He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.

Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”

He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.

Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.

I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit as a response to big city politicians who rural voters think lie constantly and treat rural people like shit.

Because he gave their bigotry a voice.

I read that rural voters often feel like the government isn’t for them, they feel disempowered. And in response, they seek to undermine and break the system that disempowers them. They do not look to improve or change the system, they want to destroy it. So when people yell at them for threatening democracy by voting for a lunatic with dictator fantasies, they feel empowered.

Who they worship doesn’t matter. Based on the article, they voted for a brick to be thrown into the window of the elites. It really doesn’t matter who that person is, just as long as they inflict damage on the elites who have been marginalizing them for years.

It was a super informative article and I hope people read it, and not assume from the title or read the summarized version like we usually do.

If we keep labelling them ‘deplorables’, it’ll make things worse. We need to reach out and listen while also helping as best we can.

Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

Why latch on to Trump in particular?

Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

You know, standard fascist shit?

It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.

It’s not what he says, but how he says it. He knows what outrages them and plays on it. He pretends that it outrages him too.

I think it’s partly his ‘strong man’ persona, but also that he was one of the only candidates hitting on all the things they needed to hear. We need to do more for our rural communities. Help the farmers! Help the coal miners! Keep oil production flowing! He touched on the lifeblood on these rural towns, which is something other conservative politicians weren’t doing as much. That let his message spread wider organically, from people who were quite literally willing to devote their life to him. He ‘stuck to his guns’ (on the issues they cared about anyway) which is what let them ignore the other things he said and did. There was also one of the largest state-sponsored propaganda campaigns in Internet history backing his election. In many or most small towns it became an Us vs. Them (Trump being the Us) and if you know how small towns work then you know it’s “When in Rome…” creating a massive echo chamber across conservative America. When the mob is rallying for something, you stay quiet or face the consequences. Many didn’t stay quiet and became outspoken, which furthered the division.

I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit

I’ll go with the easy answer/low hanging fruit: he said the same racist and xenophobic shit they think instead of trying to couch it politically correct speech (which is one of the most ironic things I think I’ve ever said). The perfect encapsulation of this is a well known Lee Atwater quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, N*****, N*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “N*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, N*****.”

Unfortunately, republican mindsets haven’t changed in the last 60 years, so we’re still dealing with the same bullshit.

I remember looking up Iowa’s county results right after a past election, and Florida too, and thinking: it is very easy to see the university towns. One or two oddities I had to look up… it turns out they were small universities. The correlation between education and liberalism is extreme. Austin vs. Texas at large would be another example.

Yeah I got to that part and remembered the meme “See all that red area? That’s sand.”

I get that it’s tough to find a point of view for trump supporters that isn’t racism or hate or idiocy, but . . . I dunno. voter maps aren’t that useful. We’re not talking about an average politician here - some interchangable figure who could have been active between 1950 and 2020. This guy is objectively a demented rapist fraud who tried to overthrow the government to stay in power.

Those aren’t rural concerns, afaik.

It’s not that rural people are bad, to me, it’s that they’re under resourced and groomed. They’re often victims of their ignorance, which is why so many people that ‘get out’ cite the exposure to other ideas as to why they evolve.

Yes they are dragging us down and backward, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But the ones to be angry at are the people in power.

The article: let’s construct a false image of city dwellers having a false image of rural dwellers to absolve rural dwellers of any personal responsibility.

It completely ignores how much they voted for and continuously cheered on their own economic demise and acts as if poverty only exists in the country and no one has ever suffered similar hardships in an urban setting.

The article got one thing right, THEY LOST THEIR MINDS.

They’ve lived through how many republican administrations yet it’s everyone else’s fault? Republicans have continuously gotten their way… reagonomics, 3 terms from the bush family, Donald trump…and things are demonstrably worse off. You cannot look at America and say the issue is that it was at any point NOT conservative enough.

All while these sensitive rural voters call the rest of the country “out of touch”. They aren’t bad people but holy shit how much do we need to coddle these children while this happens?

Suffering under capitalism, yet they keep voting for those supporting the worst forms of it.

It really is two different America’s;

Urbanites have to compete internationally, Chicago vs. Sao Paulo, Los Angeles vs. Berlin. The international corporations compete against each other.
Rural folk are at the mercy of the urban markets, and large corporate resellers. The local wealthy merchant, isn’t interested in international affairs, they want to be a despot of their local county/state.

So you get local rural ‘noble’, that have every interest in undermining urban business, as it doesn’t affect them. It’s why politics is so bitter and cancerous. The wealthy rural owners, have no steak in the game for America to do well internationally. The most conservative people tend to be wealthy rural people, think of the guy that owns a farmers co-op in rural Nebraska.

Essentially this is what happened during the American Revolution. The northern cities had enough of England, and rural American farmers fought because they thought they would wrestle some control for themselves away from the east coast cities.

In my home of Ohio we’re so gerrymandered that we regularly pass ballot initiatives. We frequently have to amend our state constitution.

I get the nuances here. I really do. Most of the people I’ve dated have been Appalachians, my girlfriend grew up on a tobacco plantation in Tennessee. Most of my career puts me in rural factories where as a visibly queer women in a male dominated career I’m routinely treated slightly worse than in cities and I deal with their very real problems. But the thing that I keep coming back to is that they aren’t punching up, and when we mock them as slack jawed yokels we aren’t either. We need to show them solidarity but we also need to stand firm on important issues. Yeah feel free to mock us city folk for thinking we’re better, but don’t act like plenty of us didn’t flee your small towns because of your behavior.

When we as a left show them an open hand we can let them reject it

You are spot on. I need to disable my notifications on Lemmy or I’m not going to get any work done today.

We need to move past First Past The Post.

For example, each vote in the electoral college for California represents 703,000 people. In Montana, on the other hand, each electoral vote represents closer to 250,000 people.

On the other hand, more conservatives voted for Trump in California than in Texas. That’s a LOT of conservatives who are having their voice drowned out. This is also why a few red states have signed on to the national popular vote amendment. So many people in deep blue and deep red states stay home on election day, we don’t actually know how the popular vote would play out. People like to say we have way more democrats but that’s not necessarily true - it’s just a matter of current vote totals.

The article is not about sympathy. It’s about understanding how all this happened. And maybe a bit of empathy.

The author has some other great reads, here are a couple I may submit later.

5 Ways Dumb Conspiracies Suck In Normal People

5 Helpful Answers To Society’s Most Uncomfortable Questions

Yeah that was a great read. It actually made me empathize and see it in a different perspective.

Fanaticism happened in the 8 years since. Trumpism is essentially a new religious movement and to its adherents, anything Trump says goes.

In 2014 these rural people would have gladly driven their 4 wheelers over to Russia to shoot Russians themselves. Now, since their god-emperor is in bed with Russia, they love Russia.

All the motivations that led rural Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016 no longer apply. Now it’s pure religious fanaticism, propaganda, and doublethink.

Well for one, this isn’t newly released: this is from 2016.

But to address your point, the reason it isn’t hypocritical is because (like he said in the article) power and culture and conventional wisdom flows from the cities. It’s the difference between punching up and punching down. Yes, rural people often have shit attitudes about cities, but it is culturally nearly homogenous to have negative opinions about rural people. The amount of people and the weight of the opinions they hold are not even close to balanced. Plus, and this is the more important bit: it’s not just their shitty attitudes. They also have, as he outlines in the article, legitimate complaints and cries for help that we wrap up with their shitty opinions and ignore. It’s not helpful.

I liked this article when it came out, and I still like it. I too moved from an area just like his to the city, and I couldn’t agree with his points more. I have friends that have spent their whole lives in cities that continually miss the mark on this stuff because they have no concept of what rural people are like or actually think.

Didn’t they just spend the entire article justifying

No they did not, and please for the love of Christ can lemmy stop equating “explaining”, “justifying”, and “supporting”?

I may have! I read it in a comment here a few months ago, so thank you for sharing. The authors ability to see the big picture as it was happening is to be admired. I’ve also experienced both sides so that’s why it resonated with me as well. Growing up in a small farming town of 2k people, to living in New Orleans, and San Diego for a bit, to now living in the largest city of my home state. I get to see the ‘both sides’ aspect of it. I have a lot of conservative friends and liberal friends. My politics are a mishmash of my own, as I get older leaning more conservative in some ways and more liberal in others. This article was a great help in putting many of my conflicting feelings on the division between rural and urban into words. There is so much hate against each ‘team’ and a lot of it is inorganic. I’d like to say that most of it started out inorganic but that’s probably being naive. However as we’ve been through the mainstream internet propaganda machine for 4 cycles now and 2016 was the most blatant, and best work (from a propagandists perspective) so it’s my hope a majority has wised up to the most blatant propaganda. But the realist in me thinks this year may be even more insidious, with even more fake grassroots boots-on-the-ground efforts, and a completely new set of strategies.

Cracked made me fall in love with after hours, then they killed it in front of me for spite. Never again, cracked

But we aren’t in an Idiocracy like in the movie. That movie was about well meaning idiots in government because they were the “smartest” of the idiot population. What we currently have is an evil corporatocracy. Capitalism decides how our elected officials govern through lobbying. People are becoming dumber over time because of knowing, bad actors who want that to be the case. Education is getting worse, those in charge want citizens to fall in line and they want us to fight so that we elect the same people over and over and over again so that said people can continue to reap the benefits of that corporate lobbying.

Top to bottom the system is the way that it is because of intelligent bad actors squeezing us for all we are worth, not idiots.

If votes don’t matter then you shouldn’t care that you can’t vote… I’m of the opinion that no one should lose voting rights ever. It’s a stupid punishment.

The election is “rigged” if you consider “rigged” to mean that first past the post voting always devolves into a two party system, and Citizens United caused both of those parties to be bought.

If by “rigged” you mean that someone today already knows for certain who will win in November, then no, that’s crazy. But I’d agree that the difference in candidates is smaller than it should be because both are heavily influenced by money.

Why are you barred from voting?