their water supply as well. Or of how many of those brain eating amebomas that they were having issues with in Texas a bit back.
I just wish that they did not demand that they drag the rest of us down with them.
Definitely seems as though it is time to get some divorce lawyers involved.
He said it when he already was president and was working to pass civil rights. As Bill Moyers tells it:
We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
In short, he wasn’t agreeing with the sentiments; he was recognizing them as a tactic that had worked for generations and would be hard to eradicate.
I know… the oft repeated great hope of demographic replacement tends to overlook the small detail that these people reproduce (and allegedly in greater numbers than urban liberals). So even if a few of the kids run away for their sanity, there will be others to pick right up.
You folks should check out some of the county-by-county results. I saw a few, including a county where I used to live, go over 90% for Trump. You read that right. NINETY PERCENT. That’s downright cultish no matter who it is!
(If you’re wondering if that’s the county where they had to discontinue the weekend backpack food program because so many of the parents were trading the backpacks and their contents for meth, you’re right.)